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Connecticut Unscathed
Victory in the Great Narragansett War, 1675â"1676
By Jason W. Warren UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4771-0
CHAPTER 1
FORGING AN ALLIANCE
THE PEQUOT WAR, MOHEGAN-NARRAGANSETT COMPETITION, AND THE COMING OF THE GREAT NARRAGANSETT WAR
"The Narragansetts will all leave you, but as for myself, I will never leave you," promised Uncas, "chief sachem of the Moheags," to Connecticut's commander, John Mason. As Uncas predicted, many of the Narragansetts abandoned the march once the Indian and colonial force entered Pequot territory, while the Mohegan sachem remained loyal to the English. The Pequot War of 1636–37 forged the Connecticut Colony–Mohegan alliance, which solidified over the following decades. This relationship was mutually beneficial, allowing Uncas to achieve greater power while the Connecticut colonists gained critical intelligence and military aid from their native allies. With similar effect, and under the patronage of future governor John Winthrop, Jr., Connecticut later reconstituted Pequot native groups that had survived the war.
Although the interaction of English and Indians during this period of intertribal conflict in southern New England remains murky and nonlinear, Connecticut ultimately supported Uncas over other groups, especially the Narragansetts. Critically, the colony developed an appreciation for maintaining peaceful relations with local Indians, setting it apart from the other New England governments. While the decades after the Pequot War brought peace for the English, the southernmost Native groups of the region experienced intermittent warfare, particularly between the Mohegans and Narragansetts. This animosity culminated with the broadening of the Great Narragansett War. While violently settling the Mohegan-Narragansett vendetta, that war also vented the acrimony that had grown between many Indian communities and the English. Although the weaker players within a multicultural New England, Plymouth and King Philip's Wampanoag band, started the war in 1675, it was the more powerful Narragansetts, Mohegan-Pequots, and Connecticut Colony that finished it the following year.
The population pressures of the Great Migration of Puritans to New England, which brought relatively large numbers of Europeans to the region, contributed to increased violence between Indian communities during the Pequot War and the Mohegan-Narragansett rivalry. American Indians, however, were by no means nonviolent in the precontact epoch. Excavations indicate that their warfare featured more than minimal violence, challenging characterizations of it as ritualistic and limited in nature. Blunt-force trauma and arrow penetrations accounted for the fatalities of 15 percent of remains in 119 excavated burial sites dating to 1000–1600 A.D. in southern New England. Women and children, who were often noncombatants in postcontact intertribal warfare, accounted for 25 percent of that number. While 15 percent is a conservative estimate based on only well-preserved remains with clearly identifiable battle scars, the actual number of combat deaths was probably much higher. The years 1636–76 witnessed a continuation of warlike conditions in the region, with European cultural and military power increasing volatility.
The newcomers also introduced diseases. Unfamiliar pathogens reduced Indian communities, nearly eradicating some along the coast. The historiography concerning the toll of European disease on Indian communities remains controversial, and the lack of precise population data further complicates the issue.
Historians estimate that the southern New England indigenous population ranged between 72,000 and 144,000 people. It is generally agreed that these northeastern communities were small compared to other world population centers, subsisting on sustenance agriculture supplemented by local hunting, fishing, and gathering.
The importance of Indian corn as a central facet of life cannot be underestimated, and not only as a source of calories. The Agawams, for instance, developed a lunar calendar in the mid-seventeenth century with five of twelve "months" based on different stages of maize growth. The Agawams were an inland group centered on present-day Springfield, Massachusetts, along the Connecticut River valley, which happened to be the prime maize-growing territory of New England. The entire region, however, did not benefit from the fertile soil and other conditions that made the inland Connecticut River valley prime territory for agriculture. The effects of significant climate cooling, frost, and seaboard conditions combined to challenge the indigenous population's ability to grow maize. Even the Indians' use of Northern Flint corn, which was suited to a short growing season and cool conditions, and the employment of other local techniques, such as cultivation near lakes to combat frost, did not allow for large crop surpluses. Without surplus food, New England Indians of the prehistoric era were unable to generate large populations of the kind found in more temperate river valleys like the mid-Mississippi region.
Where southern New England Indians did cultivate maize, they relied on polycropping or intercropping, a technique that grew it alongside other edible produce such as squash. Based on nineteenth-century Indians' per-acre agricultural output when it employed farming techniques of the seventeenth century, anthropologist Sissel Schroeder estimates that early Indian communities produced ten bushels of maize per acre. Their bushel consumption per acre was reduced by as much as 42 percent, though, when accounting for storage, wasting, ceremonial offerings, tribute collecting, and seed accumulation. Indian villages thus produced between 5–6 bushels of maize per acre during an average harvest on which to subsist. Schroeder bases these calculations on a 2,500-calorie diet for adults and 1,910 for children, assuming that the ten-bushel yield would supply less than 30 percent of a family's caloric requirements when accounting for supplemental dieting such as game, fish, and other plants.
Warriors in combat needed a minimum of 3,500 calories, however, to sustain themselves in the field, and hunters also required a similar intake. Since these men practiced hunting, fishing, and warfare as their primary occupations, Sissel's estimated acreage output sustained even less of a family's caloric requirement than his study indicates. Allowing for a moderate increase in the supplemental foods to offset agricultural output—Indians could only increase fishing, hunting, and gathering activities so much based on natural limitations such as game availability, hunting and fishing success, and weather conditions—the net caloric output of sustenance activities indicates that New England Indians who relied on corn as a major portion of their diet lacked a nutritive surplus necessary to sustain a large population. Thus, another way to conceive of this 30-percent calculation is that maize accounted for a higher percentage of individual caloric intake for a smaller population. Schroeder estimates that there were two parents and three children in a typical family unit, but based on New England–specific anthropology, there was likely an elderly adult in an Indian household and perhaps only two children. While the elderly adult consumed something like an adult's calorie load, family composition also meant that there were fewer children available to someday till their own acreage and increase the population. These factors together point to all Indian sustenance activities as generating a population not just smaller than the historic numbers that Sissel criticizes, but one significantly smaller.
Although Neal Salisbury argues for a factor of 7–1 or 8–1 when calculating an adult-male-to-family ratio, other scholars more generally accept a 5–1 ratio. Francis Jennings argues that the Narragansetts fielded five thousand warriors in the period before European diseases spread, which would have placed their total population at around twenty-five thousand people using this standard formula. In 1675 the Narragansetts fielded around one thousand warriors and hence maintained a population of around five thousand persons, a large decrease from Jennings's pre-epidemic numbers. Although this number of warriors was still considerably more than other native groups could field, the Narragansetts would have suffered a population decline in excess of 80 percent after 1620, according to Jennings's calculations. In addition to natural population growth, however, the Narragansetts from 1637 to 1675 attempted to offset deaths to intertribal warfare and new epidemics by absorbing conquered Pequots and other Indian refugees of colonial expansion. Further, the diseases that devastated the Massachusetts coastal Indians did not strike the Narragansetts (and Pequots) until the early 1630s. At a time of the booming fur and wampum trade, as well as the introduction of European goods, it is likely that these two large groups actually increased their populations before suffering grievous losses from disease in the years before the Pequot War.
These considerations allow for a numerical reevaluation of the Indian population in southern New England in the precontact period. Using the Narragansett population of 1675–76 as a starting point from which to work backward, it is likely that this largest of regional Native peoples fielded around 3,500 warriors prior to 1620, giving the group a population of 17,500. The Narragansetts slightly increased in size until the early 1630s, when the first epidemic to strike them coupled with increased warfare against the rival Pequots to cause its population to decline substantially. The Narragansetts then received a slight salve with the integration of Pequot captives. By the outbreak of the Great Narragansett War, continued disease and warfare had reduced the Native group to 5,000 persons.
As the Narragansetts outnumbered the rival Pequots, the latter probably fielded around 2,500 warriors at the time of the first English settlement. The estimated Pequot population of 12,500 then dramatically declined in the 1630s as a result of a first encounter with an epidemic as well as brutal warfare against other Indian groups, the Dutch, and finally the English in 1636–37. In line with these figures, Pequot population probably was 4,000–5,000 people at the beginning of the Pequot War. The reconstituted western Pequot group mustered no more than 200 warriors by 1675, a dramatic reduction in numbers since 1637.18 Unlike the Narragansetts and other New England Indian peoples, the English targeted the Pequots in a war of extirpation. The remaining Indians of Connecticut, likely reduced at first by the Delaware invasion and then both by Pequot and Mohawk incursions in later centuries, counted perhaps 1,500 warriors total prior to the first European epidemic. Connecticut's Native population of the early 1600s thus numbered about 20,000 persons.
The Nipmucks and Nashaways of central Massachusetts, and the Pocumtucks and other Indian groups of the upper stretches of the Connecticut River, although less documented than those on New England's coasts, probably each mustered 2,000 warriors. The Mohawks and Mahicans, the latter inhabiting northwestern Massachusetts and northeastern New York, also reduced the population sizes of these groups through intermittent warfare. Prior to decimation from European diseases, Indians on the Massachusetts coast probably included 2,500 warriors, as did the nearby Wampanoags, including those on the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Thus, a high-end estimate based on the generally accepted warrior-to-family ratio indicates a population in southern New England of 82,500 persons prior to the first inroads of European disease. This approximation appears within the range of Jennings's estimate but covers more territory and thus argues for a lower population density. All modern historians agree that by the time of the Pequot War, the Indian population of southern New England had experienced a dramatic decline from its pre-epidemic numbers. Indeed, the reductions among the Pequots and their tributaries limited their military response to the English incursions of that conflict.
The causes and conduct of the Pequot War account for a vibrant historiography of its own. Recent archaeology and historical analysis contribute fresh ideas to the existing body of literature, including new evidence concerning the attack on Mystic Fort, the fate of Pequot groups, and exclusively intertribal battles. The war was noteworthy for the lack of battlefield restraint that the English showed to their opponents, leading to atrocities. The Indians also committed horrific acts of violence. The conduct of both sides reflected differing cultural frameworks for waging war. Connecticut's appreciation of good relations with local Native groups and the importance of Indian allies were the critical influences from the Pequot War in determining the colony's future policy. These crucial lessons became a means of survival for Connecticut during the Great Narragansett War.
Although Alfred Cave claims that their reputation for fierceness was overblown, the Pequots were the most militarily competent Native group in southern New England from the founding of the first English settlement at Plymouth in 1620 through the confederacy's defeat in 1637. The group's hegemony over the Mohegans, Western Niantics, and lower Connecticut River valley peoples indicated military superiority as well as the ability to fend off and intimidate the more numerous Narragansetts. In addition to this potent military capability, the earlier conflict with the Dutch (1633) taught the Pequots to avoid fighting a European opponent in the open field. Indeed, the better-known conflict of 1636–37 was far from a lopsided military contest between proficient Westerners and hapless Indians as often portrayed. During the years 1638–76, the Mohegans, Western Niantics, and remaining Pequots retained this military advantage over other Native groups.
In late August 1636 Massachusetts Bay Colony initiated military action against the Pequots, with raids against groups on Block Island and a principal Pequot fort in southeastern Connecticut. Massachusetts launched these attacks because of perceived Pequot provocations. Far from intimidating the confederacy, these failed attempts stirred it to military action. Trouble began with a treaty between Massachusetts and the Pequots in 1634, when the Bay Colony, seeking to weaken the confederacy, demanded wampum and hostages as well as the surrender of the "murderers" of English traders. The Pequots refused to meet all of these stipulations, ignoring a final ultimatum from the colony in July 1636. After the ineffectual Massachusetts raids, the Pequots deployed their closely related Western Niantic tributaries and aided them in besieging Connecticut's fort at Saybrook Point, located at the mouth of the Connecticut River. This force bested the garrison's foraging parties in a number of ambushes. But the fort's commander, Lion Gardiner, a veteran of the Thirty Years' War, directed a successful effort to stave off defeat and annihilation. Gardiner avoided serious casualties and, though besieged, managed to feed his men.
As the siege of Saybrook continued, Sequassen, a Pequot tributary sachem of the central Connecticut region, requested that his patrons raid the colonial settlement at Wethersfield. He desired revenge because the settlers there had swindled him out of a portion of land. On 23 April 1637 the Pequots honored their obligation to their tributaries with a surprise raid on Wethersfield, killing a handful of settlers and carrying off two prisoners. Though a tactical success, the raid was a strategic blunder. The attack escalated the conflict by enraging nearby English inhabitants who previously had been suspicious of the Bay Colony's intentions toward the confederacy, objecting to Massachusetts's punitive expeditions. It also demonstrated to the Connecticut colonists the importance of good relations with local Indians, for Sequassen's supplication to the Pequots precipitated the raid. Revealing that it had learned from its previous mistakes, Connecticut later pardoned Sequassen, admitting wrongdoing in his provocation over the land dispute. Nevertheless, after the Wethersfield raid, the tide turned against the Pequots.
The leader of Connecticut's militia forces and another Thirty Years' War veteran, Captain John Mason, conceived of an operation to take the fighting to Pequot territory. Although initially suspicious of Mohegan intentions, Mason accepted the support of Uncas's band to fight the confederacy. Uncas, who had asserted a claim of hereditary right to the Pequot leadership prior to the war, offered his people's military assistance to the fledgling Connecticut Colony in a search for new allies to further his own political agenda. As was often the case in southern New England, intermarriage dynamics between closely related Indian groups led to political friction and eventual violence. In this case, Uncas claimed the sachemship through his father, who was a son of the principal Pequot sachem. The Pequot council rejected his claim, and his cousin Sassacus assumed the chieftainship of the confederacy. Uncas never forgave this decision, embarking upon years of subterfuge to overthrow his cousin and dominate both the Mohegans and Pequots. The latter even banished Uncas to the enemy Narragansetts on several occasions, only to grant him amnesty after he pledged allegiance to Sassacus. When the Pequots ran afoul of the English in the following years, Uncas recognized an opportunity to finally overthrow Sassacus and to establish the Mohegans, then a tributary group to the Pequots, as the hegemonic Native power between the Pawcatuck and Housatonic Rivers, or much of what is now Connecticut.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Connecticut Unscathed by Jason W. Warren. Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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