America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback by Kenneth C. Davis Page A
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
Plymouth, Salem, and Boston, the number of English settlers exploded. The Indians saw their hunting grounds, farmlands, and sacred territory being overrun. Settlers who sought more acre-age to pass on to their children—the chief reason, alongside religion, that many of them left England—were pressing the bounds of the | 66 \
Hannah’s Escape
frontier further and further west. With increasing frequency, this was accomplished through questionable real estate dealings with the natives, many of whom possessed no tradition of land being bought and sold. Instead they saw land as a shared resource, to be utilized but not owned. Often the sellers had no real right to offer the land. Eventually, some deeds were simply forged; others were obtained after the Indians had been liberally supplied with alcohol.
Assessing this period in English-Indian relations, Colin Calloway observed, “Europeans used a broad repertoire of devices to obtain land, one of which was to encourage Indians to run up large debts in trade.
The tribe’s accumulated bill then could be settled only by cession of territory. Indian leaders sometimes used land sales as a strategy to keep colonists at bay, hoping that this time their land hunger would be satisfied, but the pressure on Indian lands was unrelenting, a constant source of friction.”24
Fueling that pressure was the prodigious fertility of the Puritans, who clearly observed the biblical admonition to “be fruitful and multiply” in their New World utopia. Seven or eight children in a Puritan family was typical, and much larger families—Anne Hutchinson’s fourteen or the Emersons’ fifteen, for instance—were hardly unusual.
“The emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the great migration became the breeding stock for America’s Yankee population,” David Hackett Fischer writes. “They multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two centuries. Their numbers increased to 100,000 by 1700, to at least one million by 1800 . . . —all descended from 21,000
English emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the period from 1629
to 1640.”25
This swelling tide of colonists, doubling and trebling their numbers, threatened the existence of the dwindling tribes, already deci-
| 67 \
America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory mated by smallpox and other diseases that swept Indian villages with the ferocity of Egypt’s plagues—another biblical connection not lost on the Puritans. Epidemic disease—most likely introduced by the traders and fisherman who had plied North America’s coastal waters well before the Pilgrims arrived—emptied many northeastern coastal Indian settlements in 1616. That was why the Mayflower Pilgrims found a deserted village at the site of their Plymouth landing. In the 1630s, another severe epidemic had a similar effect, as Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop reported back to England. “For the natives in these parts, God’s hand hath so pursued them as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox.”26
Eventually this Puritan population explosion pressed the Indians to fight back for survival. The relative peace, first crafted by the Pilgrim fathers and cultivated by later arrivals, was first shattered during the Pequot War of 1636–37, a brief but brutal conflict that was complicated by the intertribal rivalries among several groups: the Pequot, a coastal Algonquian group based along the Connecticut River; their traditional rivals, the Mohegan, based around the Thames River near modern Norwich, Connecticut; and the Narragansett, of Rhode Island. Along with other area tribes, they were struggling to control their traditional lands and the lucrative fur trade with the competing English and Dutch.
The immediate cause of the war lay in the killings of several English traders and sea captains, blamed on Pequot tribesman. Operating in the belief that the Pequot were harboring those responsible for the deaths of these Englishmen,
Hannah’s Escape
frontier further and further west. With increasing frequency, this was accomplished through questionable real estate dealings with the natives, many of whom possessed no tradition of land being bought and sold. Instead they saw land as a shared resource, to be utilized but not owned. Often the sellers had no real right to offer the land. Eventually, some deeds were simply forged; others were obtained after the Indians had been liberally supplied with alcohol.
Assessing this period in English-Indian relations, Colin Calloway observed, “Europeans used a broad repertoire of devices to obtain land, one of which was to encourage Indians to run up large debts in trade.
The tribe’s accumulated bill then could be settled only by cession of territory. Indian leaders sometimes used land sales as a strategy to keep colonists at bay, hoping that this time their land hunger would be satisfied, but the pressure on Indian lands was unrelenting, a constant source of friction.”24
Fueling that pressure was the prodigious fertility of the Puritans, who clearly observed the biblical admonition to “be fruitful and multiply” in their New World utopia. Seven or eight children in a Puritan family was typical, and much larger families—Anne Hutchinson’s fourteen or the Emersons’ fifteen, for instance—were hardly unusual.
“The emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the great migration became the breeding stock for America’s Yankee population,” David Hackett Fischer writes. “They multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two centuries. Their numbers increased to 100,000 by 1700, to at least one million by 1800 . . . —all descended from 21,000
English emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the period from 1629
to 1640.”25
This swelling tide of colonists, doubling and trebling their numbers, threatened the existence of the dwindling tribes, already deci-
| 67 \
America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory mated by smallpox and other diseases that swept Indian villages with the ferocity of Egypt’s plagues—another biblical connection not lost on the Puritans. Epidemic disease—most likely introduced by the traders and fisherman who had plied North America’s coastal waters well before the Pilgrims arrived—emptied many northeastern coastal Indian settlements in 1616. That was why the Mayflower Pilgrims found a deserted village at the site of their Plymouth landing. In the 1630s, another severe epidemic had a similar effect, as Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop reported back to England. “For the natives in these parts, God’s hand hath so pursued them as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox.”26
Eventually this Puritan population explosion pressed the Indians to fight back for survival. The relative peace, first crafted by the Pilgrim fathers and cultivated by later arrivals, was first shattered during the Pequot War of 1636–37, a brief but brutal conflict that was complicated by the intertribal rivalries among several groups: the Pequot, a coastal Algonquian group based along the Connecticut River; their traditional rivals, the Mohegan, based around the Thames River near modern Norwich, Connecticut; and the Narragansett, of Rhode Island. Along with other area tribes, they were struggling to control their traditional lands and the lucrative fur trade with the competing English and Dutch.
The immediate cause of the war lay in the killings of several English traders and sea captains, blamed on Pequot tribesman. Operating in the belief that the Pequot were harboring those responsible for the deaths of these Englishmen,
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