Lessons From The Pequot War
Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington
May 29, 2005
Rev. Paul Ratzlaff
Many years ago, we had a rash of airplane hijackings in this country, particularly out of Miami airport. One such plane was hijacked on its way to New York. “Turn the plane around and head for Havana,” ordered the hijacker gruffly. The pilot could tell that the man was desperate, so he did what the hijacker said. When the gunman tried to intimidate the passengers, however, they started roaring with laughter. No matter what the hijacker did, the passengers laughed. They laughed all the way to Havana. They laughed while the plane was on the ground and tense negotiations were going on between Cuban and American authorities. They laughed when the plane was allowed to resume its flight to New York. They turned the whole experience into a big party. Only one man was not laughing, besides the hijacker and the pilot. He didn’t get the joke. In fact he was worried that the hijacker would react violently to the laughter of the other passengers. The whole experience was miserable for this one passenger. His name? Allen Funt, host of the popular CANDID CAMERA.
When the other passengers saw that Allen Funt was on board, they assumed this was all a prank. They were waiting for someone to say, “Surprise! You’re on Candid Camera.”[1]
Isn’t this the human condition? We assume we know what is “real” even against all evidence to the contrary. Will Rogers quipped, “It’s not what we don’t know that hurts, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”
In the case of the hijacking, it led to hilarity. In other cases, assumptions have led to dire consequences.
In wanting to know more about this Long Island on which I now live and have my being, I’ve just begun to learn about the peoples who lived here before the Europeans arrived. That interest led me to pay attention when a colleague at my minister’s study group noted that there was a wonderful museum at the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. On my way back from Rhode Island, I thought I’d see what the research librarian would recommend, and what was available in the bookstore. That led me to “The Pequot War” by Alfred A. Cave, professor of history at the University of Toledo. Thumbing through a couple of pages, I thought this was as good a place to start as any.
The Pequots lived mostly around what is now Mystic, Connecticut, between the Narragansetts (yes, Rhode Island) and the people of the rivers, Mohegans. However the Pequots dominated several other communities, including villages on Long Island. Indigenous people on the North Shore paid tribute to the Pequots, who traveled across the Sound in their large, dugouts, capable of carrying a dozen or more people. (As I understand it, all of these peoples were part of a broad language group, the Algonquin, about whom I have much to learn.)
The “war” took place in 1636. Cave writes the following:
Most of the basic facts about the war itself are not at issue. It is a matter of record that the English assaulted the Pequots after the failure of efforts to persuade them to apprehend and surrender to Puritan justice those Indians believed to be responsible for the deaths of Captain John Stone and other Englishmen. The record also reveals that immediately before the outbreak of hostilities English negotiators pressed new demands upon the Pequot sachems, specifically, that they pay a substantial indemnity and send Pequot children to Boston to serve as hostages to guarantee future good behavior. Puritan chroniclers freely admitted that their military offensive against the Pequot Indians was highly punitive, deliberately intended to inflict the maximum number of casualties (“shock and awe”). Pequot resistance was broken by a surprise attack on a fortified village near the Mystic River. The commanders at that engagement wrote detailed descriptions of the deliberate slaughter of Pequot noncombatants, many of them burned alive when their homes were put to the torch by English troops. They related that they spared neither women nor children but ordered their men to shoot or impale those survivors who escaped the flames. One recalled that dead and dying Indians in the fields surrounding Fort Mystic were “so thick in some places that you could hardly pass along.” Their accounts of the mopping-up operations following the Mystic massacre speak of the summary execution of prisoners of war and of the enslavement of their surviving women and children. The more fortunate captives were given to Mohegan and Narragansett sachems who had assisted the Puritans in their war against the Pequots. The less fortunate were sold to Caribbean slave traders. At the war’s end, the victorious English terminated Pequot sovereignty and outlawed use of the tribal name.[2]
The prose is straightforward. It is left to our imagination to begin to feel ourselves into the horror of what we would now call “ethnic cleansing.”
Even before this intentional slaughter, European diseases wiped out populations of native peoples against which they had no immunity. It is estimated that the pandemic of 1616 – 1619 killed 90% of the Indians along the east coast of New England. [3] 90%! I don’t think we can begin to imagine that horror! This pandemic did not affect the Pequots (or Narragansetts), however. Their turn came 17 years later. In 1633 – three years before the “Pequot War” – small pox killed an estimated 80% of the Pequots. Their numbers were reduced from about 16,000 to 3,000. Again, I find the dislocation, horror and despair unimaginable. In addition to the immensity of the human suffering, what is sobering is the Puritan reaction to these pandemics. They understood these pandemics as a sign of God’s favor on them. Clearly, God wanted them to settle this new land, for God was clearing the land of any opposition. “[T]he Saints, as one of their early chroniclers noted, gave thanks for ‘this wonderous work of the great Jehovah’ in ‘wasting the naturall Inhabitants with deaths stroke’ in order to make room in the wilderness for God’s own people.” [4]We may scoff today at the Puritan rationalization, but I find it sobering to consider how they came to be so cruel. What enabled them to take delight in the deaths of their fellow human beings? How could they go about with a clear conscience after burning to death whole families, and slaughtering all, including women and children, who rushed from their burning homes?
Cave argues that the English colonists came with pre-conceptions about the humans that they would encounter; preconceptions that living experience would not alter. In his chapter “Perceptions and Misperceptions” he establishes at length the way the colonists of Massachusetts Bay viewed the Indians, and the tragic consequences of those misperceptions.
Instead of viewing the Indians as human beings, like themselves, with social, familial, and spiritual needs like themselves, the Indians were viewed as “Satanists.” They were viewed as threats. They were viewed, in a pop psychology term, as the “other.” In the war of good and evil, God’s people must exterminate Satan’s forces. The colonists arrived, then, with the assumption that they must intimidate the hostile forces they would meet. “Peter Martyr declared, ‘there is no man able to behowlde them, but he shall feele his bowelles grate with a certen horroure.’ “…Anglican bishop John Jewell [insisted]…the Americans a ‘wild and naked people’ who lived ‘without any civil government, offering up men’s bodies in sacrifice, drinking men’s blood…sacrificing boys and girls to certain familiar devils.’” [5] Theologian Joseph Mede declared that, shortly after the advent of Christianity, Satan induced the ancestors of North American’s Indians to migrate with to America, ‘where they might be hid, and not be disturbed in the idolatrous and abominable, or rather diabolical, service he expected from those his followers.’” [6] Quite a set-up for the fearful settlers first encounter with the people already living on the land. The lived experience of the newly arrived settlers was quite different, however, from the preconceptions. In fact, the native peoples were, at first, generous and hospitable. In Jamestown, Virginia, aid from Powhatan saved many of the first settlers. But this is what is sobering. Instead of recognizing the Indians’ compassion extended toward the colonists, Captain John Smith “…explained away their generosity by claiming that the Almighty had intervened to soften their hearts, as charity is alien to savage nature.” [7] Likewise in New England, the Indians provided life-saving aid, but it did not change the Puritan perception of them. “Don’t bother me with the facts.” Cave concludes, “characterization of Indians as savages devoid of virtues such as pity and compassion confirmed Christian Europe’s sense of moral superiority and justified not only occupation and dispossession but also the violence and cruelty toward indigenous peoples….” [8]As a side note, it’s interesting to learn that Roger Williams, kicked out of the Puritan colony for his unorthodox religious views, went to live among the Narragansetts. He lauded their kindness and hospitality, but even he failed to understand their spirituality, equating them with English witches. [9] His attempt to offer an alternative view of native peoples was rejected out of hand by the dominant Puritan culture. It’s tempting to distance ourselves from the Puritan, and other colonists. We can feel rather smug considering their ignorance, and their shortsightedness. But, as I have said several times, I found myself feeling very sad and angry for the cruelty (who was the “savage” after all?), but also sobered as I read how the English misperceived the humans they encountered on the land we call America. After all, these English were good people, risking all to set up a new world in which they could worship in their own way. They loved their families as dearly as I love mine. And yet… And yet they slaughtered other good people – people who loved their children as dearly as I love mine.
Could it be that we, like the Puritans, might be so blinded by our assumptions about others who share this earth with us that we end up slaughtering them?
You know where my mind goes. Could it be that our love of what we call “democracy” so blinds us that we fail to see the humanness of others who live under different political systems? Could it be that our worship of free trade and so-called open markets blinds us to the humanness of those who organize their economies differently?
I’m reminded of a story about these high-powered executives who helicopter into a remote Central American beach village in order to go scuba diving for a few days vacation before returning to their high-powered jobs. The beach is pristine. The villagers fish only to provide their day’s needs. The execs approach one of the fishermen, lounging, laughing with his friends, after his morning’s work. “How much would it cost for you to take us and our gear to the reef where we want to dive? …So little. It’s a deal.” On the way back, the execs begin talking with the fisherman. “You know, if you fished in the afternoon, you could double your haul.” “And then, what?” “Then you could buy another boat, and quadruple your catch?” “And then, what?” “Then you should buy a freezer ship, buy up your neighbor’s catch, and ship your fish to the capitol.” “And then, what?” “Oh, then you could expand into supplying the Fulton Fish Market in the United States of American. Why you could become internationally known as king of the fish market!” “And then, what?” “Why then, you could come here to vacation.”
We laugh at the execs, but I fear that, like the Puritans, our drive to expand our political ideals – and our markets – leads us to maintain our preconceptions of other humans, so that we can trample over them without regret.
Those of us who oppose the war in Iraq, and distrust this administration’s intentions in other parts of the Middle East, can see how blinded our current leaders are with expanding American so-called democracy. The death of nearly 1,700 American women and men is necessary to establish freedom, we are told. We don’t even count the numbers of Iraqis, many of them women and children, noncombatants, who have died and who suffer injury. We don’t count, because they don’t “count” in our scheme of life.
Some UU congregations are creating public memorials to the dead, so that we don’t lose count. Following a Scottish tradition, they add stones to a memorial cairn for each of the dead on all sides. In Scotland, warriors would take a stone with them to battle. After the battle, the survivors would take back their stones, leaving a cairn of stones to memorialize the dead.
It’s easy to see blinding pre-conceptions in others. How about the assumptions we make that blind us to the humanness of those who live differently?
What are the assumptions so deeply rooted in us that we don’t think about them, any more than we think about the air we breathe? What truths do we know with such certainty that nothing in anyone’s experience can raise questions about these truths in our minds?
Here’s a clue that can always alert us that we are operating from assumptions that may be ignoring actual experience. Whenever we dismiss another human being as outside, as alien, as beyond the pale, I fear that we have gotten ourselves ensnared in our assumptions. When we fail to see in another our own face, we are on dangerous ground. Such failure leads to slaughter, to burning family houses and shooting the fleeing children, women and men.
On this Memorial Day, I pray that we will stand fast by our Universalist heritage that just as no one can be separated from the love of God, so no one can be separated from our shared human life upon this common planet Earth. May our choices enhance life for every living being. Blessed Be.
[1] King Duncan, King’s Treasury of Dynamic Humor, 1990, Seven Worlds Press, Knoxville, TN, p. 205.
[2] Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War, 1996, The University of Massachusetts Press, pgs. 1-2.
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