The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (24 page)

Much as Massasoit had done more than a decade before, a Mohegan sachem named Uncas used the conflict between the Indians and English as an opportunity to advance his own tribe. Before the Pequot War, Uncas was a minor player in the region. But after pledging his loyalty to the Puritans, he and his people were on their way to overtaking the Pequots as the most powerful tribe in Connecticut.

The Narragansetts were less enthusiastic in their support of the English. The Pequots were their traditional enemies, but they were reluctant to join forces with Uncas and the Mohegans. Only after Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, personally asked for help on Massachusetts Bay's behalf did Narragansett sachem Miantonomi agree to assist the Puritans against the Pequots.

The Puritans attacked a Pequot fortress on the Mystic River in southern Connecticut near the Rhode Island border. After setting the Indians' wigwams on fire, the soldiers shot and hacked to pieces anyone who attempted to escape. By the end of the day, approximately four hundred Pequot men, women, and children were dead. “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same,” William Bradford wrote, “and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”

Bradford saw the killing as the work of the Lord. The Narragansetts, however, saw nothing divine in the slaughter. As Roger Williams observed, Native American warfare was more about the bravery and honor of the fighters than the body count, and usually only a handful of warriors were killed in battle. Prior to the attack on the Pequot fort in Mystic, sachem Miantonomi had tried to get Williams to promise that no women and children would be killed. Unfortunately, Williams, who had been thrown out of Massachusetts Bay just two years before for his unorthodox religious views, had been unable to make any kind of deal with the Puritans. As the flames devoured every living thing in the village, the Narragansetts angrily protested the slaughter, claiming “it is too furious, and slays too many men.” With the Pequot War, New England was introduced to the horrors of European-style genocide.

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An engraving showing the Puritans' 1637 attack on the Pequot fort in Mystic, Connecticut.

◆◆◆ Before the massacre, the Pequots had urged the Narragansetts to join them against the Puritans, claiming that the English would soon “overspread their country” and force them off their own lands. In the years ahead, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi would come to realize that the Pequots had been right. By the late 1630s, when he saw that there were more Puritans in Massachusetts Bay than Native Americans in all of New England, he decided to eliminate the English threat before the Narragansetts suffered the same fate as the Pequots.

In 1642, he traveled to the Montauks on Long Island in hopes of persuading them to join the Narragansetts against the English. To accomplish this, he proposed that all Indians work together to retake New England. Miantonomi's speech to the Montauks included an insightful account of the ecological problems that had come to New England: “You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having 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 all be starved.” Miantonomi knew from experience that to pick a fight with the Puritans was to fight to the death. He proposed that they now “kill men, women, and children, but no cows,” since the Indians would need the English livestock for food.

But instead of joining with Miantonomi and the Narragansetts, the Montauks reported his speech to the English. And in the end, Miantonomi was unable to follow his own advice. Instead of attacking the English, he attacked Uncas and the Mohegans. Like Massasoit before him, Uncas had used his allegiance with the English to increase his power and influence, and by 1643, Miantonomi had had enough of him. After an assassination plot against Uncas failed, Miantonomi and a thousand of his warriors launched an assault on the Mohegans.

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A 1634 map of New England.

Before the attack, Miantonomi put on a protective iron corselet, like the English wore in battle. But instead of saving his life, the armor led to his death. When the fighting turned against the Narragansetts and the sachem was forced to flee, he staggered under the weight of the metal breastplate and was easily captured.

At the same time as the Narragansetts and the Mohegans were fighting, it had become clear to many New Englanders that the English colonies had to act as one body in their dealings with the Indians. so they established the United Colonies of New England. Each colony had its own representatives, called “commissioners.” Noticeably missing from the union was Roger Williams's Rhode Island—the only non-Puritan colony in New England.

According to John Quincy Adams, the United Colonies of 1643 was “the model and prototype of the North American Confederacy of 1774,” which, in turn, became the basis of the United states. More than a hundred years before the colonies' war with England, the United Colonies of New England showed the importance of looking beyond local concerns and prejudices. If Miantonomi had succeeded in creating the same kind of confederacy for the Native Americans of the region, the history of New England might have been very different.

Miantonomi was still being held prisoner by Uncas when the commissioners of the United Colonies met for the first time in Hartford, Connecticut, on september 7, 1643. Uncas asked the commissioners what he should do with the Narragansett sachem. After long discussions, they decided to let Uncas do as he wished.

There is evidence that the Miantonomi tried one last time to unite the Native peoples of New England by proposing that he marry one of Uncas's sisters. It was, however, too late to make up. On the path between Hartford and Windsor, Connecticut, Uncas's brother walked up behind Miantonomi and “clave his head with a hatchet.” For the time being, the threat of a united Native assault against Puritan and Pilgrim New England had been laid to rest.

ELEVEN

The Ancient Mother

BY THE EARLY
1640s, the Great Migration to the New World had come to an end as England was torn apart by civil war. Many settlers returned to England to join in Parliament's efforts to overthrow King Charles. With the king's execution in 1649, England became a Puritan state—unimaginable just a decade before. Bradford felt compelled to turn to an early page in his history of Plymouth and write, “Full little did I think, that the downfall of the bishops, with their courts, canons, and ceremonies, etc. had been so near, when I first began these scribbled writings ... or that I should have lived to have seen, or hear of the same; but it is the Lord's doing, and ought to be marvelous in our eyes!”

Until this spectacular turn of events, it had been possible for a Puritan to believe that America was where God wanted them to be. Now it seemed that England was the true center stage. In addition, the English civil war hurt the region's economy. Pilgrims, who had watched the prices of their cattle and crops skyrocket over the last decade, were suddenly left with a surplus that was worth barely a quarter of what it was in the 1630s. More than a few New Englanders decided that it was time to return to the mother country, and one of those was Edward Winslow.

Winslow had emerged as Plymouth's main diplomat, whether negotiating with Massasoit or with the government back in England. In 1646, Winslow sailed for London on another diplomatic mission. His talents were noticed by Oliver Cromwell, head of the Puritan regime, and the Pilgrim diplomat soon became caught up in England's struggles. To Bradford's bitter regret, Winslow never returned to Plymouth. In 1654, Cromwell sent Winslow to the West Indies; a year later, he died from yellow fever off the island of Jamaica and was buried at sea with full honors.

 

◆◆◆ By the time Bradford received word of Winslow's passing, Elder William Brewster had been dead for more than a decade. A year later, in 1656, Miles standish died in his home in Duxbury. At that point, Bradford was sixty-eight years old. He had come to America not to establish a great and powerful colony but to create a tightly knit religious community. For that to happen, everyone was supposed to live together and worship in the same church. But as early as the 1630s it had become apparent that the soil around the original Plymouth settlement was not the best. Many inhabitants also claimed they needed more land to accommodate the growing herds of cattle. To the governor's dismay, many of his closest friends, including Brewster, Winslow, standish, and John Alden, had left Plymouth to found communities to the north in Duxbury and Marshfield. Thomas Prence, one of the colony's rising stars, who first served as governor in 1634, also moved to Duxbury, then helped found the town of Eastham on Cape Cod.

At the root of this trend toward town building was, Governor Bradford insisted, a growing hunger for land. For Bradford, land had been a way to create a community of saints. For an increasing number of Pilgrims and especially for their children, land was a way to get rich. Bradford claimed that the formation of new towns was “not for want or necessity” but “for the enriching of themselves,” and he predicted it would be “the ruin of New England.”

It was difficult for Bradford to lose Winslow, Brewster, and the others. For as the new towns prospered and grew, Plymouth, the village where it had all begun, fell on hard times. “And thus was this poor church left,” Bradford wrote, “like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children.... Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor.”