Mayflower (22 page)

In the summer of 1630, the profane John Billington fell into an argument with his English neighbor John Newcomen. A few days later, while hunting for deer, Billington happened upon Newcomen and shot him down in cold blood.

Billington had believed, the historian William Hubbard later reported, “that either for want of power to execute for capital offenses, or for want of people to increase the plantation, he should have his life spared.” But with the appearance of the Puritans, the dynamics of the region had changed. By the fall, Bradford had already established a rapport with Massachusetts-Bay governor John Winthrop, and after consulting with him, Bradford determined that Billington “ought to die, and the land to be purged from blood,” and he was executed in September 1630.

That year, the infamous ne’er-do-well Thomas Morton made his way back to Merrymount. Since the settlement was technically in his territory, Winthrop offered to kill two birds with one stone. The Puritans not only arrested Morton, they burned his house to the ground. Evidently, Plymouth and Massachusetts-Bay had much in common.

A 1634 map of New England

Convinced that they had God on their side, magistrates from both colonies showed no qualms about clamping down on dissent of any kind. In the years ahead, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were cast out of Massachusetts-Bay for espousing unorthodox views, and in 1645 Bradford angrily opposed an attempt to institute religious tolerance in Plymouth. Soon after, the Quakers, who began arriving in New England in 1655, were persecuted with a vehemence that climaxed with the hanging of four men and women on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661.

It was the Puritans who led the way in persecuting the Quakers, but the Pilgrims were more than willing to follow along. As a Quaker sympathizer acidly wrote, the “Plymouth-saddle is on the Bay horse,” and in 1660 Isaac Robinson, son of the late pastor John Robinson, was disenfranchised for advocating a policy of moderation to the Quakers.

In the beginning, the Puritan settlement to the north proved a financial windfall for the Pilgrims. What the new arrivals wanted more than anything else were cattle and hogs, which the Pilgrims now had in surplus. Over the course of the next decade Plymouth experienced an economic boom fueled, in large part, by the rising price of livestock. Inevitably, however, the grandees of Massachusetts-Bay began to cast what Bradford felt was “a covetous eye” on the profitable trading posts Plymouth had established in Maine and Connecticut. As Massachusetts moved into the region with outposts of its own, tensions rose between the Pilgrims and Puritans. But as became increasingly clear, the sheer size of what is now known as the Great Migration meant that Plymouth had no choice but to be shunted aside as it watched dozens of Puritan settlements spring up to the north and south.

It was only a matter of time before Massachusetts-Bay’s economic ambitions brought the Puritans into conflict with the region’s other occupants, the Native Americans. In the lower portion of the Connecticut River valley lived the Pequots, a tribe whose economic might more than equaled that of the Puritans. When the captains of several English trading vessels were killed by Indians in the region, Massachusetts-Bay seized upon the murders as a pretext for launching an attack on the Pequots. In many ways, the Pequot War of 1637 was the Puritans’ Wessagussett: a terrifyingly brutal assault that redefined the balance of power in the region for decades to come.

Much as Massasoit had done more than a decade before, a local sachem used the conflict between the Indians and English as an opportunity to advance his own tribe. Prior to the Pequot War, Uncas, sachem of the Mohegans, was a minor player in the region, but after pledging his loyalty to the Puritans, he and his people were on their way to overtaking the Pequots as the most powerful tribe in Connecticut.

The Narragansetts, on the other hand, were less enthusiastic in their support of the English. The Pequots were their traditional enemies, but they were reluctant to join forces with Uncas and the Mohegans. Only after Roger Williams, the new founder of Providence, had personally interceded on Massachusetts-Bay’s behalf did Narragansett sachem Miantonomi agree to assist the Puritans in a strike against the Pequots.

Led by several veterans of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the Puritans fell upon a Pequot fortress on the Mystic River. After setting the Indians’ wigwams ablaze, the soldiers proceeded to shoot and hack to pieces anyone who attempted to escape the inferno. By the end of the day, approximately four hundred Pequot men, women, and children were dead. “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same,” Bradford wrote, “and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”

Bradford saw the devastation as the work of the Lord. The Narragansetts, however, saw nothing divine in the slaughter. As Roger Williams observed, Native American warfare was more about the bravery and honor of the combatants than the body count, and usually only a handful of warriors were killed in battle. Prior to the attack on the Pequot fort in Mystic, sachem Miantonomi had attempted to get assurances from Williams that no women and children would be killed. Unfortunately, Williams, who had been cast out of Massachusetts-Bay just two years before, had been unable to extract any concessions from the Puritans. As the flames devoured every living thing in the fortified village, the Narragansetts angrily protested the slaughter, claiming “it is too furious, and slays too many men.” With the Pequot War, New England was introduced to the horrors of European-style genocide.

Before the massacre, the Pequots had urged the Narragansetts to join them against the Puritans, claiming that the English would soon “over-spread their country” and force them off their own lands. In the years ahead, sachem Miantonomi came to realize that the Pequots had been right. By the late 1630s, when he saw that there were more Puritans in Massachusetts-Bay than Native Americans in all of New England, he decided to eliminate the English threat before the Narragansetts suffered the same fate as the Pequots.

In 1642, he traveled to the Montauks on Long Island in hopes of persuading them to join the Narragansetts against the English. To accomplish this, he proposed a truly visionary strategy of pan-Indian cooperation. By laying aside their ancient differences, which the English had exploited so effectively during the Pequot War, the Indians might retake New England. Miantonomi’s speech to the Montauks included an insightful account of the ecological endgame that had come to New England: “You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.” Miantonomi knew from experience that to pick a fight with the Puritans was to fight to the death. He proposed that they employ guerrilla tactics to “kill men, women, and children, but no cows,” since the Indians would need the English livestock for food until the deer had increased to precontact levels.

In the end, Miantonomi was unable to follow his own advice. Instead of attacking the English, he attacked Uncas and the Mohegans. Like Massasoit before him, Uncas had parlayed his allegiance to the English into a sudden and, from the Narragansetts’ perspective, most annoying increase in power and influence. Uncas also did his best to undermine rival tribes, and the rumors he spread of Narragansett intrigue did much to worsen the tribe’s relations with the English.

By 1643, Miantonomi had had enough of the Mohegans and their upstart sachem. After an assassination plot against Uncas failed, Miantonomi and a thousand of his warriors launched an assault on the Mohegans. Prior to the attack, Miantonomi donned a protective iron corselet. But instead of saving his life, the English armor proved his death sentence. When the fighting turned against the Narragansetts and the sachem was forced to flee, he staggered under the weight of the metal breastplate and was easily taken by the enemy. Uncas might have executed Miantonomi on the spot. But the crafty sachem, who was destined to outlive all of the Native leaders of his generation, recognized an opportunity to ingratiate himself even further with the English.

By 1643, it had become apparent to several prominent New Englanders that Indian-English relations throughout the region needed to be managed in a more coordinated manner. With the rise of Native leaders such as Miantonomi and especially Uncas, who had learned to exploit the needs and fears of both the English and the Indians with Machiavellian sophistication, it was important that the English colonies attempt to act as a unified body. Since the boundaries of the colonies had been in dispute from the beginning, cooperation did not necessarily come naturally to the English. But in 1643, with the troubles between the Mohegans and Narragansetts threatening to spread across the region, the United Colonies of New England came into being. The union included Plymouth, Massachusetts-Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven, which would later be absorbed by Connecticut. Each colony sent its own delegation of commissioners to act on its behalf, but only with approval of the individual colonies’ General Courts. Noticeably missing from the confederation was Roger Williams’s Rhode Island—the only non-Puritan colony in New England.

Edward Winslow appears to have had an important role in creating the United Colonies, a combination for which it is difficult to find an English precedent. In Holland, however, there had been a similar confederation of independent states since 1579, and the Pilgrims may have introduced the concept to their Puritan counterparts from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven. According to John Quincy Adams, the United Colonies of 1643 was “the model and prototype of the North American Confederacy of 1774,” which, in turn, became the basis of the United States. More than a hundred years before the colonies’ growing tensions with England provided the impetus to create a confederation, the United Colonies of New England demonstrated the importance of looking beyond local concerns and prejudices. If Miantonomi had succeeded in accomplishing the same kind of combination for the Native Americans of the region, the history of New England might have been very different.

Miantonomi was still in Uncas’s custody when the commissioners of the United Colonies met for the first time in Hartford, Connecticut, on September 7, 1643, and Uncas asked the commissioners what he should do with the Narragansett sachem. By appealing to what was for all intents and purposes the Puritan Nation of New England, Uncas had given the Mohegans truly regionwide exposure and influence. After extensive deliberations, the commissioners decided to let Uncas do what he wanted with Miantonomi.

There is evidence that the Narragansett sachem attempted one last bid to unite the Native peoples of New England by proposing that he marry one of Uncas’s sisters. It was, however, too late for a reconciliation, and on the path between Hartford and Windsor, Connecticut, Uncas’s brother walked up behind Miantonomi and “clave his head with a hatchet.” For the time being, the threat of a united Native assault against Puritan and Pilgrim New England had been laid to rest.

B
Y THE EARLY 1640S,
, the Great Migration had come to an end as England was torn apart by civil war. Many settlers returned to England to join in Parliament’s efforts to overthrow King Charles’s repressive regime. With the king’s execution in 1649, England became a Puritan state—unimaginable just a decade before. Bradford felt compelled to turn to an early page in his history of Plymouth and write, “Full little did I think, that the downfall of the bishops, with their courts, canons, and ceremonies, etc. had been so near, when I first began these scribbled writings…or that I should have lived to have seen, or hear of the same; but it is the Lord’s doing, and ought to be marvelous in our eyes!”

Until this spectacular turn of events, it had been possible for a Puritan to believe that America was where God planned the apocalyptic series of events that would anticipate the millennium. Now it seemed that England was the true center stage, and those who had ventured to the New World were in danger of being left out of the most critical events of their time. In addition to putting Puritan New England’s raison d’être into question, the civil war endangered the region’s economy. Pilgrims who had watched the prices of their cattle and crops skyrocket over the last decade were suddenly left with a surplus that was worth barely a quarter of what it had commanded in the 1630s. More than a few New Englanders decided that it was time to return to the mother country, and one of those was Edward Winslow.

From the very beginning Winslow had shown a talent for getting what he wanted, whether it was the hand of the widow Susanna White just a few weeks after the death of his own wife or winning back the loyalty of Massasoit. For two and a half decades, he had conducted a kind of shuttle diplomacy between America and England as he spear-headed negotiations with merchants and government officials in London. He was also valued by Massachusetts-Bay for his diplomatic savvy, even if some found the peripatetic Pilgrim a little too glib for his own good. Samuel Maverick was an Anglican who had once lived on an island in Boston Harbor, and he later remembered the Pilgrim diplomat as “a smooth tongued cunning fellow.”

In 1646, Winslow sailed for England on yet another diplomatic mission. His talents came to the notice of the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell, and as happened to Benjamin Franklin in the following century, the Pilgrim diplomat kept postponing his return to America as he became caught up in the historical destiny of his country. To Bradford’s bitter regret, Winslow never returned to Plymouth. In 1654, he was named commissioner of a British naval effort against the Spanish in the West Indies; a year later, he succumbed to yellow fever off the island of Jamaica and was buried at sea with full honors. Winslow undoubtedly looked to his final decade in England as his shining hour as a diplomat, but his most significant contribution to British and American history had actually occurred more than thirty years earlier when he became the Englishman Massasoit trusted above all others.

By the time Bradford received word of Winslow’s passing, Elder William Brewster had been dead for more than a decade. A year later, in 1656, Miles Standish died in his home in Duxbury.

In 1656, Bradford was sixty-eight years old. According to the patent issued by the Council for New England, he might have become the sole proprietor of the colony back in 1630. Instead, he had shared his rights with those who had come to America during the first years of the colony. Ten years later, in 1640, Bradford and the other “Old Comers” turned the patent over to the colony’s freemen.

He had come to America not to establish a great and powerful colony, but to create a tightly knit and godly community. For that to happen, everyone must live together and worship in the same church. But by the early 1630s it had become apparent that the soil around the original settlement was not the best; many inhabitants, moreover, claimed they needed more land to accommodate the growing herds of cattle. To the governor’s dismay, many of his closest associates, including Brewster, Winslow, Standish, and John Alden, left Plymouth to found communities to the north in Duxbury and Marshfield. Thomas Prence, one of the colony’s rising stars and who first served as governor in 1634, also moved to Duxbury, then helped found the town of Eastham on Cape Cod. Although he didn’t arrive in New England until the 1630s, John Brown was one of the colony’s wealthier inhabitants. He would probably have joined the Puritans in Massachusetts-Bay had not a meeting with John Robinson in Leiden in the 1620s caused him to choose Plymouth instead. In 1640, Brown helped found the town of Taunton; by 1645 he had moved to Wannamoisett (in the vicinity of modern Barrington, Rhode Island), which became a part of Swansea in 1667. By that time Brown had long since been joined by his son James and his son-in-law Thomas Willett, who established a prosperous trade with the Dutch in Manhattan.

At the root of this trend toward town building was, Governor Bradford insisted, a growing hunger for land. For Bradford, land had been a way to create a community of Saints. For an increasing number of Pilgrims and especially for their children, land was a way to get rich. Bradford claimed that the formation of new towns was “not for want or necessity,” but “for the enriching of themselves,” and he predicted it would be “the ruin of New England.” Even Roger Williams, whose vision of an ideal community was very different from Bradford’s, shared his concern about land. Williams railed against the rise of “God Land” in New England and feared that it would become “as great with us English as God Gold was with the Spaniards.”

It was difficult for Bradford not to take the exodus of Winslow, Brewster, and the others as a personal affront. For as the new towns prospered and grew, Plymouth, the village with which it had all begun, fell on hard times. “And thus was this poor church left,” Bradford wrote, “like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children…. Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor.”

Despite Bradford’s lament, his vision of a compact, self-contained community of fellow worshippers remained the organizing principle behind each of the colony’s new towns. In 1652, Plymouth magistrates admonished one Joseph Ramsden for locating his house “remotely in the woods from his neighbors” and ordered him “to bring his wife and family with all convenient speed, near unto some neighborhood.”

A settler in a typical town in Plymouth Colony in the 1650s received a house lot that ranged from just a single acre to as much as twenty, depending on his social standing. Instead of the tiny wattle-and-daub cottages constructed by the original Pilgrims, the subsequent generation built post-and-beam structures covered with clapboards and shingles and anchored by mammoth brick chimneys.

It took a tremendous amount of lumber to build one of these houses—even a modest house required at least twelve tons of wood. Just as daunting were the heating requirements of the home’s open hearth. It’s been estimated that the average seventeenth-century New England house consumed fifteen cords, or 1,920 cubic feet, of wood per year, meaning that a town of two hundred homes depended on the deforestation of as many as seventy-five acres per year.

As the number of towns grew, the character of the colony inevitably began to change, and from Governor Bradford’s perspective, it was not for the good. The influx of newcomers made it increasingly difficult to ensure the colony’s moral purity. Even worse than the cases of premarital sex and adultery were, according to Bradford, those of “sodomy and buggery.” In 1642, seventeen-year-old Thomas Granger, a servant to “an honest man of Duxbury,” was convicted of having sexual relations with “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.” Taking their lead from Leviticus, Bradford and his fellow magistrates executed Granger on September 8, 1642, but not until the boy had witnessed the killing of his animal paramours, which were all buried in a pit. Bradford speculated that “Satan hath more power in these heathen lands,” but he also feared that a pernicious complacency had infected the colony.

In 1655, Governor Bradford delivered an ultimatum. If his subordinates did not do something to improve the spiritual state of the colony, he must resign his office. Promises were made, and Bradford continued on as governor, but that did not prevent a profound despair from overtaking him in his final years. Late in life Bradford looked back on the manuscript pages of his history of the colony. Beside a copy of a letter written by Pastor Robinson and Elder Brewster back in 1617, in which they referred to their congregation’s “most strict and sacred bond,” Bradford wrote, “I have been happy in my first times, to see, and with much comfort to enjoy, the blessed fruits of this sweet communion, but it is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay, and…with grief and sorrow of heart to lament and bewail the same.”

There may have been another dimension to Bradford’s sadness—a sadness that reached back to his decision in 1620 to leave his son John in Holland. After his second marriage in 1623, Bradford and his wife Alice had been blessed with three children: William junior, born in 1624; Mercy in 1627; and Joseph in 1630. Bradford adopted Alice’s two sons, Constant and Thomas Southworth, as well as eighteen-year-old Thomas Cushman when his father, Robert, died at about the same time as Robinson’s death in 1625. Other members of Bradford’s extended family included the boys Nathaniel Morton, Joseph Rogers, and William Latham. But as late as 1627 there was one missing member. John, Bradford’s son from his first marriage with Dorothy, was still in Europe. By the time he finally did join his father, John was eleven years old; he had been just three when he had last seen his parents, and he must have had little memory of his father.

Bradford’s stepson Nathaniel Morton was almost precisely John’s age. But while Morton became the governor’s right-hand man in the years ahead, John, his firstborn, drifted, eventually moving to Norwich, Connecticut—about as far away from the home of his famous father as it was possible for a New Englander to get.

No one knew what the future held, but Bradford had his suspicions. If New England continued its “degenerate” ways, God would surely wreak his vengeance. In Bradford’s view, the seeds for this terrible apocalypse had been sown more than thirty years before, when Thomas Morton of Merrymount had begun selling guns to the Indians. Almost immediately, the Natives had become more effective huntsmen than the English “by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body, being also quick-sighted and by continual exercise well knowing the haunts of all sorts of game.” They were also quick to master the mechanical aspects of operating a musket and were soon able to perform their own repairs and manufacture their own lead bullets.

The conservatism of the English made it difficult for them to abandon their old and cumbersome matchlock muskets for the newer flintlocks. The Indians, on the other hand, knew from the start that they wanted only flintlocks. “[T]hey became mad (as it were) after them,” Bradford wrote, “and would not stick to give any price they could attain to for them; accounting their bows and arrows but baubles in comparison of them.” Suddenly the English were no longer the technological superiors of the Native Americans, and when they happened on “the Indians in the woods armed with guns in this sort, it was a terror unto them.”

Over time, however, the English became accustomed to the sight of an Indian with a gun. Indians armed with flintlocks brought in more game and furs to English trading posts. And besides, if the Indians did not get their weapons from the English, they could easily buy them from the French and the Dutch. Selling guns and ammunition was a highly profitable business, and Plymouth magistrates eventually came to sanction the exchange.

From Governor Bradford’s perspective, the arming of the Indians was just another symptom of the alarming complacency that had gripped his colony. New England was headed for a fall. And it was the gun-toting Indians who would be “the rod” with which the Lord punished his people:

The last days of Bradford’s life were spent in what might seem a strange pursuit for the governor of a New England colony: studying Hebrew. He yearned to have as direct a connection as possible with the word of God, and to do that, he must learn the language in which the Bible was originally written. The initial pages of his Plymouth history are filled with a doodlelike scrawl of Hebrew words and phrases. “Though I am grown aged,” he wrote, “yet I have had a longing desire to see with my own eyes, something of that most ancient language and holy tongue, in which the law and oracles of God were written…. And though I cannot attain tomuch herein, yet I am refreshed, to have seen some glimpse hereof; (as Moses saw the Land of Canaan afar off).” The community of Saints he had hoped to create in New England had never come to be, but Bradford had earned at least a glimpse of another kind of Promised Land.

In the winter of 1657, Bradford began to feel unwell. His health continued to decline until early May, when a sudden and marvelous change came upon him. All God-fearing Puritans were in search of evidence that they were among the elect. On the morning of May 8, Bradford’s doubts and worries were answered with a startling certitude: “[T]he God of heaven so filled his mind with ineffable consolations,” Cotton Mather wrote, “that he seemed little short of Paul, rapt up unto the unutterable entertainments of Paradise.” Here at long last was proof that his journey through life was to be crowned by redemption. That morning he told those gathered around his sickbed that “the good spirit of God had given him a pledge of happiness in another world, and the first-fruits of his eternal glory.” He died the next day, “lamented by all the colonies of New England, as a common blessing and father to them all.”

In 1913, a gravel-mining operation in Warren, Rhode Island, uncovered an Indian burial ground. Known as Burr’s Hill, the site was in the vicinity of the Pokanokets’ ancestral village at Sowams and contained forty-two graves, many of which dated back to the middle of the seventeenth century. The artifacts collected from the graves provide fascinating evidence of the degree to which Western goods had become a part of the Indians’ lives. Accompanying the dead, who were buried on their sides with their heads pointed to the southwest, was a stunning array of objects: in addition to traditional Native artifacts such as arrowheads, amulets, and steatite pipes were wine bottles, muskets, spoons, iron axes, kettles, bells, wool blankets, combs, scissors, hammers, horseshoes, locks, keys, hinges, knives, pewter bowls, swords, leather shoes, and a Jew’s harp.