Thursday is the 115th anniversary of the
Massacre at Wounded Knee, in which the Seventh Cavalry killed 150 captured Lakota and wounded another fifty. Wounded Knee ended the "Indian Wars" in the US West, but the Indian hating mentality, which considers non-Europeans as less-than-human, uncivilized savages, lives on. You could make a pretty strong case that the logic of the Iraq War follows directly from just such an "Indian" hating mentality.
In an earlier diary, I showed how two critical documents produced at the founding of our nation - the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance - provide clear evidence that Indian hating has always been a central element of our national consciousness. In this diary, I'd like to go back to the earliest moment of the British colony in North America to see just how deeply rooted an element it is.
Today's story is about the Pequot War, a bloody, genocidal massacre conducted by the Puritan fathers of Salem, Massachusetts against the Pequot Indians of the Mystic and Thames Rivers in coastal Connecticut.
More on the flip.
The defining event of the Pequot War occurred during the early morning hours of May 26, 1637. An English force of some eighty men, led by John Mason and John Underhill, had come upon the principal Pequot town as the Indians were sleeping off a feast. According to historian
Richard Drinnon:
Just before dawn Mason stormed one entrance of the [fortified town] and Underhill the other. The sounds themselves must have been terrifying, with Pequot shouts of alarm, "Owanux! Owanux!" ("Englishmen! Englishmen!"), mixed with war whoops, screams of women and children, musket shots, barked orders. Warriors within the wigwams pelted the English with their arrows so effectively they made "the fort too hot for us," Underhill admitted: "Most courageously these Pequeats behaved themselves." Mason, reaching the same conclusion, declared to his men, "We must Burn them." Immediately stepping into a wigwam he "brought out a firebrand, and putting it into the Matts with which they were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire." Underhill from his side started a fire with powder, "both meeting in the centre of the fort, blazed most terribly, and burnt all in the space of half an hour." The stench of frying flesh, the flames, and the heat drove the English outside the walls: Many of the Pequots "were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. Others [who were] forced out ... our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword. Down fell men, women, and children," Underhill observed, and all but a half-dozen of those who escaped the English fell into the hands of their Narragansett and Mohegan allies in the rear (pp. 42-3).
In the space of little over an hour, the Puritans had killed some four hundred people. Over the next couple of months, the remaining four to five hundred members of the Pequot tribe were hunted down and killed, and the General Assembly of Connecticut later "declared the name of the tribe extinct. No survivors should be called Pequots. The Pequot River became the Thames, and the village known as Pequot became New London" (p. 55).
There is some dispute about why the war began. The precipitating cause was the murder of John Oldham on board his ship off Block Island on the Rhode Island coast, but Oldham was killed by Narragansetts, not Pequots, and his killers had already been murdered, bound hand and foot and tossed into the sea, by English settlers long before the war began. Still, the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts used his death as the excuse for mounting a punitive expedition against the Pequots. When the Pequots retaliated by attacking a Puritan settlement in Fort Saybrook, Connecticut, Massachusetts mounted the genocidal expedition described above.
Historian Alan Taylor sees the war as a simple act of territorial expansion by the Puritans, begun after the Pequots rejected a demand to pay a "heavy tribute in wampum." Drinnon, for his part, believes the sexually repressed Puritans felt threatened by the more open social norms of the Native Americans, but he also sees the land issue as a central factor behind the war. It is undeniable that after their victory, the Salem colonists took possession of the formerly Pequot lands in the Thames and Mystic valleys.
The brutal massacre at Pequot Town defined the war for Indians and settlers alike. According to Taylor, the
indiscriminate slaughter contradicted Indian custom and shocked the Narragansett and Mohegan allies [of the Puritans], who had expected to capture and adopt the women and children. They bitterly complained that the New English mode of war was "too furious and slays too many people." A veteran of warfare in Europe, Captain Underhill dismissed the more limited Indian mode of war as "more for pastime than to conquer and subdue enemies." He sarcastically noted that "they might fight for seven years and not kill seven men." If so, on a single day, Underhill helped to destroy the equivalent of nearly four hundred years of Indian warfare (p. 195).
When English Puritans criticized the brutality of their New England brethren, Underhill replied, "Sometimes the Scripture declareth [that] women and children must perish with their parents.... We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings." Plymouth governor William Bradford likewise thanked God, "who had wrought so wonderfully for [the colonists], thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and given them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy" (p. 195).
To help understand Puritan brutality, it might be helpful to look at how their non-Puritan countrymen had behaved in Virginia nearly thirty years before. In the summer of 1610, following a winter in which many English settlers had resorted to cannibalism to survive, the British at Jamestown went on the offensive against the Indian tribes whose sales of corn had helped save their lives. The Virginia governor sent George Percy "to take Revendge" on the Indians closest to Jamestown. Percy and a body of men seized the principal Paspahegh town, killing fifteen or sixteen people, and took the town's "queen" prisoner.
Following the account of historian Edmund Morgan (who annoyingly wrote in the present tense), this is what happened next:
Percy then has his men burn the houses and "cutt downe their Corne groweinge about the Towne." He takes the queen and the children back to his boats and embarks for Jamestown, but his men "begin to murmur becawse the queen and her Children weare spared." Percy therefore obliges them by throwing the children overboard "and shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water"... Upon returning to Jamestown, Percy hears that the governor is displeased that the queen of the Paspaheghs has been spared. Davis wants to burn her, but Percy, "haveinge seene so mutche Bloodshedd that day," insists that she merely be put to the sword. So she is led away and stabbed (p. 74).
Morgan sums up the colonist mentality like this:
If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians'. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages. It was evident in your firearms, your clothing, your housing, your government, your religion. The Indians were supposed to be overcome with admiration and to join you in extracting riches from the country. But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. They even furnished you with the food that you somehow did not get around to growing enough of yourselves. To be thus condescended to by heathen savages was intolerable. And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much. If it came to that, the whole enterprise of Virginia would be over. So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to the savage way of life (p. 90).
Historian Patricia Seed did not address Indian massacres as such, but she did investigate the mentality British settlers in America used to dispossess Indians of their land. Noting that the English settlement began at the height of the enclosure movement in the English countryside, the settlers believed that one laid claim to land by building houses, fences, and by practicing agriculture. Indians did not do these things, at least not in ways the British could recognize:
"And for the Natives in New England," wrote John Winthrop, "they inclose noe land neither have any setled habitation nor any tame cattle to improve their land by" (emphasis added by Seed). The phrase piles up native deficiencies, "noe enclosures," "neither settled habitation," "nor tame cattle," establishing a series of lacks that can be summarized at the end as the failure to "improve"... Lacking settled habitation (fixed permanent English villages), domestic animals, and fences, Indians (Winthrop and other Puritans reasoned) did not institute full dominion over their land: "And soe [these natives] have noe other but a naturall right to those countries," that is, one that could be extinguished by the arrival of those who had a civil right through the clear action of improvement, -- building fences, planting gardens, constructing houses -- the English signs of possession (p. 39).
To bring this back to Iraq, in the eyes of George Bush and the neo-con authors of the war Iraqis who held no recognizable elections and had no recognizable parliament therefore had no recognizable way to express the popular will in their government. Saddam Hussein could be legitimately removed from power, over and beyond the interests of the Iraqi people and the world community, because military force can be used to occupy a territory where political processes do not hold.
Okay, maybe that last part can be fleshed out a little bit. That's why we have comments on diaries, right? In a future diary, I'll be looking at what Edward Said had to say about Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. Something tells me it might be relevant to neo-con mentality, Indian hating, and the Iraq War.
