Pequot War

But I just wanna set that early foundation of by the time you reach some of the later periods where English traders are involved in a larger scale slave trade, there's been decades of practice and ac- acceptance fundamentally of sort of taking Native people of, especially during warfare, of enslaving them, of also of shipping them out of these colonies into other regions, especially the men who are seen as, as rather dangerous.

So whether it's these early wars in Virginia or in New England, you have the, the Pequot War in sixteen thirty-six, sixteen thirty-seven, which is truly a war to exterminate the Pequots on the part of the English colonists, leads to the enslavement of several hundred Pequots in the Boston area, also Rhode Island, Connecticut, other places as well.

So that, that lays the foundation, and really what you see then in King Philip's War and what we often call Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, these are sort of extensions of those early wars.

But maybe what you're referencing is actually something slightly different that starts in the sixteen eighties in the Carolinas, which is a different process.

When Connecticut arrived the next day, they brought with them their indigenous allies, a hundred and fifty Mohegans and Pequots.

The latter, the subordinate vassals of both the Mohegans and Connecticut after their near complete genocide in the Pequot War.

With these native auxiliaries, and with intel from Indian Peter, on the nineteenth of December, the combined force reached the outskirts of the Great Swamp, near modern-day South Kingston, Rhode Island.

For most of the year, this would have been largely impassable.

A native war would rage across the frontier from New England to Canada, uh, and refugees would flee from thou- by the thousands, uh, from war parties burning along the frontier because of this.

Now, we talked about the Pequot War before.

It ends in sixteen thirty-seven.

So New England would have the removal of the Pequots, these people stopping progression into the wilderness, uh, and it would establish a forty-year period of peace for New Englanders.

Now, this bigger map shows also where the Narragansetts were.

So these areas where Massachusetts is being formed, I mean, these are areas that were traditionally, uh, o- owned by other people.

And remember, the Pequot War ends.

They're completely wiped out.

Now let's go back all the way to 1827.

Catherine Maria Sedgwick, one of the first novelists in this country, male or female, wrote a work of historical fiction called Hope Leslie, which takes place right after the Pequot War.

And it includes a conversation between a young woman, a young Native American woman, Magawiska, And a young English boy, Everill.

And let me pull this up because I lost that when I shared this.

But how Everill man is ever breaking the peace of nature.

It was such a night as this so bright and still when your English came upon our quiet homes.

That's referring to the Pequot War where the English attacked Native Americans.

And Avril says, you have never spoken to me that night, Magawiska.

New England's native population lacked an overarching leader like Powhatan, but by 1637 the inevitable conflict between the English and the Indians did happen.

It was called the Pequot War.

After some Pequots killed an English fur trader, soldiers from Massachusetts, the newly formed colony of Connecticut, and some Narragansett Indians, who saw an opportunity to gain an upper hand over the Pequots, attacked a Pequot village at Mystic, burning it and massacring over 500 people.

The war continued for a few months after this, but to call it a war is in a way to give it too much credit.

[laughs] Religious disagreement continued in the new Massachusetts Bay colony, leading to some Puritans being banished and setting up new colonies across areas which are now part of Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Unlike the peaceful relationship which has existed between the Plymouth colony and Massasoit's people, there were lots of tensions among the new splinter colonies with native people, including the awful Pequot War, which I expect you'll speak more about in the Connecticut episode when we get there.

Yeah, I mean, it's a tale as old as time, isn't it?

Yeah.