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.

 

Disambiguation of Lenape/Delaware/Mahican/River Indians

On page twelve of The Munsee Indians, A History, Robert Grumet states

The idea that cultures are...organizations of [internal] diversity is important... People identified as Munsees in one context and Mahicans [his spelling] in another did not suddenly become members of different cultures. Neither did references to people by different names necessarily suggest confusion or disorganization. Names used like this can reflect what may be called situational identity. Different names identifying the same people in different situations serve as markers of social flexibility that can allow a person to function as a Munsee in one context and a Mahican in another.

There was always cultural change, but that change accelerated after white contact. Grumet says that the fact that the Munsees were "enduring people" means that all the specifics of their lives changed. And with that change, it sometimes becomes harder to keep track of who is who. While Gromet says all the different names doesn't necessarily suggest confusion, I think that there is a lot of confusion about different names - I know for a fact that they aren't used with consistency.

The Arvid E. Miller Museum had a sign (maybe they still do) that listed many names and claimed they were all different names for the same tribe. I'd qualify that by saying that they were all legitimate names for the people now known - according to their most recent constitution - as "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community." That is not quite the same as saying all the names on the sign referred to exactly the same people in exactly the same context.

One of the names on the sign was "River Indians." According to Patrick Frazier, the River Indians included "the Mohicans and the Indians at Schaghticoke"(see page 6 of The Mohicans of Stockbridge).

Let's try another one. This is according to Grumet: "Today, many writers regard Lenape as the most appropriate term to use when talking about Delaware-speaking people." But he adds that "Lenape" is too broad of a term to be used in everyday language by the people themselves.

Wikipedia has pages where they "disambiguate" names that refer to more than one thing. Although I've made some attempt to disambugate the eastern Algonquian Indians here in this post, at some point, this disambugation becomes a fool's errand. We have to accept that the rapid change over the first 100 or 200 years of white contact resulted in complexity which, in turn, resulted in some confusion over names.

[mc4wp_form]

"Mohicans" is the title of a new video with music by Leo Rojas

No description was available on YouTube.