University:
Arizona State University
Course:
HST 200 | Historical Themes
Academic year:

2024
Views:

405

Pages:

2
Author:

Thuyoul US

Puritan Connections with Indigenous Peoples English Puritans in America attempted to evangelize indigenous peoples to their brand of Christianity, much like their competitor Spanish and French Catholics did. Leading Puritan missionary in New England, John Eliot, encouraged Native Americans in Massachusetts to live in “praying towns” set up by the English government for converted Native Americans and to embrace the Puritan focus on the Bible’s primacy. In 1663, he released his translation of the Bible into the native Algonquian tongue, according to the Protestant focus on reading scripture. Eliot believed that some of the native people of New England would become preachers as a result of his work. The native people who ruled southern New England and the Puritans had been at odds from the start (Figure 3.13). As the Puritans aggressively expanded their colonies and as European practices progressively disturbed local life, relationships worsened. These tensions sparked the enormous regional struggle known as King Philip’s War (1675–1676), which came dangerously close to driving the English out of New England. The Algonquian inhabitants of the area had seen the Puritans as possible friends in the conflicting Native tribes that were already brewing when they started to arrive in the 1620s and 1630s. At Plymouth, the Wampanoag, under the leadership of Massasoit, signed a peace contract with the Pilgrims in 1621. The Narragansett and Mohegan tribes joined up with the Puritans in Massachusetts and Plymouth in the 1630s to fight the Pequot, who had just extended their lands into southern New England. A sizable contingent of several hundred Pequot people were assaulted by the Puritans in May 1637 along the Connecticut Mystic River. The Puritans slaughtered all but a small number of the men, women, and children they encountered, much to the sorrow of their Native friends. The Puritans established outposts along the Connecticut River Valley by the middle of the seventeenth century, having forced their way farther into the heart of New England. Their growth appeared to have no bounds. The Wampanoag chief Metacom, or Metacomet, as he was called by the English, was adamant about putting an end to the incursion. In order to expel the English from the area, the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, and Narragansett tribes took up arms. Native American troops were able to demolish half of the frontier Puritan villages in the next battle, known as King Philip’s War; nevertheless, in the end, the English, with the help of Mohegans and Christian Native Americans, won and sold many prisoners into slavery in the West Indies. (In Plymouth, King Philip’s severed head was on public display.) The conflict also permanently altered the English public’s view of Native Americans; Puritan authors made tremendous efforts to portray them as vicious barbarians. In the Northeast, ties between Native Americans and English became characterized by a new kind of racial hate.