“Newes from America” — Uncovering Early American Genocide
Chapter Two of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
In 1638, a very distant cousin of mine, John Underhill, published a book called Newes from America; or, A New And Experimentall Discoverie of New England; Containing, A True Relation of Their War-like proceedings these two years last past, with a figure of the Indian Fort or Palizado.[i] A bit of translation might be needed here. Not just spellings but also meanings of words can change over the span of four centuries. In the early seventeenth century, “experimentall discoverie” had little to do with science. It simply implied a first-hand description, a revealing of something learned through experience.
In at least one sense, the meaning of “discoverie” has not changed over the past four hundred years. Discovery still means the uncovering of something unknown. For me, finding and reading Newes from America was a disturbing discovery, an uncovering of genocide at the roots of my American family tree.
Genocide[ii] is not where I would have chosen to start my American family history. If, in good conscience, I could avoid the topic, I would. But genocide was pivotal in shaping the fates and fortunes of my American ancestors.
Is there anything in human experience more evil and traumatic than genocide? No one touched by the experience remains whole. The survivors of a racial, national, ethnic, or other group targeted for genocide are deeply scarred, as are their friends and family and descendants. And the perpetrators? They too are marked for life and carry psycho-social wounds passed down for many generations.
The trauma of genocide can echo across centuries, long after those who suffered from it directly are gone and memories of their suffering has faded. The shocking violence and inhumanity of genocide can also feed into delusional ideologies of justification, distortion, and denial. Passing off delusions for history might bring comfort to some, but it does nothing to assuage the trauma, the scars of colonial American genocide still visible in the racial injustices, inequities, and violence of the United States today.
Although the word did not yet exist when he wrote his book in 1638, it is clear from page one that John Underhill is writing about genocide, not just a war of retribution or conquest, but the intentional extermination of the Pequot Nation:
…I shall according to my promise begin with a true relation of the new England wars against … that insolent and barbarous Nation, called the Pequot, whom by the sword of the Lord, and a few feeble instruments, soldiers not accustomed to war, were drove out of the Country, and slain by sword, to the number of fifteen hundred souls in the space of two months and less: so as their Country is fully subdued and fallen into the hands of the English…
By subjugating Indigenous neighbors and by controlling access to Indigenous trading networks available to Dutch and British traders in the Northeast, the early seventeenth-century Pequot Nation had established themselves as regional power brokers. After a pandemic outbreak of smallpox in 1633 decimated and weakened the Pequot Nation, leaders of England’s colonies on the Connecticut River and in Massachusetts Bay decided that the time was right to force change in the regional balance of power.[iii]
British American colonial leaders used the deaths of two traders to justify war on the Pequot, but it was clear from the start British aims were broader than exacting revenge for two killings. In 1636, Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony initiated the war by ordering Captain John Endicott: “To putt to deathe the [Pequot] men of Blocke Iland but to spare the woemen & Children & to bringe them away & to take possession of the Iland.”[iv]
The Pequot War was a shift away from reliance on maritime power to protect British commercial interests in America to a strategy of military assaults on Indigenous settlements and takeover of Native lands. The Pequot War marked a transition to more aggressive and expansive British colonization of Indigenous homelands in America.
John Underhill was with the militia led by Endicott and Newes from America recounts the assault on Block Island, a mostly unsuccessful endeavor resulting in destruction of Pequot homes and food reserves and little else. But Underhill’s book also recounts more “successful” episodes in the Pequot genocide, including an account of the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of men, women, and children in the fortified Pequot town near what is now Mystic, Connecticut.
The army put together for the attack on the fortified Pequot town near the mouth of the Mystic River included a contingent of roughly a hundred English militiamen, men recruited from the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies and given minimal training. The attack force included about double that number of far more experienced Indigenous soldiers supplied by the Narragansett and Mohegan nations, Indigenous peoples who had long been dominated by the powerful Pequot Nation and forced to pay tribute to them.
In the pre-dawn hours of a late spring morning in 1637, English colonial militia and Indigenous soldiers approached the Pequot town quietly and surrounded it. At sunrise, the English militiamen, arrayed in a ring just outside the town, discharged their muskets through gaps in the palisade, killing or wounding many Pequot still in their wigwams. As the Pequot scrambled to fight back, the English drew swords and entered the town, Captain Underhill leading the charge through the southwest gate and Captain John Mason attacking with his men from the northeast.
Once the English soldiers entered the town, Pequot resistance was fierce. The English soldiers were forced to retreat, setting fires as they went, and blocking the only two gates in the palisade wall surrounding the town so that no one could escape the flames. In the end, by Underhill’s estimate, only a handful of the four to five hundred people in the Pequot town survived.
Underhill describes the destruction and death caused by the fire in vivid detail:
… the fires…meeting in the center of the Fort blazed most terribly, and burnt all in the space of halfe an houre; many courageous fellowes were unwilling to come out, and fought most desperately through the Palisadoes, so as they were scorched and burnt with the very flame, and were deprived of their armes, in regard the fire burnt their very bowstrings…
Narragansett and Mohegan allies who witnessed the burning and mass slaughter of the Pequot townspeople were appalled. Underhill reports that they cried out: “mach it, mach it” which he understood to mean “‘it is naught, it is naught,’ because it is too furious, and slays too many men.”
Indiscriminate killing and destruction of entire communities were not part of traditional Algonquian modes of warfare. The Pequot, Narragansett, and Mohegan and other Indigenous peoples of the region were accustomed to “mourning wars,” a type of warfare that typically resulted in few casualties and was conducted, in large part, for the purpose of taking captives who could be adopted into the nation, sometimes to be treated as slaves, but just as often to be treated as kin.
Underhill understood that English readers of his book might also be troubled by the mass killing of Pequot noncombatants and so he offered a justification for the genocide grounded in Christian scripture:
…I would referre you to Davids warre when a people growne to such a height of bloud, and sinne against God and man, and all confederates in the action, there he hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and sawes them, and puts them to the sword, and the most terrible death that may be: some-time the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents…We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.
Some historians have recognized the genocidal attack on the Pequot as a turning point in American history. The genocidal tactics of the Pequot War established a pattern that was replicated soon after in Kieft’s War (1643–44) and was repeated again and again for the next two centuries as British America and the United States waged war on Indigenous Nations for control of the American interior.[v]
My New England American ancestors benefited from the Pequot genocide and its aftermath in a number of ways. Dozens of my known seventeenth-century lineal ancestors, and perhaps hundreds more unknown ancestors, homesteaded and farmed on lands adjacent to Long Island Sound, lands cleared for English settlement after the destruction of the Pequot Nation. The genocide also gave my ancestors access to the forced labor of enslaved people. After the Pequot War, hundreds of Indigenous captives were enslaved by British settler colonial families and hundreds more were shipped to the Caribbean where they were sold or traded for enslaved Africans who were shipped back to the Northeast.[vi]
In the 1650s, my eight times great grandfather, Richard Stites, acquired land for a homestead on Long Island on the northern edge of the Hempstead Plains, grasslands well-suited for raising cattle and horses. In the 1660s, Richard married Mary Underhill (a cousin of John Underhill) and over the next five decades they prospered and thrived, raising at least seven children to adulthood and acquiring ownership of hundreds of acres of meadow, planting fields, and forest.
Just north of the Stites homestead, in the forested coastline of Cow Neck, was Matinecock, home to a band of Lenape-speaking people, one of several groups of Lenape peoples on Long Island who had previously been dominated by the Pequot Nation. Under the leadership of the Massapequa sachem, Tackapousha, the Lenape peoples living on the perimeter of the Hempstead Plains (what is now Nassau County, New York) tried for fifty years, roughly from 1645 to 1695, to negotiate and re-negotiate terms for land use rights, to ascertain boundaries between Indigenous and settler colonial lands, and to accommodate access to natural resources and create living space for both natives and Anglo-Dutch colonists.
But Tackapousha had to negotiate under the long shadow of the Pequot genocide. The ever-present threat of genocidal attacks on his people by the Dutch of New Netherlands and later by the British of New York dogged Tackapousha throughout the second half of the seventeenth century. Over time, the size of the population of Lenape peoples on Long Island he spoke for dwindled and their ability to protect and preserve their homelands dissipated.
The once large population of Indigenous peoples on Long Island was reduced to a handful of small villages. Among the booming population of Anglo-European settler colonials on Long Island, memories of the genocide a little more than a generation earlier gradually faded away.
Writing in 1670, Daniel Denton, a Hempstead neighbor of Richard and Mary Stites, assigned no responsibility to his own community of settler colonials for the decimation of the Indigenous population of Long Island:
To say something of the Indians, there is now but few upon the Island, and those few no ways hurtful but rather serviceable to the English, and it is to be admired, how strangely they have decreased by the Hand of God… it hath been generally observed, that where the English come to settle, a Divine Hand makes way for them, by removing or cutting off the Indians, either by Wars one with the other, or by some raging Mortal disease.[vii]
Denton was echoing a trope that would persist for centuries, the myth of the “disappearing Indian.” But the Pequot Nation did not disappear. Even though the treaty ending the Pequot War, the 1638 Treaty of Hartford, prohibited the Pequot from speaking their language, returning to their homelands, or identifying themselves as Pequot, the Pequot Nation survived.
The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center was opened in 1998 on Pequot tribal lands about ten miles north of the site of the Mystic Massacre. The Pequot Nation has survived to reclaim the narrative of their history as a nation and people and as survivors of attempted genocide. The Pequot genocide is a pivotal and painful piece of my family history. It is also an essential truth of the origin story of America, a piece of our history that must never be forgotten or diminished in importance.
NOTES
[i] John Underhill published Newes from America in London in 1638. A facsimile of the book is available online at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1037&context=etas. According to Wikitree, John Underhill is my fourth cousin, ten times removed. John’s three times great grandmother, Agnes (Porter) Underhill (abt. 1445–1526), is my thirteen times great grandmother.
[ii] There many definitions and many debates about the definition of genocide. The most widely-accepted legal definition of genocide comes from the 1948 Genocide Convention which defined genocide as having two elements, a “mental element” (“the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, or racial group, as such”) and a “physical element” (killing, causing bodily or mental harm, inflicting destructive conditions of life, preventing births, and/or forcibly transferring children). For more information see the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect at https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml.
[iii] Pekka Hämäläinen, in his book, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2022. page 77), estimates the Pequot lost four thousand people to smallpox in 1633. He cites a 1634 letter to Sir Simond D’Ewes from John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the letter, Winthrop wrote: “But for the natives in these parts, Gods hand hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space, the greatest parte of them are swept awaye by the small poxe, which still continues among them: So as God hathe hereby cleered our title to this place, and those who remaine in these parts, being in all not 50, have putt themselues vnder our protection, and freely confined themselues and their interest within certain Limitts.” See full text of Winthrop’s letter online at https://www.masshist.org/publications/winthrop/index.php/view/PWF03d141#sn=0.
[iv] The full text of Winthrop’s 1636 “commission” to John Endicott to kill all the Indigenous men on Block Island and take all the women and children captive is reprinted on page 77 of Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Americans and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023).
[v] The causes and consequences of the Pequot War (1636–1637) are covered well in several recent books, including Ned Blackhawk’s 2023 book The Rediscovery of America (cited in the previous note; see Chapter 2. “The Native Northeast and the Rise of British America,” pages 71–104), as well as Andrew Lipman’s The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. See Chapter 4, “Blood in the Water: 1634–1646,” pages 125–164), and Robert S. Grumet’s First Manhattans: A History of the Indians of Greater New York (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. See Chapter 2, “Conflict: 1640–1645,” pages 31–43).
[vi] Ned Blackhawk (The Rediscovery of America, 2023, pages 76–77) connects acts of Indigenous genocide and dislocation in British North America directly to the development of the institution of chattel slavery: “Historians have failed to recognize the essential truth: Indigenous dispossession fueled the rise not only of British North America but also its foundational institution of chattel slavery. The English conquest of Native American lands laid the foundation for American slavery, an institution preceded by traffic in Indian slaves.”
[vii] The quotation is from page 12 of Daniel Denton’s A Brief Description of New York, Formerly Called New Netherlands, published in 1670 in London and available in facsimile online at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=libraryscience.
