An early printing of Stockbridge 1739-1974: A Chronicle, as it appeared on ebay recently[/caption]There is quite a bit of racial bias in Sarah Cabot Sedgwick and Christina Sedgwick Marquand's Stockbridge, 1734-1974: A Chronicle. So I've ignored it until now. However, Stock-Mo-History wishes to leave no stone unturned. Let's see what this book says and if there are unfair biases, let's call the authors out on them.
Page 2: Konkapot was "a man of stalwart character, but limited brain power."
Certainly an undeserved insult. An assumption that is not backed up.
Page 4:
Questioned more specifically about the Indians' religious beliefs, Ebenezer was vague. Some believed God to be the sun; some that the sun was the habitation of God; others were professed atheists, believing that all things began, continued and ceased, according to the laws of their natures without any direction from an outside power.
That was paraphrased from somewhere. I've been trying to locate the original quote myself in recent months. The bias in that statement is not racial, but in the original quote, it was emphasized that some of the Indians believed in one God, just like the whites.
Page 14: I'm not an anthropologist, so I cannot claim to know exactly how nomadic the Indians were prior to 1734, but the authors seem to think they know, and it sounds overly romantic to me:
They [the Mohicans] roamed as naturally as deer through the forest. A wigwam was taken down in ten minutes and they were gone, leaving no trace behind them.
Page 17: In describing the ordination of John Sergeant, we get this:
All the protagonists in the struggle between the Indians and English were represented in the meetinghouse at Deerfield that day and the hopeless division between the two races was shown up in a series of dramatic contrasts. some of these contrasts were quite deliberate. The showy paint and feathers and gay blankets of the Six Nations [Mohawks and other Iroquois had their own reasons for being present] were a definite indication to the English of the arrogance of the Indians in the wily game they were playing between the English and the French. The English, on their side, were doing everything in the way of full regimentals in scarlet and gold to impress the Six Nations with what a powerful hand they held in thins game.
I think I'd re-frame that and emphasize that there was a big struggle between the English and the French for world domination back then. The Indians "wily game" was, understandably, the things they had to do to maintain trading partnerships with European powers, while, at the same time, working on their own survival, something that isn't arrogant in my opinion.
Page 18: Jehoiakim Van Valkenburgh, a Dutch trader, is known to have been a very good friend of Konkapot. but he was a trader. And we know what traders did, right? Most of them cheated the Indians. Alcohol was one of their tools. But for Van Valkenburgh to have been a good friend of Konkapot, I'd suspect that he was one of the few ethically-minded traders.
Sedgwick and Marquand lump Van Valkenburgh with the other unscrupulous traders. Their conclusion that Van Valkenburgh controlled the Housatonic Mohicans with alcohol, rests on their assumption that Konkapot had "limited brainpower" (see above). (In other words, Konkapot needs to be lacking in brains for our authors, otherwise, he'd have been able to see how evil his friend Van Valkenburgh was.)
On page 22, Van Valkenburgh is described as "a veritable Satan."
So, if, as Sedgwick and Marquand have it, Van Valkenburg, the close friend of Konkapot, is the bad white man, guess who their white hero is in the first chapter? Not John Sergeant. Although they have nothing bad to say about Sergeant, their story about Stockbridge, Massachusetts only moves forward when the focus of the mission town changes. It was Ephraim Williams who made the changes in a way that those with a capitalist mindset could find admirable.
Their description of Ephraim Williams is on pages 22-23:
Williams was the typical, hard-headed pioneer who carves his way through forests, builds roads, throws out bridges and in the process rolls up for himself a handsome fortune.... [He] arrived in 1737, with...various schemes in his head for becoming a large frog in a small pond.
They don't mention that none of Williams' schemes had anything to do with the town's original mission. (To not condemn Williams comes across to me as something like approval.)
To Sedgwick and Marquand, Ephraim Williams had the support of the English ministers who had set up the mission. This may have been true at the beginning, after all Ephraim Williams' daughter Abigail married John Sergeant.
But the thing that moved the town forward into chapter two of the book was Ephraim Williams' decision to get Van Valkenburgh, the Dutch trader, out of the way. Acting on Williams' proposal, the English bought out Van Valkenburgh and his 290 acres (page 23).
I doubt that any legitimate historian claims to know much about Jehoiakim Van Valkenburgh. On the other hand, historians like Lion Miles and Patrick Frazier have shown us conclusively that Ephraim Williams was a real villain. Maybe it isn't a good idea to put all the blame for the Indians getting dispossessed of their mission town on one person. But there is no question who that one person would be.
[…] reviewed some rather outrageous biases from the first chapter of Stockbridge, 1739-1974 in a previous post. There really is no point in going over the rest of the book, except for Sedgwick and […]
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