Chapter Two: The First Slaves
Out
of a swampy thicket, near the blue waters of Long Island Sound, 200 old
men, women and children stepped into the bright sunshine and entered a
new world.
Hundreds
of edgy soldiers, mustered from villages and farms across Connecticut,
had finally surrounded the Pequots and their leader, Sassacus.
It
was July 13, 1637, a critical day in the Pequot War that had consumed
Puritan Connecticut for several years. Six weeks before, in a key
victory for the colonists, Capt. John Mason had led a massacre at the
Pequot fort in Mystic, killing as many as 700 Indians in a single hour.
attack on the Pequot fort at Mystic
This
summer afternoon was a jubilant one for the Puritans and their Mohegan
scouts who had cornered these "most terrible" Pequots. A new chapter in
American history was about to begin: Indian enslavement in Colonial
America.
Among the
Pequots caught in the bog in what's now part of Fairfield, a group of
perhaps 17, mostly children, were thought to have been exported as
slaves. Others were handed out to soldiers as wartime booty. Historians
believe these 17 Pequots later ended up on an island off Nicaragua. Like
many of the Indian slaves sent from America over the next century,
there is little record of what happened to them.
Barely
five years after their first recorded contact with Europeans, this
final battle of the bloody Pequot War conclusively finished a doomed
experiment by Indians and Puritans to live side by side. By the time the
Treaty of Hartford was signed the following September, formally ending
the war, the English had killed or enslaved more than 1,500 Pequot men,
women and children, scholars believe.
During
the uneasy decades that followed, as the Puritans pushed deeper into
Indian country and their numbers swelled, it was difficult to travel
through Connecticut, Massachusetts or Rhode Island and not encounter an
Indian slave, working in a field, orchard or boatyard.
By
the end of the 1600s, there were probably thousands of Indian slaves,
many of them servants in homes and on farms. It would become, in the
words of Roger Williams, a founder of Brown University, an essential
component of "the Unnecessary Warrs and cruell Destructions of the
Indians in New England."
In
Connecticut and throughout New England, where, 350 years later,
descendants of Indians and Europeans still have an uneasy relationship,
Indian slavery remains a rarely recited part of our history.
Wampanoag, longhouse
"There are a lot of things that people in America don't have any idea about,"' said Everett "Tall Oak" Weeden, an Indian historian who shares both Pequot and Wampanoag ancestry. "History has been sanitized."
The Indians `have their eyes fixed upon us'
A
primal fear of Indians, a desperate shortage of labor, a biblical sense
of entitlement - these forces coalesced, leading to the enslavement of
the Native Americans in southern New England in the 1600s. The colonists
ultimately thought of the conflict as the "civilized" English against
the "savage" natives.
"Partly
it's social control. But they also want the labor. People wanted
household servants," said Margaret Newell, a professor at Ohio State
University who is writing a book on Indian slavery.
In
Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and to a lesser extent in Connecticut,
Newell said, "You would find [Indian] women working as domestic
servants, taking care of children. You would find men working as farm
laborers, drivers. You would find children taking care of livestock."
For
some Indians, servitude lasted only until age 24. But others were bound
to masters for indefinite periods. Indian slaves and household servants
appear on census rolls and court records well into the 18th century.
This
was a time of growing divisions and bloody violence between the native
populations and the Puritans. As the colonists sought to settle in to
their new home in America, there were conflicts, small and large, all
over. It was a time of murdered women and children, of severed limbs and
smashed corpses, when it was not uncommon to see Indian and English
heads mounted on stakes, wigwams burned and frontier farms devastated.
For
many Indians, Mason's brutal Pequot massacre and others after it
remained fresh. For the colonists, the scalpings and mutilations, which
included flayings and torture, seemed too monstrous for any true
Englishman to ever accept.
By
the beginning of King Philip's War in 1675, when Indians attacked and
destroyed town after town in New England, it would be difficult to
overestimate the fear English colonists felt as they sought to conquer
and subdue New England. After a string of stunningly successful Indian
attacks at the start of the conflict, Puritans were well aware that "all
the Indians have their eyes fixed upon us."
Thousands
of English and Indians would perish in the bloody two-year conflict,
named for a regal Wampanoag sachem, or chief, whose father, Massasoit,
sat with the Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving feast. By the end of
1675, it was full-scale battle across New England.
"Many
of our miserable inhabitants lye naked, wallowing in their blood, and
crying, and whilst the Barbarous enraged Natives, from one part of the
Country to another are in Fire, flaming their fury, Spoiling Cattle and
Corn and burning Houses and torturing Men, Women and Children," wrote
one unidentified colonist, quoted in historian Jill Lepore's revealing
1998 book, "The Name of War."
The Indian threat
"strained even the most eloquent colonists' powers of description,"
Lepore writes of a time early in the war when Indians nearly drove the
Puritans from New England's interior.
"I
was so struck by how strident and how fearful these people were,"
University of Connecticut anthropologist Kevin McBride said of his
research into Indians and Puritans of the 1600s. "These guys must have
been panicked."
Enslaving the problems
As
the 17th century wore on, and colonists grew to outnumber natives in
New England by about 2 to 1, Indians were increasingly pursued. A
systematic divvying up of captives from the many Connecticut tribes
emerged. The colonists originally focused on the more warlike Pequots,
but soon members of the Narragansetts, Nipmucks and Wampanoags were also
enslaved.
"The general court appointed certain
persons in each county to receive and distribute these Indian children
proportionately, and to see that they were sold to good families," wrote
Almon W. Lauber in his 1913 book, "Indian Slavery in Colonial Times."
"The
custom of enslavement came from the necessity of disposing of war
captives, from the greed of traders and from the demand for labor,"
explained Lauber, whose book is still considered an essential reference.
Captured
Indian warriors were frequently executed - or shipped to slave markets
around the world. By the time King Philip's War began, Indian slaves,
often women and children, were a common sight across southern New
England.
From Newport, R.I., to Portsmouth,
N.H., Indians came to public auction, "tied neck to neck," and sold for
half of what an African might bring.
A
7-year-old girl was toted to Connecticut from a battle in Massachusetts,
a spoil of war who was handy around the house. At times, there were so
many captured Indians available that a few bushels of corn or 100 pounds
of wool sufficed for payment. A New London man left "an Indian
maidservant" as part of his estate. Another, a farmer and businessman
from the New London area, kept a careful diary noting how common Indian
slaves were on the farms and in the homes of southeastern Connecticut.
And
on sailing ships, bound for the slave markets in Europe, Africa, the
Caribbean and the Azores, Indians were packed away tightly by the
profiteers, who kidnapped or bought them wholesale from Colonial
authorities eager to finance an increasingly costly war against the
Indians.
Indians who surrendered were treated
only slightly more gently in the colony, with the Connecticut General
Court ordering children sold as indentured servants for 10-year terms,
though some would be slaves far longer if they got into legal trouble in
Puritan courts.
A note left by attacking
Nipmuck Indians after the plundering of Medfield, Mass., in February
1676 reveals much about the time: "We have nothing but our lives to
loose but thou has many fair houses and cattell & much good things."
The rewards of war
In
the fall of 1676 the sailing ship Seaflower departed Boston Harbor for
the Caribbean, its cargo hold filled with nearly 200 "heathen
Malefactors men, women and children" sentenced to "Perpetuall Servitude
& slavery."
As Lepore recounts in her book -
one of the few published scholarly examinations of Indian slavery - the
sale and lucrative export of Indians had become by 1676 one of "the
rewards of war" that replenished "coffers emptied by wartime expenses."
Despite government efforts to regulate it, much of the trade was
conducted illegally and ruthlessly.
The slave
export began to heat up in 1675 and 1676, when captives from the rapidly
expanding King Philip's War were filling New England cities, further
frightening the English. Most of the Indians captured and exported out
of New England were from Massachusetts, whose towns suffered the most
from Indian attacks.
Perhaps not surprisingly,
the colonists also found that adult Indian males who were kept as slaves
made poor servants here. Mason said as much, when he wrote of captives
from the Pequot War: "They could not endure that Yoke; few of them
continuing any considerable time with their masters."
African-Indian intermarriage
Records
of Indian slaves turn up well into the 18th century, but the practice
faded rapidly in the 1700s, because of a growing market for African
slaves and the widespread elimination of Indians and their culture.
Scholars like Lepore also said that New England at this time began to
see itself as a place that celebrated liberty and a growing anti-slavery
movement.
Meanwhile, the eradication of Indian
males through war, ravaging diseases and slavery led to significant
intermarriage between native women and African males in the 18th century
and beyond. Thus, as researchers like McBride and Newell note, the
arrival of African slaves would help assure the survival of some Indian
communities into the 21st century - while also setting the stage for
some of the racial tension today.
Narragansett woman dressed up for a powwow
"Slavery
really did have a devastating impact on the Native American population.
Men were more likely to be exported. You had some tribes and
populations where the ratio of women to men is completely out of whack,"
said Newell.
In
the 20th century this would lead to tribes, such as the Narragansett
and Pequots, with members who, to an outsider, look distinctly African
American - but who nevertheless descend from historic New England
tribes.
For
many modern Indians in southern New England, slavery remains an
essential and too-little-discussed element of their being, a chapter
that must be acknowledged to understand the dynamics of today's often
fragile relationship between Indians and non-Indians.
Back to the past
This
year, on the 365th anniversary of the Fairfield "swamp fight" of 1637,
"Tall Oak" Weeden and a delegation of Wampanoag Indians and Mashantucket
Pequots went hunting for remnants of this forgotten slavery era.
Searching
for clues, they traveled to St. David's Island in Bermuda. There they
met with a small clan claiming to be descendants of New England Indian
slaves shipped there centuries ago. Those who went came away convinced
they had struck gold when they saw the faces, the dances and rituals of
the St. David's Indians.
"I
was struck by how much they looked like us," said Michael J. Thomas, a
Mashantucket tribal leader who went on the Bermuda trip this past
summer.
According
to local legend, the wife and son of King Philip might have been among
those on St. David's. After the king's death, his wife, Wootonekanuske,
is said to have married an African man, preserving a genealogical line
with Indians in New England.
The
Pequots, flush with casino wealth and in the midst of their own 21st
century resurgence, plan to dig even further into slavery's hidden
history, Thomas said.
"What's
to be learned is a more accurate perception of Colonial-era history,"
he said. "It helps people to understand our insecurities of today."
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