The Puritans’ malignant legacy

On Oct. 13, 1675, the fifth month of a war between a coalition of Native American tribes and New England’s English settlers, the Massachusetts Council ordered the roundup and incarceration on Deer Island in Boston Harbor of 500 Native people who had been converted to Christianity decades before and who lived in the five so-called Praying Towns of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Half of those taken prisoner are thought to have died of exposure or disease, while others were kidnapped and sold into slavery. 

As it happened, the prisoners only narrowly escaped being massacred by a gang of 30 vigilantes who planned to row out to Deer Island in mid-winter and kill every man, woman and child they could lay hands on. Historian Jill Lepore recounts the plot, foiled when a man who had been invited to join the conspirators reported it to the Massachusetts Council, in “When Deer Island Turned Into Devil’s Island,” published in Boston University’s Bostonia magazine in 1998. 

The pretext for the stranding was the colonists’ fear that no Native could be trusted in the days following the outbreak of what came to be known as King Philip’s War, a concerted attack led by a Wampanoag chief named Metacomet, but whom the settlers called King Philip. The aim of the uprising was to prevent the Colonists, whose concept of property rights was as foreign to the Natives as was the language in which the laws were written, from further encroaching on Native lands. The war – “in proportion to population, the most fatal war in all of American history,” as Lepore observes – lasted from June 1675 to August 1676, when Metacomet was killed and beheaded.

In August, too, Major John Talcott, of the Colony’s militia, carried out a mop-up operation. Described in the Yale Indian Papers Project as having “participated in a number of brutal massacres of Indian people throughout the summer and fall of 1676,” Talcott, upon learning that some 200 Indians, including women and children, were fleeing toward the Hudson, led a militia force in pursuit and discovered them encamped on the west bank of the Housatonic River, somewhere between Great Barrington, Mass., and Salisbury, Conn. 

According to an account of the action in Hoyt’s “Antiquarian Researches of the Indian war in the Country Bordering Connecticut River and Parts Adjacent,” published in 1824, Talcott’s instructions to his men were “to kill and destroy them, according to the utmost power God shall give you.” An ambush was set, the attack carried out, and “25 Indians were left on the ground, and 20 were made prisoners.” Women and children prisoners were customarily parceled out for use as servants, while healthy male prisoners were manacled and sent on slave ships to the West Indies, to be sold or exchanged for Africans, who were regarded as less likely to rebel.

The colonists had been trafficking in slaves since 1637, the year of the Pequot War. King Philip’s War saw a sharp increase in the slave trade. In “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War,” Nathaniel Philbrick writes, “It has been estimated that at least a thousand Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip’s War.” 

The same impulse to confine and punish people who have committed no crime that led the Puritans to leave 500 Native Americans to die on an island prompted the 1940s roundup of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, who were placed in detention camps for four years following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Trump’s ban on visitors from six Muslim-majority countries, excluding Saudi Arabia, reveals a similar xenophobia and ignorant vindictiveness. 

Meanwhile, an administration devoted to plundering the country’s natural resources appears to have scant concern for the religious customs and well-being of America’s Indigenous people, as in the case of the Navajo and Acoma Pueblo in the Chaco Culture National Historic Park, in New Mexico; the Gwich’in, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota; the Menominee in Wisconsin; the Havasupi in the depths of the uranium-rich Grand Canyon; and the five tribes that regard the Bears Ears National Monument, in Utah, as a sacred site.

The malignant legacy of the Puritans lives on.

Jon Swan is a poet, journalist and former senior editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Several years ago, after living in the Berkshires for 40 years, he and his wife moved to Yarmouth, Maine. His poems and several articles can be found at www.jonswanpoems.com.