A Tale of Two Warfares

This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be slight differences in wording and content.

PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th century guy, here with Ed Ayers–

ED: The 19th century guy.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: The 18th century guy. And today, we are taking on a touchy subject, the kind of subject that could press a few buttons.

CAROLINE FRANK: Oh, let’s press buttons. That sounds good. That’s what we should be doing.

PETER: Caroline Frank is a historian at Brown University, and she joined us to tell the story of two different wars fought by two groups of people following two different sets of rules.

ED: We’ll start with the first of these wars, what’s known as the Pequot War. In 1637, the Pequot Indians were a powerful tribe in southern New England. They controlled a lot of land and a lot of resources.

PETER: At this point, the English settlers in the area– that would be modern day Connecticut more or less– were vastly outnumbered by the Pequots. But the Indians see them as a threat, as growing in numbers and wanting more and more of their land all the time. As for the English, they see the Pequots as terrible stewards of that land and maybe in league with the devil, too.

BRIAN: So the Pequot and the English had been getting on each other’s nerves for some time– a skirmish here, a skirmish there. But eventually, the English decided enough was enough. They enlisted the help of another Indian tribe also enemies of the Pequot, the Narragansett. The Narragansett saw this as a great opportunity to move into Pequot territory. And so–

CAROLINE FRANK: They decided to advise the English on the best ways to approach a Native American tribe, militarily. And they said, the way we do things is we don’t march out in the field in the middle of the day in a big group. It’s better to get them at night when they’re not expecting you. So what happened was the English came together with the Narragansett and discussed a plan.

They decided to sail over to where the Pequots were living on the coastline by Mystic, rather than march, because it would be more quiet. And they would sail at night. They first sailed past the Pequot village and were spied by some Pequots, who thought, OK, good, they’re going away. As night fell, they turned around and came back and got off their ships and came off and came onto land and approached the village.

BRIAN: And this is where things take a strange turn.

CAROLINE FRANK: Now, the Narragansett understanding of what was going to happen at the time and the English understanding were different, and somehow they hadn’t realized how this was going to play out. In the Narragansetts’ minds, they would capture people. They had actually asked the English ahead of time to assure them that no women and children would be killed.

And as the battle started, as they went into the Pequot village, the goal was to scare people, the shock awe factor and get people to flee or lay down and surrender. And then given a surrender, the Narragansett would get what they wanted, which was hunting rights in the area, maybe some Pequot slaves. Instead, the English, who came from a very different background of warfare– and this is where we get into the really interesting aspect of the story– the English were shooting at people and fired the entire village.

The Narragansett saw the fire going up and were horrified. And people began to flee from the village. And as people were fleeing, the English would shoot them point blank with their firearms. At the end of the day, over 700 Pequot men, women, and children, young and old were massacred. And the Narragansett were absolutely horrified.

BRIAN: When it comes to fighting wars today, there are rules everyone is supposed to play by, like the Geneva Convention, dealing with the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war, or rules about invading sovereign nations. Many of these rules have been invoked in the current debate over the use of unmanned drones by the Obama administration. Hardly a day goes by without a headline questioning the legality of so-called targeted killings.

ED: Trying to figure out what is fair in war and why are questions that Americans have struggled with for centuries. But with each new war, those questions seem to take on new currency and new urgency as people try to fit new fighting technologies into the ethical frameworks of the past.

PETER: And so today on this show, we’re going to look at some of the answers Americans have come up with. What has been considered fair throughout history? And when have people simply bent the rules to suit their own ends? Let’s return to the Pequot War of 1637, which was really more like a series of skirmishes that boiled over into the massacre we just heard about.

To understand why the Indians on both sides of that massacre would have been so horrified by it, we need to consider what their version of war fighting had looked like up until then. Here’s Caroline Frank again.

CAROLINE FRANK: The firing of the village is not something the Indians would have done. In general, when they fought, they did fight in forests, highly decorated with warpaint. The goal was to frighten your enemy, but the intention was not generally to kill. Captain Underhill, who led the Pequot massacre for the English, was a professionally trained soldier in the Netherlands. And he made the comment that the Native Americans could fight for seven years and kill barely seven people.

Scornfully and sarcastically he made that comment. For Underhill, these men were unmanly. They were wimps, as we would say today. But their goal was never to kill people. And in fact, during a Native American ambush, during a battle, if there were one or two dead in the field or on the ground, fighting stopped. And people were allowed to collect their dead and take them off the field before fighting resumed.

PETER: You mentioned the experience in the Netherlands for Underhill and other English fighters. When Europeans made war on each other, there were lots of barbarities, of course. But there was an emerging idea for a limited war or a law of nations, a law of war covering war. And that is, indiscriminate killing, particularly of civilians, was increasingly not encouraged or discouraged.

Why didn’t that ethic apply in the new world?

CAROLINE FRANK: Well, it’s interesting. I think first of all, you have to look at who’s waging the war here. Often, the English crown was against these sorts of battles. Now, it’s easy for them sitting across the ocean, but they would have preferred a more harmonious relationship between the tribes and the English who were here. They wanted them to become subjects.

But one does think of the experience these English people had had fighting the Irish. The Irish were considered tribal people who did not deserve the respect of proper military protocols. The English fighting the French or the Holy Roman Emperor, it may have been a different story than the type of battles they conducted fighting the Irish. And the approach they took with the Native Americans was similar to the way they dealt with the Irish, where some of the rules dropped.

And they did horrible barbarities, horrible things.

PETER: What was the Indian perspective on this English way of making war?

CAROLINE FRANK: I think that it was a lesson for the Indians. They had to treat the English a little more carefully. They saw that the English knew no bounds in warfare.

PETER: Over the next 40 years, the Indians in southern New England learned in this lesson well. Lots of tribes, not just the Pequot, stepped up their fighting with the colonists and started making them more alliances with one another. They gained access to better weapons, like muskets and got quite good at using them.

And everything came to a head in 1675 in another war between the English settlers, their Native American allies, and other warring Indian tribes. This one was called King Phillip’s War.

CAROLINE FRANK: It lasted a year and covered the entire scope of New England, all the way up to Maine. And it was the bloodiest war in American history on American soil.

PETER: Proportioally.

CAROLINE FRANK: Proportionally to the population at the time. And I think that it shows the degree to which there had been injury done by the English to the Native Americans across the board at this point. These cultural misunderstandings had gone too far in a lot of places.

PETER: What’s the difference between the way Indians had traditionally made war and how they were making war now in King Phillip’s war?

CAROLINE FRANK: Yeah you do see a merging at this point of the techniques of battle. And you see the Native Americans, one thing that they did quite a lot was to sneak up on families and torch their homes and kill the women and children. And some of the horrible stories that circulated about the Indians and the beginning of the myths that we have about the barbaric Indians scalping people comes from the King Phillip’s War.

This attack on people’s homes did not have any part of Indian warfare before the English.

PETER: Carolyn Frank is a historian at Brown University.