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Pequot War

American Genocide: The Mystic Massacre of 1637

Many modern New Englanders have heard of the Great Swamp Fight (Great Swamp Massacre) of 1675 that took place in Rhode Island during King Philip’s War. But few know of an equally horrific event that predated it in Connecticut 38 years earlier — the Mystic Massacre.

The Mystic Massacre: Background

“When a people is grown to such a height of blood and sin against God and man…there [God] hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most terrible death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with the parents….We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”

Thus did Captain John Underhill, Massachusetts Bay Colony, justify the slaughter of hundreds of helpless Pequot women, children and the aged at Mystic, Connecticut Colony, in 1637.

Bas relief of Capt. John Underhill near the Underhill Burying Ground on Long Island.

The Pequot Indians were one of the numerous Native American tribes spread out throughout territory now called New England and Long Island when Dutch and English colonists arrived from the Old World. Up to the 17^th century, the Pequot nation included the Mohegans, who split from the tribe and later turned into implacable enemies.

Modern archaeological and historical evidence has shown that the Pequots inhabited large portions of the area now known as Connecticut and the Connecticut River Valley. When the Europeans first arrived, they dominated the area between the Niantics in the west and the Narragansetts in the east. Estimates put the Pequot population at 16,000 in 1620.

A Pivotal Year

The year 1633 proved pivotal for the Pequot. Dutch settlers set up a trading post, the House of Good Hope, in Hartford. Then they seized and executed an important Pequot sachem, claiming violation of an agreement. That same year, an epidemic of some form of European-introduced disease wiped out 80 percent of the Pequot population.

Up to this point, the Pequot had powerfully opposed European incursion into their ancestral homelands. But their hegemony eroded swiftly as the English and Dutch carried out plans to expand trade and land ownership. The devastating epidemic and friction with neighboring Native American peoples also ate away at Pequot strength. Both the Dutch and the English waited to seize on any excuse to move against them.

A Murder Sets Off More Violence

In July 1636, Narragansett warriors allied with the Niantics raided an English ship near Block Island, killing a trader named John Oldham and some crew. Plymouth Colony had expelled Oldham as a troublemaker. The Narragansetts were rivals of the Pequot, and there is no evidence that the Pequot had anything to do with the raid. But proof didn’t matter, as with most colonial and later settler interactions with Native Americans. Retaliation against the Pequot followed swiftly. That inevitably led to Pequot raids. Pequot warriors raided Wethersfield in Connecticut Colony on April 23, 1637, killing six men and three women.

The turmoil in Connecticut and Block Island caused Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island colonists to get involved. Massachusetts treated Oldhams’ death as a cause celebre, conveniently forgetting Plymouth Colony had expelled him. In August, Massachusetts Gov. Henry Vane sent a punitive expedition to Block Island. John Endicott led a party of 90 men, attacking empty villages, and claiming victory.

John Endecott invades Block Island

He then marched along the coast to a Pequot village, making demands to give up the Niantic raiders. While the Pequots had given refuge to some of the Niantic raiders, they had no direct involvement in the killing of Oldham and his crew. Claiming that the Pequot were stalling, Endicott attacked and burned down the village and crops. Considering the Pequots had nothing to do with Oldham’s death, they were understandably upset.

Gathering Storm

Connecticut colonists then had to deal with the aftermath of the Massachusetts Bay Colony raid.

The Pequots had few allies. Only the Western Niantics joined them. Their traditional enemies, the Mohegans, joined the English. So did the Narragansett, urged by Roger Williams.

The spring of 1637 saw numerous raids on colonial settlements in Connecticut and the besieging of Fort Saybrook. For the Pequot however, spring marked the calm before the coming storm.

In May 1637, the colonial governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut decided to destroy the Pequot. For the English it was a crusade. For the Pequot, it was the coming Armageddon. Militias under Capt. John Underhill of Massachusetts Bay, Capt. John Mason of Connecticut Colony, and some volunteers from Plymouth Colony gathered near Mystick Fort (modern Mystic, Conn.). There warriors from the Narragansett and Mohegans joined them. They led the colonists to the site of the main Pequot fort.

The Mystic Massacre

Before dawn on May 26, 1637, colonial militia and their Indian allies surrounded one of two fortified Pequot villages at Mystick. Underhill, dividing his forces, began approaching the two village entrances. As they came forward, a dog sounded an alarm, alerting in turn an Indian, who called out “Owanux, Owanux” (“English, English”). Rushing forward, the attackers began firing into the village. The Pequot initially resisted, and they started to overwhelm 20 soldiers who had entered. Then the English set fires that rapidly spread, creating chaos.

Engraving depicting the attack on the Pequot Fort, published in 1638.

As the Pequot rushed to escape the fires, the waiting soldiers cut them down. It was a slaughter. The brutality and wanton killing shocked even the Narraganset and Mohegan allies. One Native complained about the “manner of the Englishmen’s fight…because it is too furious, and slays too many men.”

It was not all one-sided initially, and the Pequot resisted where they could. But only a handful of warriors had manned the fort, trying to protect the rest: dependent women, children and the aged.

Casualties

The English killed between 400 and 700 Pequot. The Pequot killed two Englishmen and wounded 26. The disparity in deaths highlights the lack of warriors present. In a small touch of irony, the English wounded about 40 Narraganset warriors because they had trouble telling one Indian from another. While there is some question as to the actual author, a quote attributed to Capt. Underhill noted:

Statue of John Mason at Mystic, since removed

“Captaine Mason [Connecticut] entring into a Wigwam, brought out a fire-brand, after he had wounded many in the house, then he set fire on the West-side where he entered, my selfe set fire on the South end with a traine of Powder, the fires of both meeting in the center of the Fort blazed most terribly, and burnt all in the space of hafe an houre…many were bujrnt in the Fort, both men, women and children, others forced out…which our souldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword; downe fell men, women, and children…not above five of them escaped out of our hands.”

Aftermath of the Mystic Massacre

The Mystic Massacre drained the spirit from the Pequot people and sent them on the run. Abandoning their villages, they fled west along the coast to attempt to gain refuge with the Mohawks. There were about 400 warriors left, virtually none present at the massacre. The English eventually surrounded them in a swamp near modern Fairfield, Conn. Called the Fairfield Swamp Fight, this time the mostly women and children were allowed to surrender. Sassucus, the Pequot chief, escaped with about 80 warriors and sought refuge with the Mohawk. The Mohawk in turn murdered him and his warriors, sending his head and hands back to the English at Hartford.

The Pequot War had now ended. The Narraganset and Mohegans met in Hartford and signed the Treaty of Hartford on Sept. 21, 1638. Only a few hundred Pequot survived the war. Some were divided up among the Narragansetts and the Mohegans. The rest were shipped as slaves to Bermuda, the West Indies or to colonial households. They were forbidden to call themselves Pequot or to ever inhabit their native land again.

Treaty of Hartford

The English viewed the victory over the Pequots as an act of God.

Survival of the Pequots

While all the actions of the colonists were directed to the extermination of the Pequot, in the end the Pequot identity survived. In another small touch of irony, the Mohegans treated their Pequot captives so badly that Connecticut Colony removed them to two reservations in 1683. Since that happened 66 years after the massacre, it seems likely that only a handful of these people were actual survivors of the massacre.

Mashantucket Pequot Museum Exhibit showing Pequot warrior (Ledyard, Conn.)

By 1910, there were only 66 Pequot listed on the U.S. Census. While numbers continued to fall, they rose again beginning in the 1970s. Various lawsuits followed resulting in a settlement for land illegally sold in 1856. In 1983, the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Land Claim act was passed. It recognied them as a tribe by Federal definition, and allowed the buy-back of their lands to create a reservation. In 2002, the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation was formally recognized.

The Pequot War Origin Story

Lest one think that at least some of the past wrongs were righted by this recognition, the State of Connecticut opposed their formal recognition to prevent casinos being established. The Bureau of Indian Affairs then withdrew the recognitions. Perhaps the Pequot War of 1637 is not yet over.

Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly given the American penchant for myths, a Thanksgiving myth arose out of the massacre. The governor of Massachusetts Bay announced a celebration of thanksgiving for the “victory.” This has somehow been interpreted by some in modern literature as one of the origins of the Thanksgiving we know today. It has no more basis in reality than the Plymouth Thanksgiving story. At least the Plymouth origin story highlights a good narrative. The Pequot War origin story stems from the celebration of mass murder.

The author of this story, William Utley, recently published his second book, “Fort Niagara: The British Occupation from 1759-1796” with Patricia Kay Scott.

Images: Statue of John Mason at Mystic By MoonWaterMan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47118910. Pequot warrior By User: Stilfehler at wikivoyage shared, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23029164.

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Native-American Slavery in New England

Native-American slavery began almost as soon as English colonists arrived in Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. The earliest records date to 1636. By the end of the 17th century, the colonists enslaved over 1,200 Native Americans or sold them as slaves to other colonies.

Prior to 1700, colonists enslaved most of the Native men, women and children after capturing them in war. The Pequot War from 1636-38 provided New England leaders the chance to increase trade in Native-American slaves. A powerful trading nation, the Pequot dominated southern New England in the decades before the English arrived. Though they did not expand beyond southeastern Connecticut, the other Native Nations felt the Pequot’s trading power. The arrival of the English made a volatile situation worse. Aligning themselves with the Narragansett, Niantics and Mohegans, colonists used the murder of two English traders as an excuse to ignite the conflict.

The Pequot War

According to historian Alfred A. Cave, “Puritan chroniclers freely admitted that their military offensive against the Pequot Indians was highly punitive, deliberately intended to inflict the maximum number of casualties.” During the yearlong conflict, the English killed over 700 of the approximately 4,000 Pequot and enslaved many more. The colonists and their allies killed many of the male captives. The women and children who could not escape were to “be disposed aboute in the townes” of New England, or sold into slavery in colonies as far away as the Caribbean and Nicaragua.

Trespassing

After the English destroyed the Pequot nation, their hegemony slowly grew in the area. Warfare and disease left Native-American villages throughout New England vacant. As the number of English colonists grew, they began moving into these ghost towns. That decreased the distances between English settlements and Native American villages. But as the English moved farther and farther inland, they brought their livestock with them.

English farmers routinely let their livestock roam free in the forests surrounding their burgeoning settlements. Often the animals found their way into the fields of Native American farmers and ate their crops. The Native Nations of New England complained to the colonial government, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. Fed up, many began killing any English livestock that wandered into their fields. Tensions rose and led to an inevitable war. Metacomet, known by the English as King Philip, leader of the Wampanoag, reportedly said that “for forty Yeares Time, Reports and jealosys of War had bin very frequent, that we did not thinking that now a War was breaking forth.” However, he wrote, “about a Week before it did, we had Cause to think it would.”

Metacomet, known as King Philip

King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War lasted three years. Metacomet rallied a large Native-American alliance, consisting of several Native Nations of New England to fight. Ultimately, the English prevailed, further cementing their hegemony in the region. Recounting the war in 1685, a colonist by the name of Edward Randolph noted that “upward of 3000 Indian men women and children destroyed, who if well managed would have been very serviceable to the English, which makes all manner of labour dear.” During King Philip’s War, the English enslaved huge numbers of Native American captives, claiming it as their right in a “just war.” They often sold hundreds of Native American captives at large scale auctions. Others got assignments “to individuals as rewards for wartime service, and as a form of monetary restitution to war-battered English towns.”

A scene from King Phillip’s War, illustration from Indians of North America by George M. Bodge

King Philip’s War was a turning point in the history of New England. The colonists captured and killed almost 50 percent of the Native American populations. They lost 5 ,000 of 11,000 Indigenous souls in southern New England. The war also drastically changed the way Native American slavery operated.

Native-American Slavery Begins to Change

Prior to the 18th century, most Native-American slaves were war captives or refugees. The English called it something different; they “sold and devoted unto servitude “By the second half of the 17th century, Native-American slavery began to look much different.

The English felt confident in their dominance of the region and tried to assert sovereignty over all the Native Nations. They felt it right to consider the Native Americans of New England subject to English colonial law. Native Americans did not agree. Nevertheless, the colonists consistently set out to punish Native Americans who broke English law. These offenses ranged from “killing Cattle and Shepe,” stealing a handkerchief and “Eatting of mottin that was stolen.” When English judges found Native Americans guilty of breaking English law, they sentenced them to indentured servitude. Once indentured, they could be bought and sold throughout New England and beyond. And, if they tried to escape and failed, colonial officials would tack years onto their sentences. That effectively tied them to lifelong slavery. Thus, the colonists found ways to keep Native-American slavery alive even when the numbers of POWs declined.

Going to Court

Native Americans did not take this lying down. Since before King Philip’s War, Native Americans tried to use the English court system to retain sovereignty and resist English incursion. In 1700, leaders of the Mashpee petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to free several Mashpee thrown into debtors’ prison.

In the petition, Simon Popmoney, George Wapock and the other leaders claimed the English frequently made them and their children servants for too long. They pleaded “Ignorance of the Law, weaknes, foolishnes, & Inconsideration.”

“[S]ome of us that are Elder, & severall of our Children have run in to the English mens Debts, and not being able, nor perhaps careful to pay att the time appointed; our Self & our poor Children, are frequently made Servants for an unreasonable time.”

In this letter we see a rather brilliant strategy unfolding. By using such subordinate language, the Mashpee leaders attempted to use the English colonists’ own notions of superiority against them. By claiming fault through “Ignorance…weaknes, foolishnes, & Inconsideration” they told the English what they wanted to hear. Nevertheless, they defended their sovereignty by asserting the unfairness of long stretches of servitude. Unfortunately, the results of such cases depended upon the presiding judge, who often had Native American slaves himself.

The Long Life of Native-American Slavery

Perhaps as a response to the widespread abuse of indentured servitude after King Philip’s War, colonies created laws governing the status of Native Americans. In the early 18th century, Massachusetts passed a law rating Native American, as well as African, slaves with “horses and Hogs.” While in the past, the English bought and sold Native American slaves while they had term left on their indenture, but they still viewed them as people — unequal to Europeans, but people nonetheless. Now, English eyes viewed Native Americans as property.

Rhode Island attempted to ban the practice. But, in the end, the ban had little to no effect. It allowed indentures of children for up to 30 years. In colonial New England, that amounted to a life sentence.

Ultimately, the practice of Native-American slavery persisted up to the Revolution, if not beyond. In 1744, a physician from Annapolis visited a southern Connecticut town with an African slave. [T]he children were frightened att my negroe, for here negroe slaves are not so much in use,” he wrote. “Their servants being chiefly bound or indentured Indians.”

Thirty years later, the Rhode Island census of 1774 showed over 35 percent of Native Americans in the colony lived with white families.

The author of this story, Jordan Baker, holds a BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com, where he has also written about the Mourning Wars.. This story was updated in 2022.

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The West Indies Send Sugar, Slaves and Red Sox Stars to New England

For four centuries, the West Indies have made an outsized impact on New England. In 2018, West Indian stars and a West Indian manager brought the Boston Red Sox to a World Series championship.

West Indians have come to New England as doctors, teachers, ministers, slaves, farm workers and servants, depending on when they came.

Beginning in the 17^th century, merchants like Connecticut horse jockeys, Rhode Island slavers and Boston banana importers have traded with the West Indies. Well into the 19^th century, retail shops called West India Goods Stores sold items from the Caribbean and all over the world.

And West Indians came to New England in waves – from the British and Spanish West Indies, the French Antilles and the Dutch Caribbean. Some were Afro-Caribbean, like W.E.B. Du Bois’s father, some were Euro-Caribbean, like Oscar de la Renta, Jackie Kennedy’s favorite designer.

Kevin Youkilis, Alex Cora and Dustin Pedroia.

And some came as key players for the Boston Red Sox. Rafael Devers came from the Dominican Republic. Xander Bogaerts came from Aruba. Christian Vazquez and manager Alex Cora came from Puerto Rico.

So when the Red Sox clinched the world championship in Los Angeles, Cora acknowledged a historic relationship when he said, “I can’t imagine what’s going on in Boston, I can’t imagine what’s going on on my island.”

West Indies Trade

Tragically, the first documented West Indians in New England were slaves from Barbados. European slavers bought captured Africans and took them to Barbados in the British West Indies to work on ever-larger sugar plantations.

Because the West Indian planters grew few crops other than sugar cane, New England traders seized the opportunity to sell them farm produce, livestock, salted fish and wood products. They brought back sugar, molasses and some of their slaves on the two- to five-week voyage.

Enslaved Afro-Caribbeans first came to Massachusetts in 1638 and to Connecticut in 1639. At the end of the Pequot War in 1669, the Puritans tried to force captured Indians into slavery. The Indians, though, ‘would not endure the yoke,’ so the Puritans sent them to the West Indies in exchange for captive African laborers.

On the eve of the American Revolution, Massachusetts and Connecticut each had about 5,000 black people living within their borders. Most had lived in or were born in the Caribbean.

As late as 1860, one in five black Bostonians had a Caribbean birthplace. Many West Indians were free, and some quite successful. Prince Hall from Barbados founded the Negro Masonic Order in Boston in 1775. John Brown Russwurm from Jamaica founded the first African-American newspaper after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1826.

W.E.B. Du Bois, born free to a Haitian father in Great Barrington, Mass., in 1868, rose to international prominence as a historian, sociologist and civil rights leader.

An 1855 map of the West Indies

2nd Wave from the West Indies

From 1900 to 1930, a second wave of immigrants from the West Indies arrived, mostly from the English-speaking islands. They were typically literate and skilled, and a significant number had worked as professionals and in offices. Others were dockworkers, porters, laborers and domestic servants.

They came because they suffered tremendous economic hardship due to the decline of the Caribbean sugar plantation during the late 19^th century. And they came to New England for a very specific reason: cheap steamer fares.

During the late 19^th century, a group of Boston merchants called Boston Fruit ran a steamship service between the West Indies and Boston. They imported bananas, coconuts, oranges and lemons, eventually becoming Chiquita Brands International.

Boston Fruit’s steamer also carried passengers, including West Indians coming to Boston, the first port of call. They also settled in New Haven, Cambridge, Mass., and New York. Florida, though, had the highest concentration of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in 1900, just under 22 percent..

In 1924, immigration from the West Indies all but stopped with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. The law sharply limited immigration from countries outside of Western Europe.

Then the Great Depression came, and many immigrants returned to the West Indies, forced home by economic hardship and even more restrictive immigration policies.

World War II

Puerto Rican men immigrating to the United States. Photo from the film ‘Puerto Rican Passages.”

In 1900 Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens, and for the next 45 years about 90,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the continental United States. Some came to work in defense plants during World War II. But it wasn’t until 1945 that the Great Migration of Puerto Ricans started, lasting until 1964.

Half a million people from the islands, 21,000 a year, came to the mainland, many as farm workers. Some stayed in Springfield, Mass., and Hartford, Conn. They were joined by Jamaican contract farm workers picking apples, tobacco, melons and blueberries.

Life was harsh for Puerto Ricans in New England’s declining industrial cities. Young Puerto Ricans rioted from Worcester to Waterbury during the late 1960s through the 1970s. Many returned to the island.

Jamaicans

The flow of West Indian immigrants slowed in 1952, when Congress enacted an immigration law, the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. It aimed to keep out black immigrants, and it worked.

But like a pendulum, immigration laws loosened up in 1968. They let in close to half a million Caribbean immigrants, mostly Cubans, to Florida. The number of Jamaicans rose eightfold, to about 75,000 in the ’60s. Then it almost doubled in the ’70s to 140,000 and rose again in the 1980s to 208,000 in the 1990s.

In New England, Jamaicans concentrated in the Hartford and Bridgeport areas of Connecticut, which has the fifth highest population of Jamaicans in the country. The Blue Hills neighborhood of Hartford, in fact, has the densest concentration of Jamaicans in the United States. Jamaicans have also settled in the Boston area and throughout New England. Jamaican musicians perform at reggae festivals all over the region. Even Brattleboro, Vt., has a Jerk Festival.

Dominicans

Big Papi, David Ortiz

Today, three New England states – Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut – have some of the densest populations of people with West Indies heritage in the country. Only Florida and New York have more.

The arrival of Dominican immigrants from the West Indies contribute heavily to the West Indian presence in New England. Beginning with the assassination of President Trujillo in 1961, a series of political and economic crises drove waves of Dominicans to the United States.

Dominicans comprise the largest Hispanic group in Rhode Island – 35,008 in 2010. They also dominate the Hispanic population in eastern Massachusetts. The Connecticut cities of Danbury, Waterbury and Bridgeport have large Dominican populations.

Only New York City has more Dominicans than Lawrence, Mass., with 30,243 as of 2010. And when Marcos Devers was appointed as Acting Mayor of Lawrence, he became the first Dominican-American mayor of a U.S. city.

Massachusetts, in fact, has the fourth largest Dominican population (103,292 in 2010) in the United States. The Bay State can also claim David Ortiz, the Red Sox legend, now an American citizen living in suburban Boston.

End Notes

Images: David Ortiz By Arturo Pardavila III from Hoboken, NJ, USA – CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52501471; Alex Cora By Eric Kilby – Three Amigos, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63535958.

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Six Places Renamed Out of Spite

Many New England cities and towns have been renamed over the years. When the European settlers arrived, they usually changed Indian names to those from their home country. And then they sometimes renamed a place again.

The Puritans, for example, first called Boston Trimontaine after the three hills on the peninsula. John Winthrop soon renamed the town Boston after the hometown of several prominent colonists. The new name would fit better, as Bostonians eventually cut down their three hills.

Townspeople, though, sometimes renamed themselves because they didn’t like what the old name represented. Sometimes they didn’t have a choice, as when a new authority arrived and tried to assert his power over a town.

Here, then, are six towns renamed for spite. If you know of any others, please mention them in the comments section.

Pochoug, Conn.

The Patchogue River in Westbrook.

Westbrook, Conn., originally belonged to Saybrook, which came under attack by Indians during the Pequot War. When the Pequot threat ended, about 40 families moved to West Saybrook to an area known by the Indian name of Pochoug. The word meant ‘place where the river divides,’ and refers to the Patchogue and the Menunketesuck rivers.

In 1810, the town petitioned the General Assembly to rename it Westbrook. The petition noted that ever since the first settlement it had ‘retained the Indian name of Poochague or Poorchague, which name it is believed very few if any, can either spell or pronounce correctly.’ The name was said to be ‘inconvenient to the said inhabitants and to the public.’

Connecticut is full of towns with portmanteau names, and ‘Westbrook’ probably derived from ‘West Saybrook.’ However, we note that Col. Thomas Westbrook had fought Indians during Father Rale’s War.

Gorgeana, Maine

Nubble Light in York, Maine

When King James I in 1620 gave Sir Fernando Gorges a patent to colonize the New World, Gorges thought that included Massachusetts. After all, the king had specified he was to ‘plant, rule, order and govern’ all the land between New France and Virginia.

Gorges, an Anglican and a Royalist, began by financing the settlement of Maine. He hoped to turn it into a series of feudal plantations, and he named one settlement after himself — Gorgeana.

Maine’s neighbor, Puritan Massachusetts, grew in population, wealth and power. Anglican Maine did not. So by 1658, the Puritans from Massachusetts went town by town to persuade what is now Maine to join Massachusetts.

Names carried great importance to the early New England Puritans. And so when Gorgeana agreed to join Massachusetts, the Puritans decided to rename it York. The name York carried a special sting because it was the name of a Royalist city in England that fell to the Puritan Parliament during the English Civil War.

New Glasgow, Mass.

The White Church in Blandford, Mass.

Scots-Irish families first came to Blandford in 1735 and called their settlement ‘New Glasgow.’ They had good reason: The people of Glasgow, Scotland, had promised them a church bell if they named their town after them.

The colonists of Massachusetts Bay only tolerated the Scots-Irish because they provided a useful buffer against hostile Indians on the frontier. In 1741, the settlers petitioned royal Gov. William Shirley for incorporation as the Town of New Glasgow. Shirley instead renamed the town Blandford, supposedly for the ship that had just carried him to Boston.

But what did Shirley have against Glasgow? He probably wasn’t keen to recognize the Scottish city. After all, enraged Glaswegians had recently rioted against a malt tax, driven out the British military and destroyed the home of their parliamentary representative.

Blandford didn’t get its bell.

Adams, N.H.

Jackson, New Hampshire

Nestled in the White Mountains near Maine’s border, Jackson, N.H., was originally named New Madbury after the Seacoast town from which its first settlers came. The town renamed itself Adams in 1800 to honor John Adams, just elected president as a Federalist Party member.

But then two Democratic-Republicans won election — Benjamin Pierce as governor of New Hampshire in 1827 and Andrew Jackson as president in 1829. Rivalry between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans could get fierce. So when Adams, N.H., petitioned the General Court for incorporation as a town in 1829, Pierce brought to bear his influence. Adams was renamed Jackson.

Haversham, R.I.

Westerly, R.I.

In 1684, British authorites sought to assert their control over their colonies in New England. They annulled the colonial charters and combined the colonies into the Dominion of New England. In 1686 they appointed Joseph Dudley, a native of Roxbury, Mass., as president of the Council of New England, which included Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and the Narragansett Country in Rhode Island.

Dudley had a tough time of it. Magistrates and military officers refused to serve and Puritan leaders ignored him. He traveled to Narragansett to establish his authority there, and he renamed Westerly ‘Haversham,’ Kingstown ‘Rochester’ and Greenwich ‘Dedford.’

Sir Edmund Andros took over from Dudley with the added territory of Connecticut and Rhode Island. He didn’t last long, only until 1689, when Bostonians sent him packing. In England, a new king took the throne and restored the colonial governments. Haversham was renamed Westerly.

Sodom, Vt.

Back in the day, quarrying often used to attract rough men who enjoyed women and liquor when they weren’t blasting rock. Sodom, an unincorporated village in the central Vermont town of Calais, was apparently one such place. Sodom had several active quarries, but no church.

According to lore, a local preacher pounded his fist on the pulpit and said, “I am adamant that we change the name of this town!” Citizens in 1905 petitioned the Legislature to change the name, and Sodom was renamed Adamant.

Village boosters say the name was chosen to reflect the hardness of granite. We like the other explanation better, though.

Images: The White Church, Blandford, Mass. By Rhcowles – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31505090; Sodom, Vt. By Erikamit – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39732709. This story was updated in 2023.

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William Pynchon Leaves Connecticut in 1637 and Takes Springfield With Him

Springfield, Mass., and the rest of Western Massachusetts, might well belong to Connecticut today if William Pynchon had not decided to leave Connecticut and join with Massachusetts in an acrimonious dispute in 1637.

William Pynchon, one of the original founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, arrived with John Winthrop in 1630. Rather than staying by the coast, however, Pynchon moved inland. He bought land in what was called Agawam from the American Indians and named it Springfield after his home in England.

Out of Step

William Pynchon marched somewhat out of step with his Puritan comrades in more than just the fine points of religion. He had a more pragmatic approach to business than a typical Puritan. He believed in trading with the local Indians, not fighting with them.

As one of his first acts when coming to Springfield, he made a deal with the local Indians. He procured land and compensated them for it. Then he made agreements to allow the Indians to continue to use the land for hunting and other purposes. Further, he agreed to restrict his pigs on the side of the river where the Indians grew corn, so they couldn’t invade their cornfields.

Puritans burning the book by William Pynchon, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.

Pynchon’s fellow settlers in Connecticut and Massachusetts had more fractious relations with the Indians — perhaps because they didn’t live among so many of them.

Springfield was controlled by a government made up of the river towns of Hartford, Windsor, Wethersfield and Springfield. Then that government declared war on the Pequot Indians.

The Pequot War

This left William Pynchon in a precarious position. Springfield, which only had a handful of settlers, could expect no defense in case of Indian attack. Nevertheless William Pynchon received a war tax bill. When he balked at paying, the authorities at Hartford hauled him before them.

In the spring of 1638, when the snow receded enough for William Pynchon to reach Hartford, he answered the charges (and probably paid the tax). While there, the local government gave him a monopoly on the fur trade in Springfield. The news did not sit well with Pynchon. He would have had a virtual monopoly on it anyway, and the new designation meant he had to pay a tax on every pelt he bought from Indians.

William Pynchon

The river towns to the south of Pynchon also had a food shortage that year, the war having limited the colony’s ability to focus on growing corn. So the magistrates directed Pynchon to procure 500 bushels of corn from the Indians near Springfield at five shillings per bushel. What Pynchon discovered, he would later report, was that the Indians wanted eight shillings. He was not authorized to pay that price.

The next move by the river towns was to send another man, John Mason, to Springfield to procure the corn. Mason was a hero to his Connecticut countrymen, having led a deadly rout against Pequots at Mystic the year before. The Indians did not hold him in such high esteem, though they were not Pequots.

According to William Pynchon, he tried to broker a deal between Mason and the Indians, but the Indians would not part with corn at the price offered.

Back to Hartford

Returning to Hartford, John Mason charged that William Pynchon held up any deal in hopes of profiting himself. The Puritan governments believed that the public good outweighed private profit and fixed the prices of essential commodities. To their thinking, the price for corn should be, if anything, lower than it had been in the past.

The Hartford authorities again summoned William Pynchon to answer charges of “unfaithfull dealing in the trade of corne” and for ignoring his duties as a magistrate of the colony. They fined Pynchon 40 bushels of corn for failing to deliver the Indian corn at the price of six shillings per bushel. The river towns then sent Mason again to Springfield, this time with a band of armed men, and threatened the Indians if they did not sell corn. The Indians agreed, but at a price of 12 shillings per bushel.

Despite Pynchon’s protests, the Connecticut authorities went so far as to write to the church at Roxbury to undermine his reputation there. Later that year, the leadership of Massachusetts and Connecticut gathered to settle questions over the boundary of the two colonies,. Then, William Pynchon declared Springfield belonged to Massachusetts.

Banned in Boston

Despite some protests from the river towns, Massachusetts officially took Springfield by 1642. Pynchon, meanwhile, did not live happily ever after in Massachusetts. He continued to chafe against Puritan practices and beliefs. In 1650 he published a religious tract — The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption — the first book banned in Massachusetts. Many would follow. (Read more about his banned book here.)

William Pynchon was accused of heresy. At the same time, the colonies were beginning to get whipped up over witchcraft. Sensing the dire mood, Pynchon gave title to his lands to his son. He departed for England in 1652, where he lived the life of a wealthy man for the next 21 years.

Thanks to: William Pynchon, Founder of Springfield; Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. This story was updated in 2022.

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How the Slave Trade Took Root in New England

On Feb. 28, 1638, the slave trade probably began in New England when a ship arrived in Massachusetts Bay from the West Indies. The Salem ship Desire carried enslaved Africans along with the other cargo of cotton and tobacco.

After a slow start, the slave trade would take root in New England. First it flourished in Massachusetts, then gained a toehold in coastal New Hampshire. Finally it dominated Rhode Island, which became the biggest slave market in the colonies.

In the slave trade, captured Africans were packed belowdecks in a transatlantic slave ship.

Over time, the African-American population would reach 10 percent in some parts of New England. As the slave population rose, so did the number of free blacks. Africans could buy their freedom, or they could win it by fighting in the Revolution or by getting too old to work. Black men could escape their bonds and go to sea.

But many African-Americans would learn the sad truth that freedom was just another word for harassment and discrimination.

The Slave Trade in New England

English settlers had tried to enslave Indians in 1636 and 1637, capturing them after they lost the Pequot War. The Indians made lousy slaves, however, as the Puritans complained they would ‘not endure the yoke.’ So they sent the captured Indians to Bermuda, preventing them from uprising. The Puritans then exchanged the Indian prisoners for enslaved Africans.

The Massachusetts Puritans in 1641 made slavery legal. And until the 18^th century, it was Massachusetts merchants who mostly supplied slaves to New England. Peter Faneuil built Faneuil Hall in Boston with money inherited from his uncle’s slave trade.

Phillis Wheatley, victim of the slave trade.

The slave trade wasn’t easy because multinational companies held a monopoly on Africa’s Gold Coast and Guinea. There, most captured Africans were bought and herded onto slave ships.

But by 1676, Massachusetts merchants started buying slaves in Madagascar and then selling them to Virginians. Many New Englanders, though, preferred experienced slaves, so merchants swapped captured Africans for slaves who’d already worked the Caribbean plantations. Sometimes the merchants brought back weaklings like Phillis Wheatley who they couldn’t sell in the West Indies.

Some merchants preferred their slaves young and easily trained. They would send rum to the Caribbean with directions for the captain to return with an African child.

Rhode Island Slave Trade

Rhode Island merchants began importing African slaves at least by 1652, but they pursued the slave trade in earnest around 1700. There were two reasons: First, the slave-trading monopolies were breaking up. Second, large plantations in Narragansett, R.I., and nearby New London, Conn., needed labor. So did New England’s burgeoning industries and maritime trades.

Newport and Bristol by the middle of the 18^th century had overtaken Boston as the leading slave market in the colonies. In the 98 years between 1709 and 1807, Rhode Island merchants brought more than 100,000 slaves from Africa to the New World.

The Brown family ran one of the biggest, nastiest slave trading businesses in New England. In 1764, for example, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses Brown sent their ship Sally to Africa to buy slaves. Her captain bought 196, but returned with fewer than half. At least 109 died in a mutiny, by suicide, starvation or disease.

The federal government banned the slave trade in 1794, though found it difficult to enforce.

Early African-Americans

Connecticut had few slaves until about 1700, when the number began to rise. By the time of the American Revolution, all the wealthy families in Norwich, Hartford and New Haven had slaves. So did half of all the ministers and lawyers and a third of all the doctors.

Manacles used in the transatlantic slave trade

By 1800, Connecticut had more African-Americans – slave and free — than the rest of New England combined. Then, Connecticut had about a thousand slaves and 5,000 free blacks.

African-Americans had already become a substantial minority by the 1750s in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. They reached 10 percent of the Massachusetts population and 11.5 percent in Rhode Island.

New Hampshire’s African population grew from 1645, when records show African slaves in the colony. However, New Hampshire’s black population never got as big, proportionally, as the southern New England states.

New Hampshire’s African-Americans concentrated on the Seacoast. One reason was that New Hampshire didn’t impose a tariff on slaves, so merchants brought slaves to Portsmouth and then smuggled them into the other colonies.

Massachusetts slaves also tended to concentrate in the coastal towns, especially Boston. And in Rhode Island, black mariners made up one-fifth of the crews leaving Newport by 1807.

Slavery in New England

The Puritan missionary John Eliot, who converted Indians to Christianity, decried the treatment of the African slaves. He “lamented . . . with a bleeding and burning passion, that the English used their Negroes but as their Horses or the Oxen, and that so little care was taken about their immortal Souls.”

The colonies restricted slaves’ behavior in many ways – and sometimes the law didn’t differentiate between slave and free. Connecticut in 1690, for example, barred people of color, including Indians, from walking the streets after 9 pm. The colony also required black slaves to have a pass to leave their own town. By 1708, fights between blacks and whites prompted a law that imposed a penalty of 30 lashes on a black person who tried to hit a white person.

Massachusetts passed similar laws between 1720 and 1750. Slaves could not buy provisions at a market, carry a stick or cane, keep pigs or walk on a street after dark or on Sunday.

When slaves got old, tired and lame, their masters often set them free so the town had to take care of them. In 1703, Massachusetts passed a law forcing masters to post a £50 bond for every slave freed. Rhode Island doubled that fee in 1729. Connecticut in 1711 simply required masters to support their former slaves.

Emancipation

Elizabeth Freeman played an important role in ending the slave trade.

The rhetoric of the American Revolution inspired many people to question the morality of slavery. And many slaves earned their freedom during the war by fighting for either side.

Enslaved Africans took matters into their own hands in Massachusetts. Quock Walker and Elizabeth Freeman sued for their freedom in 1781. The Massachusetts courts decided “the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and [the Massachusetts] Constitution.”

In 1784, Connecticut and Rhode Island began to gradually – very gradually — emancipate their slaves. In those colonies, all children of slaves born after March 1 were to be free, though they served as ‘apprentices.’

Vermont from the beginning outlawed slavery. The Constitution of the Vermont Republic, adopted in 1777, stated “no male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one Years, nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years, unless they are bound by their own consent.”

Connecticut didn’t abolish slavery until 1848, well after the other New England states. As African-Americans began to shed the bonds of slavery, Connecticut towns began to warn them out, regardless of how long they’d lived there. That practice continued until well into the 20^th century.

With thanks to www.slavenorth.com for this story on the slave trade. Image of manacles: By ZekethePhotographer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66345939

This story about the slave trade was updated in 2023.

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