Witch-Hunt: the Clash of Cultures

By Xlibris US

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493187287

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Copyright © 2014 by Dr. Clifton W. Wilcox.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014905772

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4931-8727-0

Softcover 978-1-4931-8726-3

eBook 978-1-4931-8728-7

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Rev. date: 04/03/2014

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CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Chapter 1: From Predatory Identities To Predatory Policies

Chapter 2: Mapping The Pequot War

Chapter 3: War Is Like A Three-Footed Stool: Men, Munitions, And Food

Chapter 4: Metacom’s Rebellion

Chapter 5: Military Practices In King Philip’s War

Chapter 6: Fourth Anglo-Abenaki War

Chapter 7: War On Two Fronts

Conclusion

References

Nargiza Wilcox you are my best friend,

companion and my guide to walk through this life.

Books by Dr. Clifton Wilcox:

Scapegoat: Targeted for Blame

Groupthink: An Impediment to Success

Bias: The Unconscious Deceiver

Witch-Hunt: The Assignment of Blame

Envy: A Deeper Shade of Green

Perhaps one way of understanding the Salem trials of 1692 was that they were an attempt to draw a line in the sand: the New England Congregational standing order and the colonial governments had found themselves tolerating Baptists, Anglicans, and even Quakers, but it drew the line at witchcraft.

David A. Weir, Early New England: A Covenanted Society

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the second installment of six books regarding The Salem Witch Trials. My first book on this subject, Witch-Hunt: The Assignment of Blame laid the foundation of the future books. My intent, in the first book, was to produce a general overview of the mass hysteria that hit Salem, Massachusetts and the dangers associated with isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and the lapses in due process. Likewise, my intent was to introduce the reader to the main characters who were instrumental in conviction and execution of Reverend George Burroughs and 19 others before the Court of Oyer and Terminer (which literally means to hear and determine).

Salem was a community in turmoil in 1692. Bad weather reduced harvests. An epidemic of small pox had swept through the town. Indians renewed attacks on the frontier settlements. The townspeople feared that another conflict like the recent King Phillip’s War was about to engulf them. As if this were not enough, there was great political uncertainty, since the King of England had revoked the colony’s charter in 1684. The colonists had been without a sanctioned government since they had forced, though without bloodshed, ejected the King’s chosen replacement in 1689.

There was also a great deal of conflict within the town. Salem at that time consisted of two main districts. Salem Town was the second largest city in Massachusetts, and was rapidly becoming a major center of trade and commerce. Salem Village, on the other hand, was largely made up of small households and farmers. They were traditional Puritans who were not pleased with the secular changes in Salem Town. For years the people of Salem Village had been trying to become a separate township. That way they would be free of the control of Salem Town and its merchants and businessmen. They had been able to form a separate parish in 1672 and had started their own church in 1689. There was even strife within the Village church, with nearly equal factions strongly divided over the minister, Rev. Samuel Parris. It was in this tense atmosphere that led to the Salem witch-hunts of 1692 where 141 accused and 20 were executed for witchcraft (19 hanged, and one crushed to death during torture/interrogation).

This second book, Witch-Hunt: The Clash of Cultures covers one element that was instrumental in contributing to the witch frenzy, the Indians. The Puritans responsible for the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony had frequent interactions with the local Native American tribes, ranging from cooperation to minor conflict and all-out war. War places great stress on individuals and societies, forcing them to act in new ways and often to reevaluate and abandon old habits. New Englanders and their communities did change dramatically as a result of repeated wars with the region’s natives.

Beyond the extensive physical damage, the conflicts challenged the identities and values of English colonists in myriad ways. In the midst of battle, many men failed to live up to the expectations of their gender, while some women stepped beyond theirs to act in a manly fashion. In a Puritan colony, these acts did not go unnoticed. Puritan gender norms and roles were under the watchful eye of ecclesiastical leaders; who were quick to sermon and chastise their constituents, offering examples of proper behavior, as a way to reasserted control over flock.

Puritan accounts describe Native Americans in a number of diverse and often contradictory ways. They describe the tribes in the Massachusetts area as friends and allies as often as savages and tools of the devil. Descriptions varied but all shared one commonality—they were formed in the context of the Puritan colonists’ providential world view. Fitting Native Americans into their providential narrative served to reinforce Puritan identity and sense of mission while creating internal stability, but in doing so stifled the voice and perspectives of the local tribes. As such, it encouraged a form of cultural imperialism that eventually threatened the lives, autonomy, and beliefs of the tribes. In the decades immediately following its founding, the Massachusetts Bay colony was fragile and still developing the infrastructure and power base necessary for survival. In the early years the Puritans were occupied with the struggles involved in founding the colony and they made little attempt to expand their territory. As the colony’s strength grew they began to more aggressively seize land and resources, stressing their relationship with local tribes.

Thousands of English inhabitants of the outer tier of New England settlements would feel the hard hand of Indian wars over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Indian-white relations in New England had simmered for the first fifty years of white occupation, occasionally flaring up into short-lived conflicts such as the Pequot War of 1636. The continuous pressures on the Indians to cede their land and autonomy to the English, coupled with the effects of altered subsistence patterns and the ravages of European diseases, brought tensions to a critical point by the early 1670s. Indian warriors and English soldiers continued to destroy one another’s towns and fields and slaughter opponents of all ages and conditions.

When faced by attacks from Native Americans, the Puritan ecclesiastical leaders; intensified sermon’s that bitterly laments the state of Puritan society and warned of the coming apocalypse decrying the moral and spiritual laxity of the colony. The Puritans believed that they had failed to fulfill the divine covenant implicit in the colony’s founding, and were certain that the colony’s troubles were a punishment for impiety. The intensity of the Salem witch trials was in part due to the anxiety Puritans experienced surrounding the threat of apostasy within their community. When faced by attacks from Native Americans, a crisis of meaning, and an erosion of conformity within the colony, the Puritans searched their own community for possible spiritual failings that may have provoked divine punishment. The events in Salem reflected the Puritan anxiety concerning conformity and piety within the community, and the tendency to turn their gaze inward when attacked. The Puritans responded to attacks from Native Americans by scouring their own community for failure.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM PREDATORY IDENTITIES TO PREDATORY POLICIES

In 2010, American University anthropologist Akbar S. Ahmed published Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam. Professor Ahmed’s work is a study based on his fieldwork of Muslims in contemporary America and historical research on the origins of American society going back to the landing at Plymouth in 1620. In his book, Dr. Ahmed sought to explain the attitudes of twenty-first century Americans toward Islam and Muslims in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Dr. Ahmed posits that three trends in American history can help to explain, in his words, why Islam remains unknown to most Americans, who, on top of all the other insecurities and fears about the religion have recently added another: the ‘homegrown terrorist’. According to Dr. Ahmed the three basic identities that define American society are primordial, pluralist, and predator. The primordial identity was rooted in the seminal landing at Plymouth and provided the foundation of the two other identities. He contends that the aim of the early settlers was to survive and create a Christian society under the rule of law. While the majority of the Founding Fathers in the next century would subscribe to what he labels as a pluralist identity—believing in civil rights and liberties, religious freedom and tolerance. The third identity, predatory, took its shape with the first settlers. The more zealous of the settlers Dr. Ahmed writes argued that the land was given to them by God, and they were to occupy it regardless of who was living there." A maxim phrased as we are white, we are Christian, and we are here. As their confidence grew Dr. Ahmed found that they began to prey on the weaker natives through generating an arrogance that did not encourage self-reflection and [made] it easy to demonize and destroy the enemy. This marked the birth of a predator identity. ¹

Dr. Ahmed’s ideas have generated tremendous discussion in academic, media and political circles and most of those in dialogue with his ideas have found much to like and to praise. In a 2010 interview with Tom Ashbrook of National Public Radio (NPR) On Point Dr. Ahmed further explained the connection he sees between contemporary fear and ignorance about Islam and the desires and motivations of early English settlers in New England. He told Ashbrook that the view of the original settlers was that this land is white, it is Anglo, specifically racially, and it is Christian and anyone who is not part of these features is to be exterminated literally.² This predatory identity was the basis of colonization buttressed by a seventeenth-century Christian worldview which explains why, as Ahmed pointed out in the interview and in his 1999 book Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World, within a few decades eighty percent of the Indian population was wiped out.³ Dr. Ahmed revealed that these notions created a zero tolerance policy toward Indians that can still be seen today in American attitudes toward Muslims.⁴

The connections Dr. Ahmed makes between the present and the past are seductive and thus compelling. They are also ahistorical, misleading and illustrate a tendency outside of academia to seek out comfortable explanations about ourselves and our past. Though good historians will normally sidestep such generalizations, the public arena is often less skeptical. Racial explanations might make pieces of the past easier to digest but they only partially illuminate the complicated and often contradictory relations of the past.

Seventeenth-century New England was no exception. Understanding and explaining the past is rarely simple and easy explanations, especially those that hinge on a single theme, can obscure more than they reveal. While Dr. Ahmed is certainly correct to highlight the religiosity of the first settlers to New England and the effect their worldview had on relations with Indians; to cast the colonists as racist ideologues minimizes other important variables that played a role in the development those relations. Therefore, historians are obligated to take care and plug into the public sphere by means of continually filtering the findings, and debates, into the public square through teaching.

The purpose of this book is two-fold: Firstly, it seeks to answer the following question: Did the souring relationship between colonial New England and the American Indian contribute to the mania in Salem, Massachusetts? Secondly, why did colonial New England settlers have problems with military acculturation when they faced the American Indian?

Colonial soldiers’ attempts to mimic Indian tactics and strategies met with very limited success. Letter upon letter from field commanders to colonial authorities in the Pequot War, King Phillip’s War and the two-pronged conflicts alternately called Dummer’s War and Greylock’s War, reveal the inability of provincial forces to adequately track and locate roving Indian war parties and officers frequently requested that friendly Indians be employed to supplement colonists deficiencies. Indians’ ability to move secretly through the forest, skulking as the colonists called it and for long periods of time allowed the Indians to surprise, ambush, and frustrate settlers. ⁵ The colonists’ inability to mimic these skills did not match the critiques of 18th century British regulars or the conclusions of several notable historical works on these wars. There is an argument to be made that colonists’ attempts and failures to mimic native warfare were significant markers of the influence of political economy on combat. Indian warfare was not a simple technology like a musket that could be picked up and operated by anyone; it was a complex practice that emerged from native political economy. The colonists’ inability to master it too reflected the influence of their economic choices on their ability to wage war.

This book not only examines the troubles and strained relationships between Indians and Salem, which was a contributing factor of the witch-hunt; this book also adds to the historiography on warfare in colonial New England by investigating political economy on both sides of the frontier. Historians had not seriously seemed to be a very new thing in history. Persons and groups reaching for illicit power Francis Jennings continued, customarily assume attitudes of great moral rectitude to divert attention from the abandonment of their own moral standards and behavior. ⁶ The actions of English settlers, particularly those in power, mirrored the actions of corrupt politicians in the present. Thus, behind Puritan racial and religious justifications for the dispossession of Indians he found avarice, greed, and hypocrisy all in the name of self-aggrandizement.

Jennings was not only responding to the political events of his day but also to the historiography on colonial New England. He believed prior studies largely focused on rationalizing the actions of English settlers. Two works in particular drew Jennings’ ire: Douglas Edward Leach’s monograph on King Philip’s War, Flintlock and Tomahawk and Alden Vaughn’s New England’s Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-175, a retelling of the first half-century of relations between Indians and settlers. Jennings wrote that the former overly equated civilization versus savagery with white man versus red while Vaughn preferred to type it as Christianity versus heathenism. ⁷ Both authors, he argued, took pains to justify the Puritan conquests. ⁸ Although Leach and Vaughn viewed Indian and settler relations through a lens of race and religion their arguments were premised on material and political differences in colonial New England. Jennings rejected the focus on materiality and policy, as voiced by colonial ministers and officials, and instead argued that settlers’ documents revealed a conscious attempt to manipulate history in order to hide their true intentions.

While Jennings’ did not promote racial explanations, in fact he explicitly rejected them, he influenced a generation of scholars who viewed race as a dominating category of analysis in colonial New England history. Jennings established that Europeans had come to America with the intention of exploiting Native Americans and believed this was the result of colonists’ desire to enrich themselves at any cost. The next generation of colonial New England scholars accepted Jennings premise but offered new explanations for colonists’ exploitation of native peoples: ethnocentrism.

The first book to substantially offer new insights after Jennings was Neal Salisbury’s Manitou and Providence. Salisbury’s work was an outgrowth of the emergent field of ethno-history which combined evidence from interdisciplinary sources to complement traditional historical documents. Covering the same time period and geographical space as Jennings; Salisbury argued that avarice and greed could not alone explain how English settlers came to dominate the region. He wrote that the concrete historical experiences ⁹ of both Indians and settlers needed to be explored in their proper context in order to understand how their societies developed together. Salisbury argued that an examination of the different religious expressions in the region provided useful ways to understand these concrete historical experiences. ¹⁰ Unlike Jennings, Salisbury sought and found Indian voices and agency and developed a new standard by which future works would be judged.

Since the 1990’s, the historical writing about colonial New England has investigated and explained the first century of contact by emphasizing Indians’ agency and the effect of English ethnocentrism on the development of a hegemonic colonial project. ¹¹ Identity, according to many of these authors, was a central preoccupation amongst settlers and anxiety about losing their identity played a dominant role in the violence against and marginalization of native people. Jill Lepore’s award-winning monograph on King Philip’s War, In the Name of War, is perhaps the most popular work to advance the idea that apprehension about identity caused the colonists to prosecute bloody wars against Indians. The colonists who prosecuted these wars, she argues, were motivated in large part by a desire to avoid becoming Indianized. ¹² This fear presented a paradox; if settlers continued to live peaceably with Indians they were bound to degenerate in savages. ¹³ If, however, they waged war, they were bound to fight like savages. ¹⁴ Colonists negotiated this inconsistency in their writings about the war and mitigated their actions by constructing narratives of the threat Indian savagery posed to English civility.

Lepore is not alone in suggesting that identity was the central protagonist in Indian settler relations. In Subject Matter: Technology, the Body and Science on the Anglo-Indian Frontier, 1500-1676 Joyce Chaplin agreed with Lepore that identity was at the heart of colonial conflict, but for Chaplin settlers’ ideas about the superiority of their bodies compared to Indians helped them to prosecute and justify their wars against native people. She focused on the way in which contemporary European theories about nature, particularly the body, influenced English settlers’ relations with Indians. ¹⁵ For Chaplin colonists’ ideas about themselves and about Indians laid the foundation for the conflicts between them. Here, as in Lepore’s work, ideas take precedence over, and indeed influence, actions. There is little reason to question the scholarship and analyses; that colonists’ desire for land was motivated in part by their belief in their superiority whether cultural, religious or racial remains a fact. This view does not, however, fully explore the connection between the places Indians and colonists lived and the economic choices they made in those spaces.

There are works that attempt to bridge this gap in the historiography by focusing on Indian views of the colonial experience. Jenny Hale Pulsipher and Ann M. Little argued that important similarities existed between Indians and settlers that contributed to conflict as much if not more than did the differences between them. For Pulsipher, similarities in the understanding and appreciation of political power caused friction between natives and English settlers because their interpretations of their respective places in New England’s political hierarchy differed. Little theorizes that similar conceptions about the relationship between masculinity and warfare in both societies contributed to conflict as gendered hierarchy privileged manhood and reserved politics and war for men exclusively ¹⁶ on both sides of the frontier; both Indians and colonists, she argued, spoke and understood the same gendered language of power. ¹⁷ Pulsipher and Little focus on cultural similarities and thus present a direct departure from earlier scholarship that tended toward cultural differences to explain conflict in New England.

All of these works share a common thread in that the authors’ explanations focus on settlers’ and Indians’ ideas about the world. This book explores the experiences in it. Conflicts over identity provide interesting but incomplete explanations of war in colonial New England. The aim here is not to discredit racially and religiously charged chronicles of Americas’ past but to add by exploring the context in which these narratives developed. Settlers constructed an Indian ethnicity that did not rest solely on their belief in their own religious and cultural superiority. Their creation of a monolithic Indian identity was also predicated on colonists’ observations of native land use and the value judgments they made about such use. In part, the seasonal rounds used by most Indians in New England allowed colonists to view different tribal polities as members of a unified race; competition for land produced an environment where economic anxieties encouraged the marginalization of people engaged in semi-sedentary economies. Colonists’ racial attitudes about Indians were deeply correlated to their economic practices and the value judgments they made about the economic practices of Indians. Marginalization increased over time in tandem with colonial population growth.

Warfare between Native Americans and English settlers during the century following the English settlements at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay was shaped by differences in political economy. The use of the term political economy, for both colonists and Indians, borrows heavily from Eric Wolf’s usage in Europe and the People without History. In his preface to the second edition in 1997, Wolf used political economy to designate inquiries into the economic foundations of different polities and societies in their changing environment. ¹⁸ He sought to examine the ways power and economy sustain and drive each other on ¹⁹ and argued that these forces were engaged in a fragile but instructive dialectic. Political economy in southern New England during the first third of the 17th century was thus the relationship between power and production.

Indians and settlers acquired, utilized, and distributed resources in very different ways. Native people in New England, depending on their geography, farmed and fished in spring and summer months and hunted from late fall through winter. Agriculture was less prominent in northern regions of New England; yet, virtually all Indian communities in the region followed seasonal rounds. English settlers, on the other hand, fished, farmed and raised livestock in permanent sedentary communities. These societies were further differentiated by different mechanisms of political power. The different political needs of Indians and settlers were directly related to their approaches to resource extraction. As settlers produced, rather than acquired, the vast majority of their subsistence their political structures reflected the needs of a sedentary society supported by produced rather than acquired resources. While many New England Indians produced a large amount of their subsistence through farming, few domesticated animals for consumption. When the leaves began to change color in New England most Indian societies split into smaller social groups to hunt and their political structures reflected the political needs of complex semi-sedentary societies. ²⁰

It is argued that these differences were at the root of the tensions between Indians and settlers and that the clash of these diverse political economies produced a context in which English settlers began to racialized and marginalize native peoples. Indians in New England, especially southern New England, were in a period of change when the first permanent English settlements in the region were established. The Pequot’s and Narragansett’s, the two largest tribes in the region, were expanding their political influence and tributary base by extracting furs, fish, game, and manufactured trade goods from smaller tribes in exchange for protection. Yet, this expansion was largely economic and political as neither tribe sought to displace the smaller tribes. The arrival of English settlers complicated this situation for within a little more than a decade, through a mix of natural increase and migration, English settlers desired land occupied or claimed by Indians. English approaches to subsistence caused the ever-increasing desire for land. In short, because the colonists came to New England intent on farming and raising livestock, their populations grew at a much faster rate than Indian populations.

It was in part population growth in England that made migration to New England attractive to many colonists. As E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield have shown, England experienced a tremendous population expansion over the course of the 16th century. ²¹ According to the data they collected the English population more than doubled from 1541 to 1641. ²² Population increases throughout the time frame of their study, 1541-1841, were intricately connected to agricultural production. ²³ Yet, England did not experience consistent population growth over these three centuries but rather saw growth occur in fits and starts. According to the authors rapid population growth continuing over a long period of time was impossible because agricultural production could not be expanded commensurately. ²⁴ Migration and mortality checked the increased fertility brought on by increased agricultural production. As Malthus argued, there was, and is, a dire relationship between food production and population; societies that produce more food can produce more people. ²⁵ While Malthusian anxieties about population outstripping available resources have largely been disproved, his initial premise about the relationship between population and production holds true. Therefore, it was not only political and religious pressure that motivated migrants to travel to New England but population pressure as well. What is perhaps most interesting, if not paradoxical, is that the English migrants to North America sought to alter political and religious aspects of their culture but not their modes and methods of production.

The population growth of sedentary agriculturalists has historically been higher than hunter-gatherer populations and semi-sedentary populations. Indians in New England at the time of English arrival engaged in a mix of the latter two economies. The population of the island of England, containing 50,000 square miles, was roughly 2.7 million in 1541. ²⁶ By 1641, the population had risen to almost 5.1 million. ²⁷ While population figures for pre-contact New England are more difficult to ascertain, the estimates for the population of all of eastern North America, including New England, eastern Canada the mid, south and gulf Atlantic states, encompassing more the 500,000 square miles, vary between 900,000 and 3.7 million. ²⁸ If the median estimate is taken for eastern North America the pre-contact, pre-virgin soil epidemic population was almost the same as that of England, spread out over more than ten times the amount of land. As the settlers to New England did not intend or attempt to alter the fundamentals of their subsistence it is unsurprising that conflict arose as quickly as it did.

Indians and settlers also developed different mechanisms of power to manage their differing methods of subsistence. Indigenous power structures in New England were based largely on consensus; sachems’ and war chiefs’ powers were limited to their past successes and present powers of persuasion. For English colonists, however, the power to make war lay in the hands of elected and appointed persons with the power to coerce citizens to fight. Thus, for English colonists the purpose of war was largely beyond the control of the combatants who did the fighting while for native peoples the purpose and prosecution of war was largely controlled by those who chose to fight it. As a result, settlers were able to form larger contingents of forces than their adversaries and could keep those forces in the field longer, particularly in winter, than Indians.

Though the relationship between settlers’ economy and governance allowed them to field larger forces for a longer amount of time, their methods of subsistence did not prepare them, or allow then time to prepare for warfare in New England forests. While colonial officials could compel military service they had difficulty adequately training their forces. The vast majority of migrants to America had little to no military training and few were willing or able to devote the time necessary to develop the skills needed to fight in their new environment. Most colonies required that men between sixteen and sixty be ready and prepared to defend the colony. ²⁹ Farming and raising livestock were laborious tasks that required all available hands involved for long hours throughout the year, leaving little time to drill. Furthermore, when colonists did train, they prepared for the wars they expected to fight, which were not the kinds of wars they would actually come to fight. Colonists prepared for wars fought between armies over open spaces by learning how to load, level, and shoot. Based on the experiences of the few military men who fought in wars in Europe this training was virtually useless against Indians who rarely chose to engage the settlers across open fields. Thus military training for most English settlers was an ancillary and marginal activity.