[On September 10th,
1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked
by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this
week I’ll AmericanStudy historical massacres, leading up to a special weekend
post on contemporary hate crimes.]
On three texts that
help us remember one of post-contact America’s earliest dark histories.
The central
military action of the Pequot War
(1636-37), the first large-scale conflict between the English and Native
American communities in colonial New England, was the 1637 massacre of the Pequot village
of Mystic (in modern-day Connecticut). A number of Puritan figures and
historians wrote about the attack (including William
Bradford in Of Plimoth Plantation),
but perhaps the most telling such document was composed by military leader Captain John Underhill.
In his account Underhill notes that mostly women, children, and the elderly
were killed in the massacre (which was timed purposefully for a moment when the
village’s warriors were on a raiding mission), and justifies that fact by
writing, “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with
their parents. … We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our
proceedings.” Violence and brutality are
inevitable in war, but directing them at non-combatants comprises another
level of brutality—and using religion to rationalize such actions another level
still (if a far-too common one).
Accompanying
Underhill’s account of the massacre was a famous woodcutting that
has become a central image through which the massacre is remembered (when it is
remembered at all). The woodcutting certainly captures just how surrounded the
village was, a detail that looks far different if we sympathize with the
villagers more than Underhill himself was able to. But it also captures another
and even more complex historical detail: the second circle of attackers are
Native Americans, an attempt to include in the image the hundreds of Mohegan,
Narragansett, and Niantic warriors who took part in the massacre as allies
to the English and/or enemies to the Pequots. That Native American
participation does not excuse the English in the slightest, neither for their
overall impetus for the attack nor for their particular actions during it. But
it does remind us of the quantity and variety of Native American tribes within even a relatively close geographic area,
and of the individual and at times conflicting situations and needs facing each
tribe (at any historical point, but doubly so in the post-contact era of
course). That’s part of the story of Mystic as well, and one that the
woodcutting accurately highlights.
While texts such
as Underhill’s account and the woodcutting can thus reveal (if sometimes
unintentionally) multiple layers to the massacre at Mystic, they nonetheless
originated from and are ultimately driven by an English perspective on the
battle. Also originating from the perspective of an Anglo American author, but
working hard and well to create a Pequot perspective, is the pivotal Chapter IV
in Catharine
Maria Sedgwick’s historical novel Hope
Leslie (1827). As I highlighted at length in this early
blog post, Sedgwick’s Magawisca—a composite fictional character who is the
daughter of an actual historical figure, the Pequot chief Sassacus—offers in
her long monologue (to her young English friend and potential love interest
Everell Fletcher) about the Mystic massacre what Sedgwick’s narrator calls “a
very different picture” of the battle. As with any historical fiction, and
certainly any that seeks
to cross cultural boundaries, Sedgwick’s chapter and novel are complex and
open to critique as well as celebration (and everything in between). Yet I
believe that Sedgwick succeeds on a number of levels in this chapter, perhaps
especially in her portrayal of the profoundly human effects of the massacre and
how those effects echoed and extended well beyond 1637. Such effects must be
part of our collective memories of Mystic, and Sedgwick’s text helps us begin
to engage them more fully.
Next massacre
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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