The Name of War Read online

  All wars have at least two names. In Vietnam, the conflict Americans call the “Vietnam War” is called the “American War.” What most Americans now call the “Civil War” has been called (by Northerners) the “War of the Rebellion” and (by Southerners) the “War of Northern Aggression.” Names of wars are always biased; they always privilege one perspective over another. This is no less true of “Metacom’s Rebellion” than it is of “King Philip’s War.” And, though names of wars may tell us a good deal, they rarely tell us everything. Calling what happened between 1739 and 1742 the “War of Jenkins’ Ear” tells us about the sad fate of a British sea captains auditory apparatus, but not that the war was fought between England and Spain. Still, it is a telling name, since Captain Robert Jenkins’ ear, cut off by the Spanish as punishment for smuggling, became a symbol of the conflict (especially after Jenkins presented it to Parliament). “King Philip’s War” is telling in this same way. Philip was not, literally, a king; his own people may have called him by a name other than “Philip”; and, at the time, they probably called the fighting something other than “King Philip’s War.” Nevertheless, Philip did begin a war in which his people’s sovereignty (their “kingdom”) was lost, and his death did become a symbol of the English victory. (His severed head was staked on a pole for public viewing in Plymouth.) Meanwhile, the colonists did call what happened “King Philip’s War,” and the very fact that what their enemies called it has not survived (“Metacom’s Rebellion” is mere conjecture) is part of what the fighting was about in the first place: it was a contest for meaning—and the colonists won.

  “King Philip’s War” is not unbiased, but its biases are telling. (And some of its biases are less biased than historians have assumed.) Perhaps it will be best to consider each of the contested terms in “King Philip’s War” in turn. To begin with, calling an Indian leader a “king,” though it eventually became mocking, began as a simple (though inaccurate) translation of sachem. The English called many prominent Indian leaders “kings,” partly in recognition of the sachems’ very real political authority and partly as a result of the colonists’ overestimation of that authority. Most sachemships were hereditary, and English colonists saw them as roughly analogous to European monarchies, however much smaller in scale; “king” might have seemed a fitting, if not entirely satisfactory, translation of “sachem.” “Philip,” too, was an English creation; it was the name given to Metacom when he and his brother Wamsutta appeared before the Plymouth Court in 1660 as a gesture of friendship and fidelity.26 In 1677 one colonist, with the benefit of hindsight, suggested that Metacom, “for his ambitious and haughty Spirit,” had been originally “nick-named King Philip.”27 But, in 1660, naming Metacom and Wamsutta “Philip” and “Alexander” after the ancient leaders of Macedonia was most likely a reference (oblique to us but obvious to them) to the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an engraving of an Indian mouthing the words, “Come Over and Help Us,” and itself an echo of Acts 16:9, in which the Apostle Paul sees a vision of a Macedonian begging him, “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.”28 Plymouth authorities, like their Massachusetts counterparts, saw Indians as pagan Macedonians who, at heart, were desperate for the light of the gospel. “Philip” was no compliment, but that doesn’t make it a joke.

  “War” is, of course, the slipperiest, most disputed word in “King Philip’s War,” but the recently proposed alternatives are poor substitutes. “Conquest” implies that the outcome of the hostilities was predetermined, while “rebellion” suggests that Philip was a treasonous subject of King Charles. Neither is quite true (much as the colonists would have liked to believe both). “Indian Civil War” rings false, too, since, although the colonists were quick to call upon Indian allies, the majority on both sides perceived the war as an English-on-Indian conflict. In the end, “war” may be the word that takes the conflict most seriously, but, tellingly, even at the time of the fighting, the word “war” sparked controversy. In the fall of 1676, soon after Philip’s death, Increase Mather, the Puritan minister of Boston, published A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England. A few months later, William Hubbard, minister of nearby Ipswich, took exception to the title of Mather’s book. In the preface to his own Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England, Hubbard distinguished his book from Mather’s by explaining that he had titled his work a “narrative” because “the Matter of Fact therein related (being rather Massacres, barbarous inhumane Outrages, than Acts of Hostility or valiant Atchievements) no more deserve the Name of a War than the Report of them the Tide of an History.”29 Here was no “history” of a “war”; this was a “narrative” of some “troubles.” In Hubbard’s mind, to call the conflict a “war” and the account of it a “history” gave it a dignity it did not deserve, not to mention giving Mather stature he did not merit. Hubbard no doubt bridled that, in his own preface, Mather had boasted, “I have performed the part of an Historian.”30 Did Mather pretend to be Thucydides? Did he suggest that what happened in New England in 1675 and 1676 could be likened to the Peloponnesian War? Perhaps it is only fair to observe that Increase Mather was a bombastic bully, but ultimately the two ministers’ petty squabbling is beside the point. When Hubbard declared that the Indians’ fighting—“Massacres, barbarous inhumane Outrages”—simply did not “deserve the Name of a War,” he made Mather seem somewhat pretentious; more importantly, he made New England’s Algonquians seem entirely inhuman.

  Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Courtesy of the Massachusetts Archives

  The Reverends Hubbard and Mather, much as they bickered, had a great deal in common. Most importantly, they shared what the seventeenth-century English scholar Samuel Purchas called the “literall advantage”: they could write, and most Indians could not. “Want of Letters,” Purchas argued, left Indians in awe of Europeans’ astounding abilities and led them “to thinke the Letter it selfe could speake.” Compared to men who could read and write, Indians were no more than “speaking Apes.” For Purchas, the “literall advantage” truly separated men from beasts—“amongst Men, some are accounted Civill, and more both Sociable and Religious, by the Use of letters and Writing, which others wanting are esteemed Brutish, Savage, Barbarous.”31 With this, both William Hubbard and Increase Mather would have agreed. Like all literate Europeans in the New World, Hubbard and Mather had a veritable monopoly on making meaning, or at least on translating and recording the meaning of what they saw and did, and even of what they supposed the Indians to have seen, done, and said. And herein lies the circularity of the “literall advantage”: “speaking Apes” cannot respond in writing to the writers who label them inhuman.

  Title pages of Increase Mather, Brief History, LEFT, and William Hubbard, Narrative, RIGHT. Both courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

  LEFT: Reverend Increase Mather, London, 1688, by Jan Van der Spriett. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, RIGHT: Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics, c. 1681, unidentified artist. Courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Gift of Mr. Robert Winthrop

  Nowhere are differences like the “literall advantage” better illustrated than in the contrast between two portraits from the 168os, one of Mather himself, and one of Ninigret, a Narragansett sachem.32 Mather sits in his library, studying his books and manuscripts; Ninigret stands in the woods, armed with a knife and club. To the Europeans who painted these portraits, Mather was clothed in the fine fabrics of arts and letters (his collar even seems to be made of the pages of an open book), while Ninigret was naked in body, mind, and soul.

  If, in the seventeenth century, the “literall advantage” proved decisive, recent challenges to the name “King Philip’s War” have attempted to even the odds, to take away the colonists’ monopoly on making meaning of the war by asking, What would the Indians have called it? Most historians who have asked this question have begun with the assumption that no Algonquian would have called the conflict “King Philip’s War.” But thos
e who spoke English might have. At least one Nipmuck, in a note tacked to a tree outside a burning English town, called the fighting a “war,” and Metacom at least occasionally called himself “King Philip.”33 (A rebellious letter written from Mount Hope to the governor of Plymouth and transcribed by Philip’s interpreter, Tom Sancsuik, begins, “King Philip desire to let you understand that he could not come to the Court.”34) Moreover, Philip, who probably knew the alphabet, signed documents with a “P,” not an WM”—only his scribes occasionally added “alias Metacom” to his mark, probably to accommodate the colonists, who were meticulous record-keepers.35

  Mark of Philip, alias Metacom

  It is possible that Philip called himself “Philip” when addressing the English and “Metacom” when talking with Indians. But it seems more likely that he simply abandoned the name Metacom after 1660. After all, Philip was raised in a culture in which people commonly adopted new names, leaving old names behind. Edward Winslow had observed in 1624, “All their names are significant and variable, for when they come to the state of men and women, they alter them according to their deeds or dispositions.”36 For just this reason, it is possible that Philip renamed himself during the war, to mark a new stage in his life, but surely he would not have returned to Metacom, the name of his youth. That no record of Philip’s new name survives should come as no surprise. Those who knew Philip by the name he went by at the time of his death, in August 1676, would not have uttered it: a strict naming taboo prohibited it. As Roger Williams had reported, “the naming of their dead Sachims, is one ground of their warres”; in 1665 Philip himself had traveled to Nantucket to kill an Indian who had spoken the name of his deceased father, Massasoit.37 If Philip took another name during the war, it has not survived. (Although one small, uncorroborated bit of evidence suggests that he may have been renamed “Wewesawamit.”38) And, since he seems to have initially taken “Philip” in earnest, calling him “Metacom” today is no truer to his memory, especially because “Metacom” became a popular substitute for “Philip” only in the early nineteenth century, when white playwrights, poets, and novelists sought to make the war sound more authentically, and romantically, Indian.39

  Unfortunately, as relates to seventeenth-century evidence, there are few clues about what Algonquians might have called the war, with the important exceptions of Philip’s inky “P” and rare notes left by retreating Indians. Nearly all of what we know about the fighting—whether “brief histories” or “narratives of troubles”—comes from the colonists themselves, and, as the Massachusetts seal (“Come Over and Help Us”) so poignantly illustrates, more than a bit of skepticism must be brought to words the colonists quite literally put into the mouths of their Algonquian neighbors. Yet those neighbors were neither as silent as the colonists hoped nor as “inarticulate” as most historians have assumed. Still, perhaps the question of what Algonquians might have called King Philip’s War is ultimately futile. Or perhaps it is simply the wrong question. In either case, the question this study asks is slightly different: If war is, at least in part, a contest for meaning, can it ever be a fair fight when only one side has access to those perfect instruments of empire, pens, paper, and printing presses?

  THIS STUDY ASKS other questions, too, of course, questions about cruelty, language, memory, and, most of all, identity. I argued earlier that war cultivates language, but in writing this book it has at times seemed to me that war cultivates questions, many of them disturbing and all too few of them answerable. Scholars of the generation whose work has most inspired me were themselves compelled to write about war because of their experiences as witnesses of Vietnam, a war best remembered for the debate over whether it ought to have been waged at all. In his tellingly titled Just and Unjust Wars, for instance, Michael Walzer explained, “I did not begin by thinking about war in general, but about particular wars, above all the American intervention in Vietnam.”40 Nor did I, nearly two decades after Walzer, begin by thinking about war in general, but about a particular conflict, the Persian Gulf War. That war, noted for its excess of video images through extensive television coverage, led me to wonder how war could be represented without pictures. In an age when there were few technologies for visual representation, how effective were words in describing and justifying war? That question, in turn, led me to consider how cultures lacking not only television but also literacy come to terms with war. And, like Walzer, while I began by thinking about a particular war, I soon found myself facing some rather grand philosophical questions. To me, the most pressing of these is, How do people reconcile themselves to war’s worst cruelties? Or, as Elaine Scarry put it, “By what perceptual process does it come about that one human being can stand beside another human being in agonizing pain and not know it, not know it to the point where he himself inflicts it?”41 Between each line and on the words on every page, this question drives my investigation. Yet nowhere do I answer it, nor did I ever expect to. It has seemed to me the most unanswerable of all.

  As distressing as it can be to study cruelty, King Philip’s War, like most bulky chunks of the past, is filled with fascinating characters, bizarre happenings, and strange tales. Not surprisingly, I have found myself caught up in these stories, with the result that the questions that brought me to this topic, however urgent, are sometimes seduced into slumber by the cunning charms of a pressing plot. Analysis, however, is a light sleeper. Just when it seems that plot might take over entirely, rest assured that analysis will soon be awake, as cranky and demanding as ever. In the end, this book is just another story about just another war, but happily, along the way it is also a murder mystery, an adventure story, and a tale of peril on the high seas.

  The structure of this book is shaped both by the action of the war and by my own ideas about its importance. Bookended by the Prologue and the Epilogue, the four parts of this study—Language, War, Bondage, and Memory—describe and define four elements of the conflict and also four themes of my analysis. Part One examines why so many colonists wrote so much about King Philip’s War while New England’s Algonquians wrote so little, investigating, along the way, how war alters an individual’s relationship to language. Next, Part Two traces how boundaries were drawn during King Philip’s War, both on the physical landscape and on the landscape of the human body, and how the war’s cruelties were explained and justified by both sides, especially in religious terms. Part Three contrasts New Englanders’ differing experiences of bondage during the war: captivity, confinement, slavery. Last, Part Four analyzes how subsequent generations of Americans have remembered King Philip’s War, most notably through Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, a wildly popular play that was performed in theaters across America in the 1830s and 1840s.

  Meanwhile, to preserve the flavor of the stories of King Philip’s War, and most especially to help readers appreciate the differences in the spoken and written language among colonists and Indians, I have preserved the original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization in all seventeenth-and eighteenth-century sources with the following important exceptions: superscribed characters have been brought down; abbreviations have been spelled out; fanciful or conventional italics have been removed, unless they were clearly intended for emphasis; mistaken homonyms (“there” used for “their”) have been corrected if their usage might confuse the reader, but not otherwise; and, when relevant, the following letters have been changed: “u” to “v,” “v” to “u,” “j” to “i,” “y” to “th,” and “t” to “c.”42 (Remember that what we see as poor spelling does not always imply poor education; seventeenth-century spelling is entirely idiosyncratic.) Additionally, all “old style” dates have been modernized—that is, dates between January 1 and March 25 have been changed to the modern calendar and are considered part of the new year (thus, what in seventeenth century notation is “February 10, 1675/6” is here rendered as “February 10, 1676”). And, in rendering Algonquian personal names, whose spellings often vary tremendously, I have in each case chosen th
e least quirky and simplest spelling for use in the text; variant spellings are recorded in the notes.

  Finally, a word about the title of this study. In 1677, when William Hubbard explained why he had called his account of King Philip’s War a “narrative,” he uttered the mouthful that bears repeating: “The Matter of Fact therein related (being rather Massacres, barbarous inhumane Outrages, than Acts of Hostility or valiant Atchievements) no more deserve the Name of a War than the Report of them the Tide of an History.”43 A better illustration of the importance of language I could not have asked for, and so, with a nod to Reverend Hubbard, I borrow the tide for this, my own set of words about war.

  A Brief Chronology of King Philip’s War

  1675

  JANUARY

  29 John Sassamon dies at Assawampsett Pond.

  JUNE

  8 Sassamon’s alleged murderers are executed at Plymouth.

  11 Wampanoags are reported in arms near Swansea.

  14-25 Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Massachusetts authorities attempt negotiation with Philip and seek guarantees of fidelity from Nipmucks and Narragansettsy.

  24 Wampanoags begin attacking Swansea.

  26 Massachusetts troops march to Swansea to join Plymouth troops.

  26-29 Wampanoags attack Rehoboth and Taunton, elude colonial troops, and leave Mount Hope for Pocasset. Mohegans travel to Boston and offer to fight on the English side.