Military men figured prominently in the leadership of the first English

colonies in North America and, as one would expect, brought with them

to the NewWorld their European-derived conceptualization of unlimited

war.11 The mercenaries who led the first colonies' small armies - John

Smith in Virginia, Myles Standish at Plymouth, John Mason in Connecticut,

and John Underhill in Massachusetts - were products of Wars of

Religion that had ravaged Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the midseventeenth

centuries. The conflicts in which they learned their craft were

brutal affairs. Fueled by the passions of the Reformation and Counter

Reformation, late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century European soldiers

had little compunction about, and some would say almost a preference,

for putting towns to the torch and noncombatants to death.

Tragically for the Indian peoples of the Eastern seaboard, the mercenaries

unleashed a similar way of war in early Virginia and New England.

Military necessity, the colonists believed, demanded that they turn to

extirpative war, what today's soldiers term unlimited warfare, manifested

by the destruction of enemy noncombatants and their agricultural resources.

Over the course of nearly four decades, the English colonists of

Virginia embraced increasingly harsher measures for dealing with their

Indian neighbors, until by 1646 they had made the killing of Indian noncombatants

their preferred strategy and tactic.

In Virginia in 1607, the Jamestown colonists were at a loss over how to

deal with Powhatan warriors who stealthily moved through the woods,

attacked working details, and then, John Smith wrote, “by the nimbleness

of their heels escaped.”12 Smith, as the individual responsible for the

colony's defense, responded with a crash training program to teach the

settlers “to march, fight, and skirmish in the woods [so that they] were

better able to fight.”13 He abandoned that course, however, when he

realized it had done little to turn Englishmen into effective woodland

warriors. Smith then turned to what he and his men knew best.

Noting that “if they assaulted us, their Towns they cannot defend,”

Smith engaged the Powhatans in a “feedfight,” or the destruction of

Powhatan fields and villages. The feedfight had worked well for the

English in Ireland, but in North America it was a dangerous gamble.14 The

English were dependent on the Indians for food, and if any group were to

starve in Virginia because soldiers had destroyed crops and fields, it would

be the settlers. Needing therefore to do more than burn Indian fields to secure

victory, Smith warned “King” Powhatan that if his subjects attacked

English foragers, the colonists would seek ghastly retribution against the

Indians' wives and children. Smith learned that making good on such

threats worked. When, for example, the Indians refused to return several

Englishmen they had taken captive, Smith and his men sallied forth “and

burnt their Towns, and spoiled, and destroyed, what they could, but they

brought our men and freely delivered them.”15

The extirpation of Indians, rather than just a feedfight, became the order

of the day when full-fledged war between the English and Powhatans

erupted in August 1609. After a year of inconclusive skirmishing in which

the English found themselves virtually trapped in Jamestown, Virginia's

Governor Thomas Gates, in August 1610, ordered a full-scale mobilization

of the colony's meager military resources under George Percy, a veteran

of the Wars of Religion in the Netherlands. Percy was “to take Revenge”

and destroy the Paspaheghs.16 Their extirpation, Gates and Percy

hoped, would serve as a powerful deterrent for other Indian villages that

might join Powhatan's war with the English.

Few contemporary accounts relate the depths of ferocity of the settlers'

extirpative war better than George Percy's A Trewe Relacyon. Upon arriving

at a Paspahegh village, Percy recalled, he and his men “beset the

savages' houses that none might escape.” Upon his signal, the English

fell in upon them, put some fifteen of sixteen to the Sword and

Almost all the rest to flight, Whereupon I caused my drum to

beat and drew all my Soldiers to the Colors. My Lieutenant

bringing with him the Queen and her Children and one Indian

prisoner for which I taxed him because he had Spared them, his

Answer was that having them now in my Custody I might do

with them what I pleased. Upon the same I caused the Indian's

head to be cut off. And then disposed my files Appointing my

Soldiers to burn their houses and to cut down their Corn

growing about the Town, And after we marched with the queen

And her Children to our Boats again, where being no sooner

well shipped my soldiers did begin to murmur because the

queen and her Children were spared. So upon the same a

Council being called it was Agreed upon to put the Children to

death, the which was effected by Throwing them overboard and

shooting out their Brains in the water. Yet for all this Cruelty

the Soldiers were not well pleased.17

Only after the return to camp was the soldiers' bloodlust satisfied. The

colonists, genuinely fearing all Indians and eager to expropriate the natives'

lands, proved uninterested in granting quarter of any kind to their

Indian enemies. Thus, a certain Captain Davis, Percy related, believed

that it was “best to Burn” the “queen” of the Paspaheghs. Percy, however,

determined to “give her A quicker dispatch. So turning myself from

Captain Davis he did take the queen with two soldiers Ashore and in the

woods put her to the Sword.”18

Similarly, extirpative war became the colonists' modus operandi during

the misnamed First Indian War of 1622-1632. The “massacre” of

1622 in which the Powhatan Confederacy under Opechancanough, King

Powhatan's brother and successor, attacked virtually every English settlement

along the James River hardened the settlers' attitudes toward the

Indians. Although a friendly Indian warned the English of the impending

attack, nearly 350 of the colony's settlers perished, or almost 30 percent of

the European population.19 GeorgeWyatt, upon learning of the slaughter,

advised his son Francis, then Governor of Virginia, that the settlers'

Game are the wild and fierce Savages haunting the Deserts and

woods. Some are to be taken in Nets and Toils alive, reserved to

be made tame and serve to good purpose. The most bloody to

be rendered to due revenge of blood and cruelty, to teach them

that our kindnesses harmed are armed.

Smith, speaking for many victims of the attack, wrote from London, “now

we have just cause to destroy them by all means possible.”21

When they proved incapable of catching and extirpating Opechancanough's

people, the English fell back on the feedfight and destroyed

the Indians' provisioning grounds as a means of subjugating them. John

Martin, a planter who sought to use the Indians as slaves, suggested that

the English could starve the Indians into submission by denying them access

to their food supplies. To that end, Martin proposed to use 200 soldiers

to torch Indian fields and destroy fishing weirs. During the summer

months, Martin advised, English shallops should patrol the waterways

and kill Indians attempting to fish. At the same time, the government

should forbid all trade in corn between settlers and Indians, even those

Indians friendly to the settlers. With the Indians thus weakened, he argued,

settlers could enslave them and take their land for the cultivation of

hemp, flax, and silk. In June 1622, theVirginia Council embraced Martin's

plan and began the systematic destruction of the Powhatans' agricultural

resources. In that month the colony's small army set “upon the Indians in

all places,” and “slain divers, burnt their Towns, destroyed their Wears

[weirs] & Corn.”22 The campaigns continued the next year. A survey of

the colony's military rosters shows that of the 180 men fit for military

duty in 1623, 80 took up “carrying corn,” that is, destroying Powhatan

fields.23 In 1624, the Virginia Council created a special company of “60

fighting men (whereof 24 were employed only in the Cutting down of

Corn)” to destroy Indian crops. In the ensuing operations against maize

and legumes, the settlers deemed each field destroyed a “great Victory”

and relished how the Indians “gave over fighting and dismayedly, stood

most ruefully looking on while their Corn was Cut down.”24 The raids,

nonetheless, proved quite dangerous; the 1624 operations alone cost the

English 16 casualties. Such losses, however, were acceptable since, as

Governor Wyatt observed, the colonists had destroyed as much corn “as

would have sustained 400 men for a twelvemonth.”25

After 12 years of peace that saw English control of the Tidewater grow,

and unable to drive them from Virginia, Opechancanough must have

hoped to reestablish an English-Indian balance of power in which Indianscould maintain independence and initiative. Thus began the Tidewater

War of 1644-1646. As in the Massacre of 1622, the Powhatans attacked

the English settlements. Rather than cowing the colonists into dealing

with them as coequals, the Massacre of 1644 only enraged the English.

The colonists' reaction to what they perceived as the most recent example

of Indian nefariousness was a total embrace of extirpative war. The

House of Burgesses raised five times the number of men as it had for the

1622 campaigns.26 The Tidewater War involved no single event that we

rightly can call a “battle.” Instead, it consisted of two years of unrelenting

English raids on Indian villages and fields that starved nearly every Indian

out of the James Valley. When this was added to the capture and murder

of the septuagenarian Opechancanough, the few remaining Indians

of the Tidewater had little option but to accept total English dominance

in eastern Virginia.

The Tidewater War's end ushered in 30 years of peace for Virginians

and made extirpative war their preferred and primary form of warfare.27

Whereas the English originally had room for some Indians among them -

they needed Indians to provide food and labor - as the number of

first European indentured servants and then African slaves increased in

Virginia, English use for Indians disappeared. Thus, by 1646, after two

generations of extirpative war and exposure to European diseases had

devastated most of the tribes of the Tidewater, the victors displaced the

survivors to reserves set away from European settlements and seized their

lands, a policy with which the colonists had first experimented in the

wake of the Massacre of 1622.28 While some tribes, like the Piscataways

of Maryland, managed to avoid total dislocation by accepting demeaning

tributary status, as far as the English were concerned they had sufficiently

abandoned their Indian ways. The English would tolerate Indians within and near their settlements provided that they essentially neither saw

nor heard them. Of course, in the struggle to find a path “between total

war and complete capitulation,” Indians like the Piscataways managed

to maintain elements of their cultural identity.29 Similarly, as Englishmen

constructed their new identity as the conquerors and overlords of

Virginia, they made extirpative war the defining part of their culture of

war making.

Peaceful relations, with only minor exceptions, created an environment

of coexistence between Englishmen and Indians in early New England.30

Unlike the Jamestown colony, located in the middle of the territory controlled

by the most powerful Indian confederacy on the Atlantic seaboard,

a disastrous epidemic of European diseases between 1617 and 1619 had

destroyed perhaps 80 percent of the Indian population of New England.

As a result, New England's Indians, at least in the early days of settlement,

seemed more tractable to English interests. Yet when war broke

out in 1636, the Puritans ignored the years of peace, leaped over the

feedfight, and moved directly to the extirpation of their Indian enemies.

Indians villages, and therefore noncombatants, were the main target

of the English in the Pequot War, New England's first large-scale military

conflict.31 In response to English attempts to kidnap Pequot women

and children to stand as hostages for the Indians' good behavior, the

Pequots attacked English settlements on the lower Connecticut River.

John Endicott and 90 Massachusetts men countered with a raid on the

Pequots' village on Block Island, which they burned with its surrounding

fields. After Endicott retreated, the Pequots laid siege to Connecticut's

Fort Saybrook. That siege and the ensuing months of Indian raids showed

the colonists how vulnerable they were to Indian attacks and made clear

the need for direct, concerted action against the Pequots. Connecticut

thereupon commissioned its resident mercenary, Captain John Mason, to

subjugate the Pequots.32

In May 1637, Mason led 90 Connecticut soldiers, with the assistance of

70 Massachusetts troops under John Underhill, against the Indian “fort”

on the Mystic River. While there were in fact two main Pequot forts - one

with mainly warriors in it and one with women, children, and old men -

Mason prudently selected the latter as his troops' target.

The English destruction of the Mystic River fort stands as the most

infamous event in the early military history of New England, as well

as a striking example of the place extirpative warfare occupied in early

Americans' military culture. As soon as the English attack began, some

Pequots retreated to their wigwams to barricade themselves inside, others

tried to flee the fort, and still others took cover under their beds to hide

from the English attackers who broke in to shoot and stab defenseless

Pequot women and children. Mason and Underhill led the way in the

slaughter and showed their men by personal example what they expected

of them. Coming upon some Pequots in a lane between two rows of

wigwams, Mason and a party of troops chased them to the end of the lane,

backed them into a corner, and dispatched them with swords. Mason then

came upon two English soldiers standing idly by watching the massacre.

Upbraiding them - “We [the English] should never kill them after that

manner” - an inspiration struck him: “We must Burn them.”33 He thus

stepped into a wigwam, removed a firebrand, and set the structure afire.

Underhill, seeing what Mason had done, kindled a fire on the other side of

the compound. The two fires spread quickly, joined, and soon engulfed the

entire compound in flames, “to the extreme Amazement of the Enemy, and

a great Rejoicing of our selves.” Two other officers then joined Mason in

setting the wigwams aflame while the shocked “Indians ran as Men most

dreadfully Amazed.”34

The Puritans of New England had set loose a way of war unfamiliar

to the Indians. The precontact Indian culture of war making among the

Eastern Woodland Indians often was a mix of a highly evolved and ritualized

system of limited war and the quest for individual glory. Within

the Indian conceptualization of “mourning war,” particularly among

Iroquoian peoples, vanquished foes and captives often “replaced” losses

in native communities. Indian raiding parties would venture forth, take

captives, return to the war party's home village with those captives, and apportion them among grieving clans. At that point, the elder women of

the clan determined the fate of the captive: males usually suffered death by

excruciating torture; the captors most often incorporated women and children

into their society.35 The Narragansetts therefore joined the English

in hopes of reaping a large harvest of prisoners, booty, and glory. But

as the Narragansetts observed after the fact, the English ways were “too

furious” and “slays too many men.”36 Although the scale of the slaughter

shocked even him, Underhill contended that it was necessary. “Should not

Christians have more mercy and compassion?” he asked. “Sometimes,”

he answered, “the Scripture declare the women and children must perish

with their parents.”37

The slaughter at the Mystic River village was only the first act of

Connecticut's war of extirpation. Many New Englanders believed that

the way to preserve the security of their homes, especially since they had

made the Pequots an intractable enemy, was to complete the extirpation of

the Pequots that they began on the Mystic River. They therefore embarked

on a campaign in which they and the Narragansetts pursued the surviving

Pequots, “ranging the country until they destroyed many of them, and the

rest were so scattered and dispersed.”38 On one such expedition, Mason

and 40 Englishmen came upon 200 old men, women, and children holed

up in a swamp. With the Pequots destroyed as a military power, Mason

was “loath to kill Women and Children.” Instead, he put the men to the

sword and “spared” the remaining 180 women and children by enslaving

them.39

The few remaining bands of Pequots, near starvation and lacking either

the strength or the will to fight, found themselves at the mercy of

the colonists. When the Pequot sachems sued for peace and prostrated themselves before the English and Narragansetts at Hartford, all that

remained of a nation that had totaled at least 2,000 souls at the beginning

of the war was 180 to 200 half-starved survivors.40 Seeing that total

victory was in their grasp, the Puritans apportioned the surviving Pequots

among their Narragansett and Mohegan allies as slaves and then forbade

the Pequots to inhabit their native lands or even to maintain the name

Pequot. Connecticut, weighing the “several Inconveniences that might

ensue” from a Pequot “revival,” then sent Mason and 40 men to burn

the Pequots' remaining wigwams and destroy their cornfields.41

Connecticut's decisive victory over the Pequots served as an ominous

harbinger to the other Indians of southern New England. When tensions

over English encroachments on Indian lands almost erupted into open

conflict between the settlers and the Narragansetts in 1643 and 1644,

for example, New Englanders responded quickly. Plymouth gave Captain

Myles Standish command of a small army, while Massachusetts prepared

for war by designating 30 percent of each militia company to be prepared

to take the field within half an hour's notice.42 The Narragansetts, seeing

the settlers' preparations and recalling the fate of the Pequots when they

had fought the English, appealed to King Charles I for redress. In the early

1640s, however, Charles I faced issues more pressing than the abuse of

Indian rights perpetrated by his subjects in Boston. Thus in the summer

of 1645 the Narragansetts, who had come to understand that war against

the New Englanders could lead to apocalypse, agreed to a treaty in which

they accepted tributary status. The threat of extirpation at the hands of

the English had come to hang like a Damoclean sword over the heads of

Southern New England's Indians.

I. Extirpative War Comes to English

North America, 1607-1646