THE GREAT SWAMP FIGHT IN FAIRFIELD A PAPER PREPARED FOR AND READ AT A MEETING OF THE COLONIAL DAMES BY HON. JOHN H. PERRY ON OCTOBER TWELFTH, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FIVE NEW YORK 1905 1 mmVi SPiiii ii • X \ THE GREAT SWAMP FIGHT IN FAIRFIELD A PAPER PREPARED FOR AND READ AT A MEETING OF THE COLONIAL DAMES BY HON. JOHN H. PERRY ON OCTOBER TWELFTH, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FIVE NEW YORK 1905 THE GREAT SWAMP FIGHT IN FAIRFIELD HON. JOHN H. PERRY You are met this afternoon in a town conspicuously honorable and honored even in the Connecticut galaxy. I am not its historian nor its panegyrist. It has notable incumbents of both offices, who should be in my place to-day. While I once professed to right wrongs, I never pretended to write stories, and my present predicament is the evolved outcome of a long line of pious ancestry, my fitness to survive which is demonstrated by a genius for obedience. When I was bidden to read a paper to you I found my ability to disobey atrophied by long disuse. I can tender nothing worthy of the town or the occasion, and I frankly throw myself for mercy upon that peace- with-all-the-world feeling which invariably follows the hospitality of Osborn Hill. To have steadily produced Jenningses and Goulds and Burrs generation after generation would alone pay the debt of any town to its country; but Fairfield, insatiable in usefulness, has not been content with that. She has produced college founders and Yale presidents, great preachers, United States senators and representa- tives, famous poets, learned judges, governors, secretaries of state, and other notables in number out of all proportions to her size. Washington, that sleepiest of presidents, whose nights, geo- graphically considered, are more entertaining than those of Sche- herezade, has slept within her borders, and in the Temple of Lib- erty she offered herself on July 8, 1779, a burnt-sacrifice. But in this Colonial atmosphere let me confine myself to a I R Colonial incident. Fairfield was conceived in a crisis which threat- ened the very existence of the colony of Connecticut, and at the moment of her potential birth was baptized in blood. An Indian band, offshoot from the Six Nations—then a fully organized aboriginal combine for raising hair, and the first great trust known to American history—leaving the parent tribe on the banks of the Hudson, had slowly scrapped its way eastward through quiet tribes long resident in upper Connecticut or lower Massachusetts, until the Connecticut River was crossed, and then, turning southerly, set- tled at last upon the Sound. The date was about 1600; the name Pequot or Mohegan; the disposition restless, treacherous, and blood- thirsty; the final location from the Connecticut River eastward across the Niantic, Thames, Mystic and Pawcatuck into what is now Rhode Island. When Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield were settled, in 1635, the Dutch were occasionally somewhat in the way, but the Pequots had to be reckoned with daily. They numbered about six hundred fighting men, and knew no other business. The white settlers were a feeble folk. They could neither hunt, fish, nor cul- tivate their fields, nor travel at home or abroad, save at the peril of their lives. They must needs keep constant watch in light and darkness, and go armed to their daily labors. Before they sat upon the bench in meeting, the butt of a musket found the floor. They lay down and rose up in fear and danger. More than thirty citizens had been murdered, with accompaniment of torture and mutilation beyond belief, when, realizing that the very existence of the colony was at stake, a court is summoned to meet at Hartford on Monday, the 1st of May, 1637. The three towns for the first time send committees. Roger Ludlow, deputy governor, presided, and Andrew Ward, later a distinguished resident of Fairfield, sat in the court. Its action was prompt and resolute, and is thus recorded: 2 " It is ordered that there shalbe an offensive warr agt the Pequoitt and that there shalbe 90 men levied out of the 3 Plan- tacons Hartford Wethersfield and Windsor" . " under the comande of Captain Jo'. Mason." In this resolve behold the first act of sovereignty by the infant colony, and therein Fairfield, as will hereafter appear, lay hidden. So complete are the features of statehood here that we may fairly assign May 1, 1637, as the proper birthday of Connecticut. Listen to a further item from this historic order, pitiful for its confession of youth and weakness: " It is ordered that Windsor shall pruid 60 bushells of Corne, Harteford 84 bushells, Weathersfield 36 bushells, of this each plan- tacon to bake in biskett the on half if by any means they cann, the rest in grounde meale." Down the river, in " one pink, one pinnace and one shallop," went the little company—seventy-seven in all when the forces met. Sailing eastward to Narragansett Bay, they landed, and after a wearisome and perilous march in the early morning of May 26th fell upon a band of the savages sleeping in a so-called " fort " on Pequot Hill, in Groton, killed the flower of the tribe and burned the fort. The colonists returned in triumph to Saybrook, and the pall was lifted from the river towns. I have thus sketched with exceeding brevity the introduction to my task. The last council of the Pequot Nation was held on the day following the capture of this fort. The survivors from far and near attended. It had been proved to be as impossible for them to resist these grim, fearless, pale-faced strangers as it was impossible to conceive the notion of surrender for themselves. They came to a Roman resolution. The path of their original entry into Con- necticut along the river was now barred by the new English towns. 3 The only open route back to the Hudson lay westward along the Sound. Burning their villages and crops, they set out upon the des- perate venture. Sassacus, the greatest of their chiefs and at the time grand sachem, was first, and Mononotto apparently second, in command. Mason, with Stoughton and Patrick from Massa- chusetts, took ships at Saybrook to pursue them by the Sound, while the renegade Mohegan Uncas, with his followers, trailed and harried them along the shore. Roger Ludlow, representing the civil power, accompanied the English. Near Guilford two Pequot Sagamores, with a few followers, were overtaken. Swimming across a small bay in their flight, they were one and all shot by the Mohegans as they landed. Uncas cut off the heads of the chiefs and lodged them in the branches of an oak near the shore, where they hung for years, giving the place the local name of Sachem's Head. Thus the expedition fared on westward. Of the subsequent events, and especially of the great swamp fight in Southport, I know of but one contemporaneous account and but one by an eye-witness. Much has been subsequently written on the subject, and local traditions, many deep, overlie the place, but for an account of what really happened we seem to be confined to the two narratives above referred to. This is unfortunate, for they are brief, the situation lends itself to romance, the local imagination is impatient of re- straint, and Southport pride is creative and boundless. The contemporaneous account is found in a letter from Gov- ernor John Winthrop to William Bradford under date of July 28, 1637, and the story of an eye-witness is a narrative by Captain John Mason himself, written at the colony's request after he had retired to private life in Norwich, some thirty years after the bat- tle. Of this the blunt old soldier, upon learning that it was to be printed, naively says: " I never had thought that this should have 4 come to the Press until of late. If I had I should have endeavored to have put a little more varnish upon it. ... I wish it had fallen into some better hands that might have performed it to the life. I shall only draw the curtain and open my little casement, that so others of larger hearts and abilities may let in a bigger light." Compelled often to borrow the very words of these two narra- tives for adequate description, let me portray to you the raison d'etre of Fairfield. After the incident at Sachem's Head, the Lilliputian fleet soon sailed into the Quinepiack, where is now New Haven. Seeing a great smoke in the woods and supposing some of their enemy might be there, they hastened ashore, but discovered only Connecticut Indians. Returning to their vessels, they remained a few days, while a Pequot captive—named by the English, Luz—was sent upon discovery. To the quaintly expressed surprise of Mason the spy proved faithful, and barely escaping with his life, returned with tidings of Sassacus and the Pequots. Sassacus, suspecting treachery and failing in his effort to kill the Indian, became alarmed, and with Mononotto and some twenty braves left the band and fled precipitately to the Mohawks. " So " —to quote from Winthrop's letter—" our men missed of him; yet dividing themselves and ranging up and down as the providence of God guided them (for the Indians were all gone save three or four, and they knew not where to find them, or else would not), upon the thirteenth of this month (July, 1637) they lighted upon a great company, viz., 80 strong men and 200 women and chil- dren, in a small Indian town fast by a hideous swamp, which they all slipped into before our men could get at them." This so-called "lighting upon" is thus further described by Mason: "We then hastened our march towards the place where the enemy was, and coming into a corn-field several of the English espyed some Indians, who fled from them.