Chapter 5: In Guns We Trust. During America's early colonial period, if a visitor had asked people about the Pilgrims, the colonists wouldn't have known whom he was talking about. That's because back then nobody called these people the Pilgrims, not even the Pilgrims themselves. Rather, writers of that time generally called them Separatists or Brownists. In general, Separatists were English Calvinists with very similar beliefs and practices as the Puritans.
Yet, unlike the Puritans, the Separatists believed that true Christians should separate themselves altogether from the Church of England instead of trying to reform it, as the Puritans were trying to do. As a result, in England, both the Anglicans and the Puritans persecuted the Separatists. The people we know as the Pilgrims were Separatists, but there were other Separatist groups as well. Although the people of their day often referred to the Pilgrims as Brownists, that name was actually a misnomer.
The name Brownists originally was given to the followers of Robert Brown, a Separatist who believed that ministers didn't need to be licensed by the state. In that sense, almost all American Christians today are Brownists. However, the Pilgrims were not Brownists. They believed that baptism and communion could be performed only by state-licensed preachers. They themselves were pastored by a state-licensed minister.
The Pilgrims did allow elders such as William Brewster to teach, but not to administer communion or baptism. Under King James, the Pilgrims sought permission to leave England and go to the Netherlands, where there was religious toleration. But King James denied their request. Nevertheless, in 1608, the Pilgrims clandestinely left England and fled to the Netherlands without the king's permission. In the Netherlands, they enjoyed full religious freedom.
Most of the Pilgrims had been farmers in England, but in the Netherlands, they had to toil long hours in the city, doing whatever work they could find. Even worse, they had to hire out their children to work for others. Discouraged by their economic difficulties and by the pervasive Dutch influence on their children, the Pilgrims voted in 1617 to emigrate to America. It's important to realize that without Jamestown, the Pilgrims probably would never have considered moving to America.
But Jamestown had been in existence for ten years when the Pilgrims decided to come here. By that time, Jamestown was on its feet and turning a handsome profit from tobacco farming. So the Pilgrims knew it was feasible to settle in Virginia and to make a living there. What many Americans don't realize is that the destination of the Pilgrims was Virginia. However, because of storms and navigational problems, they ended up in Massachusetts instead.
And once the Pilgrims landed there, they decided to go ahead and stay. And the king decided not to make an issue of it. Myths about the Pilgrims. During our school years, most of us were taught all sorts of myths about the Pilgrims. For example, I was taught in grade school that the Pilgrims came to America because they believed in freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. But none of those things are true. The Pilgrims had already obtained freedom of worship in the Netherlands.
Their motive in coming to America wasn't so they could worship freely. Rather, they were seeking better economic conditions, and they wanted to raise their children in an English-speaking community. Moreover, the Pilgrims didn't come to America because they believed in freedom of religion.
They wanted to establish a settlement in which they could worship freely in accordance with their own beliefs, but they never intended that other people could move into their settlement and freely practice whatever they happened to believe. In fact, the Pilgrims' settlement at Plymouth passed a law prohibiting Quakers from living there at all. Furthermore, the Pilgrims didn't believe in separation of church and state. From day one, church and state were united at Plymouth Plantation, the Pilgrims' first settlement.
A person could be fined or imprisoned there merely for attending a Quaker meeting. The Pilgrims and the Indians. Like the settlers at Jamestown, the Pilgrims wanted to live peacefully beside the local Indians. But they came to America with the same attitude as had the Jamestown settlers. The Pilgrims felt they had a God-given right to settle in America, and if the Indians opposed them, they were justified both in defending themselves and in exacting vengeance on the Indians.
For this very reason, the Pilgrims hired a military man, Miles Standish, to accompany them to America. Miles Standish had not been a member of the Pilgrims' church in the Netherlands. He was an English professional military officer and adventurer who had fought in the Netherlands, helping the Dutch in their war of independence. It was in the Netherlands that the Pilgrims met Standish. I remember learning in grade school about the Pilgrims and their friendly relationship with the local Indians.
We learned about Samoset and Squanto, without whose help the Pilgrims may not have survived the first two winters. We learned about Chief Massasoit and the Thanksgiving feast the Pilgrims and Indians shared together. Did all of that really happen? Yes, it did, and it is well chronicled in William Bradford's Plymouth Plantation. However, the impression we received in school was that the Pilgrims always had peaceful and equitable relations with the Indians. And that is not correct.
The Pilgrims' policy toward the Indians was the same as that of the other English settlers. They wanted good relations with the local Wampanoag Indians, but they didn't believe they needed the Indians' permission to settle on their lands. They entered into a treaty with Chief Massasoit, but their treaty didn't treat the white man and the Indian as equals. For example, if one of the Wampanoags harmed a white man, the tribe had to surrender the offender to the Pilgrims for punishment.
But if a white man harmed an Indian, the settlers did not have to turn him over to the Indians for punishment. Moreover, the Indians were to come unarmed anytime they visited the Plymouth settlement. But no such restriction was put on the Pilgrims when they visited the Wampanoag settlements. The Pilgrims attacked the Indians. As more settlers came to Plymouth, some of the new settlers moved out to start a second settlement in Massachusetts. However, they didn't ask the Indians for permission to do so.
Although the Indians had cautiously accepted the initial settlement of Plymouth Plantation, they grew concerned at the prospect of Englishmen establishing additional settlements in their territory. One day, word reached Captain Miles Standish that the Indians were planning to attack this second Pilgrims' settlement. So Standish led a small army of men from Plymouth to the new settlement, which was surrounded by a stockade. It turned out that there had been no Indian attack at all.
Nevertheless, Standish verbally confronted two of the local Indian chiefs, Wituwamat and Pecksuot, who had made threats against the English. The next day, Standish invited these two Indian chiefs and their men into the stockade to enjoy a feast together and work out their differences. But it was really an ambush. After the Indians had entered the stockade, Standish and the other Pilgrims attacked them. They killed Wituwamat, and then Standish cut off his head. They hanged one of the other Indians.
They then surprised the Indians who waited peacefully outside the stockade and slaughtered a number of them. Afterward, Standish took Chief Wituwamat's head back to the Plymouth settlement and stuck it on a pole as a warning to any other Indians to think twice about making threats to the Pilgrims. News of Standish's attack quickly spread among the Native American tribes. As a result, many Indians abandoned their villages and fled the area, thinking that they might be the next ones to be attacked.
Edward Winslow, one of the Pilgrims, wrote in his memoirs that the Indians "forsook their houses, running to and fro like confused men, living in swamps and other deserted places. As a result, they brought manifold diseases upon themselves, from which very many are dead." News of the Pilgrims' attack on the Indians reached their congregation back in the Netherlands. Their pastor, John Robinson, strongly rebuked the Plymouth colony for what they had done.
Concerning the killing of those poor Indians, of which we heard at first by rumor and since by more definite report, oh, how happy a thing it would have been if you had converted some before you had killed any. Besides, where blood once begins to be shed, it is seldom staunched for a long time after. You will say they deserved it, I grant it, but upon what provocation from those heathenish Christians, that is, the white settlers.
Besides, since you were not magistrates over them, you had to consider not what punishment they deserved, but what you were by necessity constrained to inflict. Necessity of killing so many I cannot see. I think one or two principals should have been enough, according to the approved rule, the punishment to a few and so the fear to many. The slaughter also gave Pastor John Robinson concerns about Miles Standish.
Robinson wrote, "Upon this occasion, let me be bold to exhort you to seriously consider the disposition of your captain, Standish. He is a man humble and meek among you and towards all under ordinary circumstances. But if this merely comes from a human spirit, there is a cause to fear that on occasions of special provocation there may be lacking that tenderness of the life of man who is made after God's image, which is appropriate." Consequences of the Pilgrims' Raid.
Standish's murderous raid quickly soured any goodwill the Pilgrims had experienced with the Indians. Furthermore, his raid had severe economic consequences for the Pilgrim colony. After the raid, some of the Indian tribes refused to trade furs with the Pilgrims any longer. This forced the Pilgrims to delay paying the English investors who had financed their settlement in America. The investors were upset with the Pilgrims, and they threatened legal action against them.
Nevertheless, because of the huge distance between England and America, the investors never followed through on their legal threats. Because of their friendship and their value as military allies, Chief Massasoit maintained peace with the Pilgrims throughout his life. However, the Indians' grievances against the Pilgrims kept growing. After Massasoit died, his sons, King Alexander and King Philip, became the leaders of the tribe.
Alexander, Philip, and other Indians never forgot the slaughter that Miles Standish and the Pilgrims had inflicted on the Indians. In addition to that, they had a long list of grievances against the Plymouth colony and its sister settlements. Philip eventually met with representatives from the Plymouth colony and voiced these many complaints. One of the Englishmen made a record of the Indian objections.
Among their complaints were the following: "If twenty of the tribe's honest Indians testified that an Englishman had done them wrong, it was treated as nothing. However, if but one of the worst Christianized Indians testified against any Indian or their king, that was sufficient when it pleased the English." Since the chiefs could not read the land deeds they had signed, they unknowingly had signed deeds that conveyed more land than what was orally agreed upon.
As a result, some of the chiefs had left their own people with no land to live on. On a number of occasions, the Pilgrims got the Indian chiefs drunk and then cheated them in various bargains. The Plymouth settlers didn't fence in their cattle and horses, and so their farm animals destroyed the crops in the Indian villages. The Indians felt the English had the responsibility to make sure their animals stayed on the English settlers' property.
The English were so eager to sell the Indians liquors that most of the Indians spent all in drunkenness and then harassed the sober Indians. However, the Pilgrims and other English settlers didn't correct these wrongs. To make matters worse, in 1662, several of the Pilgrim men barged into the Indian settlement and demanded that King Alexander return with them to Plymouth to address suspicions that were circulating about him.
When Alexander refused to go with them, they forced him at gunpoint to accompany them back to Plymouth. King Alexander was ill at the time, and he died as a result of the journey. After this outrageous treatment, his brother, King Philip, led the Indians in a bloody war against the Pilgrims and other English colonists. The white settlers eventually prevailed, but with considerable casualties. For the Wampanoag, it meant near extinction.
Yet, none of this would have happened if the Pilgrims had treated the Indians lovingly and justly. If they had fully trusted in God instead of their guns, the Pilgrims would have never needed their guns except for hunting. But because they had trusted in their superior arms, they had felt free to act as though they were the Indians' superiors. They felt they could arbitrarily punish certain Indians for various wrongs, real or imagined, but deny the same reciprocal right to the Indians.
Daniel Webster and the Pilgrim Myth. In the early to mid-1800s, as the slavery controversy raged, North Americans wanted to distance themselves from the Jamestown saga because Jamestown was located in a slave state. So they turned to the Plymouth colony as the real foundation of America. They're the ones who started calling the Plymouth settlers the Pilgrims. Daniel Webster, in particular, promoted the myth of the Pilgrims as being the primary founders of America.
This new glorification of the Pilgrims was challenged by a Methodist lay preacher, William Apess. Apess' mother was an Indian, and he identified with the Indians as his people. Although not as famous as Daniel Webster, Apess was an eloquent speaker in his own right. He presented a contrasting view of the Pilgrims in these words: "How they could go to work to enslave a free people and call it religion is beyond the power of my imagination.
O thou pretended, hypocritical Christian, whoever thou art, to say it was the design of God that we should murder and slay one another because we have the power. Power was not given us to abuse each other. In the year 1622, had it not been for the humane act of the Indians, every white man would have been swept from the New England colonies. In the Pilgrims' sickness too, the Indians were as tender to them as their own children.
And for all this, they were denounced as savages by those who had received all the acts of kindness they possibly could show them. In December 1620, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and without asking liberty from anyone, they possessed themselves of a portion of the country, built themselves houses, and then made a treaty and commanded the Indians to accept it. If this were done today to white men, it would be called an insult.
And every white man would be called to go out and act the part of a patriot to defend his country's rights. And if every intruder were butchered, it would be sung upon every hilltop in the Union, would be rung from Georgia to Maine, from the ocean to the lakes, about what fine men and Christians they were in the land. But when a few red children attempt to defend their rights, they are condemned as savages by those, if possible, who have indulged in wrongs more cruel than the Indians.
Who could have supposed that the meek and lowly followers of virtue would have taken such methods to rob honest men of the woods? We might suppose that meek Christians had better weapons than cannons, weapons that were not carnal, but mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds. These are the weapons that modern Christians profess to have. But if the Pilgrims did not have them, they ought not to be honored as such. But let us again review their weapons to civilize the nations of this soil. What are they?
Rum and powder and ball, together with all the diseases, such as smallpox. Let the children of the Pilgrims blush while a son of the forest drops a tear and groans over the fate of his murdered and departed fathers. He would say to the sons of the Pilgrims, "Let the day be dark, the 22nd of December, 1622. Let it be forgotten in your celebration, in your speeches, and by the burying of the rock that your fathers first put their foot upon.
For be it remembered, although the gospel is said to be glad tidings to all people, yet we poor Indians never have found those who brought it as messengers of mercy." In the end, the conduct of the Pilgrims led to a blood-stained land. Sadly, their neighbors, the Puritans, drenched the land with even more blood.