Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England

Abstract

In April 1676, the English captured the Narragansett sachem Canonchet. It was a turning point in King Philip's War. Canonchet refused to talk, saying only “that he was born a Prince, and if Princes came to speak with him, he would answer them. But none of those present being Princes, he thought himself obliged in honor to hold his Tongue” (p. 202). Informed that he was to be executed, he asked to die at the hands of Uncas, an English ally and Mohegan sachem he acknowledged as “his fellow Prince” (ibid.). The English described Canonchet as proud and insolent and treated him as a traitor: his body was drawn and quartered. As Canonchet's capture and execution illustrate, and as Jenny Hale Pulsipher's book impressively explains, Indians and English in seventeenth-century New England clashed over issues of sovereignty as well as over land and culture. Pulsipher presents New England as a kaleidoscope of competing and colliding interests. There were struggles for authority between colonies and religious groups, between colonies and the Crown, between colony and colony, between tribe and tribe, and between the generations in colonies and tribes. Indians saw themselves as allies of the colonists, not subordinates, and expected relations of equality and reciprocity. Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and Mohegans all “went over the heads” of colonial officials and appealed directly to the king in England about issues involving land and interference in native government, a strategy that implied they were subjects with equal access to royal authority and protection. King Philip's War, an explosion easily attributed to growing English pressure on Indian land, was also a struggle over authority. Confronted with increasingly blatant English assaults on their sovereignty, Indians chose to fight rather than submit, a position against which the colonies could, for once, unite. Even English victory involved assertions of authority, as Connecticut valley settlers took conduct of the war into their own hands and away from Boston. In the end, though, both Indians and colonists lost authority. The English asserted dominance over the Indians and the Crown asserted dominance over the colonies.