Listen on: iTunes Subscribe on Android Stitcher and more

 

A series of unfortunate misunderstandings

In 1637, the Pequots were a tribe on the decline.  A plague had killed 80% of their population, the Dutch had started trading with other tribes, and in a trade dispute, the Dutch had killed their leading sachem – Tatobem.  Tatobem’s death had left a power vacuum which led a section of the tribe to split off and form their own Mohegan tribe, and the Pequots had briefly gone to war with the Narragansetts.  Then, they accidentally killed English trader John Stone in retaliation for Tatobem’s death, at the time that they hoped to use an alliance with the English to regain dominance in the region.

The English pushed a highly punitive treaty which the tribe’s sachems refused to ratify.  Then, Narragansett allies killed John Oldham, and the tribe said the murderers had fled to the Pequots.  The English feared Pequot-Narragansett collaboration for a 1622-style attack, so they sent John Endicott on a raid, and he spent days looting and pillaging Block Island and Pequot Territory.  Nearby settlements opposed the Endicott Raid, saying they’d be the people to suffer most if war broke out with the Pequots.

 

Transcript

In 1637, Massachusetts went to war with the Pequot tribe.  Over the course of this series, we’ve hit on some of the events leading up to the Pequot War from the Puritan perspective, but it’s worth recapping the events themselves, and this time filling in the Pequot side of the conflict.

Introduction

In 1630, the Pequots had been the strongest tribe in New England.  They, alone with the Narragansetts, had been spared by the epidemics that ravaged the area between 1616 and 1619.  Lesser tribes paid tribute to either the Pequots or the Narragansetts, and the Pequots enjoyed a great trading relationship with the Dutch.  It was the Pequots who introduced the Dutch to wampum, and as they gave the Dutch 10,000 pelts per year to ship home, the relationship had helped the tribe emerge as the dominant Indian power in the region.

The Massachusetts Puritans also respected the Pequots.  Unlike the Podunks who they saw as manipulative, the Mohawks who they saw as threatening, the Narragansetts who they saw as mercenary, in the early 1630s the English felt that the Pequots were courteous and trustworthy.  They were the preferred trading partner in the region for English and Dutch alike.

In 1633, everything changed.  They were hit by a plague, killing 80% of their population.  In the aftermath of the epidemic, the Dutch changed the nature of the Pequot trade, pushing the tribe to end their monopoly.  So, the population damage led to an economic blow.

The Pequots signed the agreement allowing other tribes to use their trading posts, but their warriors soon killed a group of Indian traders – likely Narragansetts – traveling to the trading house.  There were more than trade issues at stake with the Narragansetts.  Narragansett power had been increasing as the Pequots’ diminished, and after the plague they had a bigger population and better trading relations with the Europeans.  They used their influence to convince smaller tribes to stop paying tribute to the Pequots, and start paying it to them instead.  So Pequot influence diminished even more.  So, they went to war, and in the short conflict, they effectively demonstrated to the Narragansetts that even in their weakened state they weren’t people to be trifled with.

Though it wasn’t Dutch people who had been killed, the Dutch retaliated immediately.  It was Dutch trade at stake, and they needed to show the Pequots they couldn’t control that trade by force.  So, the Dutch kidnapped the leader of the Pequots, a man named Tatobem, and demanded a ransom of a bushel of wampum, or the Pequots would never see him again.  The Pequots sent the payment, and the Dutch sent Tatobem back to his tribe – dead.

This was an insane and totally unjustifiable reaction on the Dutch part.  And, the Pequots wanted revenge.  The problem was, they got their revenge on a drunken Englishman – not a Dutch trader.  That Englishman was Captain Stone, the privateer and trader who had been banished from Plymouth and Massachusetts and had stopped to trade with the locals on his way to the Chesapeake.  He wasn’t liked, but he was their countryman, and the English did demand the Pequots explain their behavior and make it right.

While they were dealing with external struggles, though, the death of their sachem also brought about a crisis of succession.

Pequot tradition stipulated that sachems must come from the same ruling family, but within that family the leader would be selected by the tribe as a whole.  There were three major candidates to succeed Tatobem – Sassacus, Uncas and Wequash.  Sassacus won, but Uncas and Wequash refused to accept the result.  Uncas spent the next few years fleeing to the Narragansetts, then asking forgiveness and after moving back onto Pequot land, trying to depose Sassacus.  Then, he was forced to flee and the cycle started all over again.  He did this about five times over the course of just a few years.

When Uncas was finally pushed out for good, allied with the Narragansetts and English, and formed his own tribe, the Mohegans.  He also started to pull away some of the small tribes who had once paid tribute to the Pequots, gaining their loyalty and wampum and further weakening his former tribe.

So when, in fall 1634, the Pequots sent an envoy to Boston to negotiate a treaty in the wake of Stone’s murder, they were in a very weak position, and weaker, in fact, than the English even realized.  While the English wanted peace, justice, security, and to assert their authority in the region, the Pequots were hoping that an alliance with the English would help stop their decline.  For them, a military as well as trade agreement would be ideal, and they hoped that by inviting the English to settle in Connecticut they could strengthen their alliance, and stop Narragansett and Mohegan incursion onto their lands.

They got the trade alliance.  Pequots would get the exclusive right to trade with the Puritans.  The Puritans were also eager to move into Connecticut.  The English refused a military alliance, though, which was unfortunate.  But, as a condition for Massachusetts’s ratification of the treaty, the colonists demanded the Pequots turn over Stone’s murderers, as well as an unfathomable sum of wampum – the equivalent of half of the colony’s total tax revenue that year.  This would be the price for peace.  The Pequot delegation signed the treaty, but when they returned home, the sachems refused to ratify it.  They’d never authorized something like that, and they didn’t even get a military alliance out of it.  The Pequots still pursued trade, still sent some wampum and beaver skins, and still encouraged the English to settle near them, but they wouldn’t ratify the treaty, and they knew that in the absence of Stone’s murderers or the full payment demanded for English ratification, the colonists wouldn’t either.

When they explained this to John Oldham, he called them a false people and the English felt they’d acted in bad faith.

They did start settling Connecticut, though, an area which Pilgrim, Dutch and Puritan alike had wanted, and by 1637, a string of English towns dotted the Connecticut River.  Hartford, Concord, Saybrook and soon New Haven were populated either by Puritans who didn’t fit in in Massachusets or by new groups of people moving from England with their own plans for colonization.

Conditions in most of these settlements were harsh, and only a couple hundred people lived at any of them.  At Saybrook, colonists sent a petition to England complaining that the nobles had neither sent them supplies nor a minister.  They had no bread nor beer, and were just living on pea porridge.  Many of the people were living in makeshift caves, or “cellars” around a single fort.

The settling of Connecticut didn’t help the Pequots the way they’d hoped, though.  Knowingly or unknowingly, the English were allying with a network of Indians working to break up the already-weakened Pequot Confederation.  Pequot tributaries were inviting the English to move into their towns to protect them from the Pequots, and more alarmingly, Pequot enemies were taking advantage of their newfound proximity to the English to turn the English against the Pequots.  The most notable of these enemies was Uncas of the Mohegans.  So, Uncas told Jonathan Brewster of Plymouth that Sassacus was planning an attack on Plymouth’s trading bark, and that Stone’s murder had been a carefully planned operation which Sassacus, himself had been involved in.  Already suspicious about the broken treaty, the English started to believe the rumors, and started to see the Pequots as an extremely dangerous presence.  There weren’t enough Algonquian speaking Englishmen to verify the rumors, and though Williams was their best source of information, he was exiled, living with the Narragansetts and therefore informed by people with their own agendas.  If what Uncas was saying was right, they couldn’t trust the Pequots, and they were almost wholly reliant on him for information.  When a couple English traders were killed on Long Island, fear increased yet again.

Vane and the council decided to act.  Even in the midst of the Antinomian Controversy, this was something they could agree on.  Vane commissioned John Winthrop, Jr., accompanied by George Fenwick, Hugh Peter, John Oldham and translator Thomas Stanton, to investigate Pequot conduct, and push the tribe to fulfill the obligations of the 1634 treaty.  If they refused, they were to return the wampum and furs the Pequots had given them in 1634, and tell the Pequots that the English felt no obligation to be peaceful with a people guilty of English blood.  If they refused to surrender Stone’s murderers, the English would seek revenge.  Furthermore, if the English found signs of Pequot involvement in the Long Island deaths, they would again take revenge.

The Englishmen of the Connecticut River Valley didn’t want Massachusetts to go through with this plan.  Saybrook’s leader, Lion Gardiner, told Winthrop, Fenwick and Peters’ delegation that while Massachusetts would remain safe no matter what happened, Saybrook would be the first to suffer if violence broke out between the English and Pequots.  As it was, they barely had holes to put their heads in, and there were only 24 people living in the fort, with food for no more than two months.  They needed to be able to harvest their corn before hostilities broke out, or they would starve.  The delegation ignored their pleas.  They summoned the sachem, and when he refused the terms of the rejected treaty, they returned the wampum and furs, and told the Indians they were planning to avenge Stone’s death.  In fact, they were so intimidating that the Niantic sachem, Sassious, offered Winthrop a large grant of land in exchange for protection.  He took the offer, but soon left for Connecticut.

A few days after Winthrop and Peters’ delegation left, a Pequot who had learned English while living in Plymouth visited Saybrook, and said Sassacus wanted to continue trade with the colony.  Regardless of the threats, the Pequots wanted peaceful trade with the English.  He had also found two stray English horses, and he’d return them if Gardiner would send a trading party.  Gardiner wanted good relations as much as Sassacus, but he also suspected this was a trap.  So, he sent a trading party, but gave them specific instructions about how to remain as safe as possible during the mission.  They must remain constantly armed, and stay in the area only one day, leaving the Pequot River before dark, and only allow one Pequot canoe to approach the shallop, with no more than four Indians aboard.  They tried following the directions, but the Pequots were afraid to board the shallop in a way that rendered hem so vulnerable.  They could easily end up like Tatobem – kidnapped and killed in revenge for Stone’s death.

So, two of the Englishmen went ashore, one to prepare a meal and the other to confront the sachem about the horses.  When he entered the wigwam, armed with a sword, all the Indians fled except for Sassacus’s wife.  She told him to go, and made a series of gestures including one which he interpreted to mean that the Pequots were planning to cut off his head.  He pulled out his sword, and the two Englishmen fled to the ship.  The Pequots called them to come ashore again, but they left and went home.

The incident cemented English paranoia about the Pequots.  The Puritans were sure they had been led into an ambush.  In reality, they were the ones who had behaved aggressively, but the event came after months of paranoia and rumors, and many people in Massachusetts wanted to go to war with the Pequots and get it over with.  It wasn’t long before they had a genuine outburst of violence to put them over the edge.

On July 20, 1636, a man named John Gallop was sailing by Block Island, home of one of the small tribes who had changed their allegiance from Pequot to Narragansett as Pequot power diminished.  There, he saw John Oldham’s ship, but oddly he couldn’t see one Englishman on board.  There were, however, 14 Indians.  He hailed the ship but no one answered.  Gallop shot the sides of the ship with duckshot, and then rammed it with his own boat.  This startled the Indians, and some jumped overboard to escape.  He shot the sides and rammed the ship again, and a third time, until there were only four Indians left on board, and then he and his crew fought his way onto Oldham’s ship, taking one prisoner, and either killing or driving the others away.  Once on board, they found Oldham’s body, still warm, naked, head split open, and his hands and feet half cut off.  They buried him at sea and left his ship at the Narragansett shore.  The others in his company were also dead, except for two young boys who had been taken prisoner, and Oldham’s two Narragansett guides.

As the colonists investigated the event, the Narragansett sachem, Canonicus, sent a message to Boston via Roger Williams, saying the Narragansetts were deeply grieved by Oldham’s death and would avenge it.  He sent Oldham’s two guides to Boston as messengers to discuss the event, and did everything he could to show his goodwill.  The Narragansetts had always been skeptical of the English, but Canonicus knew he couldn’t win in a battle against them, and trade was a nice bonus.  He also referenced Squanto’s very old rumor that the English could unleash the plague at will.  He wanted to protect his tribe, and cooperating with the Puritans was the way to do this.  However, back in Boston, the Court interrogated Gallop’s Narragansett prisoner, and he told them the murder was a planned event which the Narragansetts had helped organize.  Canonicus and Miantonomo weren’t involved, but every one of the tribe’s other sachems were, and so were Oldham’s two guides.  He said the Narragansetts had been upset that Oldham was working to open trade with the Pequots, their strongest rivals.  Roger Williams had also been looking into the event, and he gave a very similar account to the Narragansett prisoner.

The magistrates let the guides return to Canonicus, because they’d been sent as messengers, but Vane asked Williams to tell Canonicus that he demanded the immediate return of the two hostages.  War with the Narragansetts was now a distinct possibility, and Vane also told Williams to “look to himself.”

The next day, Vane sent e message directly to Canonicus, saying he suspected the guides/messengers of complicity in Oldham’s murder, and that while he’d refrained from arresting them while on a diplomatic mission, now he expected him to send the two back to Boston for investigation, and Canonicus agreed.  He also said he’d return Oldham’s remaining trade goods, but neither the 50 pounds in gold coins which had been taken, nor the guides were sent to Boston.  In response, Vane demanded the return of everyone involved in the attack, but the Narragansetts said that those people had taken refuge with the Pequots.

Oldham’s murder had virtually nothing to do with the Pequots until this, but unfortunately for the Pequots, Canonicus’s message came at the same time as a message they, themselves had sent, refusing to comply with the terms of the non-ratified 1634 treaty.  This turned suspicions about the treaty rejection, and rumors spread by Uncas, and confusion over the trading party, into outright terror.  What if the Pequots and Narragansetts were collaborating to wipe out the English?

The 1622 Powhatan Massacre in Virginia had left a strong impression on colonial New Englanders.  The notion that something like that could happen played on every fear and doubt people had when moving to America.  They didn’t really know the language, they didn’t particularly know the landscape, and they did live alongside Indians.  The notion that someone could pretend to be your friend for years, only to turn around one day and kill your entire family with no warning made the New World scary, and meant that you couldn’t fully trust it.  And this wasn’t just the faint speculation that it could happen – it was the knowledge that something exactly like this had happened.  There was no defending yourself against that, and any time an Englishman worried about Indian loyalty, the fear went directly to the memory of that massacre.

For Connecticut, the fear was even more intense, as there were 19 Indians per Englishman living in even their biggest towns.

If the Pequots and Narragansetts were secretly colluding, it was possible they were planning a similar event.  There would be no defending themselves after the fact, so the Puritans decided to demonstrate their strength and the repercussion for killing Englishmen.  To do this, they sent John Endicott with 90 volunteers for a punitive raid on both the Block Islanders, and the Pequots.

Before setting out, they met with Canonicus, who gave his approval for the mission and sent Miantonomo with a force to support the English attack.  Their orders were to land on Block Island and kill all the Indians they could find, but spare the women and children and take them hostage.  Then, they would go to the Pequots and demand the surrender of the murderers, as well as 1000 fathoms of wampum as backpayment, and children as hostages to ensure future good conduct.  While they were supposed to go to Block Island with guns blazing, though, they were supposed to make the demands of the Pequots diplomatically at first, only resorting to violence if they encountered resistance.  Punishment of Block Island, and intimidation of the Pequots.

They reached Block Island at sunset and saw a single Indian walking on the shore.  The others had either left or were preparing an ambush, so they carefully approached the beach.  As they did, arrows started to fly at them.  The shallops were moving too much to accurately shoot from them, so Endicott’s volunteers jumped into the water and waded to shore, firing their guns as they reached stable ground.  The arrows soon stopped, and the attackers disappeared.  The first attack was repelled with virtually no English casualties, and the group moved inland and set up a camp for the night.

Over the next few days, they explored, destroyed the cornfields, corn stores, and villages they found, killed a few dogs, and looked for the island’s inhabitants.  With few exceptions, they couldn’t find them, though.  One Narragansett guide killed a Block Islander who tried to encourage him to abandon the English, and a handful shot arrows at them from the edge of a swamp, but that was it.

When they reached Saybrook, Gardiner was furious.  “You come hither to raise these wasps around my ears, and then you’ll take wing and fly away.”  Saybrook was small, poor, vulnerable and on the edge of English society.  They would inevitably be the first to suffer, and their corn hadn’t matured yet.  If there was a siege, they’d lose it.  If Endicott persisted in his plan to attack the Pequots before the harvest, he would ensure they’d starve.  Gardiner asked Endicott to wait until after the harvest to attack the Pequots, but Endicott refused.  So, he asked Endicott to at least bring Saybrook some of the Pequot corn, but again he refused.  So Gardiner brought out six bags and gave Endicott a concrete plan for getting the corn effectively, and said his people and a hired Dutch trading ship would accompany them to help gather the corn.  But, Endicott needed to let the Saybrook and Dutch vessel leave first.  Endicott begrudgingly agreed.

Unlike the Block Islanders, the Pequots and their Western Niantic allies rushed out to greet the English as they approached.  “What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for?”  They welcomed them heartily, expecting trade, but the English remained silent.  Growing suspicious, they started asking why they’d come, but with no answer.  The English stayed on their ships overnight, while the Pequots and Western Niantics kept watch, and prepared for the worst.

At dawn, a Pequot elder boarded an English ship and asked why they’d come.  “The governors of the Bay sent us to demand the heads of those persons that had slain Captain Norton and Captain Stone and the rest of their company.”  It was not the English custom to suffer murderers to live, so they could give them the murderers, or face war.

The Pequots responded that they had killed Stone and his company, and openly confessed that Sassacus had actually personally killed Stone.  But, they argued, it wasn’t the sort of thing that should justify a war, because it itself was an act of retribution to settle a grievance.  He was avenging the death of his father.  Who could blame us?  We could not possibly have known that Stone and his compatriots weren’t accessories to the murder, because we thought the Dutch and English were one nation.  It was a completely rational explanation, and many people may have accepted it, but we’ve seen repeatedly that Endicott wasn’t that type of person.

Endicott responded that the man had lied to them.  They’d dealt with both English and Dutch enough to know the difference.  “They are both strangers to us, we took them to all be one.  Therefore, we crave pardon, we have not willfully wronged the English.”  The English responded that if they weren’t immediately given the heads of the guilty, they would attack.  Of course the Pequots couldn’t do this.  Not only would that be turning over innocent people for execution, it would mean turning over their own sachem for something he really hadn’t done wrong.

The envoy asked to go consult his people as to what to do next, and was allowed to disembark, and the English also went ashore, clad in armor and in full battle array.  They marched to the highest ground in the area, and as soon as they did the envoy reappeared, saying there was no one in the area who could respond to their demand, and that the high ranking sachems had gone to Long Island.  Again, Endicott called him a liar.  If Sassacus didn’t appear immediately, he threatened to march through the country and spoil the corn.  He said he’d go try to find Sassacus, and was gone an hour.  Then, he returned saying he’d found a lesser sachem named Mornmenotech and the man was on his way.  And, they were going to try to identify Stone’s remaining murderers.  But, it was over an hour before he came, and in that time, the English saw that the women and children had been moved away, and the men were burying their valuables.

It looked like they were preparing for battle, and Endicott decided he’d strike the first blow.  A new envoy said that if they’d lay down their arms and march 30 paces toward the Pequots, a sachem would come forward to parley.  The English put up their battle flags and marched forward in full armor.  They opened fire, marched into the village, set fire to the wigwams and corn, and dug up and destroyed the buried goods.  For the rest of the day, they pillaged.

On the way back to Saybrook, he wanted to visit the western Niantics, but they all fled, so Endicott’s troops burned and spoiled whatever they could find.  The only English casualty was one man wounded in the leg.  They had killed 13 people.

Gardiner was disgusted.  Endicott’s men hadn’t helped his people load the corn, and they were still loading corn when Endicott’s army sailed away, leaving them alone, unprotected and surrounded by angry Pequots.  Then, a shift in the wind had blocked their passage downriver, so they’d gone ashore to try to gather corn until the wind changed.  And while they were doing that, they had been attacked.  They fought the attack off with a few rounds of musket fire and a show of swords, and the standoff lasted for the rest of the afternoon, until finally the Pequots withdrew and the wind shifted.  Massachusetts had condemned them to starvation with the raid to begin with, and done absolutely nothing to help mitigate the damage.

When Gardiner listed his grievances in a letter to Boston, Winthrop dismissed him, saying that Pequot arrows were shot at too steep an angle to do any real damage.  There was only one English casualty, so he was overreacting.  Gardiner replied that two of his people were injured thanks to Endicott’s malfeasance and the Massachusetts volunteers cowardice.

And soon, the other smaller, more vulnerable settlements of the Connecticut region echoed Gardiner’s complaints.  Plymouth’s Bradford wrote saying Massachusetts had provoked a war by attacking the Pequots, but Winthrop replied that Bradford should blame the Pequots, because they were the ones who hadn’t surrendered Stone’s murderers.  They hadn’t gone to make war, just do justice, and justice they had done.  Winslow wrote to Connecticut’s Winthrop Jr. saying that the Bay Colony settlers deserved no favor, and that it was a pity that religion should be a cloak for such spirits.  Connecticut also wrote to tell Massachusetts that they’d put Connecticut lives in jeopardy with their heavy-handed provocation of an Indian War.  None of them had been consulted before Endicott’s raid, and they, who were weaker, poorer, smaller and closer to the Pequots and Narragansetts, would be the first to suffer the repercussions of the attack.  And they were.