The Bias of Colonial Law: English Paranoia and the Abenaki Arena of King Philip's War, 1675-1678

Abstract

ALTHOUGH legal issues have figured significantly in the . historiography of King Philip's War, little more than the structural outlines of the legal conflict have been explored. Most histories do not examine the differing cultural assumptions Englishmen and Indians made about social and legal order. Recent studies emphasize the legal irritations of early Indian-White relations which eventually drove the New England Algonkians to war to defend their embattled political independence. The tribes closest to English settlements suffered a continuous erosion of their political sovereignty as English authority gradually extended over Indian-White relations, land ownership, traditional religious practices, and, ultimately, over intratribal affairs. The historical controversy over English legal policies has catalogued the variable justice accorded settlers and Indians in the colonial courts. In seventeenthcentury New England, Indians had access to legal redress of their grievances but the proceedings were seldom fair. The historical consensus indicts Englishmen for first imposing law on Indian peoples and then condemns them for denying Indians justice in their legal contests.l