Puritans and Indians February 12, 2025
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Uncategorized.Tags: History, pilgrims, puritans, Religion, Thanksgiving
add a comment
The Puritans didn’t see the land they colonized as pristine, which it wasn’t, and they didn’t see it as merely undeveloped, which it wasn’t, instead they saw it as a “hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.” With such an outlook is it any wonder that they looked upon the land as something to be conquered? Is it any wonder that they looked upon the Native Americans as inferior members of an inferior culture to be shunted aside at best and eliminated at worst?
The Native Americans the Puritans encountered in New England were mainly from the Algonquian linguistic group. They were divided along linguistic lines by dialect and along clan lines by families. The main groups subdivided over and over and there was much individual freedom to move between groups along these inter-relational lines. They possessed the same advanced horticultural techniques which were almost universal along the Eastern coast of North America. They grew the same crops and used the same weapons as the Natives encountered by the English in Virginia but they did not have the same level of political development. There were no great confederations like the Five Nations or the Powhatan. And so the Puritans did not have to fit into local power structures as the least powerful and newest entrants on a varied and dynamic political stage. Instead they moved into abandoned villages left empty by the ravages of European imported diseases and claimed well cleared fields left fallow by the death of their owners. They even went so far as to say God had cleared out the heathen so they could enter in, and they believed it was true.
At a very early point the growing Puritan colonies began pushing the Indians out of more and more land. They saw every agreement on the part of the natives as an abject acceptance of English sovereignty. They used trade goods and the ability to traverse great distances between various tribes as a means to not only capture much of the intertribal trade but to use it to their advantage playing one tribe against another.
A prime example of the exploitation of rivalry is found in the history of the Pequot War. The usual story is that the Pequot were recent invaders who came in and mercilessly subjugated the local Mohegan and Narragansett and that the New English merely aided them in freeing themselves from the hated oppressors. In reality the Puritans wanted to incorporate the lands of the Pequot into their growing commonwealth and to do so they lured the other Indians into guiding them to the isolated Pequot villages.
The traditional mode of combat among the Indians was long on show and short on mayhem. They sought to capture women and children to incorporate them into their tribes to make themselves stronger and their enemies weaker. They did not engage in wholesale slaughter and the general conquest of the lands of others but that is just what they signed on for in the Pequot War. In less than two years’ time the Puritans had so decimated the tribe that they declared the Pequot to have ceased to exist as a tribe. Later they resurrected the Pequot by convincing some who had been adopted into the Narragansett to once again reconstitute their tribe as allies of the Puritans in a war against the Narragansett. One side against the other until the Puritans were the only side left.
Missionary Activities & Praying Towns
Pushed and prodded by their fellow believers back in England the Puritans began actively attempting to evangelize the Indians beginning in the late 1640s. Many members of the smaller and weaker bands of Indians had decided that it was foolish to try and resist the ever increasing English and so they sought protection and advancement by adopting Christianity and following European ways. They gathered together in large inter-tribal villages known as “Praying Towns” where they could learn from the English and begin to gain the advancements that civilization had to offer. Though the larger and most powerful of the tribes never found the Praying towns or the missionaries appealing these towns did grow and become an important part of the Puritan scene in Massachusetts. This venture eventually crashed against the shoals of the bloodiest war ever fought between the Indians and the Puritans.
King Phillip’s War
Victors write History. This is a reality which has colored the perception of events since the First Emperor of China made himself the first emperor by destroying all the records of anything that had gone before. Thus it is with “King Phillip’s War.” King Phillip wasn’t even the name of the man the Puritan’s have immortalized as the Machiavellian leader of the coordinated attack against the innocent English in 1675.
After seizing the land and displacing the cultures of the many tribes and bands who were the original possessors of the land the Puritans began acting in a very high handed manner by imposing their laws and conventions on the members of any and all tribes in their vicinity. In the spring of 1675 they arrested and hanging several Indians who had killed an Indian from one of the Praying Towns who was considered a traitor by other Indians for guiding the English to their camps.
This act of self-declared sovereignty over the people of another nation led to spontaneous reactions from the Indians. These people believed in blood feuds and retribution, revenge raids and reciprocity and the Indians who were hung all had relatives and friends. Soon many of the tribes joined in a massive effort to rid their lands of the ever more intrusive English, but it was too late. The Great Migration and a prodigious birth rate had increased the English population to the point that they easily outnumbered all the local tribes combined.
The technological advantage had been lost. Greedy traders had ignored the law against selling firearms to Indians and they had gained flintlock rifles and become very adept at using them. However, the English, held a monopoly on the repair of broken firearms and the production of gunpowder. In addition, contrary to the myth which has been perpetrated and preserved, the English held an overwhelming advantage in organization. The tribes never united. Each tribe fought under their own leaders in their own way for their own goals. The English on the other hand immediately ceased their petty disputes and stood united against the tribes.
The Indians sought to cleanse their land by destroying every visage of the Europeans. They burned buildings, knocked down fences and killed livestock. They were so intent on cleansing the land that they even killed many families including women and children contrary to their own custom of adopting women and children. They had learned the lesson of total war from the English during the Pequot War and they were using that knowledge to restore their sovereignty in the land that had once been their own.
The Indians had also adapted their tactics as well as their strategy. Instead of fighting in massed formations with great displays to prove their bravery they set ambushes and fought a gorilla style campaign that proved highly effective since they knew the terrain so much better than their enemies. They would stage a surprise attack and then retreat. When they were pursued they would set ambushes choosing the place to fight and inflicting heavy casualties on their pursuers. In frustration at not being able to find or defeat their foes the English turned against the Indians of the praying towns attacking and killing the defenseless Christianized Indians because they could.
Eventually the English learned a valuable lesson. They abandoned their traditional European style tactics of massed formations and adopted the same gorilla style as the Indians which worked so well in the thick forests and swamps. Using other Indians as guides and scouts they were soon inflicting serious losses on the tribes and whereas the English could absorb the losses they had sustained and rebound the Indians could not. When the food supplies or equipment of the Indians was destroyed in a raid they could not requisition replacements from the coast as the English could. Instead they starved. When they ran out of shot and powder they couldn’t get more from their storehouses they had to retreat before the firepower of the English.
The Mohawk Indians, one of the Five Nation Iroquois also allied themselves with the English seeing this as a perfect opportunity to smash their longtime rivals the Algonquians. As the tribes began to surrender one by one the war fizzled to a close when Metacom, the man immortalized as King Phillip, was killed by one of the Praying Town Indians in the service of the English. The Puritans cut off Metacom’s head and mounted it on a pike at Plymouth as a warning to all who would dare resist their conquest of New England and thus died the hopes, dreams and memories of the proud Indian nations who had once owned the land.
Dr. Robert Owens Chronicles the History of the Future 