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“Pyquaagg Nowe Called Wythersfeild”: Connecticut River Communities and Conflict in the Pequot War. Alice Elizabeth King Boxw

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“Pyquaagg Nowe Called Wythersfeild”: Connecticut River Communities and Conflict in the Pequot War. Alice Elizabeth King Boxw “Pyquaagg nowe called Wythersfeild”: Connecticut River Communities and Conflict in the Pequot War. Alice Elizabeth King Boxworth, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom Master of Science with Distinction, American History, University of Edinburgh, 2017 Master of Arts with First Class Honors, History, University of Edinburgh, 2016 A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia December, 2020 In March 1638 John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay, received a letter from English colonists along the Connecticut River. They sought advice on a case that troubled them. In the run up to the Pequot War, a conflict that disrupted Southern New England between 1636 and 1638, colonists from Massachusetts Bay had traveled to Pyquag, an indigenous village home to the Wangunk Indians and their sachem Sowheage. The Connecticut colonists reported that they had negotiated a verbal agreement with Sowheage that allowed them to settle near Pyquag, establishing the village of Watertown, later called Wethersfield. Sowheage “gave the English land there, upon condition that he might sit down by them, and be protected,” wrote Winthrop. However, the English failed to honor the terms of the agreement. When Sowheage attempted to “set down his wigwam” in the spring of 1637, the English “drave him away by force.”1 The Wangunk sought help from the Pequot, a larger indigenous group whose tributary network stretched from the Mystic River west to the Connecticut. On April 23 1637, Pequot raiders killed six men and three women in the fields surrounding Wethersfield, and took two young women captive.2 The attack prompted the Connecticut towns to join Massachusetts Bay and declare war against the Pequot. This incident formed the basis of Connecticut’s question to the magistrates and elders of Massachusetts Bay in 1638: was Sowheage justified in seeking military aid from the Pequot in response to the broken land agreement? Massachusetts Bay scrambled together “such of the magistrates and elders as could meet on the sudden” to deliberate over the issue. They “returned this answer”: that Sowheage “might, upon this injury first offered” by the English, “right himself by force or fraud, and that by the law of nations.” 1 John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England,” 1630-1649, 2 vols, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 1:265-266. I have made the decision to use the term Pyquag/Wethersfield where appropriate to describe the communities in question, reflecting the continued presence of the Wangunk Indians and contested nature of the space. Title quotation: The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, ed. J. Hammond, Trumbull, (Hartford, Connecticut: Brown and Parsons, 1850, reprinted New York, AMS Press, 1968), 1:19. 2 PRCC, 1:7. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975), 217. King 1 Their judgement continued: “though the damage he had done them had been one hundred times more than what he sustained from them, that is not considerable in point of a just war.” The magistrates and elders also concluded that Sowheage was not bound “to seek satisfaction first in a peaceable way,” because the injury was “such an open act of hostility publicly maintained.” “It was enough,” they concluded, that Sowheage had protested the incident “as an injury and breach of covenant.” The magistrates and elders encouraged the Connecticut council to move forward with their relationship with Sowheage, making “a new agreement with the Indians of the river.” 3 A court assembled at Hartford in April 1638 to discuss the response to their question. They conducted a “full debate & hearing” over the “Injuries & difference between Soheage, an Indian the Sachem of Pyquaagg, nowe called Wythersfeild, & th’ English Inhabitants thereof.” The Court decided that both parties had committed wrongdoing. The English had offered “diverse Injuryes” to Sowheage, and “the saide Soheage & his men have likewise comitted divers outrages & wronges” against the English. The Hartford Court echoed the ultimate judgement of Massachusetts Bay, however, concluding that “the first breach was on the saide English prte.” They advocated no punishment for the English who had committed this breach, instead declaring that “All former wronges whatsoever are remitted on both sides,” and that Sowheage was “againe received in Amytie to the saide English.” 4 In one sense, the Pyquag/Wethersfield land case was fairly routine, one instance among many of competing understandings of land ownership between English colonists and Indigenous people that resulted in the imposition of English ways over Indian. It captures how English migration to the Connecticut River valley in the 1630s disrupted Native networks of power and use of land, requiring leaders and communities to decide on a response to the 3 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265-266. 4 PRCC, 1:19-20. King 2 newcomers. English colonists did not seamlessly import their social, land, religious, or legal norms, however. The process also proved disruptive for the colonists who moved beyond the oversight of the institutions and hierarchies of the Massachusetts Bay colony. The 1638 case shows courts in Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut reckoning with the consequences of this disruption by applying religious and legal concepts with complex meanings: deciding that Sowheage was justified by the law of nations and that the English actions constituted a breach of covenant. Why did the colonies appear to rule in favor of the Indigenous party? In 1965, Alden Vaughan argued that the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut rulings offered an example of Puritan justice. The “Wethersfield massacre case,” writes Vaughan, refutes the “long accepted stereotype” of Puritan cruelty towards Native Americans.5 If the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut could “decide in favor of an Indian who had retaliated so ruthlessly” against English colonists, Vaughan argues for a general “Puritan equity towards the Indians.”6 Vaughan judges that actions of the Wethersfield colonists represented a “relatively minor injustice” compared to Sowheage’s “violent retribution,” characterizing Sowheage’s actions as treacherous and perfidious.7 If so, however, we might expect more instances of colonial justice in favor of Native Americans. But the Pyquag/Wethersfield case remains highly unusual. Instead, the ruling suggests that Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut tactically utilized evocative religious and legal terms to smooth over disagreements and thereby further peaceful colonization of the Connecticut River valley. Connecticut sought to construct alliances between colonists and Native people in order to expand their land holdings, and Massachusetts Bay attempted to maintain a level of control over the Connecticut colonists who had left their orbit. 5 Vaughan, ‘A Test of Puritan Justice’, The New England Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1965), 339. 6 Vaughan, ‘A Test of Puritan Justice’, 339. 7 Vaughan, ‘A Test of Puritan Justice’, 337. King 3 Scholarship that focuses on the importance of place offers new contexts for native-colonial conflicts over land in New England. Lisa Brooks’ Our Beloved Kin and Christine DeLucia's Memory Lands, both 2018, address the persistent presence and enduring importance of Native people in seventeenth-century New England. Both examine Native people's impact during King Philip's War, 1675-1678. Their scholarship reassesses the conflict, highlighting how Natives bore the brunt of the war, as both enemies and allies of the colonists. Despite massive suffering and losses, Natives survived. This new scholarship focuses on contrasting English and Native geographies of New England. Land was foundational to communal identity for both groups. Brooks and DeLucia demonstrate that competing visions of the Northeast fueled settler violence against Indigenous owners and residents of the region.8 I hope to offer a similar reassessment of the Pequot War, 1636-1638, taking inspiration from Brooks’ and DeLucia’s treatment of New England’s layered Native and colonial geographies.9 What do we learn about the Pequot War when we view it from the perspective of the Connecticut River Valley, rather than the government in Boston? How did the conflict affect the broad range of Native peoples beyond the Pequot? Connecticut River Indians were pivotal to the coming, conduct, and outcome of the war. The war violently rearranged the region’s tributary networks, and both the River Indians and the English had to decide how to approach each other in the wake of the war. Connecticut towns sought to replace the Pequot as beneficiaries of the region’s rich agricultural production without taking responsibility for defending those Indian bands from the Mohawk, the Dutch, or the French. 8 See also work such as William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) for more on differences between Native and European relationships with the land, differences Cronon ultimately sees culminate in the devastating impact of the European market capitalism. 9 See Alfred Cave, The Pequot War, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). Cave argues that Puritan rhetoric that framed the Pequot as satanic savages was the driving force in the conflict. The English, particularly those in Massachusetts Bay, wrapped their defense of the Connecticut River plantations
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