Depiction of Miles Standish’s return from the Wessagusset Massacre of 1623, a mass murder disguised as trade talks

Almost immediately, the separatists repaid the Wampanoag miracle alliance of 1621 with enslavement and military conquest. By 1623, Bradford and Standish were personally conducting preemptive strikes against perceived threats, as they did in modern-day Waymouth when they met with their rumored enemies under pretense of trade. With five Massachusett leaders gathered in his tent and sat at his table, Standish gave a signal to seal the exits, snatched a ceremonial dagger off the neck of one leader, Pecksuot, and stabbed him to death with it while his guards handled the rest.

They returned to Plymouth with one of the victim’s heads and, Silverman writes, had it “mounted atop its fort to rot alongside a flag fashioned out of a piece of linen stained with Indian blood.”[xiii] In response, Cape Cod Wampanoags sheltered for the spring in “defensible interior swamps” rather than make their usual fish runs, leading to the disease-driven deaths of several sachems and tribesmen.

As more English families poured themselves into what they saw as a blank canvas, the white outsiders showed their true colors in more systematic fashion, beginning with the 1637 massacre of hundreds of mostly women and children at Mystic Fort - the one and only time the Narragansett teamed up with the English. The attack was ordered as retaliation for a rogue Pequot band having killed English sailors for their boat.

The formerly anti-English Narragansett watched as Boston’s militia set a fire inside the fort, burning many alive, then picked off with rifles those who fled the fort. “Narrangansetts had cried out, ‘Machit, machit’; ‘It is naught, it is naught because it is too furious and slays too many men.’ The Narragansetts were particularly appalled at the slaughter of Pequot women and children, for Indian warfare usually involved taking these populations captive for eventual adoption into the victors’ society … particularly urgent to the Narragansetts after their losses from the smallpox of 1633.”[xiv]

The English did not stop there. They hunted Pequot survivors wherever they went, bent on not just their physical but cultural extermination. In 1638, Massachusetts and Connecticut declared the Pequot Nation extinct.[xv] In March 2025, Yale Genocide Studies Program director David Simon testified before the Connecticut General Assembly supporting a resolution by State Senator Cathy Osten to condemn the colony’s actions, which included a proclamation that any remaining Pequots may never return to their lands, speak their native language or refer to themselves as Pequots.

The Pequot War finally “jolted Native people into the realization that the newly ascendant English were a dire threat.”[xvi] This was the true English face, the one Tisquantum had warned them about. This is also around the time Plymouth finally got serious about their missionary work, having eliminated any potential spiritual opponents.

In the 1640s, the Massachusetts Bay Colony assassinated a Narragansett sachem and extracted agreements from five small Massachusett tribes to become their subjects and receive religious instruction “from time to time.” The Crown, which had been frustrated with the lack of converts coming out of the Colony, encouraged stronger efforts. “Conversion,” wrote historian Neal Salisbury, “presupposed their dominion” of the converts.[xvii] By the end of 1646, Native Americans in the colonies were forbidden to worship their own deities.

Ousamequin (Massasoit to the English), the Wampanoag sachem who first took a chance on the Mayflower pilgrims, was never able to credibly present his heirs with the vision he had seen for an English-Wampanoag relationship. Decades of legal battles followed “as colonial courts tried to establish their authority … and began empowering their magistrates to seize Indians with overdue debts to English creditors.”[xviii]

Depiction of the Mystic Fort Massacre, with which Connecticut lawmakers still reckon today.

In 1659, Rhode Island went so far as to authorize the sale of Indians into overseas slavery for crimes such as theft, debt and property damage.[xix] The Rhode Island General Assembly added that an Indian may not testify against an Englishman, which is exactly how much of the law treated Black Americans until the mid-20th century. In 1665, Plymouth established “select courts” in every town to merit harsh penalties for certain Indian convictions, including whipping, branding, and forced servitude. These were the same settlers whose first act upon landing on Plymouth Rock was to loot the first Wampanoag graveyard they came across.

When Massasoit’s son, Pumetacom, became sachem, he attempted to finally unite the Northeast tribes against their colonizers, but only after years of unsuccessful lawsuits and appeals to Boston to treat them, in their small numbers, the way they had treated the English when their numbers were small. When Pumetacom rightly rebuffed a Plymouth court summons to answer for rumors of an uprising, he went directly to Boston, which surprisingly chided Plymouth for its summons, reminding them he is not their subject but “the leader of a separate polity under a shared king.”[xx] The success led Plymouth to arbitration panels with Massachusetts and Connecticut.

It was a legislative trap. Boston turned on a dime, and on the very site of the 1621 Pilgrim-Wampanoag welcome, Plymouth referred to Pumetacom as all colonies’ “common enemy” and it was determined that Plymouth did have the right to summon the sachem. Besides the existing imperial rule, Pumetacom’s punishment was, like that of nearly every minor conviction on Wampanoags, the surrender of vast swaths of land.

The law in general turned on the Wampanoags. Sachems were no longer consulted on charges; tribesmen were sent to jail - which they considered a form of torture - and bail was dependent on how much land a defendant was willing to leverage. Juries were stacked with “Praying Indians,” mostly Cape Cod-based tribesmen whose sachems had quickly embraced assimilation as a form of survival, and what few trials were held were obvious shams.

Ch. 3 SOURCES:

[xiii] Silverman, D. J. (2019). This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. India: Bloomsbury Publishing.

[xiv] ibid

[xv] Karr, R. D. (1998). " Why should you be so furious?": The violence of the Pequot War. The Journal of American History, 85(3), 876-909.

[xvi] Silverman, D. J. (2019). This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. India: Bloomsbury Publishing.

[xvii] Salisbury, N. (1974). Red Puritans: The “Praying Indians” of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot. The William and Mary Quarterly, 31(1), 27–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/1918981

[xviii] Silverman, D. J. (2019). This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. India: Bloomsbury Publishing.