Pequot War

The Pequot War was an armed conflict between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the English colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their Native American allies (the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes) which occurred between 1634 and 1638. The Pequots lost the war. At the end, about seven hundred Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies. Other survivors were dispersed. The result was the elimination of the Pequot as a viable polity in what is present-day Southern New England. The colonial authorities falsely classified the tribe as extinct. However, survivors remained in the area and did regain marginal recognition and land thanks to the relationship of Robin Cassacinnamon and his guardian John Winthrop Jr. Subsequent descendants struggled to hold on and it would take the Pequot more than three and a half centuries to regain political and economic power in their traditional homeland along the Pequot (present-day Thames) and Mystic rivers in what is now southeastern Connecticut.

Etymology

The name Pequot is a Mohegan term, the meaning of which is in dispute among Algonquian-language specialists. Most recent sources in claiming that "Pequot" comes from Paquatauoq, (the destroyers), rely on the speculations of an early 20th-century authority on Algonquian languages, Frank Speck; an anthropologist and specialist of Pequot-Mohegan in the 1920s-1930s. He had doubts about this etymology, believing that another term, after translation relating to the "shallowness of a body of water", seemed more plausible.

Origins

The Pequot and their traditional enemies, the Mohegan, were at one time a single sociopolitical entity. Anthropologists and historians contend that sometime before contact with the Puritan English, they split into the two competing groups. The earliest historians of the Pequot War speculated that the Pequot migrated from the upper Hudson River Valley toward central and eastern Connecticut sometime around 1500. These claims are disputed by the evidence of modern archaeology and anthropology finds.

In the 1630s, the Connecticut River Valley was in turmoil. The Pequot aggressively worked to extend their area of control, at the expense of the Wampanoag to the north, the Narragansett to the east, the Connecticut River Valley Algonquians and Mohegan to the west, and the Algonquian people of present-day Long Island to the south. The tribes contended for political dominance and control of the European fur trade. A series of smallpox epidemics over the course of the previous three decades had severely reduced the Native American populations due to their lack of immunity to the disease. As a result, there was a power vacuum in the area.

The Dutch and the English, from Western Europe, across the Atlantic Ocean, were also striving to extend the reach of their trade into the interior to achieve dominance in the lush, fertile region. The colonies were new at the time, the original settlements having been founded in the 1620s. By 1636, the Dutch had fortified their trading post, and the English had built a trading fort at Saybrook. English Puritans from Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies settled at the then four recently established river towns of Windsor (1632,) Wethersfield (1633,), Hartford (1635) and Springfield (1636.)

Belligerents

Lion Gardiner in the Pequot War from a Charles Stanley Reinhart drawing circa 1890

• Pequot: Sachem Sassacus
• Eastern Niantic
• Western Niantic: Sachem Sassious
• Mohigg: Sachem Uncas
• Niantic Sagamore Wequash
• Narragansett: Sachem Miantonomo
• Montauk or (Montaukett).
• Massachusetts Bay Colony: Governors Henry Vane and John Winthrop, Captains John Underhill and John Endecott
• Plymouth Colony: Governors Edward Winslow and William Bradford, and Captain Myles Standish
• Connecticut Colony: Thomas Hooker, Captain John Mason, Robert Seeley, Lt. William Pratt (c. 1609-1670)
• Saybrook Colony: Lion Gardiner

Causes for war

Before the war's inception, efforts to control fur trade access resulted in a series of escalating incidents and attacks that increased tensions on both sides. Political divisions between the Pequot and Mohegan widened as they aligned with different trade sources—the Mohegan with the English, and the Pequot with the Dutch. The Pequot assaulted a tribe of Indians who had tried to trade at what is known as Hartford. Tension sparked as the Massachusetts Bay Colony became a stronghold for wampum, which the Pequot had controlled up until 1633. John Stone, an English rogue, smuggler and privateer, and about seven of his crew were murdered by the Western tributary clients of the Pequot, the Niantic. According to the Pequots' later explanations, they did that in reprisal for the Dutch having murdered the principal Pequot sachem Tatobem, and were unaware of the fact that Stone was English and not Dutch. In the earlier incident, Tatobem had boarded a Dutch vessel to trade. Instead of conducting trade, the Dutch seized the sachem and appealed for a substantial amount of ransom for his safe return. The Pequot quickly sent bushels of wampum, but received only Tatobem's dead body in return.

Stone, the privateer, was from the West Indies. He had been banished from Boston for malfeasance (including drunkenness, adultery and piracy). Since he was known to have powerful connections in other colonies as well as London, he was expected to use them against the Boston colony. Setting sail from Boston, Stone abducted two Western Niantic men, forcing them to show him the way up the Connecticut River. Soon after, he and his crew were suddenly attacked and killed by a larger group of Western Niantic. While the initial reactions in Boston varied between indifference and outright joy at Stone's death, the colonial officials later decided to protest the killing. They did not accept the Pequots' excuses that they had been unaware of Stone's nationality. The Pequot sachem Sassacus sent some wampum to atone for the killing, but refused the colonists' demands that the Western Niantic warriors responsible for Stone's death be turned over to them for trial and punishment.

On July 20, 1636, a respected trader named John Oldham was attacked on a trading voyage to Block Island. He and several of his crew were killed and his ship looted by Narragansett-allied Indians who sought to discourage English settlers from trading with their Pequot rivals. In the weeks that followed, colonial officials from Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, assumed the Narragansett were the likely culprits. Knowing that the Indians of Block Island were allies of the Eastern Niantic, who were allied with the Narragansett, Puritan officials became suspicious of the Narragansett. However, Narragansett leaders were able to lie and convince the English that the perpetrators were being sheltered by the Pequots.

Battles

Engraving depicting Endecott's landing on Block Island

News of Oldham's death became the subject of raging sermons in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In August, Governor Vane sent John Endecott to exact revenge on the Indians of Block Island. Endecott's party of roughly 90 men sailed to Block Island and attacked two apparently abandoned Niantic villages. Most of the Niantic escaped, while two of Endecott's men were injured. The English claimed to have killed 14, but later Narragansett reports claimed only one Indian was killed on the island. The Puritan militia burned the villages to the ground. They carried away crops which the Niantic had stored for winter, and destroyed what they could not carry. Endecott went on to Fort Saybrook.

The English at Saybrook were not happy about the raid, but agreed that some of them would accompany Endecott as guides. Endecott sailed along the coast to a Pequot village, where he repeated the previous year's demand of payment for the death of Stone and more for Oldham. After some discussion, Endecott concluded that the Pequot were stalling and attacked. The Pequot ruse had worked, and most escaped into the woods. Endecott had his forces burn down the village and crops before sailing home.

Pequot raids

In the aftermath, the English of Connecticut Colony had to deal with the anger of the Pequot. The Pequot attempted to get their allies, some 36 tributary villages, to join their cause but were only partly effective. The Western Niantic (Nehantic) joined them but the Eastern Niantic (Nehantic) remained neutral. The traditional enemies of the Pequot, the Mohegan and the Narragansett, openly sided with the English. The Narragansett had warred with and lost territory to the Pequot in 1622. Now their friend Roger Williams urged the Narragansett to side with the English against the Pequot.

Through the autumn and winter, Fort Saybrook was effectively besieged. People who ventured outside were killed. As spring arrived in 1637, the Pequot stepped up their raids on Connecticut towns. On April 23, Wongunk chief Sequin attacked Wethersfield with Pequot help. They killed six men and three women, a number of cattle and horses, and took two young girls captive. (They were daughters of William Swaine and were later ransomed by Dutch traders.) In all, the towns lost about thirty settlers.

In May, leaders of Connecticut river towns met in Hartford, raised a militia, and placed Captain John Mason in command. Mason set out with ninety militia and seventy Mohegan warriors under Uncas; their orders were to directly attack the Pequot at their fort. At Fort Saybrook, Captain Mason was joined by John Underhill with another twenty men and they altered their plans with divine approval. Underhill and Mason then sailed from Fort Saybrook to Narragansett Bay, a tactic intended to mislead Pequot spies along the shoreline into thinking that the English were not intending an attack. After gaining the reluctant support of 200 Narragansetts, Mason and Underhill with Uncas and Wequash Cooke, marched their forces approximately twenty miles towards Mistick Fort (present-day Mystic). They briefly camped at Porter's Rocks near the head of the Mystic River before mounting a surprise attack just before dawn.

The Mystic massacre

Engraving depicting the attack on the Pequot fort at Mystic, from John Underhill Newes from America, London, 1638

Main article: Mystic massacre

The Mystic Massacre started in the predawn hours of May 26, 1637 when English forces led by Captain's John Mason and John Underhill, along with their Native allies from the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes, surrounded one of two main fortified Pequot villages at Mistick. Only 20 soldiers breached the palisade's gate and were quickly overwhelmed to the point that they utilized fire to create chaos and facilitate their escape from within. The ensuing conflagration trapped the majority of the natives and caused their death, those who managed to exit were slain by the sword or musket from the others who surrounded the fort. Only a handful of approximately 500 men, women and children would survive what became known as the Battle of Mistick Fort. As the soldiers made the exhausted withdrawal march to their boats, they faced several attacks by frantic warriors from the other village of Weinshauks, but again the Pequot's suffered very heavy losses versus relatively few by the Colonists

Justifying his conduct later, Mason declared that the attack against the Pequot was the act of a God who "laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven... Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies." Of the estimated 500 Pequot present at Mystic that day, only seven survived to be taken prisoner, while another seven escaped to the woods.

The Narragansett and Mohegan with Mason and Underhill's colonial militia were horrified by the actions and "manner of the Englishmen's fight... because it is too furious, and slays too many men." The Narragansett attempted to leave and returned home but were cut off by the by the Pequots from the other village of Weinshauks and had to be rescued by Underhill's men. After which they reluctantly rejoined the colonists for protection and were utilized to carry the wounded thereby freeing up more soldiers to fend off the numerous attacks along the withdrawal route.

War's end

The destruction of people and the village at Mistick Fort and losing even more warriors during the withdrawal pursuit broke the Pequot spirit and they decided to abandon their villages and flee westward to seek refuge with the Mohawk tribe. Sassacus led roughly 400 warriors along the coast, when they crossed the Connecticut River the Pequot killed three men whom they encountered near Fort Saybrook.

In mid-June, John Mason set out from Saybrook with 160 men and 40 Mohegan scouts led by Uncas. They caught up with the refugees at Sasqua, a Mattabesic village near present-day Fairfield, Connecticut. The colonists memorialized this event as the Fairfield Swamp Fight (not to be confused with the Great Swamp Fight during King Philip's War). The English surrounded the swamp and allowed several hundred, mostly women and children to surrender but not before Sassacus slipped out before dawn with perhaps eighty warriors and continued west.

Sassacus and his followers had hoped to gain refuge among the Mohawk in present-day New York. However, the Mohawk instead murdered Sassacus and his bodyguard, afterwards sending his head and hands to Hartford as a symbolic offering of Mohawk friendship with the Connecticut Colony therefore avoiding a similar fate from the powerful English. This essentially ended the Pequot War but colonial officials continued to call for hunting down what remained of the Pequots after war's end.

Aftermath

In September, the victorious Mohegan and Narragansett met at the General Court of Connecticut and agreed on the disposition of the Pequot and stealing their lands. The agreement, known as the first Treaty of Hartford, was signed on September 21, 1638. About 200 Pequot "old men, women, and children" survived the war and massacre at Mystic. Unable to find refuge with a traitorous neighboring tribe, they finally gave up and offered themselves as slaves in exchange for life:

There were then given to Onkos, Sachem of Monheag, Eighty; to Myan Tonimo, Sachem of Narragansett, Eighty; and to Nynigrett, Twenty, when he should satisfy for a Mare of Edward Pomroye’s killed by his Men. The Pequots were then bound by Covenant, That none should inhabit their native Country, nor should any of them be called PEQUOTS any more, but Moheags and Narragansatts for ever.

Other Pequot were enslaved and shipped to Bermuda or the West Indies, or were forced to become household slaves in English households in Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. The English conquerors appropriated Pequot lands under claims of a "just war". They essentially declared the Pequot extinct by prohibiting speaking the name of the people. The few Pequot who managed to evade death or slavery later recovered from captivity by the Mohegan and were forced onto reservations in Connecticut Colony.

The colonists attributed the success of the end of the resistance of the Pequot tribe at their hands to an act of God:

Let the whole Earth be filled with his glory! Thus the lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.

This was the first instance wherein Algonquian peoples of what is now southern New England encountered European-style warfare. After the Pequot War, there were no significant battles between native peoples and southern New England colonists for about 38 years. This long period of peace came to an end in 1675 with King Philip's War.

Historical accounts and controversies

The earliest accounts of the Pequot War were written by the victors within one year of the war. Later histories, with few exceptions, recounted events from a similar perspective, restating arguments first used by the war's military leaders, such as John Underhill and John Mason, as well the Puritan divines Increase Mather and his son Cotton Mather.

Recent historians and other specialists have reviewed these accounts. In 2004, an artist and archaeologist teamed up to evaluate the sequence of events in the Pequot War. Their popular history took issue with events, and whether John Mason and John Underhill wrote the accounts that appeared under their names. The authors have been adopted as honorary members of the Lenape Pequot.

Most modern historians such as Alfred A. Cave, a specialist in the ethnohistory of colonial America, do not debate questions of the outcome of the battle or its chronology. However, Cave contends that Mason and Underhill's eyewitness accounts, as well as the contemporaneous histories of Mather and Hubbard, were more "polemical than substantive." The causes of the outbreak of hostilities, the reasons for the English fear and hatred of the Pequot, and the ways in which English dealt with and wrote about the Pequot, have been re-evaluated within a larger context than daily colonial life.

Historians have placed the background of the Pequot War within the context of European history, in which religious wars gave rise to increased violence, and Dutch and English colonization in North America, as well as the geopolitical ambitions and struggles of contending Native peoples during the first half of the 17th century. Such historians have doubts about traditional histories, characterizing them as hegemonic narratives that valorize Puritans at the expense of a "demonized" Native population. Alden T. Vaughan, a noted historian of colonial America, at first was a critic of the Pequot. Later he wrote that the Pequot were not "solely or even primarily responsible" for the war. He went on, "The Bay colony's gross escalation of violence ... made all-out war unavoidable; until then, negotiation was at least conceivable."

Documentaries

• In 2004, PBS aired the television documentary Mystic Voices: The Story of the Pequot War.
• The Mystic Massacre was featured in the 2006 History Channel series 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America.

See also

• History of Connecticut
• Indian massacre
• Philip Vincent

Bibliography

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External links

• 1736 version of John Mason's account
• A summary of the Pequots and their history
• A brief history of the Pequot War
• Society of Colonial War's account
• Cape Cod Online: Worlds Rejoined.
• The Royal Gazette: Bermudians (Mohegans) and Pequots Reconnect
• P. Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell fought in New England online edition
• John Underhill, Newes from America online edition
• Lion Gardener, Relation of the Pequot Warres online edition