Home    Table of Contents    Next Chapter     Black & White Version

CHAPTER VIII

THE PENACOOK PEACE

        36. The Peace of 1634.  As we have seen, in spite of objections from the member tribes, the Penacook Federation, following the lead of Passaconaway, decided to make overtures to the Puritans for peace. The final terms were disastrous enough to the Federation, although this is hardly surprising, since the Federation was never an actually strong combination, having been, as we have seen, organized out of weakness. After the loss of the capital of the Eastern District, peace terms were proposed to include opening the lands of the Eastern District to Puritan settlement, by special arrangement with the respective tribal councils for each town so occupied, in the lands of the Saugus, Masadchu, and Okamakammessets, who had maintained the highest ideals of liberty, while the other two tribes involved were too weakened by war. The peace terms also recognized existing Puritan settlements on the north shore of Massachusetts Bay.

        The Pilgrims were not involved in that war, so the situation remained unchanged in the Plymouth colony; the land was under joint rule, governed by the Federation except where the Pilgrims settled towns by agreement. The peace terms sought to extend to the Puritans a similar arrangement. The trouble was that the Puritans already considered themselves owners of the land, and regarded the red men as trespassers in their own country. This the Penacook peoples could not be expected to understand, because they, even more than other red peoples of North America, could not grasp the idea of ownership of land. For that matter the Penacooks could not really understand the ownership of anything, though they knew that the white people had such strange institutions.

        Yet they had to try to understand the white man’s idea of property, in order to be able to agree on peace. And, since the war had originally started over the efforts of Gorges and Mason to oust the Piscataquas and Abenakis from lands north of the Merrimac, Passaconaway attempted to find a way of disposing of those lands to fit the white men’s ideas. In the first place, he completely ignored Gorges and Mason, with their land titles imported from overseas, but he induced the Federal Council to deal only with the refugee Puritan settlements in Mason’s alleged preserve. Passaconaway inquired as to whether white ideas of property covered anything corresponding to permission to occupy, and found out that the whites know of such things as leases; so, by authority from the Federal Council (after considerable objection from the Piscataquas, whose territory the place was) he had a regular deed made out as part of the peace treaty, leasing to these unrecognized Puritan outposts a region extending from the Piscataqua west to the Merrimac, and from the Merrimac thirty miles north. This lease provided for a specified rental in furs for each town to be established in that region. This rent was paid regularly, except for war periods, up to 1755; but, as land titles in that region are still based on Passaconaway’s deed, now preserved at Exeter, rather than on Mason’s title claim, this leaves the Penacook Federation, or whoever is their successor, the real owners of a territory including Rockingham County in New Hampshire, and some surrounding territory, including the cities of Haverhill and Manchester, and half of Lowell and Lawrence. The Piscataquas agreed to accept a home farther north, in the Agiochook mountains, but were never reconciled to it. There is a legend that the Piscataquas leaving the neighborhood of Strawberry Bank on this occasion, stopped on a nearby hill from which they could look back on the whites' town, and then wished a curse on the land they were standing on, that none of its occupants should ever derive any good from it until it reverted to the tribes.

        The peace terms ignored Gorges’ lands, as well as Mason’s claims to New Hampshire. This encouraged the refugee colonies as against the feudal ones. Thus by Penacook influence, New Hampshire was made a Puritan colony, with a makeshift government on the Puritan model―that is, on the model taken from the Pilgrims, and originally adapted from Wampanoag instructions―this government acting as a rival in authority to the feudal lord with title from England; and the regime established by the Penacooks became much stronger than the proprietary one decreed by England. Although no peace terms were made with the people east of the Piscataqua, it was understood that there would be no hostilities if they established a rival government similar to that of New Hampshire, and set aside under Gorges’ authority in favor of one erected by the townspeople. Several abortive efforts at this took place, but the proprietors were not ousted in either colony, although Mason, in New Hampshire, had less. Mason, however, tried to claim the Massachusetts Bay region on this occasion, and sent a subordinate to take possession; a castle was established in the region now called Quincy, and so much noise of revelry issued from it that the Puritans found that a convenient way to get rid of them without bringing a title lawsuit to England, was to arrest them for disturbance of the peace. Thus ended the last serious attempt to establish complete feudalism in New England.

        The Penacook Federation also agreed on a boundary with the Iroquois, consisting mostly of the Quinnitucket River. Very little of the west shore of that river, or of the hills behind it, were ever in actual Iroquois possession; but this boundary has given the Iroquois an excuse for claiming that their territory extended east to the Quinnitucket.

        It was also agreed to allow interchange of goods between the Puritans and the Penacook tribes, and either people could visit the communities of the other for that purpose. The Penacook peoples’ inability to understand either exchange or property, and finding no value in money, placed difficulties in the way of trade relations; but, on the other hand, traders seem to have been regarded in a way as part of the international and neutral courier system, and that helped. The final compromise reached was the use, as a medium of exchange, of seawant or wampum peag (the beads used to make wampum belts), and the Puritan settlements, and, later on, other neighboring colonies, fixed the value of wampum peag in terms of money. This has given rise to the false conception that wampum was "Indian money."

        37. Elsewhere in America.  By this time, the Virginia colony had established itself firmly in the south, and similarly the French colony in the north as Quebec and in the Quoddy peninsula (which the French called Acadie). An English expedition had captured Quebec, but it was returned by treaty between England and France. The Dutch colonies on the Paumonok Islands and in the Shatemuck River valley were also growing fast, and established friendly relations with the Iroquois Federation, then the greatest power on the continent.

        The importation of slaves in Virginia had already been increasing considerably, and that region was already beginning to speak with that African accent which characterizes the whole section of America where slavery once predominated. Besides, there were "indentured servants," people who were sold for a term of years to pay ship fare to America from England; these were really temporary slaves. Over them all ruled an aristocracy, a direct offshoot of the aristocracy that was trampling on England. The Church of England was ruling with as high a hand in Virginia as back in England, and dissenters were persecuted equally in both places. The indenture variety of slavery was also used by England as a way to get rid of criminals by selling them into servitude in Virginia, thus helping to people Virginia with criminals exiled from Britain. We have seen that they tried similarly to ship criminals to the Penacook coast, but the Pilgrim colony resisted, and although both slavery and indentured servitude were introduced into the northern colonies, they never took strong foothold there.

        England’s habit of granting charters to persons and companies, covering land claimed by England but in tribal possession, continued. Thus the Quoddy peninsula already partly settled by the French as Acadie, and mostly still Micmac, was chartered out as a Scotch colony, and called Nova Scotia, although actual settlement under the charter was impossible. Likewise, a Catholic, Lord Baltimore, obtained in 1632 a charter for territory north of the Potomac River as a refuge for Catholics from England or Virginia. This region was to be controlled by proprietorship in the Calvert family (Lord Baltimore’s); it was named Maryland after the English Queen and a settlement was brought over to Chesapeake Bay in 1634.

        There was another charter granted, for the Mohican coast between the Connecticut and Hudson River, to Lord Say and Lord Brooke, but these charter holders did not try colonizing while there was war with the Penacooks. This charter also covered the territory occupied by Dutch settlements. So little was known in Europe about the lands that they "discovered" (though they had never been lost) that many times charters conflicted, not merely with settlements of other nations, but with each other. Actually, these charters merely amounted to permission to acquire and colonize in the name of England, but later they became bases for conflicting land titles.

        38. Invasion of the Quinnitucket.  During the last stages of the war between Penacooks and Puritans, an attempt was made to get in the rear of the Penacooks by fortifying a point in the west bank of the Quinnitucket. This was done in 1633, when a Puritan expedition built on Mohican territory a fortification which they named Windsor, at the highest point on the river reachable by navigation. This was largely augmented and manned by Pilgrim volunteers who settled in the neighborhood, and, as it conducted no active warfare against the Penacook Federation, the Pequots, across the river were inclined to treat Windsor as part of the Pilgrim colony and therefore neutral, but suspicion remained because the intention had obviously been warlike. The Windsor garrison, out off from everything but red tribes, concluded an alliance with the Mohicans. This fort was operated in total defiance of the Say and Brooke charter, and, in fact, of all outside authority; and it is noticeable that the Penacook Federation did not make war against settlements which defied English authority. But the Pequots, on the opposite bank of the Quinnitucket, remained suspicious, and insisted on their rights of examining supply ships going up the Quinnitucket. In one case, the ship’s owner, who considered the Pequots trespassers in their own country, replied by opening fire on the Pequot inspectors, who had to shoot in self-defense, though they tried to avoid such a contingency even though a state of war existed. After the peace of 1634, the Pequots, dissatisfied with the terms, and especially objecting to the excessive freedom the treaty gave to traders, withdrew from the Penacook Federation, and sent envoys to Boston to negotiate a new treaty. And this delegation brought along several canoefuls of wampum peag, under the assumption that whites needed presents of large quantities of beads before they could be talked to―the Pequot interpretation of the Puritan effort to use wampum as money. Perhaps the Pequots did not misunderstand so badly, after all. However, a peace was finally patched up between Puritans and the Pequots, and Puritans also mediated to prevent a war of secession arising with the Penacook Federation.

        The Pequots’ attempt to cast loose from the Federation at this time was undoubtedly a manifestation of a strong desire to ward off the domination of the white invader and his institutions, which were so obviously repugnant to the Ganowanians. But it was bound to be disastrous to make a breach in the newly-formed union of the red peoples of this part of America.

        39. Extension of the Bay Colony.  The peace terms opened to the Puritans a considerably wider territory than they had been able to settle in before. Existing settlements also had the chance to grow more freely.

        In the fall of 1635, the first attempt was made to colonize in the heart of Okamakammesset territory. Permission was obtained from the Tribal Council to use a tract six miles square; though the Puritan leaders who did the negotiating were highly shocked to find that one of the sagamores they had to deal with was a woman. But, once permission was had, they made the first inland settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, on the Wameset River; and both town and river were named, in horror of the recent peace in the land, Concord. The aid it got from the Okamakammessets resulted in this town growing in spite of all initial difficulties, and it later became a centre for the fight for freedom in the land of Penacook. The Okamakammessets also allowed an English settlement to be made adjoining their capital; this was named Marlborough. The Okamakammesset motto, "no slave upon our land," was also spread among the settlements in this district, and they soon induced the General Court (legislative assembly) to make a resolution to that effect, which it did with enough qualifications to nullify it; but would not permit the abolition of slavery, as the slave-trade had become too profitable in England. The fact remains that the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first to declare in principle against enslavement.

        The Red tribes thus proceeded with their work of democratizing the Puritan colony. The tribal influence could now be more direct, once peace was made. The church-membership form of representative government―the Pilgrim adaptation of the idea of democracy―had been adopted by the Puritans during the war; but with it went the institutions of money, property, and persecution of religious dissenters, as brought over from Europe, and which all whites then considered as essential to organized communities, just as much as such institutions were beyond the understanding of the red men. After peace was signed, religious persecution came to the fore, largely because there had been little chance for it during the war, and because the fighting machinery made against the red tribes had to have some enemy to fight against.

        The Penacook tribes were so far from avoiding the white settlers, or realizing how the whites were to overrun the country, that even the Nipmuck tribe, far to the west on the Quinnitucket River, allowed a small group of Puritans to settle on that river, near their town of Agawam; the Puritan town started in 1636, was named Springfield. This town, in turn, colonized further up the river, but on the west bank, among the tribes disarmed by the Iroquois, and thus formed the towns of Holyoke and Northampton. The latter town was close to the Nonotuck crossing, where the Penacook Federation was first formed.

[Complete poem can be found in America's Search for Liberty in Song & Poem]

Home     Contents      Next