Pequot War

The Pequot War was a conflict that took place in 1636 and ended in 1638 in New England, between the Pequot nation and an alliance of the colonists from the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan nations. The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequot. In an event called the Mystic massacre, English colonists of the Connecticut Colony and their allies set the village of Pequot Fort ablaze, blocked the exits, and shot anyone trying to escape. At the end, about 700 Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to colonists in Bermuda or the West Indies; other survivors were dispersed as captives to the victorious nation.

The Treaty of Hartford of 1638 sought to eradicate the Pequot cultural identity by prohibiting the Pequots from returning to their lands, speaking their tribal language, or referring to themselves as Pequots. The result was the elimination of the Pequot nation as a viable polity in southern New England, and the colonial authorities classified them as extinct. Survivors who remained in the area were absorbed into other local nations; however, a western band retained sovereignty in Connecticut and are today a Federally recognized tribal nation.

The Pequot and the Mohegan people were at one time a single sociopolitical entity. Anthropologists and historians contend that they split into the two competing groups sometime before contact with the Puritan English colonists. The earliest historians of the Pequot War speculated that the Pequot people migrated from the upper Hudson River Valley toward central and eastern Connecticut sometime around 1500. These claims are disputed by the evidence of modern archaeology and anthropology finds.

In the 1630s, the Connecticut River Valley was in turmoil. The Pequot aggressively extended their area of control at the expense of the Wampanoag to the north, the Narragansett to the east, the Connecticut River Valley Algonquian nations and the Mohegan to the west, and the Lenape Algonquian people of Long Island to the south. The nations contended for political dominance and control of the European fur trade. A series of epidemics over the course of the previous three decades had severely reduced the Indian populations, and there was a power vacuum in the area as a result.

The Dutch and the English from Western Europe were also striving to extend the reach of their trade into the North American interior to achieve dominance in the lush, fertile region. The colonies were new at the time, as the original settlements had been founded in the 1620s. By 1636, the Dutch had fortified their trading post, and the English had built a trading fort at Saybrook. English Puritans from the Massachusetts Bay, along with the Pilgrims from Plymouth Colony, settled at the recently established river towns of Windsor (1632), Wethersfield (1633), Hartford (1635), and Springfield (1636). The Pilgrims had been allied with the Wampanoag since 1621.

Beginning in the early 1630s, a series of contributing factors increased the tensions between English colonists and the nations of southeastern New England. Efforts to control fur trade access resulted in a series of escalating incidents and attacks that increased tensions on both sides. Political divisions widened between the Pequots and Mohegans as they aligned with different trade sources, the Mohegans with the English colonists and the Pequots with the Dutch colonists. The peace ended between the Dutch and Pequots when the Pequots assaulted a tribe of Indians who had tried to trade in the area of Hartford. Tensions grew as the Massachusetts Bay Colony became a stronghold for wampum production, which the Narragansetts and Pequots had controlled until the mid-1630s.

Adding to the tensions, John Stone and seven of his crew were murdered in 1634 by the Niantics, western tributary clients of the Pequots. Stone was from the West Indies and had been banished from Boston for malfeasance, including drunkenness, adultery, and piracy. He had abducted two Western Niantic men, forcing them to show him the way up the Connecticut River. Soon after, his crew and he were attacked and killed by a larger group of Western Niantics. The initial reactions in Boston varied from indifference to outright joy at Stone's death, but the colonial officials still felt compelled to protest the killing. According to the Pequots' later explanations, he was killed in reprisal for the Dutch murdering the principal Pequot sachem Tatobem, and they claimed to be unaware that Stone was English and not Dutch. (Contemporaneous accounts claim that the Pequots knew Stone to be English.) In the earlier incident, Tatobem had boarded a Dutch vessel to trade. Instead of conducting trade, the Dutch abducted him and demanded a substantial amount of ransom for his safe return. The Pequots quickly sent bushels of wampum to the Dutch, but received only Tatobem's dead body in return. But the colonial officials in Boston did not accept the Pequots' excuses that they had been unaware of Stone's nationality. Pequot sachem Sassacus sent the colonists some wampum to atone for the killing, but he refused the colonists' demands that the warriors responsible for Stone's death be turned over to them for trial and punishment.

The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 also placed a great deal of pressure on the harvests of that year, according to historian Katherine Grandjean, increasing competition for winter food supplies for several years afterwards throughout much of coastal Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. This, in turn, precipitated even greater tensions between the Pequots and English colonists, who were ill-prepared to face periods of famine.