Book: The Beginnings of New England

J >> John Fiske >> The Beginnings of New England




At that time the beautiful highlands between Lancaster and the
Connecticut river were still an untrodden wilderness. On their southern
slope Worcester and Brookfield were tiny hamlets of a dozen houses each.
Up the Connecticut valley a line of little villages, from Springfield
to Northfield, formed the remotest frontier of the English, and their
exposed position offered tempting opportunities to the Indians. Governor
Leverett saw how great the danger would be if the other tribes should
follow the example set by Philip, and Captain Edward Hutchinson was
accordingly sent to Brookfield to negotiate with the Nipmucks. This
officer was eldest son of the unfortunate lady whose preaching in Boston
nearly forty years before had been the occasion of so much strife. Not
only his mother, but all save one or two of his brothers and sisters
--and there were not less than twelve of them--had been murdered by
Indians on the New Netherland border in 1643; now the same cruel fate
overtook the gallant captain. The savages agreed to hold a parley and
appointed a time and place for the purpose, but instead of keeping tryst
they lay in ambush and slew Hutchinson with eight of his men on their
way to the conference. [Sidenote: Murder of Captain Hutchinson]

Three days afterward Philip, who had found home too hot for him, arrived
in the Nipmuck country, and on the night of August 2, took part in a
fierce assault on Brookfield. Thirty or forty men, with some fifty women
and children--all the inhabitants of the hamlet--took refuge in a large
house, where they were besieged by 300 savages whose bullets pierced the
wooden walls again and again. Arrows tipped with burning rags were
shot into the air in such wise as to fall upon the roof, but they who
crouched in the garret were watchful and well supplied with water, while
from the overhanging windows the volleys of musketry were so brisk and
steady that the screaming savages below could not get near enough to the
house to set it on fire. For three days the fight was kept up, while
every other house in the village was destroyed. By this time the Indians
had contrived to mount some planks on barrels so as to make a kind of
rude cart which they loaded with tow and chips. They were just about
setting it on fire and preparing to push it against the house with long
poles, when they were suddenly foiled by a heavy shower. That noon the
gallant Simon Willard, ancestor of two presidents of Harvard College, a
man who had done so much toward building up Concord and Lancaster that
he was known as the "founder of towns," was on his way from Lancaster to
Groton at the head of forty-seven horsemen, when he was overtaken by a
courier with the news from Brookfield. The distance was thirty miles,
the road scarcely fit to be called a bridle-path, and Willard's years
were more than threescore-and-ten; but by an hour after sunset he had
gallopped into Brookfield and routed the Indians who fled to a swamp ten
miles distant. [Sidenote: Attack on Brookfield]

The scene is now shifted to the Connecticut valley, where on the 25th of
August Captain Lothrop defeated the savages at Hatfield. On the 1st of
September simultaneous attacks were made upon Deerfield and Hadley, and
among the traditions of the latter place is one of the most interesting
of the stories of that early time. The inhabitants were all in church
keeping a fast, when the yells of the Indians resounded. Seizing their
guns, the men rushed out to meet the foe; but seeing the village green
swarming on every side with the horrid savages, for a moment their
courage gave way and a panic was imminent; when all at once a stranger
of reverend aspect and stately form, with white beard flowing on his
bosom, appeared among them and took command with an air of authority
which none could gainsay. He bade them charge on the screeching rabble,
and after a short sharp skirmish the tawny foe was put to flight. When
the pursuers came together again, after the excitement of the rout,
their deliverer was not to be found. In their wonder, as they knew not
whence he came or whither he had gone, many were heard to say that
an angel had been sent from heaven for their deliverance. It was the
regicide William Goffe, who from his hiding-place had seen the savages
stealing down the hillside, and sallied forth to win yet one more
victory over the hosts of Midian ere death should come to claim him in
his woodland retreat. Sir Walter Scott has put this pretty story into
the mouth of Major Bridgenorth in "Peveril of the Peak," and Cooper has
made use of it in "The Wept of Wish-ton-wish." Like many other romantic
stories, it rests upon insufficient authority and its truth has been
called in question. [32] But there seems to be nothing intrinsically
improbable in the tradition; and a paramount regard for Goffe's personal
safety would quite account for the studied silence of contemporary
writers like Hubbard and Increase Mather. [Sidenote: The mysterious
stranger of Hadley]

This repulse did not check for a moment the activity of the Indians,
though for a long time we hear nothing more of Philip. On the 2d
of September they slew eight men at Northfield and on the 4th they
surrounded and butchered Captain Beers and most of his company of
thirty-six marching to the relief of that village. The next day but
one, as Major Robert Treat came up the road with his 100 Connecticut
soldiers, they found long poles planted by the wayside bearing the heads
of their unfortunate comrades. They in turn were assaulted, but beat off
the enemy, and brought away the people of Northfield. That village was
abandoned, and presently Deerfield shared its fate and the people were
crowded into Hadley. Yet worse remained to be seen. A large quantity of
wheat had been left partly threshed at Deerfield, and on the 11th of
September eighteen wagons were sent up with teamsters and farmers to
finish the threshing and bring in the grain. They were escorted by
Captain Lothrop, with his train-band of ninety picked men, known as the
"Flower of Essex," perhaps the best drilled company in the colony. The
threshing was done, the wagons were loaded, and the party made a night
march southward. At seven in the morning, as they were fording a shallow
stream in the shade of overarching woods, they were suddenly overwhelmed
by the deadly fire of 700 ambushed Nipmucks, and only eight of them
escaped to tell the tale. A "black and fatal" day was this, says the
chronicler, "the saddest that ever befell New England." To this day the
memory of the slaughter at Bloody Brook survives, and the visitor to
South Deerfield may read the inscription over the grave in which Major
Treat's men next day buried all the victims together. The Indians now
began to feel their power, and on the 5th of October they attacked
Springfield and burned thirty houses there. [Sidenote: Ambuscade at
Bloody Brook, September 12]

Things were becoming desperate. For ten weeks, from September 9 to
November 19, the Federal Commissioners were in session daily in Boston.
The most eminent of their number, for ability and character, was the
younger John Winthrop, who was still governor of Connecticut. Plymouth
was represented by its governor, Josiah Winslow, with the younger
William Bradford; Massachusetts by William Stoughton, Simon Bradstreet,
and Thomas Danforth. These strong men were confronted with a difficult
problem. From Batten's journal, kept during that disastrous summer, we
learn the state of feeling of excitement in Boston. The Puritans had
by no means got rid of that sense of corporate responsibility which
civilized man has inherited from prehistoric ages, and which has been
one of the principal causes of religious persecution. This sombre
feeling has prompted men to believe that to spare the heretic is to
bring down the wrath of God upon the whole community; and now in Boston
many people stoutly maintained that God had let loose the savages, with
firebrand and tomahawk, to punish the people of New England for ceasing
to persecute "false worshippers and especially idolatrous Quakers."
Quaker meetings were accordingly forbidden under penalty of fine and
imprisonment. Some harmless Indians were murdered. At Marblehead two
were assaulted and killed by a crowd of women. There was a bitter
feeling toward the Christian Indians, many of whom had joined their
heathen kinsmen in burning and slaying. Daniel Gookin, superintendent of
the "praying Indians," a gentleman of the highest character, was told
that it would not be safe to show himself in the streets of Boston.
Mrs. Mary Pray, of Providence, wrote a letter recommending the total
extermination of the red men.

The measures adopted by the Commissioners certainly went far toward
carrying out Mrs. Pray's suggestion. The demeanour of the Narragansetts
had become very threatening, and their capacity for mischief exceeded
that of all the other tribes together. In July the Commissioners had
made a treaty with them, but in October it became known in Boston
that they were harbouring some of Philip's hostile Indians. When the
Commissioners sharply called them to account for this, their sachem
Canonchet, son of Miantonomo, promised to surrender the fugitives
within ten days. But the ten days passed and nothing was heard from the
Narragansetts. The victory of their brethren at Bloody Brook had worked
upon their minds, so that they no longer thought it worth while to keep
faith with the white men. They had overcome their timidity and were now
ready to take part in the work of massacre. [33] The Commissioners soon
learned of their warlike preparations and lost no time in forestalling
them. The Narragansetts were fairly warned that if they did not at once
fulfil their promises they must expect the utmost severities of war. A
thousand men were enlisted for this service and put under command of
Governor Winslow, and in December they marched against the enemy. The
redoubtable fighter and lively chronicler Benjamin Church accompanied
the expedition.

The Indians had fortified themselves on a piece of rising ground, six
acres in extent, in the middle of a hideous swamp impassable at most
seasons but now in some places frozen hard enough to afford a precarious
footing. They were surrounded by rows of tall palisades which formed a
wall twelve feet in thickness; and the only approach to the single door
of this stronghold was over the trunk of a felled tree some two feet in
diameter and slippery with snow and ice. A stout block-house filled with
sharpshooters guarded this rude bridge, which was raised some five feet
from the ground. Within the palisaded fortress perhaps not less than
2000 warriors, with many women and children, awaited the onset of the
white men, for here had Canonchet gathered together nearly the whole of
his available force. This was a military mistake. It was cooping up his
men for slaughter. They would have been much safer if scattered about in
the wilderness, and could have given the English much more trouble. But
readily as they acknowledged the power of the white man, they did not
yet understand it. One man's courage is not another's, and the Indian
knew little or nothing of that Gothic fury of self-abandonment which
rushes straight ahead and snatches victory from the jaws of death. His
fortress was a strong one, and it was no longer, as in the time of the
Pequots, a strife in which firearms were pitted against bow and arrow.
Many of the Narragansetts were equipped with muskets and skilled in
their use, and under such circumstances victory for the English was not
to be lightly won. [Sidenote: Expedition against the Narragansetts]

On the night of December 18 their little army slept in an open field
at Pettyquamscott without other blanket than a "moist fleece of snow."
Thence to the Indian fortress, situated in what is now South Kingston,
the march was eighteen miles. The morrow was a Sunday, but Winslow
deemed it imprudent to wait, as food had wellnigh given out. Getting up
at five o'clock, they toiled through deep snow till they came within
sight of the Narragansett stronghold early in the afternoon. First came
the 527 men from Massachusetts, led by Major Appleton, of Ipswich, and
next the 158 from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; while Major Robert
Treat, with the 300 from Connecticut, brought up the rear. There were
985 men in all. As the Massachusetts men rushed upon the slippery bridge
a deadly volley from the blockhouse slew six of their captains, while
of the rank and file there were many killed or wounded. Nothing daunted
they pressed on with great spirit till they forced their way into the
enclosure, but then the head of their column, overcome by sheer weight
of numbers in the hand-to-hand fight, was pushed and tumbled out into
the swamp. Meanwhile some of the Connecticut men had discovered a path
across the partly frozen swamp leading to a weak spot in the rear, where
the palisades were thin and few, as undue reliance had been placed upon
the steep bank crowned with a thick rampart of bushes that had been
reinforced with clods of turf. In this direction Treat swept along with
his men in a spirited charge. Before they had reached the spot a heavy
fire began mowing them down, but with a furious rush they came up, and
climbing on each other's shoulders, some fought their way over the
rampart, while others hacked sturdily with axes till such a breach was
made that all might enter. This was effected just as the Massachusetts
men had recovered themselves and crossed the treacherous log in a second
charge that was successful and soon brought the entire English force
within the enclosure. In the slaughter which filled the rest of that
Sunday afternoon till the sun went down behind a dull gray cloud, the
grim and wrathful Puritan, as he swung his heavy cutlass, thought of
Saul and Agag, and spared not. The Lord had delivered up to him the
heathen as stubble to his sword. As usual the number of the slain
is variously estimated. Of the Indians probably not less than 1000
perished. Some hundreds, however, with Canonchet their leader, saved
themselves in flight, well screened by the blinding snow-flakes that
began to fall just after sunset. Within the fortified area had been
stored the greater part of the Indians' winter supply of corn, and the
loss of this food was a further deadly blow. Captain Church advised
sparing the wigwams and using them for shelter, but Winslow seems to
have doubted the ability of his men to maintain themselves in a position
so remote from all support. The wigwams with their tubs of corn were
burned, and a retreat was ordered. Through snowdrifts that deepened
every moment the weary soldiers dragged themselves along until two hours
after midnight, when they reached the tiny village of Wickford. Nearly
one-fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and many of the
latter perished before shelter was reached. Forty of these were buried
at Wickford in the course of the next three days. Of the Connecticut men
eighty were left upon the swamp and in the breach at the rear of the
stronghold. Among the spoils which the victors brought away were a
number of good muskets that had been captured by the Nipmucks in their
assault upon Deerfield. [Sidenote: Storming of the great swamp fortress,
December 19]

This headlong overthrow of the Narragansett power completely changed the
face of things. The question was no longer whether the red men could
possibly succeed in making New England too hot for the white men, but
simply how long it would take for the white men to exterminate the red
men. The shiftless Indian was abandoning his squalid agriculture and
subsisting on the pillage of English farms; but the resources of the
colonies, though severely taxed, were by no means exhausted. The dusky
warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced;
but, as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand
white men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he
added, with a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send
ten thousand more. For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a
hope that his great influence with the savages might induce them to
submit to terms of peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but
they were now as little inclined to parley as tigers brought to bay, nor
was the temper of the colonists a whit less deadly, though it did not
vent itself in inflicting torture or in merely wanton orgies of cruelty.
[Sidenote: Effect of the blow]

To the modern these scenes of carnage are painful to contemplate. In the
wholesale destruction of the Pequots, and to a less degree in that of
the Narragansetts, the death-dealing power of the white man stands forth
so terrible and relentless that our sympathy is for a moment called
out for his victim. The feeling of tenderness toward the weak, almost
unknown among savages, is one of the finest products of civilization.
Where murderous emotions are frequently excited, it cannot thrive. Such
advance in humanity as we have made within recent times is chiefly
due to the fact that the horrors of war are seldom brought home to
everybody's door. Either war is conducted on some remote frontier, or if
armies march through a densely peopled country the conditions of
modern warfare have made it essential to their efficiency as military
instruments that depredation and riot should be as far as possible
checked. Murder and pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre
is seldom heard of, and torture is almost or quite as extinct as
cannibalism. The mass of citizens escape physical suffering, the angry
emotions are so directed upon impersonal objects as to acquire a strong
ethical value, and the intervals of strife may find individual soldiers
of hostile armies exchanging kindly services. Members of a complex
industrial society, without direct experience of warfare save in this
mitigated form, have their characters wrought upon in a way that is
distinctively modern, as they become more and more disinclined to
violence and cruelty. European historians have noticed, with words
of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which characterizes the
American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked upon this humane
temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful civilization, and
which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its excellence and tends
to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict due punishment upon
the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the American of the
nineteenth century has without doubt improved very considerably upon his
forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of Cromwell and Milton
was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as compared with their
contemporaries. The long experience of internal peace since the War
of the Roses had not been without its effect; and while the Tudor and
Stuart periods had atrocities enough, we need only remember what was
going on at the same time in France and Germany in order to realize how
much worse it might have been. In England, as elsewhere, however, it
was, when looked at with our eyes, a rough and brutal time. It was a day
of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were
maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of
court. The pioneers of New England had grown up familiar with such
things; and among the townspeople of Boston and Hartford in 1675 were
still many who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or
turned pale over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the
wrath of Heaven. [Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times]

When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and
placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human
existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent
in them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself.
The feelings that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the
smouldering embers of his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies
of wife and children, are feelings that he shares with the most
bloodthirsty savage, and the primary effect of his higher intelligence
and greater sensitiveness is only to increase their bitterness. The
neighbour who hears the dreadful story is quick to feel likewise, for
the same thing may happen to him, and there is nothing so pitiless as
fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage passions seemed to find
justification in the sacred text from which he drew his rules of life.
To suppose that one part of the Bible could be less authoritative than
another would have been to him an incomprehensible heresy; and bound
between the same covers that included the Sermon on the Mount were tales
of wholesale massacre perpetrated by God's command. Evidently the
red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but rather
Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of hell,
demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the
earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were
completely callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted
upon Indians, and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who
did not risk their own persons were more truculent in tone than the
professional fighters. Of the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest
toward the Indian is the doughty Captain Church, while none is more
bitter and cynical than the Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [Sidenote:
Warfare with savages likely to be truculent in character]

While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it
was far from putting an end to the war. It showed that when the white
man could find his enemy he could deal crushing blows, but the Indian
was not always so easy to find. Before the end of January Winslow's
little army was partially disbanded for want of food, and its three
contingents fell back upon Stonington, Boston, and Plymouth. Early in
February the Federal Commissioners called for a new levy of 600 men to
assemble at Brookfield, for the Nipmucks were beginning to renew their
incursions, and after an interval of six months the figure of Philip
again appears for a moment upon the scene. What he had been doing, or
where he had been, since the Brookfield fight in August, was never
known. When in February, 1676, he re-appeared it was still in company
with his allies the Nipmucks, in their bloody assault upon Lancaster.
On the 10th of that month at sunrise the Indians came swarming into the
lovely village. Danger had already been apprehended, the pastor, Joseph
Rowlandson, the only Harvard graduate of 1652, had gone to Boston to
solicit aid, and Captain Wadsworth's company was slowly making its
way over the difficult roads from Marlborough, but the Indians were
beforehand. Several houses were at once surrounded and set on fire,
and men, women, and children began falling under the tomahawk. The
minister's house was large and strongly built, and more than forty
people found shelter there until at length it took fire and they were
driven out by the flames. Only one escaped, a dozen or more were slain,
and the rest, chiefly women and children, taken captive. The Indians
aimed at plunder as well as destruction; for they were in sore need of
food and blankets, as well as of powder and ball. Presently, as they saw
Wadsworth's armed men approaching, they took to flight and got away,
with many prisoners and a goodly store of provisions. [Sidenote: Attack
upon Lancaster, February 10, 1676]

Among the captives was Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who
afterward wrote the story of her sad experiences. The treatment of the
prisoners varied with the caprice or the cupidity of the captors. Those
for whom a substantial ransom might be expected fared comparatively
well; to others death came as a welcome relief. One poor woman with a
child in her arms was too weak to endure the arduous tramp over the icy
hillsides, and begged to be left behind, till presently the savages
lost their patience. They built a fire, and after a kind of demon dance
killed mother and child with a club and threw the bodies into the
flames. Such treatment may seem exceptionally merciful, but those modern
observers who best know the Indian's habits say that he seldom indulges
in torture except when he has abundance of leisure and a mind quite
undisturbed. He is an epicure in human agony and likes to enjoy it in
long slow sips. It is for the end of the march that the accumulation
of horrors is reserved; the victims by the way are usually despatched
quickly; and in the case of Mrs. Rowlandson's captors their irregular
and circuitous march indicates that they were on the alert. Their
movements seem to have covered much of the ground between Wachusett
mountain and the Connecticut river. They knew that the white squaw of
the great medicine man of an English village was worth a heavy ransom,
and so they treated Mrs. Rowlandson unusually well. She had been
captured when escaping from the burning house, carrying in her arms her
little six-year-old daughter. She was stopped by a bullet that grazed
her side and struck the child. The Indian who seized them placed the
little girl upon a horse, and as the dreary march began she kept moaning
"I shall die, mamma." "I went on foot after it," says the mother, "with
sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and
carried it in my arms till my strength failed me, and I fell down with
it .... After this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they
stopped. And now down I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a
few boughs behind me, with my sick child in my lap, and calling much for
water, being now, through the wound, fallen into a violent fever ....
Oh, may I see the wonderful power of God that my spirit did not utterly
sink under my affliction; still the Lord upheld me with his gracious and
merciful spirit." The little girl soon died. For three months the weary
and heartbroken mother was led about the country by these loathsome
savages, of whose habits and manners she gives a vivid description. At
first their omnivorousness astonished her. "Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea
the very bark of trees" they esteemed as delicacies. "They would pick up
old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and
drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar
and so eat them." After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself
was fain to partake of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one
of Philip's boys, she was invited to dine with the great sachem. "I
went," she says, "and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers.
It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease; but I
thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life." Early in May she was
redeemed for 20 pounds, and went to find her husband in Boston, where
the Old South Church society hired a house for them. [Sidenote: Mrs.
Rowlandson's narrative]

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