Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Mystic 1637 and King Philip's War — The Burning and the Slave Exports

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

Mystic and King Philip's War — Burning, Paper Erasure, and Enslavement in Colonial New England, 1637–1676

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. Every event below is named, dated, and sourced. Where figures vary between sources, the range is given; no figure is silently rounded up. The commanders who carried out the first event in this file are also its principal witnesses, and their counts are printed as their counts, labelled as such, with their interests stated. Quotations are verbatim and labelled; the perpetrators' own categories, where quoted, are quoted as evidence, not adopted as this record's language.

Note for the reader — where this file stands in the chronology. This file opens the corpus's massacre chronology a century and a half before its previous first entry. The earliest named massacre in massacres-and-removals.md is Gnadenhutten, 8 March 1782. Mystic, 26 May 1637, stands 145 years earlier. The mechanisms documented here — a village burned with its people inside, a nation dissolved by a treaty document, captives exported by ship into the Caribbean trade — were not late refinements of the system the later files record. They were present, fully formed, at its beginning.

1. The road to Mystic

The Pequot nation, centred on the Mystic River in present-day southeastern Connecticut, was the dominant Indigenous power in the region when English settlement began in earnest in the 1630s — a position already weakened by the epidemic of 1633–34, which killed a large share of the Pequot population before the war began (Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center educational materials). The Pequot War of 1636–38 grew out of competition over the fur and wampum trade, Pequot relations with the Dutch, and the killings of the English traders John Stone (1634) and John Oldham (1636), for which English authorities demanded surrender of the men they held responsible (Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War, 1996).

The force that marched on Mystic was an alliance, and this record names all of its parts: Connecticut Colony's main body under Captain John Mason; Captain John Underhill with a smaller party from Massachusetts Bay; Mohegan fighters under Uncas, a Pequot sachem who had broken with the Pequot leadership; and Narragansett fighters, the Pequots' regional rivals, with Eastern Niantic participation also recorded (Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War, c. 1670 [PRIMARY WITNESS]; Underhill, Newes from America, 1638 [PRIMARY WITNESS]; the allied strength is commonly given at about 300 forming the outer ring, against about 80 English). The allies pursued their own strategic aims against a dominant neighbour. What the English did inside the fort was the English commanders' decision, and it is their own accounts that record it.

2. Mystic — 26 May 1637

Before dawn on 26 May 1637, Mason's and Underhill's men attacked the fortified Pequot village at Mystic, a palisaded town of densely packed dwellings. The village's principal fighting men were largely absent — the sachem Sassacus and many warriors were at the Pequots' second fortified town. The people inside were therefore mostly noncombatants: women, children, and older men (Mashantucket Pequot Museum materials; standard summaries).

Mason's own narrative records the decision [PRIMARY WITNESS]: unable to prevail in close fighting inside the crowded fort, he resolved, in his account's words, "We must burn them" — and set fire to the dwellings. Underhill's force did the same at the other entrance. The English withdrew outside the palisade and, with their allies in an outer ring, killed the people who fled the fire. Underhill [PRIMARY WITNESS] records that "down fell men, women, and children," that very few escaped, and that only seven were taken prisoner. English losses were about two killed and twenty wounded (standard summaries of the primary accounts).

Both commanders defended the killing of noncombatants in print, against criticism they knew was coming. Underhill's Newes from America [PRIMARY WITNESS] answers the objection "should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?" by appeal to scriptural precedent — "sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents" — concluding, "We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings" [verbatim quotation, labelled as the commander's own published justification]. This record prints that defence as documentary evidence of how the massacre was justified by a man who helped carry it out. It adopts none of it. Underhill also records that the Narragansett allies were shocked at the manner of the killing (EBSCO research summary of the primary accounts) — an objection carried in the perpetrators' own publications, not a later invention.

3. The counts — the witnesses' counts, with their interests

There is no Pequot count of the Mystic dead, and no neutral count. Every surviving number comes from the English side. This record prints the range with each figure attached to its author:

• John Underhill [PRIMARY WITNESS], Newes from America (1638): "about four hundred souls." Underhill published within a year, in part a bid for recognition from a Massachusetts establishment that banished him in 1638 in the Antinomian controversy. His is the lower of the two commanders' figures.
• John Mason [PRIMARY WITNESS], A Brief History of the Pequot War (written c. 1670, over three decades later): "six or seven hundred." Mason wrote late, as the victorious commander whose public standing in Connecticut rested substantially on this war. Later historians have generally treated his figure as high (the four contemporary accounts collected in Charles Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War, 1897).
• Lion Gardener [PRIMARY WITNESS, in the wider war, not at Mystic]: about 300. Philip Vincent [contemporary pamphlet, 1637]: 300–400. Both already stood in Orr's 1897 collection as sceptical correctives to the captains. William Bradford [second-hand]: about 400.

Range for this record: about 400 to 700 Pequot dead at Mystic, on the commanders' own counts — Underhill's ~400 against Mason's 600–700 — with contemporary non-commander estimates running lower, to about 300. What no account disputes, including the commanders', is the composition of the dead: most were noncombatants, because most of the village's fighting men were not there.

Correction printed on the face of this file. Commissioning notes for this file carried the two commanders' figures reversed — Mason at ~400, Underhill at 600–700. The primary texts run the other way, as printed above. The file records the reversal here so the error does not travel further through the corpus.

4. After Mystic — pursuit

Mystic broke Pequot resistance but did not end the killing or the taking. Through the summer of 1637 English forces and their allies pursued the fleeing bands; Sassacus fled west toward the Mohawk, who killed him and sent his head and hands to the English (Mason [PRIMARY WITNESS]; standard accounts). At the Fairfield Swamp Fight in July 1637, a large body of Pequots sheltering among the Sasqua was surrounded; the fighting men largely escaped in the night, while about 180 people — again, in the main, noncombatants — were captured. Captured men were in many cases executed; captured women and children were distributed as servants and slaves in English households or assigned to the allied nations. Governor John Winthrop's journal [PRIMARY DOCUMENT] gives the campaign's July 1637 tally in his own words: "We had now slain and taken, in all, about seven hundred."

5. The ship Desire — the export begins, 1637–38

The export of Pequot captives by sea is documented in the journal of the governor who ordered it. Winthrop's journal for July 1637 [PRIMARY DOCUMENT], as printed in the standard histories of Massachusetts slavery: "We sent fifteen of the boys and two women to Bermuda, by Mr. Peirce; but he, missing it, carried them to Providence Isle."

The vessel was the Salem ship Desire — 120 tons, built at Marblehead in 1636, master William Peirce (Marblehead Museum, "Ship Desire, William Peirce, Master," on Winthrop's journal and papers [PRIMARY DOCUMENTS]). The seventeen people named in the entry — 15 boys and 2 women — are the documented human cargo of that sailing: the first documented shipment of enslaved Indigenous people out of New England in an English colonial vessel, bound for Bermuda and carried instead to Providence Island, the English colony off the Caribbean coast of Central America.

The return voyage completes the circuit. Winthrop's journal, 26 February 1638 [PRIMARY DOCUMENT]: "Mr. Pierce in the Salem ship, the Desire, returned from the West Indies after seven months. He had been at Providence, and brought some cotton and tobacco and negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tortugas." The Desire carried enslaved Pequots out of New England and brought enslaved Africans back into Massachusetts on the same round voyage — the first documented arrival of enslaved Africans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the standard record (Marblehead Museum; Wendy Warren, New England Bound, 2016). Indigenous slavery and the African trade were not parallel systems in New England. From this voyage onward they were one connected trade, and Pequot children were among its first cargo.

6. The Treaty of Hartford, 1638 — paper erasure and enslavement combined

On 21 September 1638, representatives of Connecticut, the Mohegan, and the Narragansett signed the Treaty of Hartford, disposing of the Pequot survivors — about 200 people by the standard count of those who formally submitted (Treaty of Hartford, transcript, Yale Indian Papers Project [PRIMARY DOCUMENT]). The treaty did two things at once, and this record keeps them together because the document kept them together.

First, distribution. The survivors were divided as spoils. The treaty text [PRIMARY DOCUMENT]: "There were then given to Onkos, Sachem of Monheag, Eighty; to Myan Tonimo, Sachem of Narragansett, Eighty; and to Nynigrett, Twenty…" — eighty people to Uncas and the Mohegan, eighty to Miantonomi and the Narragansett, twenty to Ninigret and the Eastern Niantic. Others were already enslaved in English households in Connecticut and Massachusetts, or shipped out — the Desire's sailing (§5) preceded the treaty by more than a year.

Second, erasure. The same document dissolved the Pequot nation as a legal and named existence. The treaty text [PRIMARY DOCUMENT]: the Pequots "were then bound by Covenant, That none should inhabit their native Country, nor should any of them be called PEQUOTS any more, but Moheags and Narragansatts for ever." The name itself was proscribed; the survivors were renamed, on paper, as members of the nations that had received them; return to their own country was forbidden. This is the mechanism how-they-were-exterminated.md §8 documents for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — allotment, blood quantum, termination — present in 1638 in an early American treaty form: the nation ended by document while its people were still alive.

And the paper failed, as it would fail again. Pequot people preserved their identity under Mohegan and Narragansett authority and in English servitude, returned to their homeland in the following decades, and stand today as the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation (federally recognised, 1983) and the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation (state recognised) — the nations whose own museum scholarship this file cites for the Mystic record. The erasure is filed here as an attempt, not an achievement.

7. Between the wars — slavery written into law

Massachusetts formalised what the Pequot War had established. In 1641 the Massachusetts Body of Liberties became the first English colonial code to give slavery legal sanction, permitting bondage for, in its category, "lawful captives taken in just wars" [the code's own category, quoted and labelled]. Margaret Ellen Newell's central finding (Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, Cornell University Press, 2015), on the colonial records themselves, is that enslavement was not a by-product of these wars but one of their engines: soldiers were promised plunder that "was understood to be human as well as inanimate" (published reviews of Newell, 2015). Newell counts only 319 Pequot War captives remaining in New England — about a third of the region's small servant-labour pool in the late 1630s — held under terms so vague, colony by colony, that many, and their children after them, "remained in bondage for the rest of their lives."

8. King Philip's War, 1675–76 — the largest slave export of colonial New England

King Philip's War — named by the English for Metacom, sachem of the Wampanoag, whom they called King Philip — was fought across New England in 1675–76, with fighting in the north continuing to 1678. Its Native death toll is given in the standard summaries at roughly 3,000–5,000 from combat, disease, and starvation, out of a southern New England Native population of about 20,000. This section documents the war's other weapon: enslavement, at a scale that dwarfs the Pequot War export.

The scale, on the colonial records. Newell (2015), built from letters, diaries, court records, and shipping records, establishes that English forces "converted more than two thousand surviving Indians into English captives" — roughly two-fifths of the Native people remaining within the New England colonies' boundaries (Newell, 2015, p. 158, as quoted in the published reviews). Of these, over a thousand were enslaved and exported out of New England — the figure carried in the standard modern summaries as at least 1,000 sold into slavery overseas (Linford D. Fisher, Brown University, 2017, summarising his Ethnohistory study: destinations "Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Azores, Spain, and Tangier in North Africa, among other places"). Hundreds more went to Bermuda and the Caribbean in individual cargoes recorded port by port. Metacom's wife and his young son were among the captured and were sold into slavery overseas, despite the missionary John Eliot's plea on the boy's behalf (standard accounts; Fisher, 2017). On Newell's and Fisher's records this was the largest episode of Indigenous slave export in colonial New England's history — against 17 people on the Desire's documented sailing in 1637.

Surrender was no protection. Fisher (2017) found that Native people who surrendered under English offers of clemency, expecting to avoid export, "were enslaved at nearly the same rate as captured combatants" (Brown University, 15 February 2017). The fear of export is documented on the Native side at the time: Fisher quotes a 1676 report [PRIMARY DOCUMENT, as quoted in Fisher, 2017] of young men refusing peace — "wee wil have no peace… to bee made slaves, & either be kild or sent away to sea to Barbadoes &c. Let us live as long as wee can & die like men, & not live to bee enslaved." Barbados stood, in the captives' own recorded words, for the fate itself.

The buyers' resistance, recorded. Barbadian and Bermudian planters moved to ban importation of New England Indians, and some cargoes were carried as far as Tangier in search of buyers (Newell, 2015, as summarised in the published reviews) — a refusal that documents both the shipments' scale and one reason the trade's paper trail thins after 1676.

9. Deer Island — the internment of the praying Indians, winter 1675–76

The war's machinery fell also on Native people who were not at war with the English at all. The praying Indians — Christian converts of the fourteen "praying towns" established under John Eliot's mission, Natick first among them — were formally allied to Massachusetts, and praying Indian scouts served with English forces throughout the war. Colonial fear overrode the alliance. On 13 October 1675 the Massachusetts Council ordered the praying Indians rounded up; on 30 October 1675 the first parties were transported to Deer Island in Boston Harbor and interned there for the duration (National Park Service, "Deer Island"; Natick Praying Indians' community history).

Numbers, at their documented level. The National Park Service gives the interned at about 500 to 1,100 people, "though exact numbers of those interned are unknown" — women and children the majority, many of the men pressed into service as English scouts. No exact figure exists in the record; this file carries the NPS range and states the uncertainty rather than choosing. The contemporary witnesses describe the condition: an exposed harbour island with little shelter, poor soil, and almost no food but shellfish, through a New England winter. Eliot, visiting in December 1675 [PRIMARY WITNESS, as quoted in the Deer Island histories], reported: "The Island was bleak and cold, their wigwams poor and mean, their clothes few and thin."

Deaths. The standard accounts agree that many died — by the commonly repeated estimate, about half of those confined died of starvation, exposure, and disease during the winter of 1675–76 (Deer Island Memorial Committee / Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs summaries; Indian Country Today, 23 August 2013: "over half of the Indians confined to the Island had died" by the release). The internees were released in the spring and summer of 1676; some survivors were afterwards among those sold overseas (§8), and the praying towns were never restored to their pre-war extent. The internment stands here at exactly that level: hundreds confined, on the NPS range of about 500–1,100; many — on the common estimate, roughly half — dead in one winter, of cold and hunger, in the custody of the colony they had served.

10. After the war — enslavement in New England households

Export was only half the system. The captives who remained — in this war the larger share, reversing the Pequot War pattern — were dispersed into English households across Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and Rhode Island as slaves and long-term indentured servants, including children bound out into their twenties (Newell, 2015; Fisher, 2017, on terms "sometimes until the age of 25 or 30"). Their status sat in the deliberate vagueness of §7, and household practice extended bondage across lifetimes and into the next generation, as captives' children were held in their turn. Newell's conclusion, on the records, is that enslaved Indians outnumbered enslaved Africans within New England before 1700, living "in English homes," raising English children, and manning "colonial armies, farms, and fleets" (Cornell University Press / Mershon Center summaries of Newell, 2015) — and that second- and third-generation Indian slaves were still litigating for their freedom in New England courts in the eighteenth century.

Sources for this file

Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War (c. 1670) [PRIMARY WITNESS] • Underhill, Newes from America (1638) [PRIMARY WITNESS] • Gardener and Vincent, in Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War (1897) • Winthrop, Journal, July 1637 and 26 February 1638 [PRIMARY DOCUMENTS] • Treaty of Hartford (21 September 1638), transcript, Yale Indian Papers Project [PRIMARY DOCUMENT] • Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641) • Cave, The Pequot War (1996) • Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, educational materials • Marblehead Museum, "Ship Desire, William Peirce, Master" • Warren, New England Bound (2016) • Newell, Brethren by Nature (Cornell University Press, 2015), with its published review literature • Fisher, Ethnohistory (2017), and Brown University summary (15 February 2017) • National Park Service, "Deer Island" • Natick Praying Indians, community history • Indian Country Today (23 August 2013) • Connecticut History (Connecticut Humanities), on the Treaty of Hartford.

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