King Philip's War - Part One

   If one could take an aerial view of Southern New England in 1675, he would see an almost unbroken expanse of forest  and wilderness; but here and there the wilderness was broken by a few acres of cleared land and a small cluster of houses - a village amidst the forest. But many forests were set besides extensive open areas that, in places like Boston, might be entirely absent of trees, desperately needed for building and firewood. The diversity of the land was remarkable, ranging from open oak woodlands, to wet lowlands, to bogs of densely matted moss, swamps, and to the sandy soil of the coast which featured oyster beds a mile in length and clam banks so dense that a person traversing them was showered with spouting water.
   New England was a land of isolated villages and occasional towns interconnected by a network of woodland paths which served as virtually the only means of access to most of the inland settlements. But New England was also a highway engineer's dream with a network of trails knitting together Indian villages with local connectors and long-distance routes. These trails, developed over centuries, followed the most efficient paths over hills and mountains, and, with river fords, constituted a means of rapid transit that was almost modern. Some of the important trails had been so heavily pounded by moccasined feet that they ran two feet below the surface of the surrounding forest.

Indian trails and Villages of southern New England

   Today tourists crowd the Mohawk Trail in Western Massachusetts reveling in the vibrant fall foliage. But the Mohawk Trail got its name and bloody reputation from the seventeenth century when the much feared Mohawks, allied to New York's Iroquois Nation, came charging down over the Berkshires into the Algonquian villages of the Connecticut River Valley. Their depredations were so severe that, by the time the Europeans discovered the valley, the valley was very thinly populated.
   Tensions between the Natives and New Englanders had been building for years. Previously we talked of the transformation of the Algonquian way of life because of the fur trade and its use of wampum. Two other factors, besides the inevitable clash of two different cultures, led to the outbreak of war - a baby boom among New Englanders requiring an expansion in settlements and the inexhaustible desire of the English mentality for more and more land. The colonist would use any means - legal or illegal - to obtain title to land and it was important that a "title", however meaningless that concept was to the Algonquian,  be obtained. If all else failed, the English would get a sachem to sell the land to him, even though the sachem had no right to sell the land and was illiterate in English.

King Philip's Mark

   When Massasoit, who had befriended the newly arrived settlers and helped them avoid starvation, died in 1661, he was succeeded as sachem* of the Pokanoket by his son Wamsutta. Wamsutta faced a different world than his father. The English had grown in power and stature and the relationship between them and the Pokanoket had grown more complex. The Algonquian often changed his name as he entered a different phase of his life and so, shortly after becoming sachem, Wamsutta asked the authorities in Plymouth to give him and and his younger brother, Metacom,  English names, probably to help them move more freely between English and Wampanoag society. Soon after, Wamsutta became Alexander and Metacom became Philip (curious choices).
   Alexander proved to be more independent than his father and was ordered to respond when the Plymouth authorities heard rumors that he was discussing war plans with the Narragansett, an adjoining tribe and long time foe of the Pakanoket. Alexander refused and was soon taken into custody by the Governor's son to force the issue. Sometime shortly thereafter, Alexander became ill and died. The Pokanoket, including Philip, believed he was poisoned. His death is one of the great mysteries of colonial history. A plausible thesis is that Alexander had developed appendicitis and was killed when a well meaning English physician administered a "working physic."
   Alexander was laid to rest in July, 1662, and his younger brother Philip, perhaps 24 years old, became sachem. With his father's memory still in his mind, watching the erosion of Wampanoag land to a new, aggressive generation of English settlers, believing that his brother had been murdered by the Plymouth authorities, concerned about a strained relationship with his Narragansett neighbors, Philip took over leadership of the Pokonoket.
   Five years later in 1667, Philip was in the center of a war scare in which he was accused of cooperating with the Dutch and French to launch an attack on English settlers. Philip manged to avert a crisis but was not as successful in 1671 when Philip reluctantly agreed to meet representatives of Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony to answer charges that the Wampanoag and Narragansett were readying to wage war. Philip was forced, at this meeting, to sign the Taunton Agreement in which he confessed to planning an attack against English settlements and agreed to give up seventy weapons brought to the meeting, with the surrender of his remaining weapons to follow. Most historians today believe that Philip was only agreeing to these terms because of overwhelming pressure.

The English who came to this country were but an handful of people, forlorn, poor and distressed. My father was then sachem, he relieved their distresses in the most kind and hospitable manner. He gave them land to plant and build upon...they flourished and increased. By various means they got possession of a great part of his territory. But he still remained their friend till he died. My elder brother became sachem...He was seized and confined and thereby thrown into illness and died. Soon after I became sachem they disarmed all my people...their land was taken. But a small part of the dominion of my ancestors remains. I am determined not to live until I have no country.

      To be continued

* A sachem is a chief, most often hereditary, of an Algonquian Indian tribe. The English, with their experience of European monarchy, when first in contact with the Algonquian, misunderstood the nature of the duties of a sachem and, influenced by their hereditary nature, translated the word "sachem" as "king." Although sachems had authority within the tribes, that authority was often dependent on the abilities and stature of the person who held that position. A sachem's authority was further limited by the fact that their power was entirely secular whereas the religious authority lay with the "powwow." A "powwow" is a shaman, literally one who derives his power from his visions (dreams.) By virtue of their control over spirits, the powwows advised the shamans. Normally, the hereditary role of the sachem and the inspired role of the powwow were not combined in one individual. The few persons who combined both were seen as extremely powerful.

N.B. Now that we have set the background for King Philip's War, future posts will focus exclusively on the role played in it by Benjamin Church. The war, while not long in duration, ranged all over New England. We will concentrate on the war in southeastern New England.

Paul Revere and His Engravings

   The above engraving was executed by Paul Revere in 1772 for Ezra Stiles'* edition of Benjamin Church's Entertaining History of King Philip's War; but, as is so typical of Paul Revere, it is not of King Philip. In fact, there is no known image of King Philip, who had been dead nearly a century when this engraving was executed, and only a very few details of his personal appearance, which I will address in a future post, survive.  So, just how did Revere come up with this portrait? In fact, this is an engraving taken from mezzotints first published in 1710 in London shortly after the visit there by two Iroquois sachems - Ho Nee Yeath and Sa Ga Yeath. Revere's Philip is a fabrication that borrowed heavily from these images including shoes, capes, weapons, postures, and faces. It's also possible that he used a 1764 Benjamin West painting for inspiration and further details.

Ho Nee Yeath Portrait



Sa Ga Yeath Portrait



   One may now wonder if, since Colonel Benjamin Church had been dead over 50 years at the time of the etching of him by Revere for the new edition of his account of King Philip's War, if the portrait of him by Revere is authentic. It is not. Revere probably used a tint of Charles Church, the English Poet, as the basis for his portrait of Church.

   In a time without copyright laws, Revere often used other people's works for his own purposes. Indeed, there is little doubt that Revere's famous etching of the Boston Massacre was in fact "taken" from the drawings of Henry Pelham. Documentation has come to light over the years indicating that Revere copied engraver Henry Pelham's drawings of the Massacre, produced his own engraving, and three weeks after the occurrence was advertising his prints for sale in Boston's newspapers. By the time Pelham's prints hit the street, Revere's print had flooded the market. Jonathan Mulliken also issued a third engraving depicting the event. Except for a number of minor differences, all three prints appear alike. In his rush to produce his engraving Revere employed the talents of Christian Remick to colorize the print.

Pelham's Boston Massacre

Revere's Boston Massacre

    Often overlooked in any discussion of the origin of Revere's Boston Massacre Engraving's origin is a mention of just who Henry Pelham was. Henry Pelham was the half brother of John Singleton Copley, eleven years his junior. Copley's portrait of Pelham entitled The Boy with the Squirrel brought Copley his first success in England after it was exhibited in London in 1766. Pelham was a virulent, outspoken Loyalist who was once attacked by a mob for his Tory sympathies and left with the British troops when they evacuated Boston in 1776. Pelham, undoubtedly, received training from his half-brother and was a talented miniaturist,  engraver, cartographer, and civil engineer. He died in Ireland in 1806, drowning from a boat while supervising the building of a defensive fort.

The Boy With The Squirrel

   * See my Aug 10 and Sep 4, 2010 posts.

 

The Natives of New England - 1675

   At the time of the first European settlements of North America, the Algonquian tribes occupied New England, New Jersey, southeastern New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, parts of Kentucky, and a large swath of Canada. Their largest concentration, however, was in New England. There were hundreds of tribes and a number of Algonquian dialects. The origin of the Algonquians is unknown and at the time of the the European settlement, the Algonquians were at war with the formidable Iroquois Federation.
   The Algonquians subsisted on hunting and fishing as well as agriculture; harvesting primarily corn, beans and squash. The streams and forests of New England were abundant with fish and game and the ocean provided mussells, scallops, clams, and oysters. In essence, the Algonquians practiced a seasonal economy. But the Algonquians were not nomads. They lived for most of the year in regular, settled communities; one in summer and another in winter. In summer, families gathered to live in villages near fertile agricultural land; in winter, they moved closer to hunting grounds, returning to the same places for as many years as the land could sustain them. Algonquian settlements were mostly small and consisted of a group of wigwams - sturdy buildings constructed of woven mats that could be easily disassembled and transported. By the middle of the seventeenth century, some wigwam construction included English hardware for door frames and windows.
   During a bad year, Algonquian communities moved more often and, during war they moved a great deal. Swamps proved to be an ideal and favorite hiding place for whole villages during time of war. Villages tended to be composed of several hundred people with strong family ties. Labor was divided by sex with women involved in agriculture and the men in hunting and fishing.

Ninigret - sachem of the Niantic - painted in 1681

   During the first years after the first European settlements in Massachusetts, New England was a land wracked by change and dislocations. The Southern Algonquian- speaking Indian tribes had been so wracked by diseases imported into their lands by European settlers that, by best estimate, only 20,000 Algonquians remained of a population that had once numbered perhaps three or four times that number. Along New England's eastern coast where contact with Europeans had being going on since the early 1500s, and the impact of European microbes the longest, the impact was the most profound. The Europeans found cleared fields, abandoned villages, and a demoralized Indian population willing to make any kind of treaty with the Europeans that would give them peace and protection.

Native Indian Tribes in New England in the early 17th century

     When the Pilgrims moved from their first landing place at Provincetown to Plymouth, they were amazed to find a home for the taking with cleared forest and fields ready to to till. Only when they questioned a sachem named Samoset did the Pilgrims learned that the native name for the place they now settled was Patuxet (Little Bay or Little Falls) and was so empty because of a massive plague that had struck in 1617, most likely introduced by European fisherman on the coast. Governor John Winthrop,who arrived in 1630, quickly noted the docility of the natives, and the open condition of the land ready for anyone who would claim it and improve it. He wrote that the plagues must have been divinely inspired and, not for a moment, did he or any other English commentator express appreciation or wonder at the natives' methods of clearing the land and managing their agriculture. But a foothold had been established and more and more European settlers arrived and more and more of them moved into the interior of New England. Yet the two sides managed to live in relative harmony and peace.
   By the mid 1600s New England started to change; an increasingly powerful and expansionist Puritan community was matched by a newly invigorated Indian population, rebounding from the diseases that had decimated it in the previous decades. The old balance between needy settlers and plague ravaged natives had been replaced by what some historians have characterized as a "golden age" of mutual prosperity. Yet this short-lived era was also a time of corruption. Many of the old agreements, such as the treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit of the Pokanokett had been set aside for more pragmatic relationships. The Puritans and their Pilgrim neighbors (between whom cross-denominational marriages began to occur in the mid-1600s) began to focus on trade, turning away from Utopian innocence and towards commercial profit. But this was economic necessity. New England had been part of the international trade world since the 1630s and commercial, rather than religious life, had become an integral part of their existence.
    It was the beaver that changed everything.

    The beaver trade was stimulated by the need of the European colonies to find a commodity that would repay the debts they owed to European merchants. European settlers and traders were quite aware that they were not as efficient as native hunters in capturing beaver, so often they hired natives  to hunt for them. Traditionally, northern Algonquins had traded with their southern brethren on the southern coast of New England, exchanging pelts for corn. Europeans inserted themselves into the traditional network, initially using "wampum" (shell beads) as currency. Although the beaver trade began in New England, similar trade networks existed later in all areas of North America where beaver were found, from New England to the Pacific Coast. The trade in furs in the seventeenth century revolutionized  American Indian trading economies, building on the old forms of gift-giving and kinship networks. European traders created a regional economy from what had once been a local network as they shuttled between corn-growing Algonquians and settlers of southern New England, wampum producers along Long Island Sound, and Indians of the rural north who hunted. European trade goods such as metal kettles also figured in the trade. Trade linked these groups with an abstract set of values measured in pelts, bushels of corn, fathoms of wampum, and price movements in sterling on the London Market.
   The term "wampum" may be derived from the Wamponoag word, Wampumpeag, which means white shell beads and refers to the white and purple sacred shell beads of  the Algonquian.  Wampum was woven into belts and was used by all of the Indian tribes to mark exchanges for personal social engagements such as betrothal and marriages, to commemorate treaties or other historical events, and for other ceremonial purposes. The introduction of European tools revolutionized the production of wampum and by the mid seventeenth century  it measured in the millions of beads. It was the Dutch who first realized the importance of wampum to the Natives and their colonists were soon mass producing wampum belts. While the Indians did not use wampum as money, the New England colonies used it as a medium of exchange. Soon, they were trading with the Indians of New England and New York using wampum.

Algonquian Wampum Belt

   To become trading partners in northern New England, the Algonquian tribes needed to alter very little in their way of life since they lived in beaver rich woodlands. But the Southern Algonquians had to turn to the production of wampum to become engaged in an international trade system that was so much more profitable than subsistence agriculture, hunting and fishing. The production of wampum meant a radical shift in how they lived and how the labor of men and women was directed. Increasingly, the lives of the southern Algonquian revolved around the trading post - a seemingly natural development in this increasingly commercial society. Initially, the change seemed quite beneficial. Some of the benefits included the development of a confident and wealthy class of Algonquian leaders; an improvement in the daily lives of their people with the acquisition of iron hoes, warm blankets, and copper kettles, as well as the myriad items available from a developed European economy. There were, of course, many negative aspects to this change - dishonest traders, alcohol, and the inequalities of the English justice system.
   Whereas the southern Algonquian had previously shifted their village sites and houses with the season, now they tended to stay by their "wampum factories." The men gathered the shellfish and the women made the belts and headbands and stoles of the strung and woven wampum. Time was also found for farming - some villages having cornfields as large as two hundred acres. But corn had long lost its trading power in the market place. Now the price offered for the beaver pelts and the translation of that into wampum and the value of a fathom of wampum at a trading post was all that mattered.
   The suddenly, the whole situation changed. The beaver market in Europe collapsed. A fathom of wampum (six feet) which had once been worth nine or ten shillings was now worth about five shillings. The Indians did not understand this and felt cheated. The golden age of fur and wampum prosperity was over. Now, the only resource the Algonquians of New England had was their land - a limited exhaustible commodity much in demand by the European settlers already living in New England and by the immigrants still arriving.

To be continued