Pequot War

Pequot War, war fought in 1636–37 by the Pequot people against a coalition of English settlers from the Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Saybrook colonies and their Native American allies (including the Narragansett and Mohegan) that eliminated the Pequot as an impediment to English colonization of southern New England. It was an especially brutal war and the first sustained conflict between Native Americans and Europeans in northeastern North America.

To best understand the Pequot War, one needs to consider the economic, political, and cultural changes brought about by the arrival of the Dutch on Long Island and in the Connecticut River valley at the beginning of the 17th century and of English traders and settlers in the early 1630s. The world into which they entered was dominated by the Pequot, who had subjugated dozens of other tribes throughout the area during the 1620s and early ’30s in an attempt to control the region’s fur and wampum trade. Through the use of diplomacy, coercion, intermarriage, and warfare, by 1635 the Pequot had exerted their economic, political, and military control over the whole of modern-day Connecticut and eastern Long Island and, in the process, established a confederacy of dozens of tribes in the region.

The struggle for control of the fur and wampum trade in the Connecticut River valley was at the root of the Pequot War. Before the arrival of the English in the early 1630s, the Dutch and Pequot controlled all the region’s trade, but the situation was precarious because of the resentment held by the subservient Native American tribes for their Pequot overlords. When the English entered upon the scene, those other tribes sought alliance with them, shifting the balance of regional power and bringing about conflict as the competition for control of trade heated up anew. Although the immediate impetus for the war is often identified as the killing of English traders, those deaths were the culmination of decades-long conflict between Indian peoples that was exacerbated by the presence of the Dutch and the English.

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Among the seminal events was the murder of a trader (John Stone) and his crew on the Connecticut River by the Pequot in early 1634. Although the Pequot provided several explanations for the deaths of Stone and his crew—all of which suggested that the Pequot viewed their actions as justified—the English felt that they could not afford to let any English deaths at the hands of Native Americans go unpunished. As tensions grew, another trader, John Oldham, was found murdered on a ship off Block Island (now part of the state of Rhode Island) in July 1636. That time, the perpetrators were assumed to have been Manisses Indians. Those incidents sparked the military response by the English of Massachusetts Bay that began the Pequot War. In late August the Massachusetts Bay Colony sent a force of about 90 soldiers under the command of Col. John Endecott to Block Island and Pequot territory in southeastern Connecticut in order to exact retribution for the traders’ deaths. After skirmishing with the Manisses and setting fire to villages and cornfields, the expedition sailed to Pequot territory, disembarked along the Thames River, and, failing to incite the Pequot to combat, again burned villages and cornfields. That spurred in turn the Pequot’s successful attack and siege of the fort at Saybrook (September 1636–April 1637), the war’s longest engagement, during which the Pequot destroyed English provisions, set fire to English warehouses, and attacked any settlers who strayed far from the palisade fortress.

The war lasted 11 months and involved thousands of combatants who fought several battles over an area encompassing thousands of square miles. In the first six months of the war, the Pequot, with no firearms, won every engagement against the English. Both sides showed a high degree of sophistication, planning, and ingenuity in adjusting to conditions and enemy countermeasures. While the Pequot War was the first time that the English had confronted Native American battle formations, tactics, and weapons in New England, the Pequot had already encountered European battle formations and methods during a brief war they fought with the Dutch in 1634, as a result of which they had adjusted their tactics to battle the English. In fact, on the eve of the war, the Pequot were a highly effective experienced military force, having honed their combat skills through decades of warfare against their Native American neighbors. Although the English muskets were superior to Pequot bows in terms of range and penetration, the Pequot were able to use the terrain and their mobility to great advantage and employed a number of stratagems to negate the English advantage in firearms. Indeed, the English suffered dozens of casualties in the early stages of the war before they were able to adapt their Old World military experiences to the battlefields of the New World and win decisive engagements.

The turning point in the conflict came when the Connecticut colony declared war on the Pequot on May 1, 1637, following a Pequot attack on the English settlement at Wethersfield—the first time women and children were killed during the war. Capt. John Mason of Windsor was ordered to conduct an offensive war against the Pequot in retaliation for the Wethersfield raid. The most-significant battles of the war then followed, including the Mistick Campaign of May 10–26, 1637 (Battle of Mistick Fort), during which an expeditionary force of 77 Connecticut soldiers and as many as 250 Native American allies attacked and burned the fortified Pequot village at Mistick. Some 400 Pequot (including an estimated 175 women and children) were killed in less than an hour, half of whom burned to death. Those who tried to escape the burning structure were shot by the English or by their Mohegan and Narragansett allies, who formed a secondary outer ring around the fortress and fired on any Pequot who managed to escape through the English lines. The English estimated that there were only a dozen survivors, seven of whom were taken prisoner. Following the “Mistick Massacre,” the English fought the 10-hour so-called Battle of the English Withdrawal against more than 500 Pequot as they sought to reach the safety of their ships at least 7 miles (11 km) away. The Pequot lost half of their fighting men in those two battles, which led directly to the disintegration and defeat of the Pequot tribe as it fled its homeland following the massacre. In the following months, the English of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay pursued the fleeing Pequot communities, executing leaders and fighting men and enslaving women and children.

The Battles of Mistick Fort and the English Withdrawal were significant victories for the English, and they led to their complete victory over the Pequot six weeks later at the Swamp Fight in Fairfield, Connecticut—the last battle of the war. The English victories were won by carefully planned and executed attacks led by commanders and officers who had decades of experience in the Thirty Years’ War and were eventually able to translate that experience to the battlefields of the New World. They were a well-trained and experienced core of combat veterans who could make the necessary tactical adjustments in an unfamiliar terrain against a determined and experienced enemy.

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In the end, the Pequot War forever changed the political and social landscape of southern New England, and it influenced colonial and U.S. policies toward Native Americans for centuries. The massacre of the Pequot at Mistick demonstrated to all observers, in southern New England and elsewhere, the English ability and will to wage total war against their Indian enemies.