[In the following essay, Kupperman contends that though the accuracy of Morton's comments in New English Canaan regarding the Pilgrims' treatment of the Indians have been discounted because of his conflicts with the Pilgrims, careful study of his observations shows them to be similar to those of modern historians and demonstrates that his insights about early New England life should be taken more seriously.]

Although the record of English treatment of the American Indians during the earliest years of colonization is dismal, historians have always been glad to point to one bright spot—the record of Plymouth colony. John Demos, the social historian of seventeenth-century Plymouth, writes of the “impressive” record of forty years of “peace, even of amity” between Pilgrims and Indians.¹ Howard Peckham speaks of the Pilgrims as “good neighbors,” because they “wanted nothing so much as to be left alone.”² David Bushnell's “The Treatment of the Indians in Plymouth Colony” strikes a similar note.³

Cracks have appeared in this happy picture. Francis Jennings has recently pointed out that historians have preferred to ignore the reconstruction of the events leading up to the Wessagusset incident presented by George Willison in his Saints and Strangers first published in 1945.⁴ Wessagusset colony had been founded in 1622 by a man who had formerly been one of the merchants supporting Plymouth colony. At first the Pilgrims helped these new colonists, though they were not Puritans, but they soon became convinced that the Wessagusset colonists' laziness and improvident ways, as well as their rivalry in the lucrative fur trade, forecast trouble for Plymouth. Joint expeditions to buy food from the Indians continued, but the Plymouth men attempted to make it clear that they were separate colonies. Ultimately, the Pilgrim leaders, saying that they had received information of an Indian conspiracy to eliminate the Wessagusset colonists and then attack Plymouth, traveled to Wessagusset and invited some of the Indian leaders to meet with them, during which meeting they locked the doors and killed the Indians. The trickery was justified as a preemptive strike, an explanation that historians have accepted ever since.

Willison demonstrates that the plot story is singularly unconvincing, especially as the supposedly conspiring Indians had just sold the desperate colonists large quantities of corn. Moreover, the Pilgrim leaders also acted in ways which are inexplicable if they had in fact just been informed of a widespread conspiracy against them. Willison concludes that the story was constructed after the fact by Edward Winslow in an attempt to justify the colonists' conduct to supporters in England.⁵ Clearly, Winslow was very successful, as his explanation of the events has stood for over three hundred years. The result of the action at Wessagusset was that it was no longer safe for that small colony to continue in the midst of the now-hostile Indians and therefore the colony was disbanded. Plymouth could not pay off its debts to its English backers without control of the New England fur trade. The main threat to that control was now gone. The Wessagusset colonists refused the further protection of Plymouth, most of them sailing for Maine in hopes of finding passage back to England with fishing ships.⁶

Neither Jennings nor Willison point out that much of the story had been told once before. Another Plymouth rival, Thomas Morton, wrote indignantly of the episode and offered an analysis of its motivation which was very similar to that of these two modern historians. Morton alleges that the Wessagusset colonists were unwelcome at Plymouth from the beginning. Since they were “no chosen Seperatists,” and since they planned to recompense investors with beaver skins, they “would hinder the present practice, and future profit.” He specifically charges that the attack on the unsuspecting Indians was intended as a blow at Master Weston, the backer in England of the Wessagusset colony and formerly a Plymouth backer. The immediate effect of this “plott from Plimmoth” was that revenge was taken on other unsuspecting Englishmen. “But if the Plimmouth Planters had really intended good to Master Weston, or those men, why had they not kept the Salvages alive in Custody, untill they had secured the other English? Who by meanes of this evill mannaginge of the businesse lost their lives and the whole plantation was dissolved thereupon, as was likely for feare of a revenge to follow, as a relatione to this cruell antecedent.” From this time forward, the Indian name for Englishmen was “Wotawquenange, which in their language signifieth stabbers or Cutthroates.” When Master Weston did arrive in New England, the Pilgrims tried to convince him that the incident had proceeded from “the Fountaine of love & zeale to him; and Christianity. …” They used their “glosse upon the false text” to argue “that the Salvages are a dangerous people, subtill, secreat, and mischievous, and that it is dangerous to live separated, but rather together, and so be under their Lee, that none might trade for Beaver.”⁷

Morton clearly had an important interest in this development, because he, like the Wessagusset planters, chose to live separately in the neighborhood of the Pilgrims and he participated successfully in the fur trade. They scorned him and considered him dangerous for his relationship with his Indian friends and they accused him of selling guns and liquor to the Indians. Plymouth's scorn for Morton has stuck, just as Winslow's version of the Wessagusset massacre has been accepted. He is widely pictured as an irresponsible libertine, attempting to create a fanciful version of some classical pagan paradise, and wrapping himself in a disguise of orthodox Anglicanism.⁸ The settlement he presided over was composed of “brawling drunkards and unscrupulous traders.”⁹ His name is rarely mentioned without an adjective such as “notorious.”¹⁰ He is always “Morton of Merrymount” or “Mine Host of Merrymouth,” his plantation never being referred to by the name he gave it—Ma-re-mount, mountain by the sea. The Pilgrim influence is again seen in the fact that their construction, Merrymount, stuck.¹¹

All of this works subtly to discount Morton's worth as a historical source. Though many writers agree that this “gay gentleman” wrote the most lively and entertaining account of early New England, his lack of value as a source on its history is assumed.¹² It is still entirely possible to write the history of Plymouth colony without taking account of Morton's version of events. Perhaps it is time to change all this. If Morton was accurate in his analysis of causation and intention in the Indian deaths at Wessagusset, then there is reason to believe his reports on the broader area of relationships on Cape Cod may also be worth looking at. Control of the fur trade may reasonably be seen to be at the bottom of the controversies between the Pilgrims and individual planters there. Individual traders may have given guns to their Indian hunters in order to increase their productivity. Leaving aside the question of the ecological effects of such hunting, it is clear that both the individual planter-traders and the men of Plymouth colony were reaching far out into the mainland to establish that trade. Morton's giving of guns to the Indians, if he did so, was offensive because of the greater share of the fur trade that it meant for him as well as because of fears of Indian attacks.

Historians who feel that Morton's expropriation by the Plymouth colonists was justified because he endangered English settlements with his gun sales are making the wholly unwarranted assumption that Indians equipped with seventeenth-century matchlock guns were much more dangerous than Indians whose weapons were bows and arrows.¹³ Each weapon had a similar range and a bowman could make many more shots per minute than could a man with a gun. Further, the necessity of keeping a match burning to ignite the gunpowder contrasted unfavorably with the silence and inconspicuousness of a man armed with a bow and arrows.¹⁴ Many writers from New England wrote to praise the power of the Indians' weapons and several, including the leaders of Plymouth colony, indicated that the arrows were headed with points of brass, bird claws, and horn.¹⁵ Bows and arrows were clearly not a negligible weapon. It is difficult to believe that the possession of guns would make a significant difference in the degree to which a lightning attack on an outlying settlement was to be feared.

The argument thus returns to the motives of the Pilgrims. Unprovoked attacks on Indians, such as that at Wessagusset, were likely to produce Indian attacks where none had formerly been experienced. If their primary concern was security, then their behavior is difficult to explain. It is time to drop the bundle of attitudes, toward both the Pilgrims and Morton, appropriate to “those, that did not know the Brethren could dissemble.”¹⁶

Notes

1. John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1971), 14-15.

2. Howard H. Peckham, The Colonial Wars, 1689-1762 (Chicago, 1964), 19.

3. David Bushnell, “The Treatment of the Indians in Plymouth Colony,” New England Quarterly, xxvi, 193-218 (1953).

4. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, 1975), 186-187.

5. Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New-England (London, 1624), 31-47.

6. George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers: The Story of the Mayflower and the Plymouth Colony, rev. ed. (London, 1966), 122-131.

7. Thomas Morton, New England Canaan, in Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, compiler Peter Force (1836; rpt. Gloucester, Mass., 1963), ii, 71-79.

8. Bushnell, “Treatment of Indians in Plymouth,” 201; Richard L. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973), 59-60; Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York, 1973), 41; Elemire Zolla, The Writer and the Shaman: A Morphology of the American Frontier, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1973), 24-25.

9. J. Gary Williams, “History in Hawthorne's ‘The Maypole of Merry Mount,’” Essex Institute Historical Collections, cviii, 184-185 (1972); Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston, 1965), 89.

10. Vaughan, Frontier, 187; James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (1921; rpt. Boston, 1949), 148.

11. See for example Vaughan, Frontier, 89; Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 61.

12. Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony, 2nd ed., revised (Boston, 1958), 14.

13. Morison, 16; Vaughan, Frontier, 89-90.

14. This argument is developed fully and documented in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “English Perceptions of Treachery, 1583-1640: The Case of the American ‘Savages,’” Historical Journal, xx, 263-287 (1977).

15. William Bradford and Edward Winslow, A Relation or Journall of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England, known as Mourt's Relation (London, 1622), 20; John Brereton, A Briefe and true Relation of the Discoverie of the North part of Virginia, 2nd ed. (London, 1602), 4; Francis Higginson, New Englands Plantation, in Tracts, compiler P. Force, i, 12; Martin Pringe, A Voyage set out from the Citie of Bristoll, in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625; rpt. Glasgow, 1906), xviii, 325: James Rosier, A True Relation of the most prosperous voyage … by Captaine George Waymouth (London, 1605), sig. C-Cv; William Wood, New Englands Prospect (London, 1634), 90.

16. Morton, “New English Canaan,” in Tracts, compiler P. Force, ii, 78.