America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (10 page)

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Hannah’s Escape

Mayflower
Pilgrim William Bradford recorded this Puritan search-and-destroy mission. His memorable telling appears in
Of Plymouth
Plantation:

They approached the same with great silence and surrounded it both with the English and Indians, that they might not break out; and so assaulted them with great courage, shooting amongst them, and entered the fort with all speed. And those that first entered found sharp resistance from the enemy who both shot at and grappled with them; others ran into their houses and brought out fire and set them on fire, which soon took in their mat; and standing close together, with the wind all was quickly on a flame, and thereby more were burnt to death than was otherwise slain; It burnt their bowstrings and made them unserviceable; those that scaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice.29

The Mystic raid shattered the Pequot resistance, and most of the aftermath was a grim mopping-up effort. Although the Pequot chief, or sachem, Sassacus, continued to fight, many Pequots abandoned their villages and went to join other southern Algonquian tribes. In June 1637, a mixed force of English and their Mohegan allies, led by their chief, Uncas, caught one of the last large bands of Pequots in a swamp near Fairfield, Connecticut. 30 Although several hundred women were | 71 \

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allowed to leave, most of the warriors were killed or captured. Many of the surviving Pequots were eventually absorbed by the victorious Mohegan and Narragansett as slaves. Some others were shipped to Bermuda and Barbados to be sold as slaves, or forced into servitude in Puritan New England households. Sassacus was later caught by the rival Mohawk and beheaded; the Mohawk sent his head to the English in tribute.

In the eyes of the Massachusetts colonists, this was a “just war.”31

Just or not, the Pequot War guaranteed a measure of peace between colonists and Indians, despite a brief flare-up of hostilities with the Narragansett. Allied with the colonists during the Pequot War, the Narragansett could see the handwriting on the wall. Their turn would soon come. “You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, also our woods, and of turkies, and our coves full of fish and fowl,” the tribe’s sachem, Miantonomi, told the Montauk of Long Island. “But these English have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall be starved.”32

Miantonomi attempted to unite several rival tribes against the colonists, but he was unsuccessful in convincing others to join an alliance.

Instead, with the support of the colonists, the rival Mohegan went to war with the Narragansett, and Miantonomi was captured and killed, ending another native threat. For the next three decades, the colonists enjoyed a measure of peace, until another tribal sachem accomplished what Miantonomi had dreamed of doing in 1642—uniting some of New England’s Algonquian-speaking tribes against the English settlers. In 1675, the simmering hostilities between native and colonist boiled over in the colonial era’s most catastrophic conflict, King Philip’s War.

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Hannah’s Escape

Brothers, these people from the unknown world will cut down our groves, spoil our hunting and planting grounds, and drive us and our children from the graves of our fathers, and our council fires, and enslave our women and children.

— At t r i b u t e d t o M e tac o m ,
also cal ed King Philip33

In Hannah Dustin’s day, painfully fresh memories still would have lingered of the terrible fighting of a generation earlier, when Metacom went to war with the English settlers in the summer of 1675. Metacom (also called Metacomet) was the second son of Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoag and the chief who had allied himself with the
Mayflower
Pilgrims. Metacom had been given the English name Philip, and his older brother, Wamsutta, had been renamed Alexander after the famous kings of Macedon. There have been disputes for centuries over the exact provocation for King Philip’s War. But there is no question that the underlying cause was the reality that the Indians could see the end of life as they knew it. Hunting grounds lost to pasture and unscrupulous land deals had soured relations between Metacom and the English. When Alexander died in 1662 while in English cus-tody, Philip was convinced that the English had poisoned his older brother. Once elevated to sachem, Philip began to prepare for war, selling land to acquire more guns and powder, which some enterprising colonists were all too willing to peddle.

The breaking point came with the execution of three of Philip’s tribesmen, convicted in the murder of John Sassamon, a Harvard-educated “praying Indian,” and one of John Eliot’s most enterprising converts. Working as a mediator between Wampanoag and the English, John Sassamon—related by marriage to Philip’s sister—revealed to | 73 \

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colonial authorities that the Wampanoag were planning to ally themselves with their traditional enemies, the Narragansett, to attack the English. Since the English first arrived, they had been able to skill-fully finesse the rivalries between New England’s tribes. Now, the prospect of Indian tribal alliances set alarm bells ringing for the Massachusetts authorities.

After John Sassamon was found dead in an icy pond, three of Philip’s tribesmen were quickly tried and convicted of murder, based on the claim of a single Indian eyewitness—contrary to English law, which at the time required at least two eyewitnesses. During the execution on June 8, 1675, after the first two men were hanged, the rope of the third condemned man broke. Promised a reprieve, he confessed to the crime, giving the guilty verdict the second witness required by law.

(The reprieve was short-lived; a month later, he was taken from his cell and shot.)

The executions were the final provocation Philip’s warriors needed.

Although Philip wanted to delay his offensive until he had time to stockpile more food and weapons, he could not keep his men back. On June 24, 1675, the Indians, many now armed with flintlocks against colonists with older, less reliable matchlock guns, began their attacks at Swansea in Rhode Island. Lasting from June 1675 to August 1676, King Philip’s War was a devastating conflict that cost the lives of thousands on both sides, soldiers and civilians alike. As one English town after another was attacked and destroyed, the colonists retaliated against Indian settlements. Neither side spared women or children.

In what was known as the Great Swamp Fight of December 19, 1675, the army of the united colonies attacked a palisaded Indian fort and burned all the wigwams inside, killing some six hundred Narragansetts, half of them women and children.

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It was not simply a settler-versus-Indian war, as some New England tribes remained allied with the English. Philip’s army had also been pressed up against another enemy to the west, the Mohawk of New York, part of the Iroquois alliance, traditional enemies of the Algonquian-speakers of New England.

In
Mayflower,
an account of King Philip’s War, Nathaniel Philbrick appropriately summarizes the devastation. “The English had suffered casualties that are difficult for us to comprehend today. . . .

During the 14 months of King Philip’s War, Plymouth Colony lost close to 8 percent of its men. But the English losses seem inconsequential when compared with those of the Indians. Of a total Native population of approximately 20,000, at least 2,000 had been killed in battle or died of their injuries; 3,000 had died of sickness and starvation, 1,000 had been shipped out of the country as slaves, while an estimated 2,000 eventually fled to either the Iroquois to the west or the Abenakis to the north. Overall, the Native American population of southern New England had sustained a loss of somewhere between 60

and 80 percent.”34

Survivors on both sides were left widowed, orphaned, homeless, impoverished, and, in the case of the natives, often in slavery. Many Indian children were sold as indentured servants to Puritan families, and others—apparently including Metacom’s son—were shipped to the West Indies slave markets. The war nearly wiped out the last remnants of the Wampanoag—the confederation of tribes whose assistance had helped keep the first Pilgrims alive back in the winter and spring of 1621 and who then sat down to enjoy the first harvest feast of legend in October 1621. Other tribes allied with Philip’s Wampanoag, such as the Nipmuc and Narragansett, also suffered devastating losses.

Their crushing defeat signaled the end, as Neal Salisbury wrote, “of | 75 \

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the legal and political autonomy of the region’s Native Americans.”35

The war also led to the introduction of a royal governor in New England, greatly diminishing the New England colonies’ near autonomy, with far-reaching consequences.

Philip was killed on August 12, 1676, shot by an Indian fighting with the English. Captain Benjamin Church, who commanded the forces that had captured Philip’s wife and son and then killed Philip, ordered that his corpse be drawn and quartered and then decapitated.

The chief’s head was then carried back to Plymouth, where a great thanksgiving feast of another sort was celebrated. Philip’s head was then staked on a pike for the public to see. It remained there for years, until a young Cotton Mather is supposed to have snuck up to the skull and removed its jaw. 36

King Philip’s War generated a flood of colonial accounts—a cot-tage publishing industry in war diaries and histories, including those of both Increase and Cotton Mather. Colonel Benjamin Church, an independent-minded settler who emerged as one of America’s first “war heroes,” wrote a memoir of his role in capturing Philip, helping to make him a prototype for such legendary Indian-fighters as James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. But the postwar publishing boomlet also created the era’s first icon of Puritan faith and resilience in the wildly popular account of the captivity of Mary Rowlandson, whose story certainly would have been familiar to Hannah Dustin. In February 1676, a Nipmuc war party attacked the small town of Lancaster, in central Massachusetts, and carried off Mary Rowlandson.

The thirty-eight-year-old wife of Lancaster’s minister, she and her six-year-old daughter were taken captive, along with another two dozen of Lancaster’s settlers. Rowlandson was separated from her two other children, taken by a separate band of raiders.

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Oh the dolefull sight that now was to behold at this House! . . . Of thirty seven persons who were in this one house, none escaped either present death, or a bitter captivity, save only one, who might say as he, Job 1.15. And I only am escap’d alone to tell the News. There were twelve killed some shot, some stab’d with their Spears, some knock’d down with their Hatchets. When we are in prosperity, Oh the little that we think of such dreadfull sights, and to see our dear Friends and Relations ly bleeding out their heart-blood upon the ground. There was one who was chopt into the head with a Hatchet, and stripped naked, and yet was crawling up and down. It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, some there, like a company of Sheep torn by Wolves. All of them stript naked by a company of hell-Hounds, roaring, singing, ranting and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out; yet the Lord by his Almighty power preserved a number of us from death, for there were twenty-four of us taken alive and carried captive.

I had often before this said, that if the Indians should come, I should chuse rather to be killed by them than be taken alive, but when it came to the tryal my mind changed; their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit that I chose rather to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous Beasts, than that moment to end my dayes; and that I may the better declare what Happened to me during that grievous Captivity.37

Like hundreds of other New Englanders before her—and later Hannah Dustin—Mary Rowlandson survived her captivity. But her six-year-old daughter, Sarah, died in Mary’s arms from her wounds, a fate shared by most of her other neighbors taken captive. For three months, Rowlandson was held among the Indians—warriors, women, and children all moving together. As they traversed western and cen-

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tral Massachusetts and fought the Anglo-American colonists, she witnessed the celebration of a great Indian victory and was also among the first Europeans to see a “war dance.”

Shortly after her daughter’s death, Rowlandson was taken to a rendezvous of more than two thousand Indians, where she learned that her other children were nearby. Ten-year-old Mary was being held by a warrior who had purchased her for the price of a gun and would not allow Rowlandson to see the child. Then she found eleven-year-old Joseph, who had been taken to another village but was permitted to visit his mother. And she ultimately encountered Philip, who shared a meal with her. In May, over the objections of Philip, who did not actually control her fate, Rowlandson was ransomed and reunited with her husband in Boston; their two children were also eventually released. With encouragement from Increase Mather,
The
Sovereignty and Goodness of God,
Mary Rowlandson’s account of her experiences, appeared in print six years later, in 1682. One of the earliest books written by a woman in America, it was among the country’s first best sellers. 38

Rowlandson’s extraordinarily successful memoir, like Cotton Mather’s versions of Hannah Dustin’s exploits in the late 1690s, was a prime example of popular Puritan propaganda that underscored the virtues of a brave woman standing up to “satanic savagery.” Along with Hannah Dustin, Rowlandson gave New England an essential foundation myth upon which Puritan pride would be built. This was in sharp contrast to the legacy of Anne Hutchinson. Not long after her trial, Puritan Boston decreed a prohibition against Roman Catholics, Quakers, and other sects such as Anabaptists. All were banned under pain of death. Anne Hutchinson’s youngest sister, who had become a Quaker, was thrashed with a whip for her “blasphemy.” Another of | 78 \