THE BATTLES OF SANTIAGO, 1898 357
I. THE FIRST PERIOD OF THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR IN THE WEST
INDIES
II. THE LAND CAMPAIGN
III. THE DESTRUCTION OF CERVERA’S FLEET
IV. THE SPANISH SURRENDER
V. CONTROVERSIES CAUSED BY THE WAR
By _John Halladay Latané, Ph.D._, Professor of History,
Washington and Lee University. Author of “America as a World
Power.”
INDEX 379
ILLUSTRATIONS
WATCHING THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL _Frontispiece_
_Facing p._
INDIANS ON THE WARPATH 20
CHAMPLAIN’S ATTACK ON AN IROQUOIS FORT 28
THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM ON THE MORNING OF THE BATTLE 70
BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE 166
GENERAL SCOTT’S ENTRY INTO THE CITY OF MEXICO 194
BATTLE OF BUENA VISTA 202
CHARGE OF THE “PALMETTOS” AT CHURUBUSCO 218
BATTLE OF MOLINO DEL REY 222
SERGEANT HART NAILING THE COLORS TO THE FLAG-STAFF, FORT SUMTER 254
FIRST CORPS, SEMINARY RIDGE, 3.30 P.M., JULY 1, 1863 316
ATTACK OF PICKETT’S AND ANDERSON’S DIVISION 324
DEPARTURE OF GENERAL LEE AFTER THE SURRENDER 340
BATTLE OF MANILA BAY 354
THE CAPTURE OF THE BLOCK-HOUSE AT SAN JUAN 366
THE LAST OF CERVERA’S FLEET 372
INTRODUCTION
America was discovered in a search for trade routes, but our country
has been in larger part maintained and transmitted to us directly or
indirectly as the result of war. Almost from the outset there were
conflicting claims on the part of Spain, France, and England, and
also Holland. The struggles against hostile native tribes along the
Atlantic seaboard were followed by war against the aggressions of the
French, who would have kept the English-speaking colonies east of the
Alleghanies. That long period of strife was followed by two conflicts
with England, the first gaining America for Americans as an independent
nation, the second confirming it as an independent nationality. While
the great Louisiana Purchase was a peaceful acquisition, Napoleon’s
willingness to cede this territory was intermingled with his military
plans. California and the extreme Southwest came out of conflict with
Mexico. The Civil War preserved the integrity of the country which
Americans had gained. Hawaii was added through a revolution fortunately
bloodless. As a result of the war with Spain, Porto Rico and the
Philippines were included within the limits of our authority.
Since war is a last resort, a brutal expression of failure to arrive
at an agreement, the series of political events which have preceded
war and the manifold aspects of civil life have seemed very justly
to modern historians more important than the descriptions of war
itself. The older writers were fond of dwelling upon all the pomp and
circumstances and all the dramatic accompaniments of battle. Modern
history is written differently, so differently, in fact, that we are
apt to find battles summarized in paragraphs by scientific historians.
Thus the pendulum has swung from one extreme to another, until it has
become a difficult matter to find in the newest shorter histories
accounts of significant military events which approach completeness.
Take, for example, the battle of Bunker Hill. No name in our own
military history is more familiar, and yet in many of the books most
readily available for older as well as younger readers this battle
appears as a brief summary of facts. As to the Mexican War, such
remarkable military events as Taylor’s victory at Buena Vista over a
force five times as large, or the series of desperate battles which won
the City of Mexico for Scott, are practically little more than obscure
names for readers of to-day. It is not strange that Mr. Charles Francis
Adams once inaugurated his presidency of the American Historical
Association with an earnest plea for military history.
In the present volume, which is a companion to Harper & Brothers’
new edition of Sir Edward Creasy’s _Decisive Battles of the World_,
the editor has kept in mind the importance of preserving historical
relations and continuity. The concise chronology of leading events
in American history which runs through from beginning to end is not
entirely limited to the military side of history. The introductory
chapter sketches world relations from the fifteenth century. The
second chapter affords a broad view of the relations of the early
colonists to the Indians, and there is also specific reference to
Champlain’s alliance with the Algonquins and the consequent hostility
of the Iroquois. For the rest, the conditions and causes leading up
to conflict are set forth wherever necessary in order to furnish a
perspective, and to afford a narrative in some degree consecutive. As
to the question of selection, there is obvious justice in Creasy’s
dictum that the importance of battles is to be measured by their
significance, and not by the number of men engaged or by carnage.
To New Englanders in the seventeenth century the struggles with the
Pequots and with King Philip were for the time being a fight for
existence as well as for possession of the country. They were but small
affairs, measured by modern standards; but much history would have been
written differently had the early New England settlers encountered the
fate of the lost colony of Roanoke.
The battle on the Plains of Abraham, which ended French rule on this
continent, was fought by Englishmen with only slight American aid, but
its consequences to Americans were assuredly momentous. As compared
with Gettysburg, or Sedan, or Mukden, Bunker Hill was a mere skirmish,
yet its fame is well founded, for it was the first formal stand against
the British by an organized American soldiery, and in this and in the
fact of American initiative in seizing and fortifying Breed’s Hill, it
differed from the hasty gathering of patriots at Lexington and from the
brief conflict at Concord Bridge. In the light of modern experience,
again, the naval battles of Lake Erie and Lake Champlain seem small
engagements, but the one safe-guarded our northern frontier and the
other repelled an invasion aimed at the very vitals of our country. On
the other hand, the dramatic battle of New Orleans, fought after peace
was made, would have had but slight political consequences had the
outcome been different.
As to the war with Mexico, a certain chastening of the American
conscience has perhaps led us to forget the extraordinary gallantry
of a volunteer as well as a regular soldiery in a foreign country,
repeatedly pitted against great odds. The story of the more significant
battles in those campaigns is entitled to better acquaintance, and
Taylor’s final victory on the north and the series of desperate attacks
by which Scott reached the heart of Mexico are therefore set forth in
some detail.
Mention of our Civil War calls up a long roll of hard-fought battles,
but Sir Edward Creasy’s point may be reiterated that it is not numbers
or bloodshed that constitute the significance of a battle. Fort Sumter
was a small affair; Antietam, Shiloh, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville,
Chickamauga, and other hard-fought battles were great conflicts.
Yet influential as they were, they were not decisive; while Sumter
represented the first open attack on the Flag and the instant call to
arms.
The fight of the _Monitor_ brought a revolution in naval warfare.
The blockade of the South, which can be only touched upon here,
represented that decisive influence of sea power which has been so
eloquently expounded by Captain Mahan. This influence was illustrated
more concretely in Farragut’s capture of New Orleans, which was as
necessary as Grant’s conquest of Vicksburg to clear the Mississippi
and cut the Confederacy in two. In spite of the military importance
of Sherman’s march to the sea, the fact that, like Grant’s ceaseless
battering in Virginia, it was a campaign rather than an event, renders
any adequate description impossible in the limits of a book dealing,
for the most part, with crises or facts of immediately significant
consequence. On the other hand, Gettysburg, which destroyed once and
for all the possibility of a successful invasion of the North, is a
historical landmark in concrete form. It is described in this volume by
a historian who is also a veteran of the Civil War.
Insignificant as was the war with Spain in comparison with the great
struggle of 1861–65, it is assuredly of historical consequence that
the battles of Santiago de Cuba destroyed the last vestiges of a
Spanish rule in the Western Hemisphere which had lasted nearly four
hundred years. Out of this came freedom at last for Cuba, and its
grave responsibilities. Earlier in the same year Dewey’s guns drove
the Spanish flag from the Pacific, and gave us a not wholly welcome
partnership in the vexed questions of the Orient.
Fortunately, our Temple of Janus is closed--let us trust, never to
be reopened. But there are momentous lessons of patriotism and
self-sacrifice to be read in these accounts of deeds which have
preserved our country and helped to make it great. The eminent
historians whose works have furnished these chapters have been moved by
no desire to glorify war in itself--rather the reverse; but they have
dealt with phases of history so vital and of such supreme interest that
this story of these events will help general readers, old and young, to
an ampler knowledge of our history.
DECISIVE BATTLES OF AMERICA
I
TERRITORIAL CONCEPTS
_European Contests Affecting America, and a Summary of American
Expansion_
The settlers’ task of conquering the wilderness might have been simpler
had they not spent so much energy in conquering one another; for side
by side with the advance of the frontier goes a process of territorial
rivalry of which the end is not yet. Along with a contest with the
aborigines for the face of the country went a nominal subdivision of
the continent among the occupying European powers, a process made more
difficult by the slow development of knowledge about the interior: as
late as 1660 people thought that the upper Mississippi emptied into the
Gulf of California.
At the very beginning came an effort to settle the prime problem of
European title by religious authority. Three papal bulls of 1493
attempted to draw a meridian through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,
west of which Spain should have the whole occupancy of newly discovered
lands, and, east of it, Portugal.[1]
Spain was first to see the New World, first to coast the continents,
first to explore the interior, first to conquer tribes of the natives,
and first to set up organized colonies. Except in Brazil, which was
east of the demarcation line, for a century after discovery Spain was
the only American power. A war for the mastery of North America between
the Anglo-Saxon and the Spaniard continued for more than two centuries.
After the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English, in 1588, it
became possible to break in upon the monopoly of American territory;
as soon as the war with Spain was over, England gave the first
charter, which resulted in the founding of a lasting English colony in
America--the Virginia grant of 1606.
The claim of Spain would have been more effective had it not included
the whole continent of North America, hardly an eighth of which was
occupied by Spanish colonies. International law as to the occupation
of new countries was in a formative state: everybody admitted that you
might seize the territory of pagans, but how did you know when you had
seized it? Was the state of which an accredited vessel first followed
a coast thereby possessed of all the back country draining into that
coast? Did actual exploration of the interior create presumptive title
to the surrounding region? Was a trading-post proof that occupation was
meant to be permanent? Did actual colonies of settlers, who expected to
spend their lives there, make a complete evidence of rightful title?
[Illustration: TERRITORIAL GROWTH]
These various sorts of claims were singularly tangled and contorted
in America. Who had the best title to the Chesapeake--the English,
who believed Sebastian Cabot had followed that part of the coast in
1498, or the French, whose commander Verrazzano undoubtedly was there
in 1524, or the Spaniards, for whom De Ayllon made a voyage in 1526?
Spanish explorers had crossed and followed the Mississippi River,
but it is doubtful whether in 1600 they could easily have found its
mouth. The French, in like manner, had explored the St. Lawrence,
but without permanent results. Therefore, the territorial history of
the United States may be said to begin with the almost simultaneous
planting of settlements in the New World by France, England, and
Holland, between 1600 and 1615. The French happened first on the St.
Lawrence, which was the gateway into the interior, with its valuable
fur-trade; and they set up their first permanent establishment at
Quebec in 1608. The English, after thirty years of attempts on the
Virginia coast, finally planted the colony of Jamestown in 1607. The
Dutch rediscovered the Hudson River in 1609, and founded New Amsterdam
in 1614. The next great river south, the Delaware, was occupied by
the Swedes in 1638. It is one of the misfortunes of civilization that
Germany, then the richest and most intellectual nation in Europe, and
well suited for taking a share in the development of the New World, was
in this critical epoch absorbed in the fearful Thirty Years’ War, which
in 1648 left the country ruined and helpless, so that no attempt could
be made to link the destinies of Germany with those of America.
Soon began seizures of undoubted Spanish territory: the English first
picked up various small islands in the West Indies, in 1655 wrested
away the Spanish island of Jamaica, and thereupon made a little
settlement on the coast of Honduras. The next step was a determined
onset against the nearer neighbors in North America. Quebec was taken
and held from 1629 to 1632; the Dutch, who had absorbed the Swedish
colonies, were dispossessed in 1664;[2] and the English proceeded to
contest Hudson Bay with the French. These conflicts marked a deliberate
intention to seize points of vantage like Belize and Jamaica, and to
uproot the colonies of other European powers in North America; it was
part of a process of English expansion which was going on also on the
opposite side of the globe.
As the eighteenth century began, France, England, and Spain were still
in antagonism for the possession of North America; and the French,
in 1699, succeeded in planting a colony on the Gulf in the side of
the Spanish colonial empire. These international rivalries were soon
altered by the struggle of England against the attempt of Louis XIV.
to bring about the practical consolidation of Spain and France, which
would have made an immense Latin colonial empire. To some degree on
religious grounds, partly to protect their commerce, and partly from
inscrutable international jealousies, the nations of Europe were
plunged into a series of five land and naval wars between 1689 and
1783, in each of which North American territory was attacked, and in
several of which great changes were made in the map.
In these wars the colonies formed an ideal as to the duty of a
mother-country to protect daughter colonies, and aided in developing
a policy which has been described by one of the most brilliant of
modern writers as that of “sea power.”[3] The illustration of that
theory was a succession of fleet engagements in the West Indies, always
followed by a picking up of enemy’s islands; and also the repeated
efforts of the colonists in separate or joint expeditions to conquer
the neighboring French or Spanish territory. The final result was the
destruction of the French-American power and the serious weakening of
the Spanish.
In 1732 the charter of Georgia was a denial of the Spanish claims to
Florida. By the treaty of 1763 France was pressed altogether out of the
continent, yielding up to England that splendid region of the eastern
part of the Mississippi Valley which the English coveted, and with
it the St. Lawrence Valley. For the first time since the capture of
Jamaica, a considerable area of Spanish territory was transferred to
England by the cession of the Floridas. Louisiana to the west of the
Mississippi, together with New Orleans, on the east bank, were allowed
to pass to Spain. From that time to the Revolution the only two North
American powers were England and Spain, who substantially divided the
continent between them by the line of the Mississippi River.[4]
During this period the English were not only acquiring but were
parcelling out their new territory. It was always a serious question
how far west the coast colonies extended; some of them--Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Virginia, the Carolinas--had bounds nominally reaching
to the Pacific Ocean. To silence this controversy, in 1763 a royal
proclamation directed that the colonial governors should not exercise
jurisdiction west of the heads of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic,
leaving in a kind of territorial limbo the region between the summit
of the Appalachians and the Mississippi.[5] These numerous territorial
grants gave rise to many internal controversies; but by the time of
the Revolution most of the lines starting at the sea-coast and leading
inward had been adjusted.
The idea of territorial solidarity among the English colonies was
disturbed by the addition of Nova Scotia and Quebec on the north,
and East and West Florida on the south. Intercolonial jealousy was
heightened in 1774 by the Quebec act, under which the almost unpeopled
region north of the Ohio River was added to the French-speaking
province. When the Revolution broke out in 1775, that jealousy was
reflected in the refusal of Quebec and Nova Scotia and the distant
Floridas to join in it. Almost the first campaign of the war, however,
showed the purpose of territorial enlargement, for in 1775 the
Arnold-Montgomery expedition to Canada vainly attempted to persuade the
Frenchmen by force to enter the union. Two years later George Rogers
Clark lopped off the southern half of the British western country. The
Southwest, into which settlers had begun to penetrate in 1769, was,
during the Revolution, laid hold of by the adventurous frontiersman;
and in 1782 the negotiators of Paris thought best to leave that, as
well as the whole Northwest, in the hands of the new United States.[6]
The result of the Revolutionary War was the entrance into the American
continent of a third territorial power, the United States, which
was divided into two nearly equal portions: between the sea and the
mountains lay the original thirteen states; between the mountains and
the Mississippi was an area destined to be organized into separate
states and immediately opened for settlement.[7] This destiny was
solemnly announced by votes of Congress in 1780, and by the territorial
ordinance of 1784, the land ordinance of 1785, and the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787, which, taken together, were virtually a charter
for the western country, very similar in import to the old colonial
charters.[8]
In this sketch of territorial development up to 1787 may be seen the
elements of a national policy and a national system: the territories
were practically colonies and inchoate states, soon to be admitted into
the Union; while the expansion of the national boundary during the war
was a presage of future conquest and enlargement; and, considering the
military and naval strength of Great Britain, the only direction in
which annexation was likely was the southwest. Although the Federal
Constitution of 1787 acknowledged the difference between states and
territories only in general terms, and made no provision for the
annexation of territory, the spirit and the reasonable implication of
that instrument was that the Union might be and probably would be
enlarged; some writers at the time felt sure that republican government
was applicable to large areas.[9]
Hence it was neither unnatural nor unsuitable that the new nation
should at once show a spirit of expansion: in 1795 and 1796 its
boundaries were finally acknowledged by its southern and northern
neighbors. Various wild schemes of invading Spanish territory were
broached, but not till 1803 was the question of the Mississippi fairly
faced. Repeating the bold policy of Louis XIV., Napoleon attempted to
combine the military and colonial forces of Spain with those of France,
in order to make head against Great Britain. As a preliminary, in 1800
he practically compelled the cession of the former French province of
Louisiana, and thereby revealed to the American people that it would be
a menace to national prosperity to permit a powerful military nation
to block the commercial outlet of the interior. Hence, when Napoleon
changed his mind and offered the province to the United States in 1803,
there was nothing for the envoys, the President, the Senate, the House,
and the people to do but to accept it as a piece of manifest destiny.
The boundaries of the Union were thus extended to the Gulf and to the
distant Rocky Mountains.[10]
With a refinement of assurance the United States also claimed, and
in 1814 forcibly occupied West Florida. In the same period began a
purposeful movement for extending the territory of the United States
to the Pacific. Taking advantage of the discovery of the mouth of the
Columbia River by an American ship in 1792, President Jefferson sent
out a transcontinental expedition, under Lewis and Clark, which reached
the Pacific in 1805, and thereby forged a second link in the American
claims to Oregon. By this time the Spanish empire was in the throes
of colonial revolution, and in 1819 the Spanish government ceded East
Florida and withdrew any claims to Oregon, Texas being left to Spain.
This is a stirring decade, and it completely changed the territorial
status of the United States. By 1819 the Atlantic coast all belonged
to the United States, from the St. Croix River around Florida to the
Sabine; the country was reaching out toward Mexico, and was building
a bridge of solid territory across the continent, where, as all the
world knew, far to the south of Oregon lay the harbor of San Francisco,
the best haven on the Pacific coast. The bold conceptions of Jefferson
and John Quincy Adams and their compeers included the commercial and
political advantages of a Pacific front; and they were consciously
preparing the way for the homes of unborn generations under the
American flag.
One result of the new position of the United States was to bring out
sharply a territorial rivalry with Great Britain. The War of 1812 had
been an attempt to annex Canada, and after it was over a controversy as
to the boundary between Maine and Nova Scotia kept the two countries
harassed until its settlement in 1842.[11] After that the rivalry
for Oregon, which had been held in joint occupation since 1818, was
intensified. About 1832 immigration began in which the Americans
outran the English; and it was fortunate for both countries that in
1846 the disputed territory was divided by a fair compromise line, the
forty-ninth parallel.[12] A third territorial controversy was fought
out within the limits of the Union itself, between the friends and
opponents of the annexation of Texas, in 1845.[13] This was the first
instance of an American colony planting itself within the acknowledged
limits of another power, until it was strong enough to set up for
itself as an independent state and to ask for admission to the Union.
The annexation of Texas inevitably led to a movement on California,
which could be obtained only by aggressive war upon Mexico, and for
connection with which the possession of New Mexico was also thought
necessary. Ever since 1820 explorers had been opening up the region
between the Mississippi and the Pacific,[14] and it was known that
there were several practicable roads to that distant coast.[15] The
annexation of California almost led the United States into a serious
territorial adventure; for apparently nothing but the hasty treaty
negotiated by Trist in 1848 stopped a movement for the annexation of
the whole of Mexico.[16] The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 conveniently
rounded out the cession of New Mexico and closed this second era of
territorial expansion.
The annexation of Texas was logical, and delayed only by the accidental
connection with slavery; but the annexation of Oregon and California
added to the Union very distant possessions, the settlement of which
must have been slow but for the discovery of gold in California in
1848. At once a new set of territorial questions arose: the necessity
of reaching California across the plains led to the organization of
Nebraska and Kansas territories in 1854, which convulsed the parties
of the time; the movement across the Isthmus to California brought up
the question of an interoceanic canal in a new light; the commercial
footing on the Pacific led to a pressure which broke the shell of
Japanese exclusion in 1854. Above all, these annexations brought before
the nation two questions of constitutional law, which proved both
difficult and disturbing: the issue of slavery in the territories,
which precipitated, if it did not cause, the Civil War, and the
eventual status of territories which, from their situation or their
population, were not likely to become states.
The third era of national expansion began in 1867 with the purchase
of Alaska,[17] which was wholly a personal plan of Secretary Seward,
in which the nation took very little interest; nor was the public
aroused by Seward’s more important scheme for annexing the Danish West
India Islands and a part of Santo Domingo; when the latter project was
taken up in 1870 and pushed with unaccountable energy by President
Grant,[18] popular sentiment showed itself plainly averse to annexing
a country with a population wholly negro and little in accord with
the American spirit. For twenty-five years thereafter there was the
same indisposition to annex territory that brought problems with it;
and then the movement for the annexation of Hawaii was headed off by
President Cleveland in 1893.[19] The Spanish War of 1898 swept all
these barriers away, and left the United States in possession of the
Philippine Islands, a distant archipelago containing seven and a half
millions of Catholic Malays; of the island of Porto Rico, in the West
Indies; of the Hawaiian group; of a responsible protectorate over Cuba;
and, four years later, of the Panama strip, which may include the
future Constantinople of the western world.
In the whole territorial history of the country, never has there been
such a transition. The Philippines, which “Mr. Dooley” in 1898 thought
might be canned goods, are now, according to the Supreme Court, in
one sense “a part of the United States,” yet not an organic part in
financial or governmental or legal relations. The country, which from
1850 to 1902 divided with Great Britain the responsibility for a future
Isthmian canal, is now “making the dirt fly” in a canal strip which
is virtually Federal territory. China, which a few years ago was one
of the remotest parts of the earth, now lies but a few hundred miles
from American possessions. The romantic era of annexations has gone by:
the automobile trundles across the Great American Desert and stops for
lunch at a railroad restaurant, and the South Sea Islands have lost
their mystery since the trade-winds straighten out the American flag
above some of those tiny land-spots.
SYNOPSIS OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS, CHIEFLY MILITARY, IN THE HISTORY OF
COLONIAL AMERICA BETWEEN THE LANDING OF COLUMBUS, 1492, AND CHAMPLAIN’S
BATTLE WITH THE IROQUOIS, 1609
1492. Columbus discovers the western world.
1497. John Cabot reaches the mainland of North America.
1498. Columbus discovers the mainland of South America.
1512. Ponce de Leon lands in Florida.
1513. Balboa discovers the Pacific Ocean.
1519. Entry of Cortez into the City of Mexico.
1521. Conquest of Mexico by Cortez.
1531–33. Conquest of Peru by Pizarro.
1534. Cartier’s first voyage to the St. Lawrence.
1535–36. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca crosses the continent from near the
mouth of the Mississippi to Sinaloa in Mexico.
1541. The expedition of De Soto reaches the Mississippi River.
Coronado, coming from Mexico, reaches the interior, probably
northeastern Kansas.
1562. The Huguenots attempt a settlement on the coast of South Carolina.
1564. Huguenot settlement on the St. John’s River in Florida.
1565. Founding of St. Augustine by the Spanish.
1583. Sir Humphrey Gilbert takes possession of Newfoundland in the name
of Queen Elizabeth.
1584. Raleigh’s expedition to North Carolina. The region is named
Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth.
1585. Unsuccessful settlement by the English on Roanoke Island.
1602. Bartholomew Gosnold attempts a settlement on the coast of
Massachusetts.
1606. James I. grants a patent to the London and Plymouth Companies.
1607. Foundation of Jamestown.
1608. Foundation of Quebec by the French.
1609. Champlain, with Algonquin Indians, defeats Mohawks, of the
Iroquois Confederacy, near Ticonderoga.
II
A FIGHT FOR LIFE
_The Hundred Years’ War Between Early Colonists and the Indians_
European history makes much of the “Seven Years’ War” and the “Thirty
Years’ War”; and when we think of a continuous national contest for
even the least of those periods, there is something terrible in the
picture. But the feeble English colonies in America, besides all the
difficulties of pioneer life, had to sustain a warfare that lasted,
with few intermissions, for about a hundred years. It was, moreover, a
warfare against the most savage and stealthy enemies, gradually trained
and reinforced by the most formidable military skill of Europe. Without
counting the early feuds, such as the Pequot War, there elapsed almost
precisely a century from the accession of King Philip, in 1662, to the
Peace of Paris, which nominally ended the last French and Indian War in
1763. During this whole period, with pacific intervals that sometimes
lasted for years, the same essential contest went on; the real question
being, for the greater part of the time, whether France or England
should control the continent. The description of this prolonged war
may, therefore, well precede any general account of the colonial or
provincial life in America.
The early explorers of the Atlantic coast usually testify that they
found the Indians a gentle, not a ferocious, people. They were as
ready as could be expected to accept the friendship of the white race.
In almost every case of quarrel the white men were the immediate
aggressors, and where they were attacked without seeming cause--as
when Smith’s Virginian colony was assailed by the Indians in the first
fortnight of its existence--there is good reason to think that the act
of the Indians was in revenge for wrongs elsewhere. One of the first
impulses of the early explorers was to kidnap natives for exhibition
in Europe, in order to excite the curiosity of kings or the zeal of
priests; and even where these captives were restored unharmed, the
distrust could not be removed. Add to this the acts of plunder, lust,
or violence, and there was plenty of provocation given from the very
outset.
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF AMERICAN INDIANS ABOUT 1500 BY
LINGUISTIC STOCKS]
The disposition to cheat and defraud the Indians has been much
exaggerated, at least as regards the English settlers. The early
Spanish invaders made no pretence of buying one foot of land from the
Indians, whereas the English often went through the form of purchase,
and very commonly put in practice the reality. The Pilgrims, at the
very beginning, took baskets of corn from an Indian grave to be used
as seed, and paid for it afterward. The year after the Massachusetts
colony was founded the court decreed: “It is ordered that Josias
Plastowe shall (for stealing four baskets of corne from the Indians)
returne them eight baskets againe, be fined five pounds, and hereafter
called by the name of Josias, and not Mr., as formerly he used to
be.” As a mere matter of policy, it was the general disposition of
the English settlers to obtain lands by honest purchase; indeed,
Governor Josiah Winslow, of Plymouth, declared, in reference to King
Philip’s War, that “before these present troubles broke out the English
did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly
obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.” This policy was
quite general. Captain West, in 1610, bought the site of what is now
Richmond, Virginia, for some copper. The Dutch Governor Minuit bought
the island of Manhattan, in 1626, for sixty gilders. Lord Baltimore’s
company purchased land for cloth, tools, and trinkets; the Swedes
obtained the site of Christiania for a kettle; Roger Williams bought
the island of Rhode Island for forty fathoms of white beads; and New
Haven was sold to the whites, in 1638, for “twelve coats of English
cloth, twelve alchemy spoons, twelve hoes, twelve hatchets, twelve
porringers, twenty-four knives, and twenty-four cases of French knives
and spoons.” Many other such purchases will be found recorded by Doctor
Ellis. And though the price paid might often seem ludicrously small,
yet we must remember that a knife or a hatchet was really worth more
to an Indian than many square miles of wild land; while even the beads
were a substitute for wampum, or wompom, which was their circulating
medium in dealing with each other and with the whites, and was worth,
in 1660, five shillings a fathom.
So far as the mere bargaining went, the Indians were not individually
the sufferers in the early days; but we must remember that behind all
these transactions there often lay a theory which was as merciless as
that of the Spanish “Requisition,”[20] and which would, if logically
carried out, have made all these bargainings quite superfluous.
Increase Mather begins his history of King Philip’s War with this
phrase, “That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose
Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful
Possession”; and it was this attitude of hostile superiority that gave
the sting to all the relations of the two races. If a quarrel rose, it
was apt to be the white man’s fault; and after it had arisen, even the
humaner Englishmen usually sided with their race, as when the peaceful
Plymouth men went to war in defence of the Weymouth reprobates.
This fact, and the vague feeling that an irresistible pressure was
displacing them, caused most of the early Indian outbreaks. And when
hostilities had once arisen, it was very rare for a white man of
English birth to be found fighting against his own people, although it
grew more and more common to find Indians on both sides.
As time went on each party learned from the other. In the early
explorations, as of Champlain and Smith, we see the Indians terrified
by their first sight of firearms, but soon becoming skilled in the
use of them. “The King, with fortie Bowmen to guard me,” says Capt.
John Smith, in 1608, “entreated me to discharge my Pistoll, which they
there presented to me, with a mark at six-score to strike therewith;
but to spoil the practise I broke the cocke, whereat they were much
discontented.” But writing more than twenty years later, in 1631, he
says of the Virginia settlers, “The loving Salvages their kinde friends
they trained up so well to shoot in a Peace [fowling-piece] to hunt
and kill them fowle, they became more expert than our own countrymen.”
La Hontan, writing in 1703, says of the successors of those against
whom Champlain had first used firearms, “The Strength of the Iroquese
lies in engaging with Fire Arms in a Forrest, for they shoot very
dexterously.” They learned also to make more skilful fortifications,
and to keep a regular watch at night, which in the time of the early
explorers they had omitted. The same La Hontan says of the Iroquois,
“They are as negligent in the night-time as they are vigilant in the
day.”
But it is equally true that the English colonists learned much in
the way of forest warfare from the Indians. The French carried their
imitation so far that they often disguised themselves to resemble their
allies, with paint, feathers, and all; it was sometimes impossible to
tell in an attacking party which warriors were French and which were
Indians. Without often going so far as this, the English colonists
still modified their tactics. At first they seemed almost irresistible
because of their armor and weapons. In the very first year of the
Plymouth settlement, when report was brought that their friend
Massasoit had been attacked by the Narrangansets, and a friendly
Indian had been killed, the colony sent ten armed men, including Miles
Standish, to the Indian town of Namasket (now Middleborough) to rescue
or revenge their friend; and they succeeded in their enterprise,
surrounding the chief’s house and frightening every one in a large
Indian village by two discharges of their muskets.
But the heavy armor gradually proved a doubtful advantage against
a stealthy and light-footed foe. In spite of the superior physical
strength of the Englishman, he could not travel long distances through
the woods or along the sands without lightening his weight. He learned
also to fight from behind a tree, to follow a trail, to cover his body
with hemlock boughs for disguise when scouting. Captain Church states
in his own narrative that he learned from his Indian soldiers to march
his men “thin and scattering” through the woods; that the English had
previously, according to the Indians, “kept in a heap together, so that
it was as easy to hit them as to hit a house.” Even the advantage of
firearms involved the risk of being without ammunition, so that the
Rhode Island colony, by the code of laws adopted in 1647, required that
every man between seventeen and seventy should have a bow with four
arrows, and exercise with them; and that each father should furnish
every son from seven to seventeen years old with a bow, two arrows,
and shafts, and should bring them up to shooting. If this statute was
violated a fine was imposed, which the father must pay for the son, the
master for the servant, deducting it in the latter case from his wages.
Less satisfactory was the change by which the taking of scalps came to
be a recognized part of colonial warfare. Hannah Dustin, who escaped
from Indian captivity in 1698, took ten scalps with her own hand, and
was paid for them. Captain Church, undertaking his expedition against
the eastern Indians, in 1705, after the Deerfield massacre, announced
that he had not hitherto permitted the scalping of “Canada men,” but
should thenceforth allow it. In 1722, when the Massachusetts colony
sent an expedition against the village of “praying Indians,” founded by
Father Rasle, they offered for each scalp a bounty of £15, afterward
increased to £100; and this inhumanity was so far carried out that
the French priest himself was one of the victims. Jeremiah Bumstead,
of Boston, made this entry in his almanac in the same year: “Aug. 22,
28 Indian scalps brought to Boston, one of which was Bombazen’s [an
Indian chief] and one fryer Raile’s.” Two years after, the celebrated
but inappropriately named Captain Lovewell, the foremost Indian fighter
of his region, came upon ten Indians asleep round a pond. He and his
men killed and scalped them all, and entered Dover, New Hampshire,
bearing the ten scalps stretched on hoops and elevated on poles. After
receiving an ovation in Dover they went by water to Boston, and were
paid a thousand pounds for their scalps. Yet Lovewell’s party was
always accompanied by a chaplain, and had prayers every morning and
evening.
[Illustration: From a drawing by Howard Pyle
INDIANS ON THE WARPATH]
The most painful aspect of the whole practice lies in the fact that
it was not confined to those actually engaged in fighting, but that
the colonial authorities actually established a tariff of prices for
scalps, including even non-combatants--so much for a man’s, so much for
a woman’s, so much for a child’s. Doctor Ellis has lately pointed out
the striking circumstance that whereas William Penn had declared the
person of an Indian to be “sacred,” his grandson, in 1764, offered $134
for the scalp of an Indian man, $130 for that of a boy under ten, and
$50 for that of a woman or girl. The habit doubtless began in the fury
of retaliation, and was continued in order to conciliate Indian allies;
and when bounties were offered to them, the white volunteers naturally
claimed a share. But there is no doubt that Puritan theology helped the
adoption of the practice. It was partly because the Indian was held to
be something worse than a beast that he was treated with very little
mercy. The truth is that he was viewed as a fiend, and there could
not be much scruple about using inhumanities against a demon. Cotton
Mather calls Satan “the old landlord” of the American wilderness,
and says in his _Magnalia_: “These Parts were then covered with
Nations of Barbarous Indians and Infidels, in whom the Prince of the
Power of the Air did work as a Spirit; nor could it be expected that
Nations of Wretches whose whole religion was the most Explicit sort of
Devil-Worship should not be acted by the devil to engage in some early
and bloody Action for the Extinction of a Plantation so contrary to his
Interests as that of New England was.”
Before the French influence began to be felt there was very little
union on the part of the Indians, and each colony adjusted its own
relations with them. At the time of the frightful Indian massacre
in the Virginia colony (March 22, 1622), when three hundred and
forty-seven men, women, and children were murdered, the Plymouth colony
was living in entire peace with its savage neighbors. “We have found
the Indians,” wrote Governor Winslow, “very faithful to their covenants
of peace with us, very loving and willing to pleasure us. We go with
them in some cases fifty miles into the country, and walk as safely and
peacefully in the woods as in the highways of England.” The treaty with
Massasoit lasted for more than fifty years, and the first bloodshed
between the Plymouth men and the Indians was incurred in the protection
of the colony of Weymouth, which had brought trouble on itself in 1623.
The Connecticut settlements had far more difficulty with the Indians
than those in Massachusetts, but the severe punishment inflicted on the
Pequots in 1637 quieted the savages for a long time. In that fight a
village of seventy wigwams was destroyed by a force of ninety white men
and several hundred friendly Indians; and Captain Underhill, the second
in command, has left a quaint delineation of the attack.
There was a period resembling peace in the eastern colonies for nearly
forty years after the Pequot War, while in Virginia there were renewed
massacres in 1644 and 1656. But the first organized Indian outbreak
began with the conspiracy of King Philip in 1675, although the seeds
had been sown before that chief succeeded to power in 1662. In that
year Wamsutta, or Alexander, Philip’s brother--both being sons of
Massasoit--having fallen under some suspicion, was either compelled or
persuaded by Major Josiah Winslow, afterwards the first native-born
Governor of Plymouth, to visit that settlement. The Indian came with
his whole train of warriors and women, including his queen, the
celebrated “squaw sachem” Weetamo, and they stayed at Winslow’s house.
Here the chief fell ill. The day was very hot, and though Winslow
offered his horse to the chief, it was refused, because there was none
for his squaw or the other women. He was sent home because of illness,
and died before he got half-way there. This is the story as told by
Hubbard, but not altogether confirmed by other authorities. If true,
it is interesting as confirming the theory of that careful student,
Lucien Carr, that the early position of women among the Indians was
higher than has been generally believed. It is pretty certain, at any
rate, that Alexander’s widow, Weetamo, believed her husband to have
been poisoned by the English, and she ultimately sided with Philip when
the war broke out, and apparently led him and other Indians to the same
view as to the poisoning. It is evident that from the time of Philip’s
accession to authority, whatever he may have claimed, his mind was
turned more and more against the English.
It is now doubted whether the war known as King Philip’s War was
the result of such deliberate and organized action as was formerly
supposed, but about the formidable strength of the outbreak there can
be no question. It began in June, 1675; Philip was killed August 12,
1676, and the war was prolonged at the eastward for nearly two years
after his death. Ten or twelve Puritan towns were utterly destroyed,
many more damaged, and five or six hundred men were killed or missing.
The war cost the colonists £100,000, and the Plymouth colony was left
under a debt exceeding the whole valuation of its property--a debt
ultimately paid, both principal and interest. On the other hand,
the war tested and cemented the league founded in 1643 between four
colonies--Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut--against
the Indians and Dutch, while this prepared the way more and more for
the extensive combinations that came after. In this early war, as the
Indians had no French allies, so the English had few Indian allies,
and it was less complex than the later contests, and so far less
formidable. But it was the first real experience on the part of the
eastern colonists of all the peculiar horrors of Indian warfare--the
stealthy approach, the abused hospitality, the early morning assault,
the maimed cattle, tortured prisoners, slain infants. All the terrors
that lately attached to a frontier attack of Apaches or Comanches
belonged to the daily life of settlers in New England and Virginia for
many years, with one vast difference, arising from the total absence in
those early days of any personal violence or insult to women. By the
general agreement of witnesses from all nations, including the women
captives themselves, this crowning crime was then wholly absent. The
once famous “white woman,” Mary Jemison, who was taken prisoner by the
Senecas at ten years old, in 1743--who lived in that tribe all her
life, survived two Indian husbands, and at last died at ninety--always
testified that she had never received an insult from an Indian, and had
never known of a captive’s receiving any. She added that she had known
few instances in the tribe of conjugal immorality, although she lived
to see it demoralized and ruined by strong drink.
The English colonists seem never to have inflicted on the Indians any
cruelty resulting from sensual vices, but of barbarity of another kind
there was plenty, for it was a cruel age. When the Narraganset fort was
taken by the English, December 19, 1675, the wigwams within the fort
were all set on fire, against the earnest entreaty of Captain Church;
and it was thought that more than one-half the English loss--which
amounted to several hundred--might have been saved had there been any
shelter for their own wounded on that cold night. This, however, was
a question of military necessity; but the true spirit of the age was
seen in the punishments inflicted after the war was over. The heads
of Philip’s chief followers were cut off, though Captain Church,
their captor, had promised to spare their lives; and Philip himself
was beheaded and quartered by Church’s order, since he was regarded,
curiously enough, as a rebel against Charles the Second, and this was
the state punishment for treason. Another avowed reason was, that “as
he had caused many an Englishman’s body to lye unburied,” not one
of his bones should be placed under ground. The head was set upon a
pole in Plymouth, where it remained for more than twenty-four years.
Yet when we remember that the heads of alleged traitors were exposed
in London at Temple Bar for nearly a century longer--till 1772 at
least--it is unjust to infer from this course any such fiendish cruelty
as it would now imply. It is necessary to extend the same charity,
however hard it may be, to the selling of Philip’s wife and little son
into slavery at the Bermudas; and here, as has been seen, the clergy
were consulted and the Old Testament called into requisition.
While these events were passing in the eastern settlements there were
Indian outbreaks in Virginia, resulting in war among the white settlers
themselves. The colony was, for various reasons, discontented; it was
greatly oppressed, and a series of Indian murders brought the troubles
to a climax. The policy pursued against the Indians was severe, and
yet there was no proper protection afforded by the government; war
was declared against them in 1676, and then the forces sent out were
suddenly disbanded by the governor, Berkeley. At last there was a
popular rebellion, which included almost all the civil and military
officers of the colony, and the rebellious party put Nathaniel Bacon,
Jr., a recently arrived but very popular planter, at their head. He
marched with five hundred men against the Indians, but was proclaimed
a traitor by the governor, whom Bacon proclaimed a traitor in return.
The war with the savages became by degrees quite secondary to the
internal contests among the English, in the course of which Bacon took
and burned Jamestown, beginning, it is said, with his own house; but he
died soon after. The insurrection was suppressed, and the Indians were
finally quieted by a treaty.
Into all the Indian wars after King Philip’s death two nationalities
besides the Indian and English entered in an important way. These were
the Dutch and the French. It was the Dutch who, soon after 1614, first
sold firearms to the Indians in defiance of their own laws, and by this
means greatly increased the horrors of the Indian warfare. On the other
hand, the Dutch, because of the close friendship they established with
the Five Nations, commonly called the Iroquois, did to the English
colonists, though unintentionally, a service so great that the whole
issue of the prolonged war may have turned upon it. These tribes, the
Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas--afterward joined by
the Tuscaroras--held the key to the continent. Occupying the greater
part of what is now the State of New York, they virtually ruled the
country from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes
to the Savannah River. They were from the first treated with great
consideration by the Dutch, and they remained, with brief intervals
of war, their firm friends. One war, indeed, there was under the
injudicious management of Governor Kieft, lasting from 1640 to 1643;
and this came near involving the English colonies, while it caused the
death of sixteen hundred Indians, first or last, seven hundred of these
being massacred under the borrowed Puritan leader Captain Underhill.
But this made no permanent interruption to the alliance between the
Iroquois and the Dutch.
When New Netherlands yielded to the English, the same alliance was
retained, and to this we probably owe the preservation of the colonies,
their union against England, and the very existence of the present
American nation. Yet the first English governor, Colden, has left on
record the complaint of an Indian chief, who said that they very soon
felt the difference between the two alliances. “When the Dutch held
this country,” he said, “we lay in our houses, but the English have
always made us lie out-of-doors.”
But if the Dutch were thus an important factor in the Indian wars,
the French became almost the controlling influence on the other side.
Except for the strip of English colonies along the sea-shore, the
North American continent north of Mexico was French. This was not the
result of accident or of the greater energy of that nation, but of a
systematic policy, beginning with Champlain and never abandoned by
his successors. This plan was, as admirably stated by Parkman, “to
influence Indian counsels, to hold the balance of power between adverse
tribes, to envelop in the net-work of French power and diplomacy the
remotest hordes of the wilderness.” With this was combined a love of
exploration so great that it was hard to say which assisted the most in
spreading their dominion--religion, the love of adventure, diplomatic
skill, or military talent. These between them gave the interior of the
continent to the French. One of the New York governors wrote home that
if the French were to hold all that they had discovered, England would
not have a hundred miles from the sea anywhere.
CHAMPLAIN’S BATTLE WITH THE IROQUOIS
_By Reuben Gold Thwaites, LL.D._
From the time of the restoration of New France (1632) till the final
catastrophe of 1759, Canada remained uninterruptedly French; and from
the tide-water of the St. Lawrence as a base, French traders, soldiers,
and settlers (_habitants_) spread westward, northward, and eventually
southward. In the year of the restoration probably not over a hundred
and eighty of its inhabitants might properly be called settlers, with
perhaps a few score military men, seafarers, and visiting commercial
adventurers. The majority of residents, of course, centred at Quebec,
with a few at the outlying trading-posts of Tadoussac on the east,
Three Rivers on the west, and the intervening hamlets of Beaupré,
Beauport, and Isle d’Orleans. At the same time the English and Dutch
settlements in Virginia, the Middle Colonies, and Massachusetts had
probably amassed an aggregate population of twenty-five thousand--for
between the years 1627 and 1637 upward of twenty thousand settlers
emigrated thither from Europe. While the English government was engaged
in efforts to repress the migration toward its own colonies, the utmost
endeavors of the powerful French companies, their arguments reinforced
by bounties, could not induce more than a few home-loving Frenchmen to
try their fortunes amid the rigors of the New World.
With all his tact, Champlain had committed one act of indiscretion, the
effects of which were left as an ill-fated legacy to the little colony
which he otherwise nursed so well. Seeking to please his Algonquian
neighbors upon the St. Lawrence, and at the time eager to explore the
country, the commandant, with two of his men-at-arms, accompanied
(1609) one of their frequent war-parties against the confederated
Iroquois, who lived, for the most part, in New York state and
northeastern Pennsylvania. Meeting a hostile band of two hundred and
fifty warriors near where Fort Ticonderoga was afterward constructed,
Champlain and his white attendants easily routed the enemy by means of
firearms, with which the interior savages were as yet unacquainted.[21]
His success in this direction was, through the unfortunate importunity
of his allies, repeated in 1610; but five years later, when he invaded
the Iroquois cantonments in the company of a large body of Huron, whose
country to the east of Lake Huron he had been visiting that summer, the
tribesmen to the southeast of Lake Ontario were found to have lost much
of their fear for white men’s weapons, and the invaders retreated in
some disorder.
[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN’S ATTACK ON AN IROQUOIS FORT
(From an old print)]
The results were highly disastrous both to the Huron and the French.
The former were year by year mercilessly harried by the bloodthirsty
Iroquois, until in 1649 they were driven from their homes, and in
the frenzy of fear fled first to the islands of Lake Huron, then to
Mackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, finally to the southern shores of Lake
Superior, and deep within the dark pine forests of northern Wisconsin.
In the destruction of Huronia, several Jesuit missionaries suffered
torture and death.
As for the squalid little French settlements at Three Rivers, Quebec,
and Tadoussac, they soon felt the wrath of the Iroquois, who were the
fiercest and best-trained fighters among the savages of North America.
Almost annually the war-parties of this dread foe raided the lands of
the king, not infrequently appearing in force before the sharp-pointed
palisades of New France, over which were waged bloody battles for
supremacy. Fortunately logs could turn back a primitive enemy unarmed
with cannon; but not infrequently outlying parties of Frenchmen had
sorry experiences with the stealthy foe, of whose approach through the
tangled forest they had no warning. Champlain’s closing years were much
saddened by these merciless assaults which he had unwittingly invited;
in the decade after his death the operations of his successors were
largely hampered thereby. Montreal, founded by religious enthusiasts
in 1642, during its earliest years served as a buffer colony, in the
direction of the avenging tribesmen, and supped to the dregs the cup of
border turmoil.
Not only were Frenchmen obliged to huddle within their defences,
but far and near their Indian allies were swept from the earth. The
Iroquois practically destroyed the Algonquin tribes between Quebec
and the Saguenay, as well as the Algonquins of the Ottawa, the Huron,
and the Petun and Neutrals of the Niagara district. The fur-trade of
New France was for a long period almost wholly destroyed; English and
Dutch rivals to the south were friendly to the Iroquois, furnished them
cheap goods and abundant firearms and ammunition, and egged them on in
their northern forays; while toward the Mississippi, and south of the
Great Lakes, Iroquois raiders terrorized those tribes which dared to
entertain trade relations with the French.
In 1646, however, the blood-stained confederates, after nearly
a half-century of opposition, consented to a peace which lasted
spasmodically for almost twenty years; until in 1665 the French
government found itself strong enough to threaten the chastisement of
the New York tribesmen, and thereafter the Iroquois opposition, while
not altogether quelled, was of a far less threatening character.
SYNOPSIS OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS, CHIEFLY MILITARY, BETWEEN CHAMPLAIN’S
BATTLE WITH THE IROQUOIS, 1609, AND THE CONQUEST OF THE PEQUOTS, 1637
1609. Henry Hudson ascends the Hudson River.
1610. Henry Hudson explores Hudson Bay.
1614. The Dutch erect a Fort on Manhattan Island.
1619. A colonial assembly is convened at Jamestown. Negro slavery is
introduced into Virginia.
1620. Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.
1622. The Dutch West India Company take possession of New Netherlands.
Indian massacre in Virginia.
1623. Settlement of New Hampshire.
1624. Dissolution of the London Company. Virginia becomes a Crown
Colony.
1626. The Dutch purchase Manhattan Island from the Indians.
1628. Settlement of Salem by the Massachusetts Bay Company.
1629. The English take Quebec.
1630. Foundation of Boston.
1631. Settlement of Maryland by Clayborne.
1632. Canada is restored to France by England. Lord Baltimore receives
a charter for a colony in Maryland.
1634. Settlement of St. Mary’s, Maryland, by Calvert.
1634–36. Settlement of Connecticut by the English. Settlement of Rhode
Island by Roger Williams.
1636. Foundation of Harvard College.
1637. Conquest of the Pequots by the New England colonists.
III
THE CONQUEST OF THE PEQUOTS, 1637
In 1636 the Massachusetts colony, under Vane’s administration,
became involved in new troubles--a violent internal controversy
and a dangerous Indian war. The most powerful native tribes of New
England were concentrated in the neighborhood of Narragansett Bay. The
Wampanoags, or Pocanokets, were on the east side of that bay within the
limits of the Plymouth patent, and the Narragansets, a more powerful
confederacy, on the west side. Still more numerous and more powerful
were the Pequots, whose chief seats were on or near Pequot River, now
the Thames, but whose authority extended over twenty-six petty tribes,
along both shores of the Sound to the Connecticut River, and even
beyond it, almost or quite to the Hudson. In what is now the northeast
corner of the State of Connecticut dwelt a smaller tribe, the enemies,
perhaps the revolted subjects, of the Pequots, known to the colonists
as Mohegans--an appropriation of a general name properly including
all the Indians along the shores of Long Island Sound as far west as
the Hudson, and even the tribes beyond that river, known afterward
to the English as the Delawares. The Indians about Massachusetts
Bay, supposed to have been formerly quite numerous, had almost died
out before the arrival of the colonists, and the smallpox had since
proved very fatal among the few that remained. Some tribes of no great
consideration--the Nipmucks, the Wachusetts, the Nashaways--dwelt among
the interior hills, and others, known collectively to the colonists
as the River Indians, fished at the falls of the Connecticut, and
cultivated little patches of its rich alluvial meadows. The lower
Merrimac, the Piscataqua, and their branches were occupied by the
tribes of a considerable confederacy, that of Penacook, or Pawtucket,
whose chief sachem, Passaconaway, was reported to be a great magician.
The interior of New Hampshire and of what is now Vermont seems to have
been an uninhabited wilderness. The tribes eastward of the Piscataqua,
known to the English by the general name of Tarenteens, and reputed to
be numerous and powerful, were distinguished by the rivers on which
they dwelt. They seem to have constituted two principal confederacies,
those east of the Kennebec being known to the French of Acadie as the
Abenakis. All the New England Indians spoke substantially the same
language, the Algonquin, in various dialects. From the nature of the
country, they were more stationary than some other tribes, being fixed
principally at the falls of the rivers. They seem to have entertained
very decided ideas of the hereditary descent of authority, and of
personal devotion to their chiefs. What might have been at this time
the total Indian population of New England it is not very easy to
conjecture; but it was certainly much less than is commonly stated.
Fifteen or twenty thousand would seem to be a sufficient allowance for
the region south of the Piscataqua, and as many more, perhaps, for the
more easterly district. The Pequots, esteemed the most powerful tribe
in New England, were totally ruined, as we shall presently see, by the
destruction or capture of hardly more than a thousand persons.
The provocation for this exterminating war was extremely small.
Previous to the Massachusetts migration to the Connecticut, one Captain
Stone, the drunken and dissolute master of a small trading vessel from
Virginia, whom the Plymouth people charged with having been engaged at
Manhattan in a piratical plot to seize one of their vessels, having
been sent away from Boston with orders not to return without leave,
under pain of death, on his way homeward to Virginia, in 1634, had
entered the Connecticut River, where he was cut off, with his whole
company, seven in number, by a band of Pequots. There were various
stories, none of them authentic, as to the precise manner of his death,
but the Pequots insisted that he had been the aggressor--a thing in
itself sufficiently probable. As Stone belonged to Virginia, the
magistrates of Massachusetts wrote to Governor Harvey to move him to
stir in the matter. Van Cuyler, the Dutch commissary at Fort Good Hope,
in fact revenged Stone’s death by the execution of a sachem and several
others. This offended the Pequots, who renounced any further traffic
with the Dutch, and sent messengers to Boston desiring an intercourse
of trade, and assistance to settle their pending difficulties with the
Narragansets, who intervened between them and the English settlements.
They even promised to give up--at least so the magistrates understood
them--the only two survivors, as they alleged, of those concerned in
the death of Stone. These offers were accepted; for the convenience
of this traffic a peace was negotiated between the Pequots and the
Narragansets, and a vessel was presently sent to open a trade. But this
traffic disappointed the adventurers; nor were the promised culprits
given up. The Pequots, according to the Indian custom, tendered,
instead, a present of furs and wampum. But this was refused, the
colonists seeming to think themselves under a religious obligation to
avenge blood with blood.
Thus matters remained for a year or two, when, in July, 1636, the crew
of a small bark, returning from Connecticut, saw close to Block Island
a pinnace at anchor, and full of Indians. This pinnace was recognized
as belonging to Oldham, the Indian trader, the old settler at
Nantasket, and explorer of the Connecticut. Conjecturing that something
must be wrong, the bark approached the pinnace and hailed, whereupon
the Indians on board slipped the cable and made sail. The bark gave
chase, and soon overtook the pinnace; some of the Indians jumped
overboard in their fright, and were drowned; several were killed, and
one was made prisoner. The dead body of Oldham was found on board,
covered with an old seine. This murder, as appeared from the testimony
of the prisoner, who was presently sentenced by the Massachusetts
magistrates to be a slave for life, was committed at the instigation
of some Narraganset chiefs, upon whom Block Island was dependent, in
revenge for the trade which Oldham had commenced under the late treaty
with the Pequots, their enemies. Indeed, all the Narraganset chiefs,
except the head sachem, Canonicus, and his nephew and colleague,
Miantonimoh, were believed to have had a hand in this matter,
especially the chieftain of the Niantics, a branch of the Narragansets,
inhabiting the continent opposite Block Island.
Canonicus, in great alarm, sent to his friend and neighbor, Roger
Williams, by whose aid he wrote a letter to the Massachusetts
magistrates, expressing his grief at what had happened, and stating
that Miantonimoh had sailed already with seventeen canoes and two
hundred warriors to punish the Block Islanders. With this letter were
sent two Indians, late sailors on board Oldham’s pinnace, and presently
after two English boys, the remainder of his crew. In the recapture
of Oldham’s pinnace eleven Indians had been killed, several of them
chiefs; and that, with the restoration of the crew, seems to have been
esteemed by Canonicus a sufficient atonement for Oldham’s death. But
the magistrates and ministers of Massachusetts, assembled to take this
matter into consideration, thought otherwise. Volunteers were called
for in August, 1636; and four companies, ninety men in all, commanded
by Endicott, whose submissiveness in Williams’ affair had restored
him to favor, were embarked in three pinnaces, with orders to put to
death all the men of Block Island, and to make the women and children
prisoners. The old affair of the death of Stone was now also called to
mind, though the murder of Oldham had no connection with it, except
in some distant similarity of circumstances. Endicott was instructed,
on his return from Block Island, to go to the Pequots, and to demand
of them the murderers of Stone, and a thousand fathoms of wampum for
damages--equivalent to from three to five thousand dollars--also, some
of their children as hostages; and, if they refused, to employ force.
The Block Islanders fled inland, hid themselves, and escaped; but
Endicott burned their wigwams, staved their canoes, and destroyed their
standing corn. He then sailed to Fort Saybrook, at the mouth of the
Connecticut, and marched thence to Pequot River. After some parley,
the Indians refused his demands, when he burned their village and
killed one of their warriors. Marching back to the Connecticut River,
he inflicted like vengeance on the Pequot village there, whence he
returned to Boston, after a three weeks’ absence and without the loss
of a man.
The Pequots, enraged at what they esteemed a treacherous and unprovoked
attack, lurked about Fort Saybrook, killed or took several persons,
and did considerable mischief. They sent, also, to the Narragansets
to engage their alliance against the colonists, whom they represented
as the common enemy of all the Indians. Williams, informed of this
negotiation, sent word of it to the Massachusetts magistrates, and,
at their request, he visited Canonicus, to dissuade him from joining
the Pequots. This mission was not without danger. In the wigwam of
Canonicus, Williams encountered the Pequot messengers, full of rage
and fury. He succeeded, however, in his object, and, in October,
Miantonimoh was induced to visit Boston, where, being received with
much ceremony by the governor and magistrates, he agreed to act with
them as a faithful ally. Canonicus thought it would be necessary to
attack the Pequots with a very large force; but he recommended, as a
thing likely to be agreeable to all the Indians--so Williams informs
us--that the women and children should be spared, a humane piece of
advice which received in the end but little attention.
The policy of this war, or, at least, the wisdom of Endicott’s conduct,
was not universally conceded. A letter from Plymouth reproached the
Massachusetts magistrates with the dangers likely to arise from so
inefficient an attack upon the Pequots. Gardiner, the commandant at
Fort Saybrook, who lost several men during the winter, was equally
dissatisfied. The new settlers up the Connecticut complained bitterly
of the dangers to which they were exposed. Sequeen, the same Indian
chief at whose invitation the Plymouth people had first established
a trading-house on the Connecticut River, had granted land to the
planters at Wethersfield on condition that he might settle near them,
and be protected; but when he came and built his wigwam, they had
driven him away. He took this opportunity for revenge by calling in the
Pequots, who attacked the town, and killed nine of the inhabitants. The
whole number killed by the Pequots during the winter was about thirty.
In December a special session of the General Court of Massachusetts
organized the militia into three regiments, the magistrates to appoint
the field officers--called sergeant-majors--and to select the captains
and lieutenants out of a nomination to be made by the companies
respectively. Watches were ordered to be kept, and travellers were to
go armed....
The new towns on the Connecticut had continued to suffer during the
winter. The attack on Wethersfield has been mentioned already. Fort
Saybrook was beleaguered; several colonists were killed, and two young
girls were taken prisoners, but were presently redeemed and sent
home by some Dutch traders. It had been resolved in Massachusetts to
raise a hundred and sixty men for the war, and already Underhill had
been sent, with twenty men, to reinforce Fort Saybrook; but, during
Vane’s administration, these preparations had been retarded--not from
any misgivings as to the justice of the war, but because the army
“was too much under a covenant of works.” The expedition was now got
ready, and, by a “solemn public invocation of the word of God,” a
leader was designated by lot from among three of the magistrates set
apart for that purpose. The lot fell on Stoughton, whose adherence to
the orthodox party during the late dissensions had restored him to
favor, and obtained for him, at the late election, one of the vacant
magistrates’ seats. Wilson was also designated by lot as chaplain to
the expedition. The people of Plymouth agreed to furnish forty-five men.
The decisive battle, however, had been already fought. The Connecticut
towns, impatient of delay, having obtained the alliance of Uncas,
sachem of the Mohegans, had marched, to the number of ninety men,
almost their entire effective force, under the command of John Mason,
bred a soldier in the Netherlands, whom Hooker, on May 10, with prayers
and religious ceremonies, solemnly invested with the staff of command.
After a night spent in prayer, this little army, joined by Uncas
with sixty Indians, and accompanied by Stone, Hooker’s colleague, as
chaplain, embarked at Hartford. They were not without great doubts as
to their Indian allies, but were reassured at Fort Saybrook. While
Stone was praying “for one pledge of love, that may confirm us of the
fidelity of the Indians,” these allies came in with five Pequot scalps
and a prisoner. Underhill joined with his twenty men, and the united
forces proceeded by water to Narragansett Bay, where they spent Sunday,
May 21, in religious exercises. They were further strengthened by
Miantonimoh and two hundred Narraganset warriors; but the English force
seemed so inadequate that many of the Narragansets became discouraged
and returned home.
The Pequots were principally collected a few miles east of Pequot
River, now the Thames, in two forts, or villages, fortified with trees
and brushwood. After a fatiguing march of two days, Mason reached one
of these strongholds, situated on a high hill, at no great distance
from the sea-shore. He encamped a few hours to rest his men, but
marched again before daybreak, and at early dawn approached the fort.
The Pequots had seen the vessels pass along the sea-shore toward the
bay of Narragansett, and, supposing the hostile forces afraid to attack
them, they had spent the night in feasting and dancing, and Mason could
hear their shoutings in his camp. Toward morning they sunk into a deep
sleep, from which they were roused by the barking of their dogs, as the
colonists, in two parties, approached the fort, one led by Mason, the
other by Underhill, both of whom have left us narratives of the battle.
The assailants poured in a fire of musketry, and, after a moment’s
hesitation, forced their way into the fort. Within were thickly
clustered wigwams containing the families of the Indians, and what
remained of their winter stores. The astonished Pequots seized their
weapons and fought with desperation; but what could their clubs and
arrows avail against the muskets and plate-armor of the colonists? Yet
there was danger in the great superiority of their numbers, and Mason,
crying out “we must burn them,” thrust a firebrand among the mats with
which the wigwams were covered. Almost in a moment the fort was in a
blaze. The colonists, “bereaved of pity and without compassion,” so
Underhill himself declares, kept up the fight within the fort, while
their Indian allies, forming a circle around, struck down every Pequot
who attempted to escape. No quarter was given, no mercy was shown; some
hundreds, not warriors only, but old men, women, and children, perished
by the weapons of the colonists, or in the flames of the burning fort.
“Great and doleful,” says Underhill, “was the bloody sight to the view
of young soldiers, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so
thick you could hardly pass along.” The fact that only seven prisoners
were taken, while Mason boasts that only seven others escaped, evinces
the unrelenting character of this massacre, which was accomplished with
but trifling loss, only two of the colonists being killed, and sixteen
or twenty wounded. Yet the victors were not without embarrassments. The
morning was hot, there was no water to be had, and the men, exhausted
by their long march the two days before, the weight of their armor,
want of sleep, and the sharpness of the late action, must now encounter
a new body of Pequots from the other village, who had taken the alarm,
and were fast approaching. Mason, with a select party, kept this new
enemy at bay, and thus gave time to the main body to push on for Pequot
River, into which some vessels had just been seen to enter. When the
Indians approached the hill where their fort had stood, at sight of
their ruined habitations and slaughtered companions they burst out
into a transport of rage, stamped on the ground, tore their hair, and,
regardless of everything save revenge, rushed furious in pursuit. But
the dreaded firearms soon checked them, and Mason easily made good his
retreat to Pequot harbor, now New London, where he found not only his
own vessels, but Captain Patrick also, just arrived in a bark from
Boston, with forty men. Mason sent the wounded and most of his forces
by water, but, in consequence of Patrick’s refusal to lend his ship,
was obliged to march himself, with twenty men, followed by Patrick, to
Fort Saybrook, where his victory was greeted by a salvo of cannon.
In about a fortnight Stoughton arrived at Saybrook with the main body
of the Massachusetts forces. Mason, with forty Connecticut soldiers
and a large body of Narragansets, joined also in pursuing the remnants
of the enemy. The Pequots had abandoned their country, or concealed
themselves in the swamps. In July one of these fortresses was attacked
by night, and about a hundred Indians captured. The men, twenty-two
in number, were put to death; thirty women and children were given to
the Narraganset allies; some fifty others were sent to Boston, and
distributed as slaves among the principal colonists. The flying Pequots
were pursued as far as Quinapiack, now New Haven. A swamp in that
neighborhood, where a large party had taken refuge, being surrounded
and attacked, a parley was had, and life was offered to “all whose
hands were not in English blood.” About two hundred, old men, women,
and children, reluctantly came out and gave themselves up. Daylight
was exhausted in this surrender; and as night set in, the warriors who
remained renewed their defiances. Toward morning, favored by a thick
fog, they broke through and escaped. Many of the surviving Pequots put
themselves under the protection of Canonicus and other Narraganset
chiefs. Sassacus, the head sachem, fled to the Mohawks; but they were
instigated by their allies, the Narragansets, to put him to death.
His scalp was sent to Boston, and many heads and hands of Pequot
warriors were also brought in by the neighboring tribes. The adult male
prisoners who remained in the hands of the colonists were sent to the
West Indies to be sold into slavery; the women and children experienced
a similar fate at home. It was reckoned that between eight and nine
hundred of the Pequots had been killed or taken. Such of the survivors
as had escaped, forbidden any longer to call themselves Pequots, were
distributed between the Narragansets and Mohegans, and subjected to an
annual tribute. A like tribute was imposed, also, on the inhabitants of
Block Island. The colonists regarded their success as ample proof of
Divine approbation, and justified all they had done to these “bloody
heathen” by abundant quotations from the Old Testament. Having referred
to “the wars of David,” Underhill adds, “We had sufficient light from
the word of God for our proceedings”; and Mason, after some exulting
quotations from the Psalms, concludes: “Thus the Lord was pleased to
smite our enemies in the hinder parts, and to give us their land for an
inheritance!” The Indian allies admired the courage of the colonists,
but they thought their method of war “too furious, and to slay too
many.”
SYNOPSIS OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS, CHIEFLY MILITARY, BETWEEN THE
CONQUEST OF THE PEQUOTS, 1637, AND THE DEFEAT OF KING PHILIP, 1676
1638. Settlement of Rhode Island. Establishment of the Colony of New
Haven. Swedes and Finns settle in Delaware.
1639. Adoption of the Connecticut Constitution.
1642. War between Charles I. and Parliament. Indecisive Battle of
Edgehill.
1643. The Colonies of New England form a confederacy.
1644. Battle of Marston Moor, in which the English Royalists are
defeated. Roger Williams obtains a patent from Parliament for the
United Government of the Rhode Island Settlements.
1645. Defeat of the English Royalists at the Battle of Naseby.
1649. Execution of Charles I.
1653. Cromwell is made Lord Protector of England.
1655. Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherlands,
dispossesses the Swedish settlers at the mouth of the Delaware.
1660. Restoration of the Stuarts in England.
1662. The Connecticut and New Haven Colonies receive a charter from
Charles II.
1664. Charles II. grants the region between the Connecticut and
Delaware rivers to his brother James, Duke of York. The English occupy
New Amsterdam and take possession of the province of New Netherland.
The Colony of New Jersey is established.
1665. The union of the Connecticut and New Haven Colonies is completed.
1668. Father Marquette founds the Mission of Sault Ste. Marie.
1670. Incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company.
1673. The Dutch occupy New York and New Jersey.
1674. New York and New Jersey are restored to the English.
1675. King Philip’s War.
IV
THE DEFEAT OF KING PHILIP, 1676
Except in the destruction of the Pequots, the native tribes of New
England had, in 1673, undergone no very material diminution. The
Pocanokets, or Wampanoags, though somewhat curtailed in their limits,
still occupied the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. The Narragansets
still possessed the western shore. There were several scattered tribes
in various parts of Connecticut; though, with the exception of some
small reservations, they had already ceded all their lands. Uncas,
the Mohegan chief, was now an old man. The Pawtucket, or Penacook,
confederacy continued to occupy the falls of the Merrimac and the
heads of the Piscataqua. Their old sachem, Passaconaway, regarded the
colonists with awe and veneration. In the interior of Massachusetts
and along the Connecticut were several other less noted tribes. The
Indians of Maine and the region eastward possessed their ancient haunts
undisturbed; but their intercourse was principally with the French, to
whom, since the late peace with France, Acadie had been again yielded
up. The New England Indians were occasionally annoyed by war parties
of Mohawks; but, by the intervention of Massachusetts, a peace had
recently been concluded.
Efforts for the conversion and civilization of the Indians were still
continued by Eliot and his coadjutors, supported by the funds of the
English society. In Massachusetts there were fourteen feeble villages
of these praying Indians, and a few more in Plymouth colony. The whole
number in New England was about thirty-six hundred, but of these near
one-half inhabited the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
Massachusetts held a strict hand over the Narragansets and other
subject tribes, and their limits had been contracted by repeated
cessions, not always entirely voluntary. The Wampanoags, within the
jurisdiction of Plymouth, experienced similar treatment. By successive
sales of parts of their territory, they were now shut up, as it
were, in the necks or peninsulas formed by the northern and eastern
branches of Narragansett Bay, the same territory now constituting the
continental eastern portion of Rhode Island. Though always at peace
with the colonists, the Wampanoags had not always escaped suspicion.
The increase of the settlements around them, and the progressive
curtailment of their limits, aroused their jealousy. They were galled,
also, by the feudal superiority, similar to that of Massachusetts over
her dependent tribes, claimed by Plymouth on the strength of certain
alleged former submissions. None felt this assumption more keenly
than Pometacom, head chief of the Wampanoags, better known among the
colonists as King Philip of Mount Hope, nephew and successor of that
Massasoit who had welcomed the Pilgrims to Plymouth. Suspected of
hostile designs, he had been compelled to deliver up his firearms,
and to enter into certain stipulations. These stipulations he was
accused of not fulfilling; and nothing but the interposition of the
Massachusetts magistrates, to whom Philip appealed, prevented Plymouth
from making war upon him. He was sentenced instead to pay a heavy fine,
and to acknowledge the unconditional supremacy of that colony.
A praying Indian, who had been educated at Cambridge and employed as a
teacher, upon some misdemeanor had fled to Philip, who took him into
service as a sort of secretary. Being persuaded to return again to his
former employment, this Indian accused Philip anew of being engaged in
a secret hostile plot. In accordance with Indian ideas, the treacherous
informer was waylaid and killed. Three of Philip’s men, suspected of
having killed him, were arrested by the Plymouth authorities, and,
in accordance with English ideas, were tried for murder by a jury
half English, half Indians, convicted upon very slender evidence, and
hanged. Philip retaliated by plundering the houses nearest Mount Hope.
Presently he attacked Swanzey, and killed several of the inhabitants.
Plymouth took measures for raising a military force. The neighboring
colonies were sent to for assistance. Thus, by the impulse of suspicion
on the one side and passion on the other, New England became suddenly
engaged in a war very disastrous to the colonists, and utterly ruinous
to the native tribes. The lust of gain, in spite of all laws to prevent
it, had partially furnished the Indians with firearms, and they were
now far more formidable enemies than they had been in the days of the
Pequots. Of this the colonists hardly seem to have thought. Now, as
then, confident of their superiority, and comparing themselves to the
Lord’s chosen people driving the heathen out of the land, they rushed
eagerly into the contest, without a single effort at the preservation
of peace. Indeed, their pretensions hardly admitted of it. Philip was
denounced as a rebel in arms against his lawful superiors, with whom
it would be folly and weakness to treat on any terms short of absolute
submission.
A body of volunteers, horse and foot, raised in Massachusetts,
marched under Major Savage, in June, 1675, four days after the attack
on Swanzey, to join the Plymouth forces. After one or two slight
skirmishes, they penetrated to the Wampanoag villages at Mount Hope,
but found them empty and deserted. Philip and his warriors, conscious
of their inferiority, had abandoned their homes. If the Narragansets,
on the opposite side of the bay, did not openly join the Wampanoags,
they would, at least, be likely to afford shelter to their women
and children. The troops were therefore ordered into the Narraganset
country, accompanied by commissioners to demand assurances of peaceful
intentions, and a promise to deliver up all fugitive enemies of the
colonists--pledges which the Narragansets felt themselves constrained
to give.
Arrived at Taunton on their return from the Narraganset country, news
came that Philip and his warriors had been discovered by Church, of
Plymouth colony, collected in a great swamp at Pocasset, now Tiverton,
the southern district of the Wampanoag country, whence small parties
sallied forth to burn and plunder the neighboring settlements. After
a march of eighteen miles, having reached the designated spot, the
soldiers found there a hundred wigwams lately built, but empty and
deserted, the Indians having retired deep into the swamp. The colonists
followed; but the ground was soft; the thicket was difficult to
penetrate; the companies were soon thrown into disorder. Each man fired
at every bush he saw shake, thinking an Indian might lay concealed
behind it, and several were thus wounded by their own friends. When
night came on, the assailants retired with the loss of sixteen men. The
swamp continued to be watched and guarded, but Philip broke through,
not without some loss, and escaped into the country of the Nipmucks,
in the interior of Massachusetts. That tribe had already commenced
hostilities by attacking Mendon. They waylaid and killed Captain
Hutchinson, a son of the famous Mrs. Hutchinson, and sixteen out of a
party of twenty sent from Boston to Brookfield to parley with them.
Attacking Brookfield itself, they burned it, except one fortified
house. The inhabitants were saved by Major Willard, who, on information
of their danger, came with a troop of horse from Lancaster, thirty
miles through the woods, to their rescue. A body of troops presently
arrived from the eastward, and were stationed for some time at
Brookfield.
The colonists now found that by driving Philip to extremity they had
roused a host of unexpected enemies. The River Indians, anticipating
an intended attack upon them, joined the assailants. Deerfield and
Northfield, the northernmost towns on the Connecticut River, settled
within a few years past, were attacked, and several of the inhabitants
killed and wounded. Captain Beers, sent from Hadley to their relief
with a convoy of provisions, was surprised near Northfield in
September, and slain, with twenty of his men. Northfield was abandoned,
and burned by the Indians.
“The English at first,” says Gookin, “thought easily to chastise the
insolent doings and murderous practice of the heathen; but it was found
another manner of thing than was expected; for our men could see no
enemy to shoot at, but yet felt their bullets out of the thick bushes
where they lay in ambush. The English wanted not courage or resolution,
but could not discover nor find an enemy to fight with, yet were galled
by the enemy.” In the arts of ambush and surprise, with which the
Indians were so familiar, the colonists were without practice. It is
to the want of this experience, purchased at a very dear rate in the
course of the war, that we must ascribe the numerous surprises and
defeats from which the colonists suffered at its commencement.
Driven to the necessity of defensive warfare, those in command on
the river determined to establish a magazine and garrison at Hadley.
Captain Lathrop, who had been dispatched from the eastward to the
assistance of the river towns, was sent with eighty men, the flower
of the youth of Essex County, to guard the wagons intended to convey
to Hadley three thousand bushels of unthreshed wheat, the produce of
the fertile Deerfield meadows. Just before arriving at Deerfield, near
a small stream still known as Bloody Brook, under the shadow of the
abrupt conical Sugar Loaf, the southern termination of the Deerfield
mountain, Lathrop, on September 18, fell into an ambush, and, after a
brave resistance, perished there with all his company. Captain Moseley,
stationed at Deerfield, marched to his assistance, but arrived too
late to help him. Deerfield was abandoned, and burned by the Indians.
Springfield, about the same time, was set on fire, but was partially
saved by the arrival, with troops from Connecticut, of Major Treat,
successor to the lately deceased Mason in the chief command of the
Connecticut forces. An attack on Hatfield was vigorously repelled by
the garrison.
Meanwhile, hostilities were spreading; the Indians on the Merrimac
began to attack the towns in their vicinity, and the whole of
Massachusetts was soon in the utmost alarm. Except in the immediate
neighborhood of Boston, the country still remained an immense forest
dotted by a few openings. The frontier settlements could not be
defended against a foe familiar with localities, scattered in small
parties, skilful in concealment, and watching with patience for some
unguarded or favorable moment. Those settlements were mostly broken
up, and the inhabitants, retiring toward Boston, spread everywhere
dread and intense hatred of “the bloody heathen.” Even the praying
Indians, and the small dependent and tributary tribes, became objects
of suspicion and terror. They had been employed at first as scouts and
auxiliaries, and to good advantage; but some few, less confirmed in
the faith, having deserted to the enemy, the whole body of them were
denounced as traitors. Eliot the apostle, and Gookin, superintendent
of the subject Indians, exposed themselves to insults, and even to
danger, by their efforts to stem this headlong fury, to which several
of the magistrates opposed but a feeble resistance. Troops were sent to
break up the praying villages at Mendon, Grafton, and others in that
quarter. The Natick Indians, “those poor despised sheep of Christ,” as
Gookin affectionately calls them, were hurried off to Deer Island, in
Boston harbor, where they suffered excessively from a severe winter. A
part of the praying Indians of Plymouth colony were confined, in like
manner, on the islands in Plymouth harbor.
Not content with realities sufficiently frightful, superstition,
as usual, added bugbears of her own. Indian bows were seen in the
sky, and scalps in the moon. The northern lights became an object of
terror. Phantom horsemen careered among the clouds or were heard to
gallop invisible through the air. The howling of wolves was turned
into a terrible omen. The war was regarded as a special judgment in
punishment of prevailing sins. Among these sins, the General Court
of Massachusetts, after consultation with the elders, enumerated
neglect in the training of the children of church-members; pride,
in men’s wearing long and curled hair; excess in apparel; naked
breasts and arms, and superfluous ribbons; the toleration of Quakers;
hurry to leave meeting before blessing asked; profane cursing and
swearing; tippling-houses; want of respect for parents; idleness;
extortion in shopkeepers and mechanics; and the riding from town
to town of unmarried men and women, under pretence of attending
lectures--“a sinful custom, tending to lewdness.” Penalties were
denounced against all these offences; and the persecution of the
Quakers was again renewed. A Quaker woman had recently frightened
the Old South congregation in Boston by entering that meeting-house
clothed in sackcloth, with ashes on her head, her feet bare, and her
face blackened, intending to personify the smallpox, with which she
threatened the colony, in punishment for its sins.
About the time of the first collision with Philip, the Tarenteens,
or Eastern Indians, had attacked the settlements in Maine and New
Hampshire, plundering and burning the houses, and massacring such
of the inhabitants as fell into their hands. This sudden diffusion
of hostilities and vigor of attack from opposite quarters made the
colonists believe that Philip had long been plotting and had gradually
matured an extensive conspiracy, into which most of the tribes had
deliberately entered, for the extermination of the whites. This
belief infuriated the colonists, and suggested some very questionable
proceedings. It seems, however, to have originated, like the war
itself, from mere suspicions. The same griefs pressed upon all the
tribes; and the struggle once commenced, the awe which the colonists
inspired thrown off, the greater part were ready to join in the
contest. But there is no evidence of any deliberate concert; nor, in
fact, were the Indians united. Had they been so, the war would have
been far more serious. The Connecticut tribes proved faithful, and that
colony remained untouched. Uncas and Ninigret continued friendly; even
the Narragansets, in spite of so many former provocations, had not yet
taken up arms. But they were strongly suspected of intention to do
so, and were accused by Uncas of giving, notwithstanding their recent
assurances, aid and shelter to the hostile tribes.
An attempt had lately been made to revive the union of the New England
colonies. At a meeting of commissioners, on September 9, 1675, those
from Plymouth presented a narrative of the origin and progress of the
present hostilities. Upon the strength of this narrative the war was
pronounced “just and necessary,” and a resolution was passed to carry
it on at the joint expense, and to raise for that purpose a thousand
men, one-half to be mounted dragoons. If the Narragansets were not
crushed during the winter, it was feared they might break out openly
hostile in the spring; and at a subsequent meeting a thousand men were
ordered to be levied to co-operate in an expedition specially against
them.
The winter was unfavorable to the Indians; the leafless woods no longer
concealed their lurking attacks. The frozen surface of the swamps made
the Indian fastnesses accessible to the colonists. The forces destined
to act against the Narragansets--six companies from Massachusetts,
under Major Appleton; two from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; and five
from Connecticut, under Major Treat--were placed under the command
of Josiah Winslow, Governor of Plymouth since Prince’s death--son
of that Edward Winslow so conspicuous in the earlier history of the
colony. In December the Massachusetts and Plymouth forces marched to
Petasquamscot, on the west shore of Narragansett Bay, where they made
some forty prisoners. Being joined by the troops from Connecticut, and
guided by an Indian deserter, after a march of fifteen miles through
a deep snow, they approached a swamp in what is now the town of South
Kingston, one of the ancient strongholds of the Narragansets. Driving
the Indian scouts before them, and penetrating the swamp, the colonial
soldiers soon came in sight of the Indian fort, built on a rising
ground in the morass, a sort of island of two or three acres, fortified
by a palisade, and surrounded by a close hedge a rod thick. There was
but one entrance, quite narrow, defended by a tree thrown across it,
with a block-house of logs in front and another on the flank. It was
the “Lord’s day,” but that did not hinder the attack. As the captains
advanced at the heads of their companies, the Indians opened a galling
fire, under which many fell. But the assailants pressed on, and forced
the entrance. A desperate struggle ensued. The colonists were once
driven back, but they rallied and returned to the charge, and, after
a two hours’ fight, became masters of the fort. Fire was put to the
wigwams, near six hundred in number, and all the horrors of the Pequot
massacre were renewed. The corn and other winter stores of the Indians
were consumed, and not a few of the old men, women, and children
perished in the flames. In this bloody contest, long remembered as the
“Swamp Fight,” the colonial loss was terribly severe. Six captains,
with two hundred and thirty men, were killed or wounded; and at night,
in the midst of a snow-storm; with a fifteen miles’ march before them,
the colonial soldiers abandoned the fort, of which the Indians resumed
possession. But their wigwams were burned; their provisions destroyed;
they had no supplies for the winter; their loss was irreparable. Of
those who survived the fight, many perished of hunger.
Even as a question of policy, this attack on the Narragansets was
more than doubtful. The starving and infuriated warriors, scattered
through the woods, revenged themselves by attacks on the frontier
settlements. On February 10, 1676, Lancaster was burned, and forty of
the inhabitants killed or taken; among the rest, Mrs. Rolandson, wife
of the minister, the narrative of whose captivity is still preserved.
Groton, Chelmsford, and other towns in that vicinity were repeatedly
attacked. Medfield, twenty miles from Boston, was furiously assaulted,
and, though defended by three hundred men, half the houses were burned.
Weymouth, within eighteen miles of Boston, was attacked a few days
after. These were the nearest approaches which the Indians made to
that capital. For a time the neighborhood of the Narraganset country
was abandoned. The Rhode Island towns, though they had no part in
undertaking the war, yet suffered the consequences of it. In March,
Warwick was burned, and Providence was partially destroyed. Most of the
inhabitants sought refuge in the islands, but the aged Roger Williams
accepted a commission as captain for the defence of the town he had
founded. Walter Clarke was presently chosen governor in Coddington’s
place, the times not suiting a Quaker chief magistrate.
The whole colony of Plymouth was overrun. Houses were burned in almost
every town, but the inhabitants, for the most part, saved themselves
in their garrisons, a shelter with which all the towns now found it
necessary to be provided. On March 26 Captain Pierce, with fifty men
and some friendly Indians, while endeavoring to cover the Plymouth
towns, fell into an ambush and was cut off. That same day, Marlborough
was set on fire; two days after Rehoboth was burned. The Indians seemed
to be everywhere. On April 18 Captain Wadsworth, marching to the relief
of Sudbury, fell into an ambush, and perished with fifty men. The alarm
and terror of the colonists reached again a great height. But affairs
were about to take a turn. The resources of the Indians were exhausted;
they were now making their last efforts.
A body of Connecticut volunteers, under Captain Denison, and of Mohegan
and other friendly Indians, Pequots and Niantics, swept the entire
country of the Narragansets, who suffered, as spring advanced, the last
extremities of famine. Canonchet, the chief sachem, said to have been
a son of Miantonimoh, but probably his nephew, had ventured to his old
haunts to procure seed-corn with which to plant the rich intervals
on the Connecticut, abandoned by the colonists. Taken prisoner, he
conducted himself with all that haughty firmness esteemed by the
Indians the height of magnanimity. Being offered his life on condition
of bringing about a peace, he scorned the proposal. His tribe would
perish to the last man rather than become servants to the English. When
ordered to prepare for death, he replied, “I like it well; I shall die
before my heart is soft, or I shall have spoken anything unworthy of
myself.” Two Indians were appointed to shoot him, and his head was cut
off and sent to Hartford.
The colonists had suffered severely. Men, women, and children had
perished by the bullets of the Indians, or fled naked through the
wintry woods by the light of their blazing houses, leaving their
goods and cattle a spoil to the assailants. Several settlements had
been destroyed, and many more had been abandoned; but the oldest and
wealthiest remained untouched. The Indians, on the other hand, had
neither provisions nor ammunition. On May 12, while attempting to plant
corn and catch fish at Montague Falls, on the Connecticut River,
they were attacked with great slaughter by the garrison of the lower
towns, led by Captain Turner, a Boston Baptist, and at first refused
a commission on that account, but as danger increased, pressed to
accept it. Yet this enterprise was not without its drawbacks. As the
troops returned, Captain Turner fell into an ambush and was slain,
with thirty-eight men. Hadley was attacked on a lecture day, June 12,
while the people were at meeting; but the Indians were repulsed by the
bravery of Goffe, one of the fugitive regicides, long concealed in that
town. Seeing this venerable unknown man come to their rescue, and then
suddenly disappear, the inhabitants took him for an angel.
Major Church, at the head of a body of two hundred volunteers, English
and Indians, energetically hunted down the hostile bands in Plymouth
colony. The interior tribes about Mount Wachusett were invaded and
subdued by a force of six hundred men, raised for that purpose. Many
fled to the north to find refuge in Canada--guides and leaders, in
after years, of those French and Indian war parties by which the
frontiers of New England were so terribly harassed. Just a year after
the fast at the commencement of the war, a thanksgiving was observed
for success in it.
No longer sheltered by the River Indians, who now began to make their
peace, and even attacked by bands of the Mohawks, Philip returned
to his own country, about Mount Hope, where he was still faithfully
supported by his female confederate and relative, Witamo, squaw sachem
of Pocasset. Punham, also, the Shawomet vassal of Massachusetts, still
zealously carried on the war, but was presently killed. Philip was
watched and followed by Church, who surprised his camp on August 1st,
killed upward of a hundred of his people, and took prisoners his wife
and boy. The disposal of this child was a subject of much deliberation.
Several of the elders were urgent for putting him to death. It was
finally resolved to send him to Bermuda, to be sold into slavery--a
fate to which many other of the Indian captives were subjected. Witamo
shared the disasters of Philip. Most of her people were killed or
taken. She herself was drowned while crossing a river in her flight;
but her body was recovered, and the head, cut off, was stuck upon a
pole at Taunton, amid the jeers and scoffs of the colonial soldiers,
and the tears and lamentations of the Indian prisoners.
Philip still lurked in the swamps, but was now reduced to extremity.
Again attacked by Church, he was killed by one of his own people, a
deserter to the colonists. His dead body was beheaded and quartered,
the sentence of the English law upon traitors. One of his hands was
given to the Indian who had shot him, and on August 17, the day
appointed for a public thanksgiving, his head was carried in triumph to
Plymouth.
The popular rage against the Indians was excessive. Death or slavery
was the penalty for all known or suspected to have been concerned
in shedding English blood. Merely having been present at the “Swamp
Fight” was adjudged by the authorities of Rhode Island sufficient
foundation for sentence of death, and that, too, notwithstanding
they had intimated an opinion that the origin of the war would not
bear examination. The other captives who fell into the hands of the
colonists were distributed among them as ten-year servants. Roger
Williams received a boy for his share. Many chiefs were executed at
Boston and Plymouth on the charge of rebellion; among others, Captain
Tom, chief of the Christian Indians at Natick, and Tispiquin, a noted
warrior, reputed to be invulnerable, who had surrendered to Church on
an implied promise of safety. A large body of Indians, assembled at
Dover to treat of peace, were treacherously made prisoners by Major
Waldron, who commanded there. Some two hundred of these Indians,
claimed as fugitives from Massachusetts, were sent by water to Boston,
where some were hanged, and the rest shipped off to be sold as slaves.
Some fishermen of Marblehead having been killed by the Indians at the
eastward, the women of that town, as they came out of meeting on a
Sunday, fell upon two Indian prisoners who had just been brought in,
and murdered them on the spot. The same ferocious spirit of revenge
which governed the contemporaneous conduct of Berkeley in Virginia
toward those concerned in Bacon’s rebellion, swayed the authorities of
New England in their treatment of the conquered Indians. By the end
of the year the contest was over in the South, upward of two thousand
Indians having been killed or taken. But some time elapsed before a
peace could be arranged with the Eastern tribes, whose haunts it was
not so easy to reach.
In this short war of hardly a year’s duration the Wampanoags and
Narragansets had suffered the fate of the Pequots. The Niantics
alone, under the guidance of their aged sachem, Ninigret, had escaped
destruction. Philip’s country was annexed to Plymouth, though sixty
years afterward, under a royal order in council, it was transferred
to Rhode Island. The Narraganset territory remained as before, under
the name of King’s Province, a bone of contention between Connecticut,
Rhode Island, the Marquis of Hamilton, and the Atherton claimants. The
Niantics still retained their ancient seats along the southern shores
of Narragansett Bay. Most of the surviving Narragansets, the Nipmucks,
and the River Indians, abandoned their country, and migrated to the
North and West. Such as remained, along with the Mohegans and other
subject tribes, became more than ever abject and subservient.
The work of conversion was now again renewed, and, after such
overwhelming proofs of Christian superiority, with somewhat greater
success. A second edition of the Indian Old Testament, which seems to
have been more in demand than the New, was published in 1683, revised
by Eliot, with the assistance of John Cotton, son of the “great
Cotton,” and minister of Plymouth. But not an individual exists in our
day by whom it can be understood. The fragments of the subject tribes,
broken in spirit, lost the savage freedom and rude virtues of their
fathers, without acquiring the laborious industry of the whites. Lands
were assigned them in various places, which they were prohibited by law
from alienating. But this very provision, though humanely intended,
operated to perpetuate their indolence and incapacity. Some sought a
more congenial occupation in the whale fishery, which presently began
to be carried on from the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
Many perished by enlisting in the military expeditions undertaken
in future years against Acadie and the West Indies. The Indians
intermarried with the blacks, and thus confirmed their degradation by
associating themselves with another oppressed and unfortunate race.
Gradually they dwindled away. A few sailors and petty farmers, of
mixed blood, as much African as Indian, are now the sole surviving
representatives of the aboriginal possessors of southern New England.
On the side of the colonists the contest had also been very disastrous.
Twelve or thirteen towns had been entirely ruined, and many others
partially destroyed. Six hundred houses had been burned, near a tenth
part of all in New England. Twelve captains and more than six hundred
men in the prime of life had fallen in battle. There was hardly a
family not in mourning. The pecuniary losses and expenses of the war
were estimated at near a million of dollars. Massachusetts was burdened
with a heavy debt. No aid nor relief seems to have come from abroad,
except a contribution from Ireland of £500 for the benefit of the
sufferers by the war, chiefly collected by the efforts of Nathaniel
Mather, lately successor to his brother Samuel as minister of the
non-conformist congregation at Dublin.
SYNOPSIS OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS, CHIEFLY MILITARY, BETWEEN THE DEFEAT
OF KING PHILIP, 1676, AND THE CAPTURE OF QUEBEC, 1759
1676. Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia against the government of Sir
William Berkeley.
1679. The Scottish Covenanters are defeated by the Duke of Monmouth at
Bothwell Bridge.
1681. William Penn obtains his patent from the English Crown.
1682. Purchase of East Jersey by William Penn. He takes possession of
New Castle (Delaware) and founds the Colony of Pennsylvania. La Salle
descends the Mississippi to its mouth.
1684. The charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company is declared
forfeited to the English Crown.
1685. James II. succeeds his brother, Charles II., as King of England.
Insurrection of the Earl of Argyll and the Duke of Monmouth. Defeat of
Monmouth at Sedgemoor; his execution.
1686. Sir Edmund Andros is made Governor of New England.
1688. William of Orange lands in England; flight of James II.
1689. William and Mary are proclaimed King and Queen of England.
England declares war against France. Victory of the Scottish Jacobites
at Killiecrankie. Overthrow of Andros in New England. Beginning of King
William’s War in America.
1690. The Orangemen in Ireland win the battle of the Boyne. Destruction
of Schenectady by the French and Indians. Sir William Phips, commanding
a New England expedition, captures Port Royal, and later makes a
fruitless demonstration against Quebec.
1691. The Jacobites are overcome in Scotland. Surrender of Limerick,
the last stronghold of James II. in Ireland.
1692. Union of the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies. Witchcraft
delusion at Salem.
1693. The French Admiral Tourville defeats the English fleet off Cape
St. Vincent.
1697. France makes peace at Ryswick with Holland, Spain, and England.
Close of King William’s War in America.
1699. The French begin the settlement of Louisiana.
1701. Beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession.
1702. Death of William III. and accession of Queen Anne. Successful
campaign of Churchill (Marlborough) in the Netherlands. Naval triumph
of the English and Dutch over the Spanish and French at Vigo. Queen
Anne’s War in America. French settlement in Alabama.
1704. The English are victorious over the French at the battle of
Blenheim. Capture of Gibraltar by the English. Massacre of white
settlers by the Indians at Deerfield, Massachusetts.
1706. Marlborough defeats the French and Bavarians at the battle of
Ramillies.
1708. Victory of Marlborough and Prince Eugene, at Oudenarde, over the
Dukes of Burgundy and Vendôme.
1711. Unsuccessful expedition of the English and New England forces
under Walker against Canada.
1713. Treaty of Utrecht. Close of Queen Anne’s War in America. Acadia
(Nova Scotia, etc.) ceded to England by France, which also restores the
Hudson Bay region. The power of the Tuscarora Indians broken by the
Carolinians.
1714. George I., Elector of Hanover, succeeds to the English Crown.
1715. Rebellion in Scotland and in the North of England in favor of
James Edward Stuart, the Jacobite pretender.
1718. French settlement of New Orleans.
1720. Failure of Law’s Mississippi scheme in France.
1722. Establishment of the Moravian settlement in Pennsylvania under
Count Zinzendorf.
1727. Accession of George II.
1728. Discovery of Behring’s Strait.
1729. Carolina, purchased by the English Crown, is divided into the
royal provinces of North and South Carolina.
1730. Baltimore is laid out.
1732. Oglethorpe embarks from England to establish a settlement in
Georgia.
1733. Founding of Savannah.
1741. New Hampshire is finally separated from Massachusetts.
1744. Beginning of King George’s War in America. The French capture
Canseau (afterward Canso), and are repulsed at Annapolis.