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On May 26, 1637, an English military force, supported by Native allies, attacked a Pequot settlement on the Mystic River in Connecticut, and set it on fire. Almost all the Pequots who escaped the flames were killed by the troops surrounding the village. Six to seven hundred Pequots died. Many Pequots who were not in the village at the time were killed later, and others were enslaved. In 1638 the Pequots were forced to sign a treaty officially dissolving their nation. The English forbade the use of the Pequot name.

Whether this incident was a case of genocide has been the subject of much dispute. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn include it in their history of genocide. Steven Katz has argued that it was not genocide. Michael Freeman has challenged his argument. The dispute turns mainly on the question of whether the English intent was genocidal. This is difficult to determine, but most of the facts of what is usually called the Pequot War are uncontroversial.

Early contacts between Europeans and Native Americans were sometimes friendly and at other times hostile. The origins of their conflicts are often obscure, but probably include cultural misunderstandings and the escalation of minor offenses. Europeans despised Natives as heathens, and feared them as savages and agents of Satan. European attitudes were not uniformly hostile, however, and some thought that the Natives could become good Christians and trading partners. Puritan attitudes were not very different from those of other English settlers, but their conception of themselves as God's elect only intensified their distrust of Native Americans. Native-American attitudes toward Europeans were generally friendly, unless provoked. The English immigrated to America to settle, trade, and/or bring their religion to the heathen. These motives were not inherently genocidal, but they did contain the potential for violence, because many English believed that Natives who obstructed these goals should justly be punished. Some saw English colonists as new Israelites entering the promised land of Canaan, given to them by God, and inhabited by devil-worshippers. This belief had genocidal potential.

The first Puritan colony in New England was established at Plymouth in 1620. In 1630 a new colony was established in Boston Harbor; it rapidly grew during the 1630s. The local Natives welcomed the Boston settlers. Puritan attitudes toward the Natives were ambivalent. On the one hand, they were motivated by both Christian goodwill and the desire to trade. On the other hand, they feared the Natives as wild and untrustworthy savages.

The Pequot War

At the time of their first contact with Europeans, the Pequots occupied the coastal area between the Niantic River in Connecticut and the Wecapaug River in western Rhode Island. In 1622 the Dutch became the first Europeans to trade with them. This trade enabled the Pequots to dominate the other Natives of the Connecticut Valley. In 1633 the Dutch established a trading post on the Connecticut River. They concluded an agreement with the Pequots, according to which the Pequots would allow all Natives access to the trading post. Almost immediately the Pequots broke this agreement by killing some Natives bound for the post. When the Pequot principal sachem (chief), Tatobem, boarded a Dutch vessel to trade, he was held for ransom. The Pequots sent the Dutch the ransom. The Dutch sent the Pequots Tatobem's corpse. In response the Pequots killed the captain and crew of a European ship anchored in the Connecticut River.

The Pequots' victims were, however, not Dutch, but English. The captain was John Stone, a smuggler and privateer. In 1632 he had attempted to steal a ship of the Plymouth colony. He went to Boston, from which he was expelled for unbecoming conduct. When news of his death became known, neither Plymouth nor Boston showed any inclination to avenge him. In 1634 the Pequots sent an envoy to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, seeking the friendship of the English. Colony authorities made the surrender of Stone's killers a condition of friendship with the Pequots. The Pequot sachems did not accept these conditions, but instead made a payment to Boston for Stone's murder.

Shortage of good land in Massachusetts led to increasing English settlement in Connecticut. In June 1636 a Plymouth trader, Jonathan Brewster, reported that the Pequots were planning an attack. On July 4 the Massachusetts Bay Colony demanded that the Pequots honor the supposed agreement of 1634 that they surrender Stone's killers and pay compensation for his murder. Later that month Captain John Gallop found the ship of John Oldham abandoned near Block Island. Onboard he discovered Oldham's dead body. The probable killers were the Narragansetts and the Block Islanders, who were tributaries of the Narragansetts. The Narragansetts returned Oldham's two sons and his possessions to Massachusetts, and made a reprisal raid on Block Island. The Bay Colony nevertheless decided to seek revenge on the Block Islanders and the Pequots. On August 25 a punitive expedition set sail from Boston to take revenge on the Block Islanders and to demand from the Pequots the surrender of Captain Stone's killers and compensation for his death. The expedition found few Native men on Block Island, destroyed various Native possessions, and then set off in pursuit of the Pequots. They were, however, unable to engage them, and, after killing one Pequot, they returned to Boston. In revenge the Pequots attacked English settlers in Connecticut during the winter of 1636 and 1637. A dispute with settlers at Wethersfield led to a Pequot attack in April 1637 resulting in the deaths of nine settlers. A week later the General Court of Connecticut declared war against the Pequots.

Connecticut mobilized a troop of ninety Englishmen under Captain John Mason and about seventy Natives hostile to the Pequots. The troop marched to Narragansett Bay, and then with Narragansett guides headed toward the Pequot settlement on the Mystic River. Mason later wrote that his plan was to destroy the Pequots. The English attacked the settlement, and the systematic massacre of its inhabitants ensued. Pequots who were not in the settlement at the time were rounded up and killed or sent into slavery. The English officially annihilated the Pequot nation as such. English apologists employed Old Testament justifications for their actions, comparing the Pequots to the Amalekites, whose name was supposed to be eliminated from the world.

The Puritan destruction of the Pequots has been explained as a preemptive strike motivated by fear of Pequot attack. The Pequot threat was, however, exaggerated, and the Puritans' inconsistent attitude about Stone's murder suggests that they had another agenda. The basis of the conflict lay in the complex, competitive relations among various Native groups and Europeans generated by European colonization and trade. The tensions these produced were aggravated by religious and cultural differences. The increasing Puritan demand for land might have brought conflict in the absence of these factors.

The Puritans sought to punish the Pequots severely and succeeded in destroying them in the process. Whether their intent was genocidal is not clear.

SEE ALSO Genocide; Massacres; Racism

Michael Freeman