Who Killed John Stone? A Note on the Origins of the Pequot War

Who Killed John Stone? A Note on the Origins of the Pequot WarAuthor(s): Alfred A. CaveSource: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 509-521Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and CultureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2947109 .

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Who Killed John Stone?

A Note on the Origins of the- Pequot War

Alfred A. Cave

F ROM the fall of i636 through the spring of i637, the English in New England waged a punitive war against the Pequot Indians. The conflict culminated in a predawn assault on a fortified village near

the Mystic River in which hundreds of Indian noncombatants were deliberately burned alive. At war's end, the English executed scores of Pequot warriors, enslaved Pequot women and children, and terminated Pequot sovereignty. Puritan chroniclers of the Pequot War defended these dra- conian measures on the grounds that the Pequots had plotted the exter- mination of the English and thus deserved to be treated as "the Devil's instruments." Scholarly defenders of the Puritan campaign against the Pequots have echoed that view and have portrayed them as a threat to the well-being of the more peaceable Indians of the region as well as to the survival of the Puritan colonies.1 However, a number of historians over the past century and a half have dissented and, regarding the Pequots as innocent victims, have condemned their Puritan destroyers as greedy, canting hypocrites who distorted the record in order to justify a cynical land-grab. Some critics of Puritan Indian policy cite the brutal treatment of the Pequots as an example of racial bigotry, while others suggest that Puritan acts of violence against Indians were essentially expressions of rage emanating from deep, unresolved psychic conflicts.2 Despite these

Alfred A. Cave is professor of history at the University of Toledo. He extends his thanks to Marvin L. Michael Kay, Will Alpern, and Joseph Marshall Becker for valuable assistance in his investigations of the ethnohistory of colonial New England and expresses his appreciation to Neal Salisbury, Alden T. Vaughan, and other William and Mary Quarterly reviewers for their helpful advice.

1 For the Puritan explanation and defense of their attack on the Pequots see Charles Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent, and Gardener (Cleveland, Ohio, I 897), and [Edward Johnson],

Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, i628-i65i, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York, igio; orig. pub. i654), I48. Before the 20th century, most historians accepted at face value Puritan claims that the Pequots were a ruthless, aggressive tribe that threatened not only the English but also their Indian neighbors. That view is now discredited. The last restatement by a major historian of the case against the Pequots is in Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, i620-i675 (Boston, i965), I23-I54. In the revised edition (New York, I979), xxiv, Vaughan states, "I am less sure than I was fifteen years ago that the Pequots deserve the burden of the blame."

2 The first historian of note to challenge the assumption of Pequot war guilt was Richard Hildreth in The History of the United States of America, vol. i (New York,



5IO WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

sharp disagreements, historians have long regarded the Pequot War as a milestone in New England history, as the Puritan victory established English hegemony and pointed the way toward the ultimate subjugation and dispossession of the region's indigenous peoples.

Until recently, defenders and critics of the Puritans' conduct also agreed that the Anglo-Pequot conflict was the outgrowth of a I634 Pequot assault on an English trading bark on the Connecticut River, which resulted in the death of Captain John Stone and his crew. Commenting on Stone's death, historians sympathetic to the Puritan cause customarily wrote of Pequot "savagery" and stressed the need to discipline Indians who attacked whites. Historians who deplored the massacre and enslavement of the Pequots, by contrast, pointed to evidence of Stone's bad character and noted that the Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders suspected that he had abused Indians. Portraying the Puritans as hypocritical, bigoted, and avaricious, these historians charged that they had used the Stone incident to justify their own aggression.

In I975, in his celebrated and controversial book The Invasion of American: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, Francis Jennings announced that the Pequots were innocent of Stone's murder. Basing his case on a passage in Captain John Mason's memoir of the Pequot War, Jennings claimed that Massachusetts authorities were well aware that the real murderers were West Niantics, members of a small, quasi-indepen- dent band who paid tribute to and were under the protection of the Pequots. In demanding that the Pequots violate their code of honor by turning members of a tributary tribe over to the English, the Bay Colony leaders, in Jennings's analysis, deliberately sought to provoke war. Their motive, he asserted, was to win title to the Connecticut Valley through conquest of the Pequots and thereby outflank the Dutch and other English Puritans who had claims in the region.3

i856), 237-242. In the early 20th century, criticisms of Puritan conduct toward the Pequots were expressed in Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., Commonwealth History of Massachusetts, vol. i (New York, i960; orig. pub. 1927), 535, and in James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (New York, i965; orig. pub. 192I), I99-200.

3Francis P. Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York, I976), I77-227. Jennings has been faulted for lack of attention to the Indian side of the story. His discussion of New England Indian policy is primarily a critique of the Puritans. Although no recent writer has provided a comprehensive reassessment of the origins of the Pequot War utilizing a multicultural, ethnohistorical methodology, the following are insightful and suggestive: Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, I500-i643 (New York, i982), 203-225; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, i983), 96-97; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, I580-i640 (London, I 980), I75; Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire- Building (Minneapolis, Minn., I 980), 3 5-6 I; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, i600-i860 (Middletown, Conn., I973), 76-78; Lynn Ceci, "The Effect of European Contact and Trade on the



WHO KILLED JOHN STONE? 5II

Jennings's interpretation has won support. A leading student of seventeenth-century Puritan-Indian interaction writes that English accusations of Pequot complicity in Stone's death rested on "the flimsiest of pre- texts."4 The author of a popular textbook on the ethnohistory of colonial America declares that the Pequots did not murder Stone.5 The editors of a collection of source material on Puritan-Indian relations concur.6 A recent essay on the Pequot War states that the West Niantics were "probably" responsible.7

It is time to reassess this crucial episode. A close reading of the relevant sources does not support Jennings's verdict, which is grounded in a highly selective use of evidence. This article offers an alternative interpretation

Settlement Patterns of the Indians in Coastal New York, I524-i665: The Ar- chaeological and Documentary Evidence" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, I977), 208-2 i8; and William John Burton, "Hellish Fiends and Brutish Men: Amerindian-Euroamerican Interaction in Southern New England, An Inter- disciplinary Analysis, i600-I750" (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, I976), i06-I46. Although most recent writers regard the Puritans as the perpetrators of the war, P. Richard Metcalf, "Who Should Rule at Home? Native American Politics and Indian-White Relations," Journal of American History, LXI (I.974- I975), 65i-665, emphasizes the importance of understanding power struggles among Indian groups as a key to their relations with Europeans. He suggests that the Pequot War was in part the outgrowth of the ambition of Uncas, the disaf- fected Pequot sachem who founded the so-called Mohegan tribe. Alfred A. Cave, "The Pequot Invasion of Southern New England: A Reassessment of the Evi- dence," New England Quarterly, LXII (i989), 27-44, demonstrates that the Pe- quots were indigenous to the region, not invaders from the Hudson River valley as once believed.

4 Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 2 II, 2 I8. 6 Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, 2d ed.

(Englewood Cliffs, N. J., I 982), 84. Nash's text is a path-breaking survey of ethnic relations in the colonial period. Coverage of Indian-white relations in New England in other textbooks and popular histories of colonial America and of the American Indian is generally sketchy and inadequate. Discussions of the Pequot War are usually brief and often misleading. To cite two examples: David Horowitz, The First Frontier: The Indian Wars andAmerica's Origins, I607-I 776 (New York, I978), 40, erroneously asserts that the Pequot envoys blamed their tributaries during their visit to Boston in i634; Arrell M. Gibson, The American Indian: Prehistory to the Present (Lexington, Mass., i980), i87, mistakenly regards the Stone incident as one of a series of confrontations, writing that "English traders from Virginia, working the Connecticut shore from an anchored ship, had fre- quently been attacked by Pequots."

6 Charles M. Segal and David C. Stineback, eds., Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny (New York, I977), Io8.

7 Laurence M. Hauptman, "The Pequot War and Its Legacies," in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (Norman, Okla., I990), 72. Drin- non, Facing West, 38, finds the evidence inconclusive, describing the circumstances of Stone's death as "forever obscure." But Steven T. Katz, "The Pequot War Reconsidered," New England Quarterly, LXIV (I99I), 208, blames the Pequots not only for Stone's death but for the murder of John Oldham as well. There is no basis for the latter claim, as sources agree that Oldham was killed by Block Islanders tributary to the Narragansetts. Katz's article is overly reliant on second- ary sources and adds little to our understanding of the Pequot War.



5I2 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

of the origin of the war by drawing on data that help explain both Puritan and Pequot responses to the Stone incident.

Available documentary evidence indicates that Stone's death was an unexpected consequence of a trading rights squabble between the Dutch and their Indian clients in the Connecticut River valley. Dutch commercial activities in the Connecticut Valley, begun by itinerant traders in the early i62os, had profoundly influenced power relationships among Indians residing in the region.8 In Indian New England, possession of certain European commodities conferred power and prestige. Controlling access to such goods became a key objective of diplomacy and war.9 Shortly after their first contact with the Dutch in i622, Pequot war parties from the lower Thames River (east of the Connecticut) defeated the principal sachem of the River Indians and established a tributary network extending throughout the lower Connecticut Valley and into eastern Long Island.10 Through that network the Pequots were able to control both the fur trade flowing down the Connecticut and wampum production on the seacoast. Pequot hegemony was resented, however, by some of the displaced River Indian sachems as well as by the more powerful Narragansetts in the area to the east (later known as Rhode Island). The Narragansetts aspired to dominate the European trade."

Alarmed by the expansion of Puritan settlements in eastern New England, the Dutch tried to safeguard their Connecticut trade by estab- lishing a permanent fortified post in the valley. On June i8, I633, they signed a treaty with the Pequots that granted them the right to occupy a tract of land on a site in present-day Hartford. The agreement specified that all Indians, regardless of tribal affiliation, were to enjoy free access to

Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 5 i-i66, 277; Nicolaes van Wassenaer, "Historisch Verhael," in Narratives of New Netherland, i609-i664, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York, i909), 86-87; E. B. O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland; or, New York Under the Dutch, vol. i (New York, i845), I45-I 50;John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal "History of New England, 1630o-639," ed. James Kendall Hosmer (New York, i908), I, I3i; Lynn Ceci, "The First Fiscal Crisis in New York," Economic Development and Cultural Change, XXVIII (I979-1980), 839- 847.

9 On the appeal of European trade goods see Christopher L. Miller and George R. Hamell, "A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade,"JAH, LXXIII (i986-i987), 3II-328, and Bonnie G. McEwan and Jeffrey M. Mitchem, "Indian and European Acculturation in the Eastern United States as a Result of Trade," North American Archaeologist, V (i984), 27I-285. The documentary record contains ample evidence that native Americans valued European goods not only for their material utility but also for their presumed supernatural attributes.

10O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland, I, I45-I50; Winthrop, Journal, I, I3I; Van Wassenaer, "Historisch Verhael," 87; Daniel Gookin, "Historical Col- lections of the Indians in New England" [i674], in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, ist Ser., I (I792), I47.

"William Wood, New England's Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst, Mass., I977), 8o-8i; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, I976), 203.



WHO KILLED JOHN STONE? 5I3

the Dutch post, named the House of Good Hope.12 But Pequots soon violated that agreement by ambushing and killing several Indian rivals (most probably Narragansetts) on the trail to Good Hope. Dutch reprisal was immediate and severe. They seized the Pequot grand sachem Tato- bem as he boarded a Dutch vessel to trade and demanded a bushel of wampum for his ransom. The Pequots promptly sent payment for Tato- bem's release to the House of Good Hope. They received his corpse in return. 13

The Pequots could easily have driven the Dutch from the Connecticut Valley. But Tatobem's murder did not prompt them to attack the tiny and vulnerable Dutch outpost. Despite their later reputation as implacable foes of the European presence, the evidence indicates that their objective was to dominate commerce with Europeans, not end it. For that reason, the Pequots did not initiate an all-out war against the Dutch. Algonkian custom did require individual revenge executed by the kinsmen of a murder victim to restore communal harmony.14 Tatobem was avenged when, shortly after the Dutch butchered the grand sachem, Indians killed Stone and his crew. The Pequots, accustomed to limited retribution, did not anticipate that their act would preclude the resumption of normal trading relations with the Dutch. They sent a trading party to Good Hope. The Dutch opened fire as they approached, killing a sachem with a blast of cannon shot.15

Discovering that they were at war with the Dutch as well as the Narragansetts, the Pequots turned to the English and sent a delegation to Boston to seek trade and assistance. Goweiror John Winthrop, recording

l2John W. DeForest, History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to i850 (Hartford, i852), 7I-72; O'Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to The Colonial History of the State of New-York, vol. I (Albany, N. Y, i856), I49-I5I.

13 O'Callaghan, Documents, I, 287; DeForest, Indians of Connecticut, 73; John Underhill, "Newes from America," in Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War, 56-57. DeForest claimed erroneously that the Pequot grand sachem kidnapped and murdered by the Dutch was Wopigwooit, and later historians have often repeated his error. The testimony of Uncas, recorded in i679, indicated that Wopigwooit had died some years earlier. See Charles J. Hoadley, "Pedigree of Uncas," New England Historical and Genealogical Register, X (i856), 227-228. DeForest also mistakenly assumed that Tatobem and Sassacus were the same person.

14For a general analysis of homicide and retribution in native American cultures see Harold E. Driver, Indians of North America, 2d ed. (Chicago, I969), 309-329. On the essentially limited nature of wars of retribution in the Northeast see Wendell S. Hadlock, "War Among the Northeastern Woodland Indians," Ameri- can Anthropologist, XLIX (I947), 204-22i, and AdamJ. Hirsch, "The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England," JAH, LIV (I988), Ii87-I2I2.

15Winthrop,Journal, I, I I8, I39; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 268-37I; John Mason, "A Brief History of the Pequot War," in Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War, I7; William Hubbard, The History of the Indian Wars in New England. . ., II, ed. Samuel G. Drake (Roxbury, Mass., I865), 7 IO; Increase Mather, A Relation of the Troubles Which Have Hapned in New-England, by Reason of the Indians There, From the Year I6I4 to the Year I675 . . . (Boston, i677), 24-25.



514 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

in his journal and in correspondence the substance of conversations with the Pequot envoys in November i634, stated that the Pequots freety admitted responsibility for the death of Stone and his men. Questioned by the English about the incident, the Pequots, Winthrop noted, explained that their grand sachem had been slain by the Dutch and that they had therefore killed Stone to avenge his death, believing that the captain was Dutch. To English insistence that the killers of Stone should be turned over to them, the Pequots responded that "all the men, who were guilty ... were dead of the pox, except two." They added that if those two "were worthy of death, they would move their sachem to have them delivered." They stipulated, however, that as envoys "they had no commission to do it." Moreover, there was a problem. Stone, "coming into their river," had seized two Indians, "bound them, and made them show him the way up the river." Given Stone's mistreatment of those captives, the envoys implied, the sachem might be very reluctant to take action. Winthrop commented that the Pequots' explanation "was related with such confi- dence and gravity, as, having no means to contradict it, we were inclined to believe it."'16 In a letter to William Bradford, Winthrop wrote that the Pequots claimed they had killed Stone "in a just quarrel."'17

Jennings advises us not to believe Winthrop's account. As previously noted, he finds proof of Pequot innocence in a statement in Mason's chronicle of the Pequot War, that the killers "were not native Pequots" but Indians who had "frequent recourse to them."''8 Mason's testimony implicates the West Niantics. Living on the east bank of the Connecticut River near its mouth, West Niantics, rather than Pequots ten miles to the east, probably would have had first contact with Stone. On the surface, Jennings's acceptance of Mason's account therefore seems reasonable. But there are problems with his interpretation. Captain John Underhill's war chronicle corroborates Winthrop's testimony that the Pequots admitted responsibility and tried repeatedly to explain their reasons to the English. Other Puritan sources confirm that the English generally believed that the Pequots killed Stone.19

Jennings argues that the Puritans often altered, fabricated, or destroyed documentary evidence in order to conceal their misdeeds.20 But there are many reasons to believe that Winthrop, who was the first but not the last

16Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 270; Winthrop,Journal, I, I38-I40; Win- throp to Winthrop, Jr., Dec. i634, in Winthrop Papers, III, ed. Allyn B. Forbes (Boston, I943), I77.

17Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 29 I. 18Jennings, Invasion of America, I94. See Mason, "History of the Pequot War,"

I7. 19 Underhill, "Newes from America," I23; Roger Clap, "Memoirs of Capt.

Roger Clap," in Alexander Young, ed., The Chronicles of the First Planters of Massachusetts Bay from 1623 to 1636 (Baltimore, I975; orig. pub. i846), 363; Michael McGiffert, ed., God's Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety, Being the Autobiography &Journal of Thomas Shepard (Amherst, Mass., I972), 66-67; Hub- bard, Indian Wars in New England, II, 7-I I.

20Jennings, Invasion of America, i 8o-i 85.



WHO KILLED JOHN STONE? 515

to report that the Pequots admitted responsibility, recorded their testimony accurately. His i634 account is found in his correspondence as well as his journal, so it is clear that he did not tamper with the record some years later in order to trump up a justification for the Pequot War. In i634, the English were at peace with the Pequots, regarded them as a friendly power, and had no reason to invent charges against them. That same year, an English visitor, summarizing the colonists' impressions of various Indian groups, described the Pequots as "just and equal in their dealings, not treacherous either to their countrymen or English, requiters of courtesies, affable towards the English."21 It must be emphasized again that in none of the contemporary English accounts of Pequot explanations of the Stone affair, early or late, do the Pequots deny their responsibility for the death of Stone and his men.

If the Pequots were innocent, why did they admit to having killed Stone? One explanation might be that they never actually made such an admission but were misrepresented in Puritan accounts of the negotia- tions. But that is unlikely. As noted earlier, the Bay Colony magistrates in i634 were not biased against the Pequots and had no reason to misrep- resent Pequot statements or to fail to record a Pequot denial. Moreover, the Puritan reports of Pequot testimony contained information about Tatobem's death probably not otherwise available to the English, which suggests that the reports were authentic. There is no evidence that the Dutch reported the incident to the English, nor is there any reason to suppose that they did so. It is reasonable to assume that the Bay Colony leaders learned about it from the Pequots. Discrepancies in the Winthrop, Underhill, and Mason versions appear to reflect the testimony of Indians who recalled the incident from different perspectives. The Pequots who related the circumstances of Stone's death to Winthrop in i634 reported that after Stone's ship anchored for the night on the Connecticut River, the captain and two of his men took their Indian captives ashore, "their hands still bound," and made camp. An Indian rescue party that had followed Stone's ship upriver waited until dark, then attacked, killing Stone and his two men while they slept and freeing the prisoners. The Indians then made for the English ship, but it "suddenly blew up into the air."22 Underhill, however, recorded that the Pequot "ambassador" who parleyed with John Endecott on the banks of the Thames River in i636 told them that Stone had been killed aboard the ship, brained by a Pequot sachem while he lay in his cabin in a drunken stupor. The ambassador related that the ship exploded after the powder magazine was ignited in a scuffle with the crew above deck.23

It is highly improbable that an agreed-upon English fabrication would have contained discrepancies of that sort. The most plausible explanation for the differences in the Winthrop and Underhill versions is that the

21Wood, New England's Prospect, 8o. 22Winthrop, Journal, I, I 39. 23 Underhill, "Newes from America," 56-57.




Pequots pursuing Stone's ship divided into two groups after they saw a landing party with Indian captives go ashore. One group attacked the landing party, freed the prisoners, and, in the dark, mistakenly assumed that one of the men they killed was the captain. Meanwhile, members of the second group boarded the vessel, killed Stone, and set off the powder magazine before the first group rejoined them. The delegation that visited Boston in i634 told the story from the perspective of the land party and may have included participants in that action. The envoy who called on Endecott at the Thames River two years later recalled the incident from the perspective of the boarding party. It is far more reasonable to assume that the discrepancies reflect different Pequot recollections than to con- trive reasons why Underhill did not adhere to a presumed official English lie.

Mason's version is not to be discounted completely. It was probably based on the account of a West Niantic who participated in the raid.24 Mason had no reason to fabricate a story about West Niantic involvement, and, as already noted, there is good reason to believe that the West Niantics participated in the action against Stone. But the evidence of Pequot involvement is even more compelling. Perhaps Pequot warriors were visiting their West Niantic tributaries at the time Stone abducted the two Indians. Or, since the Pequot and West Niantic territories were adjacent, the Pequots may have been informed of the incident soon after it happened. In any case, we have every reason to believe that Pequots joined West Niantics in pursuing Stone and used the occasion to avenge their murdered grand sachem.

The Pequot delegation to Boston in i634 offered furs and wampum in exchange for English friendship and trade. Winthrop observed that, be- cause of the animosity of the Dutch and the Narragansetts, the Pequots believed "they could not trade safely any where." To win English goodwill, they also offered "all their right at Connecticut, and to further us what they could, if we would settle a plantation there." In response, Winthrop and his associates indicated that they would require very substantial payments of wampum and peltry-payments equivalent in value, Jennings tells us, to half the tax revenue of the Bay Colony. In exchange, they promised to send traders to the Pequots but cautioned that they would not enter into any sort of military alliance with them. Winthrop noted that Bay Colony officials conveyed to the Pequots their "willingness to be friends to trade with them, but not to protect them" and added that before any treaty of friendship could be ratified, the Pequots would have to surrender Stone's killers to English justice.25

24Mason, "History of the Pequot War," I7. 25Winthrop, Journal, I, I38-I40; Winthrop to Winthrop, Jr., Dec. i634,

Winthrop Papers, III, I77;Jennings, Invasion of America, 190-I96. Jennings argues that "the Pequots had not permitted Massachusetts to assume a protectorate over them," wishing to remain free of entanglement with Europeans. This writer disagrees with his interpretation of the evidence. Winthrop's comments suggest that the English were wary of entanglement in Connecticut Indian politics, while




Although the Puritans, and some later historians, charged the Pequots with bad faith in not complying with these terms, it should be borne in mind that Winthrop also recorded that the "treaty" was never ratified by the Pequots' ruling sachems.26 It seems reasonable to assume that the sachems, informed that the Bay Colony was willing to offer only a trade agreement, not a protective alliance, saw no reason to make such substantial payments to Boston.

Payment of wampum to a stronger power in Indian New England bought tangible protection, not just goodwill. Moreover, since the payment of wampum in Algonkian custom was a means of atoning for murders as well as obtaining the protection of a stronger power, it is quite likely that the Pequot sachems believed that the wampum they had sent to Boston with the envoys in i634 had settled any grievance the English harbored over Stone's murder. They were wrong.

From the Puritans' perspective, the Pequot failure to deliver all of the wampum and furs discussed with the envoys of i634 offered partial justification for later anxieties about Pequot treachery. The Indians' refusal to hand over the murderers of Stone and his crew aroused deep apprehensions and ultimately provided the official pretext for the punitive war of i636-i637. Historians have been hard-pressed to explain the Bay Colony's intransigence on the issue of retribution for the captain's death. To some, it stands as a particuarly 'blatant example of YPuritan hypocrisy, for Boston had no reason to mourn Stone's passing and good reason to believe that he had indeed abused and provoked the Indians. New England's Puritans described John Stone as a drunkard, lecher, braggart, bully, and blasphemer. He was known to have engaged in smuggling as well as privateering. Adding to his unsavory reputation were rumors that he had resorted to cannibalism while shipwrecked in the Caribbean.27 Shortly before his final voyage, Stone had attempted to steal Plymouth's trading bark on Manhattan Island, had threatened to assault the governor of P)yImo~th CO)0z2r, az ha bees expe))e from MassawChsees fat brawling and wenching. Winthrop recorded that the captain had been "ordered uqQn iqaia of death. tQ cOme here we mQate Q OR- LeatRmgQ(if bi demise, Bradford suggested that Stone had probably abused the Indians. At first, Bay Colony officials were inclined to take no action other than to

the context of events suggests strongly that the Pequots were seeking more than a trading partner. It is worth noting that the Pequots did ask Bay Colony officials to serve as intermediaries with the Narragansetts. The magistrates did arrange a truce but were careful not to align themselves with the Pequots. The latter needed the assistance of a European power and were probably disappointed by the Bay Colony's refusal, as Winthrop put it, "to protect them."

26Henry Vane and Winthrop, "The Instructions which are recommended to John Winthrop, Junr., Esq. in his Negotiation with the Pequots," July 5, i636, Winthrop Papers, III, 285.

27Charles McKew Parr,The Voyages of David DeVries: Navigator and Adventurer (New York, i969), 24I; Vaughan, New England Frontier, I23-I25; Jennings, Invasion of America, i88-i90; DeForest, Indians of Connecticut, 77.




report his death to the governor of Virginia, where Stone had last resid- ed.28

Documentary evidence relating to the Bay Colony's later decision to demand retribution for Stone is sparse and cryptic, but Winthrop's journal and correspondence contain a very interesting disclosure. Remarking twice that the magistrates were "inclined to believe" the Pequot explanation of Stone's death, Winthrop then recorded, in both his journal and his correspondence, that the civil authorities referred the question to the clergy. After "taking the advice of some of our ministers and seeking the Lord in it," Winthrop wrote, the magistrates decided that "peace and friendship" with the Pequots would be possible only if they agreed to "deliver up to us those men who were guilty of Stone's death."29 Given Winthrop's comments, the most probable explanation is that the ministers advised against compromise and the magistrates therefore decided not to forgive the Pequots' mistake.

Jennings and others have argued that the Bay Colony's insistence on retribution for Stone was nothing other than a hypocritical pretext for despoiling the Pequots of land and wampum. Since the Puritans had demanded substantial wampum payments from the Pequots in i634 and i636 and since they did profit from the Pequot War, that interpretation is plausible. But no war's causes can be explained simply by reference to its consequences accompanied by speculation about the motives of its perpetrators. Jennings's interpretation overlooks evidence that illuminates the Puritans' state of mind on the eve of the conflict. It also gives little

28Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 268-269. Winthrop, Journal, I, I02, io8, i i8; "Clap's Memoirs,"363. The two-year interval between the murder of Stone and the outbreak of the Pequot War is often cited as evidence that the Puritans were not in earnest about avenging his death but used the incident opportunisti- cally to provoke an Indian war; see, for example, Jennings, Invasion of America, I94-I95. The Bay Colony authorities, however, did insist on the surrender of Stone's murderers soon after their first contact with the Pequots, persisted in that demand over the next two years, renounced their treaty of friendship with the tribe when it became clear that they were not going to comply voluntarily, and then sent an armed force into Pequot country under instructions to bring home hostages as well as the murderers. The key question, in this writer's view, is not why Bay Colony officials procrastinated; rather, it is why they persisted, given their own misgivings about Stone's character. The answer, I believe, is to be found in their fear of Indian conspiracies, in their determination to discipline and overawe defiant "savages," and in the fact that whatever reservations they may have had about Stone were overshadowed by fresh rumors of Pequot treachery and malevolence. Jennings offers some additional evidence in support of his argument, citing the testimony of a Dutch visitor who claimed to have spoken with an Indian who sported Stone's cloak and boasted of participating in the incident. The fact that the English did not arrest the Indian, in Jennings's view, was proof they had never really cared about avenging Stone; ibid., 227. Jennings assumes far too much. There is no evidence that the Puritans were aware of the Indian's boast. Jennings's assumption that by wearing Stone's clothes the killer was advertising his guilt overlooks the fact that by i639 when this incident presumably occurred, New England Indians commonly wore some European garb when they visited English settlements.

29Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 29I. See also Winthrop, Journal, I, I39.




weight to the ideological background of the war. But the participants' explanations of their actions should not be treated as mere rationalizations for self-interest or masks for greed. Without exception, the contemporary chroniclers claimed that the English waged a defensive war against "savage heathens" who had been led by the devil to plot the destruction of Christ's church in the wilderness. Should we dismiss those statements as wartime propaganda or Puritan cant? Not necessarily, for they can tell us much about English prejudices and preconceptions. These and other sources provide ample evidence that, from the founding of the first English settlements onward, the Puritans saw in native American culture only evidence of diabolical degeneracy, regarded Indians as untrustworthy, and were thus prone to overreact to rumors of Indian treachery.30

Only a few examples of Puritan fears need be cited. Bradford, recount- ing the founding of Plymouth, claimed that the Indians on Cape Cod in i620 had gathered in a "dark and dismal swamp" to seek the devil's aid in repelling the English. God, he declared, thwarted their efforts and com- pelled the satanists to assist the saints instead.3' Bradford's colleague Edward Winslow informed his countrymen in England that the Indians sometimes killed their own children in satanic rituals. He also claimed that God's intervention had saved the colony from their treachery.32 A decade later, William Wood, writing from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, repeated earlier claims about Indian satanism.33 Even Roger Williams, noted for his friendship with Indians, declared that shamans were devil-worship- ing witches and wrote Winthrop from exile in the Narragansett country to warn that the Pequots were planning to use sorcery against the English.34

In assessing the decision to punish Stone's killers, we must bear in mind that fear of Indian malevolence was pervasive in Puritan New England and produced a determination never to show weakness in the face of Indian provocation. The Indian policies that the authorities at Plymouth and Boston forged in the early years of settlement reflected their fundamental distrust and prescribed the use of terror, where necessary, to intimidate the servants of Satan. Thus, in an incident that foreshadowed the Bay

30 For an analysis of the preconceptions that colored Puritan interaction with the Pequots see William S. Simmons, "Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans' Perception of Indians," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXXVIII (i98i), 56-7 2. For a broader perspective see Kupperman, "English Perceptions of Treach- ery, I538-i640: The Case of the American 'Savages,"' HistoricalJournal, XX (I977), 263-287. One must not assume, however, that the Puritans' prejudices led to the development of a systematic plan of conquest and dispossession. As Andrew Delbanco perceptively observes in The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, Mass., i989), 96, "the Indian wars [in New England] ... were not crusades or even products of calculated policy, but conglomerations of error-reactive gestures of revenge .... Delbanco cites the handling of the Stone case as a key example.

31 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 84. 32Edward Winslow, "Good Newes from New England" [i624], in Edward

Arber, ed., The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers ... (New York, I 969), 5 I 5-5 I 6. 33 Wood, New England's Prospect, I 00-I02.

34Roger Williams to Winthrop, c. Aug. i636, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, vol. I, ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie (Hanover, N. H., i988), 54-55.



520 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Colony's campaign against the Pequots, Plymouth in i623 sent an armed force under Miles Standish to massacre a group of Massachusett Indians suspected, on the testimony of their Indian enemies, of conspiring to murder Englishmen.35 The conviction that God's people in the wilderness must deal sternly with savages who threatened Christians explains the clergy's insistence that the magistrates demand that the Pequots, as a sign of their goodwill, surrender the slayers of Stone and his crew; it also explains the magistrates' ready agreement to that condition.

Puritan misgivings about Pequot intentions deepened after the failure of an English trade mission in March i635. Winthrop wrote to Bradford that traders returning from Pequot country described them as "a very false people."36 The Pequots declined to surrender Stone's killers, sent no more wampum or furs to Boston, and advised that their sachems had not ratified the i634 agreement. They did not, however, take any steps to impede English settlement in Connecticut. Nonetheless, in the following year, malicious rumors spread by Indian rivals of Pequot grand sachem Sassacus led authorities in Boston to believe that the Pequots were planning an attack on the isolated and vulnerable English settlements recently established in Connecticut.37 The Puritans also suspected Pequot complicity in the death of several Englishmen on Long Island and disre- garded the advice of an experienced trader who reported that the Pequots were not involved. They accordingly demanded that the Pequots turn over any Indians guilty of killing Englishmen and pay more wampum.38 When the Pequots did not respond, Bay Colony officials formally abrogated the i634 treaty (which the Pequots had never ratified) and warned the Pequots that they could no longer consider themselves friends of the English.39 A few months thereafter, John Oldham, the Bay Colony's commercial agent, was killed on Block Island by Indians tributary to the Narragansetts. While the Puritans understood that the Pequots were not directly involved in the murder of Oldham, they were angered by rumors that the Pequots were sheltering Indians who had killed Englishmen.40 Accordingly, a Puritan force under the command of Endecott, dispatched to punish the Block Island Indians, was sent to Pequot country to demand again the surrender of the murderers. Endecott's instructions also re- quired that he obtain a substantial new wampum payment from the

35Winslow, "Good Newes," 56 I-574.

36Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 29 I-292; Vaughan, New England Frontier, I26.

37Jonathan Brewster to Winthrop, Jr., June i8, i636, Winthrop Papers, III, 270-272; Jennings, Invasion of America, 202.

38 William Pynchon to Winthrop, June 2, i636, Winthrop Papers, III, 267. 39Henry Vane to Winthrop, Jr., July 4, i636, ibid., 284-285; Lion Gardener,

"Relation of the Pequot War," in Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War, I23-I24.

David Pulsifer, ed., Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, vol. i (Boston, i859), I03-I04; Jennings, Invasion of America, 205.

40Winthrop, Journal, I, i86; Underhill, "Newes from America," 54.



WHO KILLED JOHN STONE? 52I

Pequots as well as some Pequot children to serve as hostages to guarantee future good behavior.41

The war that ensued can best be explained as a product of Puritan determination to subdue and control savages believed to be a threat to their security. It was compounded by Pequot inability to understand the English refusal to accept their explanations of Stone's death or to consider the wampum already paid as ample restitution for their error. The Puritans responded to an imaginary threat. The Pequots underestimated a very real danger.

41Winthrop, Journal, I, i 86; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 292.

