Causes and Consequences of King Philip's War

 

[caption id="attachment_9004" align="aligncenter" width="461"] "Early American Conflict" is by an unknown artist who was not a witness to King Philip's War.[/caption]

In my previous post, we saw that the New England Indians in the 1600's were selective at first in what aspects of white culture and Christianity they would take on.

But, as often happens, one thing led to another and the once tentative converts gradually became the praying Indians, taking on more white ways than before. So missionaries like John Eliot and other influential English people helped the converted Indians gain status outside of traditional Native social systems. And that created tensions - or intensified existing tensions - between the praying Indians and the Indians who were still trying to walk a traditional path.

 

Exactly why King Philip (aka Metacomet, a Wampanoag chief) decided to attack the English is a complex question, but his intention of doing so didn't start the war. As word spread among that Natives that King Philip was preparing to fight, John Eliot's scribe, a Natick Indian named John Sassamon, warned his white friends. Sassamon was murdered. Three Indians were accused and tried based on the testimony of only one witness. Maybe a war over race and culture would have happened anyway, but the murder of Sassamon and the trial that came after it made war a sure thing.

And, as I stated in an earlier post, King Philip's War was one of the bloodiest in American history. It was devastating to the "traditional" Indians, devastating to the praying Indians and devastating to the English. Harold Van Lonkhuyzen tells us that King Philip's War:

changed the context of English-Indian relations and terminated the special relationship that had allowed the two communities to derive mutual benefits from each other. Engendering a wave of vicious anti-Indian feeling, the war encouraged the English to believe that all Indians were 'fiendish sons of Satan' and threats to God's people.

And the hard feelings were mutual. The Christian Indians never regained the trust they had for the English.

How the Natick Indians Became Christians

[caption id="attachment_8984" align="aligncenter" width="753"] Native Christianity reached a peak in 1674. King Philip's War proved to be disastrous for the praying Indians. Many of them died or were forced into servitude or even slavery.[/caption]

John Eliot started preaching to Indians in the 1640's, but he didn't get his first convert until 1652. That convert was Waban. Waban himself was quoted in an award-winning scholarly article published in 1990.

After the great sickness [an epidemic in 1633-34], I considered what the English do; and I had some desire to do as they do; and  after that I began to work as they work; and then I wondered how the English came to be so strong to labor.

At the same time, one of the first things that the women of Waban's band wanted to learn from John Eliot was how to spin wool into cloth.

Taking that and other data that had been recorded prior to 1730, the historian, Harold Van Lonkhuyzen, comes to the conclusion that "Indians' individual motivations in first adopting Christianity... appear to have been highly specific, rather modest, and perhaps not at all what the missionaries might have wished."

This, of course, doesn't mean that the praying Indians of New England didn't gradually learn about the religion that was brought to them from across the Atlantic. But they didn't become complete Christians quickly. Van Lonkhuyzen puts it this way:

These Indians were eager to make use of European goods and technologies as a means not of abandoning, but of fulfilling their traditional way of life.

To put it simply, the Indians were selective. Aspects of Christianity that they came to embrace tended to have some kind of function in their traditional mindset. One example that Van Lonkhuyzen gives is the "considerable evidence that one of the major attractions of praying to God was the protection it offered from the sorcery of the powwows [that is, the shamans or medicine men]."

According to Van Lonkhuyzen, the Indian converts were "trying to enhance rather than abandon their traditional order [and] tried to take only what they wanted of the missionary program."

 

The Praying Indians: The Unlikely and Tenuous Survival of John Eliot's Converts

As of about 1670, about one-fourth of New England's Natives were Christians. They lived in fourteen towns, the first and most important being Natick, Massachusetts.

Like Christian Indians that would come generations after them, the so-called praying Indians were "neither fish nor foul." It is hard to put them in a category. Although they had adopted some white ways, they weren't actually trying to be white. And although they were genuine Natives, they were living in "towns" instead of villages, so they weren't recognized as political units in any larger Native nation.



So the uniquely vulnerable praying Indians became refugees - or maybe it would be more accurate to say they were prisoners of war. Here's how the praying Indians website describes it.

In the winter of 1675, fueled by fears of King Phillip (Metacom), [the] mighty Wampanoag Chief, the colonists removed the Natick Praying Indians to Deer Island. At midnight in the month of October, holding their Bibles and with [their missionary, John] Eliot seeking to comfort them, they were taken to Deer Island in Boston Harbor where they were confined. The first Praying Indian Village of Natick suffered severely. Abandoned by their colonial Christian brethren, the Natick Praying Indians were left unprotected on the frigid Island. A month later the Praying Indian Villages of Ponkapoag (Stoughton, MA) and Nashoba (Littleton, MA) were added to the tragic confinement from 1675-1676. By this time the other villages received news of the imprisonment and either fled or joined Metacom, the Wompanoag Chief also known as King Phillip by the colonists for his military prowess. Natives captured were also placed on Long Island in Boston Harbor. However [due to factors such as] little clothing, starvation and enforced deprivation including being forbidden to light fires, hunt game or build shelters, most lives were lost. The young, the old, the pregnant and the weak could not survive. Most of the Indians died of cold and starvation. The sad story is documented of the elderly Eliot going by boat to bring supplies to the Natives and being capsized by angered colonists. During the Island imprisonment some of the praying Indians were coerced into spying and fighting for the colonist. History would eventually misconstrue this bid for the freedom of death and suffering...as weakness and dishonorable betrayal to their Native heritage.

It was long believed that King Philip's War wiped out the praying Indians. Instead, their loss in numbers weakened them to the point that they became invisible. But they lived on, remaining in the east, and they arguably still exist, at least to the point of having a website.

Without a doubt, the praying Indians stayed together at least until 1790, as the subtitle of a book about them makes clear. The Amazon page for Jean M. O'Brien's Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 was used as a source for this post.

 

Children at LCO's Waadookodaading School Sing for Senator Tammy Baldwin

Senator Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin) and Senator Jon Tester (Montana, Chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee) visited the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation yesterday (October 23rd). The LCO reservation is near Hayward, Wisconsin.

The children of the Waadookodaading School sang for the two senators in the Ojibwe language. A video clip is now on Facebook.

By the way, the Lac Courte Oreilles (pronounced "La Coot Ah-Ray") have a good website which includes a page devoted to their school which is, unfortunately, in the midst of something of a funding crisis right now.

In the video clip below, Senator Baldwin talks about her visit to the LCO reservation and school:

Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Epsicopalians, and Papists (Roman Catholics)

[caption id="attachment_8521" align="aligncenter" width="1250"] No matter what kind of beliefs you may have, it is a nearly impossible task to keep track of all of the various Christian denominations. [/caption]

How do Christian denominations define themselves? By their stated beliefs, right? Well, that is largely correct. But maybe the different church bodies are better understood in terms of their history, that is,  how and why they were established and how they evolved. Both of those are really good ways of understanding the denominations, but you can slice it up another way.

I'm talking about the question of how a church governs itself.

The names of different kinds of Christians in the title of this post are all derived from the political units that were emphasized in each church body.

The Congregationalists believe in local control. The powerful political unit for them is the local congregation.

The Presbyterians govern their church with a Presbytery, a court consisting of the ministers and elders of several congregations.

The Episcopalians (although it isn't obvious) get their name from the word "bishop." Their church government depends more than anything on a national council of bishops, known in the United States as the House of Bishops.

Roman Catholics were once referred to derisively as "papists," a reference to their allegiance to the Pope and a top-down hierarchy. Animosity between various Protestant churches and the Roman Catholics was high for many years.

 

Simple right? So simple that we have time to ask why these differences became prominent.

Congregationalism is associated with Puritanism and, as you may know, the Puritans believed that some individuals were predestined for salvation. The mark of being chosen for salvation was some kind of conversion experience. But that is a generalization. Puritan ministers often developed some kind of "morphology of conversion," a complex explanation for who had the right to call themselves Christians. All the controversies over what made one a legitimate Christian made local control the most efficient (and probably the only possible) form of church government for the Congregationalists.

Presbyterianism (like Congregationalism) is a Calvinist denomination. Although the origin of the word is not known, to me it seems logical that this church is governed by a "court" of ministers and elders, because John Calvin himself was a lawyer by trade.

The Episcopalian Church is associated with the Church of England and the Anglicans. I imagine that explains their focus on a council of bishops.

Finally, of course, the Roman Catholic Church claims to be the original Christian church. At some point it became too big for their bishops to govern, so they developed the present system of Cardinals and a pope.

 

 

John Brown's Place in American History

Once very controversial and now largely forgotten, John Brown certainly deserves acknowledgement as a great American freedom fighter.

But he was an outlaw who opposed the law of the land. (Slavery.)

But he advocated to bring about change through violence. (That isn't cool.)

And, although he may have tried as hard to end slavery as anybody, he was white, so he isn't likely to get mentioned during Black History Month. (There isn't time to honor a white man during Black History Month, is there?)

Who was John Brown and how does he now fit into American History?

Five years ago, John Hendrix gathered up all the recent work historians were doing on John Brown, interpreted it into clear language, drew up illustrations, and the result is an outstanding childrens' book:

John Brown: His Fight for Freedom

 

Since this blog is about church history, I should point out that John Brown's religion motivated him to work to abolish slavery. Hendrix gets even more specific than that.

Behold the tears of such as were oppressed and they had no comforter, and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. -Ecclesiastes 4:1

This Bible passage caused something to happen inside John Brown's chest and he made an oath to fight slavery then and there (page 9).

When Kansas was set to vote on becoming a free state or a slave state, pro-slavery "ruffians" destroyed crops, burned settlements and killed people who got in their way. When the ruffians made threats towards John Brown he wouldn't stand for it. He and his sons took five pro-slavery settlers to a creek and killed them with broadswords (page 15).

From that point on, John Brown wasn't just an outlaw to the federal government, he was a crazed madman to many but a folk hero to others.

Violence - even used for a good cause - is what it is. But, by its own nature, slavery required violence and perpetuated more violence. John Hendrix makes the point that many, many free people were opposed to slavery before the Civil War, but not many people were doing much about it. Except talking. And talking didn't get it done. However, at the same time, Hendrix says "John didn't believe bloodshed was the answer."

Anyway, the reason I wrote this post today is that today is the 155th anniversary of John Brown's famous raid of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. Unfortunately, I don't have space here to summarize the raid. Instead, I recommend that you either read about it at U.S. history.org or, better yet, get your hands on Hendrix's book and read pages 18 to 35.

How Was Lead Mined by the Ho-Chunk?

My last post was about one particular lead mine worked by Ho-Chunk Indians for fifteen years before it was sold to a white man. White miners were probably using picks and shovels when they first settled in the lead district which is now made up of parts of Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. Unfortunately, I don't have a complete description of their processes.

On the other hand, Moses Meeker in his "Early History of the Lead Region of Wisconsin" (page 281) gives us a pretty thorough description of Ho-Chunk lead mining.

Their tools were a hoe made for the Indian trade , an axe, and a crowbar, made of an old gun barrel flattened at the breach, which they used for removing the rock. Their mode of blasting was rather tedious to be sure; they got dry wood, kindled a fire along the rock as far as they wished to break it. After getting the rock hot, they poured cold water upon it which so cracked it that they could pry it up.

White miners would eventually dominate the lead district. I have read a rather vague statement somewhere that the white miners used technology to force the Indians out of lead mining. However, other factors are also noted by Meeker: 1) the Indians' tendency to view mining as "women's work" meant that their physically strongest people weren't digging or blasting, and 2) although Indians were skilled at discovering sites to mine lead, the same Indians were also often willing to show white miners these sites in exchange for whiskey (page 290).



As evidenced by the state flag, mining was still an essential part of Wisconsin's economy when it became a state in 1848.