American Stories

Living American History: v. 1: To 1877

Jason Ripper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317477075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

This book is ideal for any introductory American history instructor who wants to make the subject more appealing. It's designed to supplement a main text, and focuses on "personalized history" presented through engaging biographies of famous and less-well-known figures from the colonial period to 1877. Historical patterns and trends appear as they are seen through individual lives, and the selection of the profiled individuals reflects a cultural awareness and a multicultural perspective.

1

Colonial New England

Puritans pray at Thanksgiving dinner. (Kean collection/Getty Images)

“The Country Is Not So As We Did Expect It.”

By 1630, small English settlements dotted the coastline, close to Native American villages of Narragansetts, Massachusetts, and Wampanoags. Bouts of disease (probably smallpox brought by fishermen) had recently devastated the region’s native population, leaving about 7,000 survivors where there had been 30,000. Then 102 sea-weary English had splashed ashore on Cape Cod in 1620. They soon relocated to a nearby, better-sheltered harbor, named Plymouth. Their Christian outpost was hundreds of miles north of the one other permanent English community in America: tobacco-growing Jamestown (built in 1607 for profit rather than salvation). The farther the better, decided the people of Plymouth. They were devoted to creating godly lives, which meant a full separation from the existing Church of England, headed by the popish King James I and tainted as it was with lingering reminders of Catholicism. This extremism had earned the Plymouth colonists the logical name “Separatists,” although they are better known today as the Pilgrims.

These Separatist women and men were strict Calvinists (in their own way), adherents to the theories of John Calvin (1509–1564)—one of a few men, like Martin Luther, credited with inspiring and guiding the Protestant Reformation. From his seat in Geneva, Switzerland, black-capped Calvin taught the doctrine of predestination, the idea that God elects people for either salvation or damnation. Calvinists did not expect to earn a path into Heaven by doing good deeds, by following the liturgy, or by praying hard enough and right enough according to the Catholic practice. Instead, they devoted themselves to hard work, family, church, and scripture, hoping to find evidence in their success of divine election to heaven and salvation. Calvinism was revolutionary, a threat to the pope, as it was meant to be. For Protestants, the pope’s power was not legitimate; some even considered him the Antichrist. No longer would half-educated village priests hold the keys to heaven. Protestants strove to know God through scripture and prayer, a more direct route than Catholicism offered. The English version of the Protestant Reformation went in a new direction in 1534, when stout King Henry VIII severed ties with the Vatican—so that he could sever ties to his Catholic wife—and created the Church of England (the Anglican Church). Under Henry VIII and his successors, the Anglican Church kept up old Roman Catholic liturgies, including penance, kneeling during administration of the Eucharist, and other traditions that Separatists (and other nonconformists) found contrary to the Bible. This was serious business because eternal human souls hung in the balance. The English Separatists had first emigrated to Holland. Fearing, however, that their children were becoming too Dutch, they decided to settle in the Americas, where they could make the world right.

The first seasons in America had been brutal, unyielding, and deadly. The winters were colder and the summers hotter than English folk had known, and farming prospects were mixed. There were good fields, but these were worked by Indians who regularly burned wide swaths of forest to make way for crops and to attract deer to the sweet grasses that sprang from the ashes. For the most part, the Indians helped, teaching colonists how to grow corn by using fish as fertilizer. Colonists had stowed some building supplies and personal effects on ships like the Mayflower, but at first the Pilgrims slept in caves and under makeshift branch-and-bark huts before they started building their houses. While the dream was to create a perfected England in a “new” land, the Pilgrims had to satisfy themselves with adapting to circumstances. The environment changed them as much as they managed to change it.

Rather than fashioning perfect Calvinist communities where only full church members could vote, where women stayed passive in public, and where religious heretics were chased away or killed, the Separatists, and their immediate followers, the Puritans, unintentionally made life so intolerably oppressive that religious freedom and outspoken women sprang up in their midst.

Roger Williams, the Narragansetts, and the Pequots

The Separatists of 1620 were followed by slow waves of migration until ten years later, when eleven ships arrived—bearing cattle, pigs, bricks, nails, beer, and nearly 1,000 cramped colonists under the governorship of long-faced John Winthrop, a born bureaucrat. Winthrop’s fellow Puritans of 1630—named for their desire to “purify” yet remain in the Anglican Church—did not sail over choppy waters for two months in order to establish religious freedom. In their efforts to steer away from hellfire, Puritans had become justifiably known as serious, prone to sitting through four-hour sermons on Sundays and Thursdays. In their new colony of Massachusetts Bay, the Puritans were human in their days and nights: laughing, drinking alcohol (moderately), working, kissing, and fighting. But they did not joke about God or their worship of him. Rigid faith and piety explained their presence in America. Here the Puritan male leaders intended to conform to biblical law as they interpreted it, and no dissenting opinions or approaches would be tolerated. This inflexibility had earned them prison sentences and dismissals from ministries back in England. This commitment to a set of ideals also inspired freethinking, at least in a few.

In 1631, an odd, charismatic minister named Roger Williams joined the struggling colonists in Massachusetts. Williams was typically devout, but oddly open-minded. He settled as a pastor in Salem, north of Boston. The parishioners liked him well, but his deep-felt emotions on two subjects got him into trouble with the authorities in Boston. He believed that all Indian lands had been taken unjustly—that English-style colonization amounted to thievery. And he thought the local church ought not involve itself in politics or law. It seemed to Roger Williams that a person should be able to choose her or his own set of beliefs, even if that involved believing in no god at all. Williams advocated the separation of church and state right in the middle of a state that was, in essence, one giant church. In 1635, the central power in the colony, the General Court, exiled Williams. He received word that soldiers were on the way to arrest him and send him back to England. So in winter snow, forced to leave his two children and wife behind temporarily, he traipsed through the countryside for fourteen weeks, finally stopping about forty miles south of Boston on some land that the Narragansett people sold to him. He named this new settlement Providence Plantations. During his four years in America, Williams had learned local languages and befriended Narragansetts and Wampanoags. The type of friendship that he shared with Indians in the region was becoming more rare for white people as the seasons went by. Strife and discord escalated each year within communities and between communities.

Colonists and Indians needed each other, though at first the colonists were much more in need: running out of food; stricken by disease; shivering without good shelter; unable to fend off attacks from pirates, other groups of colonists, or Indians. Quickly, however, Native Americans grew to appreciate and depend upon European trade goods, especially guns, ammunition, and powder. Native peoples could acquire things like this only through trade, and because different tribes competed with and warred against each other, it became imperative to develop good and secure relationships with at least one group of colonists. Once a tribe or village was sufficiently weakened by disease and reliant on trade goods, colonists could begin to advance their own agendas if they wanted to, though not always with the desired results. As colonists pushed farther into the interior, they tripped over and became enmeshed in intertribal associations of conflict, peace, and uncertainty. Native American influenced colonist, and colonist influenced Native American.

The neighboring colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were built in the midst of preexisting patterns of trade, war, and marriage. At the same time, other European nations were competing for trade and settlement in the region. The French headed north and started Quebec in 1608. The Dutch claimed New Amsterdam—modern-day New York—in 1609 and settled Manhattan island in 1625. Most were Christian of one stripe or another, so they had their sights fixed on eternity, but they intended to enjoy the good life while they were here. Southwest of Massachusetts flowed the Connecticut River, stocked with enough beaver and trees to make a poor man’s heart skip a beat. Beaver pelts were all the rage in Europe and demanded a good price. Lumber was the first major colonial export to Britain. And there was land aplenty for new settlements. The Dutch wanted in; the English wanted in. The Pequots, Niantics, and other Native American tribes already lived there. What would happen?

The Narragansetts lived to the east of the Connecticut River in present-day Rhode Island, where Roger Williams began Providence Plantations. The Pequots and Narragansetts were enemies, and both tribes hoped to use the English to their advantage. In the end, however, the English exploited the Narragansetts and the Pequots. Dutch colonists from Manhattan, Pilgrims from Plymouth, and Puritans from Massachusetts Bay all converged on the Connecticut country, erecting small forts and trading posts, sometimes living with a town of Pequots for a while. The Dutch were neither as numerous nor as pushy as the English in their attempts to take the area, and a large Pequot town welcomed some Dutch traders during the winter of 1633–1634. The townspeople suffered greatly for their openness. As William Bradford, governor at Plymouth, recalled, out of 1,000 Pequots living near the Dutch traders, 950 died from smallpox. “A sorer disease,” Bradford explained, “cannot befall them ... for want of bedding and [sheets] ... they fall into a lamentable condition, as they lie on their hard mats, [the] pox breaking and mattering [oozing], and run[n]ing one into another, their skin cleaving to their mats they lie on ... they die like rotten sheep.” The Dutch did not get the pox, but they nearly starved to death. That left the Puritans, the Pilgrims, the Narragansetts, and the remaining Pequots to fight for the Connecticut country.

In 1634, a local Englishman named John Stone was killed by some Niantic Indians, who were subordinate to the Pequots, so the Pequots got blamed. Soon after, Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay and the Pequots signed a treaty that was precipitated by Stone’s murder. John Stone himself was not well liked, given his aptitude for getting drunk and having affairs with other men’s wives. But he was English and Christian, and the Pequots were not. Already weakened by disease and by warfare with the Narragansetts, a Pequot delegation sent by the sachem Sassacus agreed to turn over Stone’s killers to the English for punishment and give up lands along the Connecticut River in return for help settling disputes with the Narragansetts. Families from Massachusetts Bay outmaneuvered those from Plymouth and soon built towns in the Connecticut Valley. The Dutch had lost; Plymouth Pilgrims had lost; but now the Puritans and the Pequots would be living very close to each other. John Stone’s killers were never turned over, and before long a new grievance settled into Puritan hearts.

In 1636, another colonist was killed—John Oldham, an Indian trader who had relocated to the Connecticut coast. Fear and rumors of further Pequot attacks circulated through Puritan colonies and towns. A small force of Puritans attempted to capture Oldham’s killers, but failed to catch them. Instead, the Puritans burned Indian villages to the ground and destroyed crops, a tactic that would starve children as well as adults. The Pequots tried to persuade the Narragansetts and the neighboring Mohegans to join them in a war against the English. Instead, Roger Williams intervened, convincing the Narragansetts to remain neutral (and some fought alongside the Puritans). Right after Oldham’s murder, Williams also tried to negotiate with the Pequots, but as he remembered it decades later, “Three days and nights my business forced me to lodge and mix with the bloody Pequot ambassadors, whose hands and arms reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered and massacred by them on Connecticut River, and from whom I could not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat also.” Roger Williams stridently opposed Puritan land-settlement policies and treatment of native peoples, yet he took sides with the English, thinking in terms of his “countrymen” and helping his English-speaking brethren who had already exiled him. A man’s allegiance to his people and place of origin could be strong. The Mohegans, on the other hand (formerly part of the Pequot tribe), rather than helping their former Pequot colleagues, joined a combined Plymouth-Massachusetts-Connecticut army and attacked the Pequots in May 1637. The commonly used term “Indian” glossed over the vast differences between indigenous folk. Pequots and Narragansetts had no more love for each other at the time than did the English and French.

Fighting raged through July. The results were gory and decisive. At Fort Mystic, an enclosed Pequot settlement, colonists burned about 750 residents—children, women, and men—to death. Many who escaped were killed by Narragansetts waiting outside the circle of English fighters. At another battle in a swamp, the Pequots suffered equally disturbing losses. Colonists sold Pequot prisoners into slavery to either the islands of the West Indies or to other Indian tribes. From the east, Mohawks sent the skull of the sachem Sassacus as a present to the English colonists. Surviving Pequots were accepted into neighboring tribes. But as a distinct people—a unique society and culture—the Pequots were nearly erased. This has been referred to, debatably, as North America’s first recorded genocide (though the word “genocide” was not coined until the 1940s).

The Pequot War offers an opportunity to reflect on the issue of Native American death at the tribal level. Some 150 years before the Pequot War, the Arawak people of Hispaniola, whom Columbus first encountered, all died within two generations, but the overwhelming majority died from disease rather than from warfare, as was the case throughout the Americas. Estimates of the total Native American population in North America circa 1500 CE vary wildly, and there is obviously no real way to derive an accurate figure. Were there 2 million or maybe 10 million North American Indians? According to census figures, by the end of the 1800s, there were 250,000 Native Americans—a possible population decline of 1,000 percent if the original high-end estimate of 10 million is accurate. How often, though, did European colonists set out intentionally to eradicate a whole population through murder, or prevent future births, or move children to live with a different people to stop a society from reproducing (three of the definitions of genocide)? The Pequot War can be a test case.

Writing in Commentary magazine in 2004, author Guenter Lewy said, “A number of recent historians have charged the Puritans with genocide: that is, with having carried out a premeditated plan to exterminate the Pequots. The evidence [argues against] this. The use of fire as a weapon of war was not unusual for either Europeans or Indians, and every contemporary account stresses that the burning of the fort [Mystic] was an act of self-protection, not part of a pre-planned massacre. In later stages of the Pequot war, moreover, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, further contradicting the idea of genocidal intention.”¹ Lewy argues that the atrocities committed first by the Pequots precipitated the massacre at Fort Mystic. He says, “Fort Saybrook on the Connecticut River was besieged, and [Puritan] members of the garrison who ventured outside were ambushed and killed. One captured trader, tied to a stake in sight of the fort, was tortured for three days, expiring after his captors flayed his skin with the help of hot timbers and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner was roasted alive.” In other words, according to Lewy, war is horrifying, and the atrocities committed by one aggressor may cause like-minded retaliation and in fact justify that retaliation.

In direct opposition to Lewy, historians Laurence Hauptman and James Wherry say, “What befell the Pequots in 1637 and afterward clearly fits the most widely accepted definition of genocide, one set by the United Nations Convention on Genocide in 1948.”² By way of contemporary evidence, Hauptman and Wherry quote a Puritan commentator who wrote in 1643, “the name of the Pequots... is blotted out from under heaven, there being not one that is, or (at least) dare call himself a Pequot.” A man, Captain Underhill, who participated in the massacre at Fort Mystic, had this to say: “Many [Pequots] were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. [Other Pequots were] forced out, and came in troops to the [Narragansett] Indians, twenty and thirty at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword.... We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”³

The near eradication of the Pequots happened during the spring and summer of 1637 as the English colonists shot, burned, dispersed, and sold into slavery every Pequot man, woman, and child they could find. These Pilgrims and Puritans demonstrated a willingness to do anything necessary to get what they wanted, in this case a feeling of safety and better access to land and beaver pelts throughout the green Connecticut River Valley. A handful of colonists disapproved of the war against the Pequots. One of these people was Anne Hutchinson, who in 1636 was about to have her own encounter with the power and authority of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Anne Hutchinson and the Tradition of Dissent

Two questions: First, how did it happen that Anne Hutchinson, a forty-six-year-old mother of fifteen children, was excommunicated from her church, banished from her town, and set on the road to anywhere that would have her? Second, what were the seeds of religious freedom in America, and did Anne Hutchinson help to plant them?

November 1637 was cold, especially for Anne Hutchinson, who trudged five miles from Boston to the windowless, wood-frame courthouse in Cambridge, thinking that she might be pregnant (and she was)—with her sixteenth child. She, her husband William, and eleven of their children had sailed to America three years earlier, in 1634, because they had found the Anglican Church too Catholic, too focused on what Puritans called the “covenant of works” (things like penance), rather than the “covenant of grace” (interacting with God’s words and waiting for the Holy Spirit to enter one’s body). The leaders of the Anglican Church—King Charles I and the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud—had found Anne Hutchinson and people like her too radical, too dangerous to the religious, social, and political order in England. Anglican authorities had imprisoned Hut...