In the spring of 1637, the First Muster of the East Regiment occurred on Salem Common. This event is widely understood to be the birth of the National Guard. While we celebrate that every year, we never talk about why the regiment was mustered and we need to…because it needs to be acknowledged that in 1637, the newly formed East Regiment was about to participate in what would be the first act of genocide carried out by the English colonists in North America.
We need to be honest about that.
It is certainly true that the Pequot War was not the first genocide in North America — by the 17th century, European diseases had decimated as much as 90% of First Nations Peoples; the Spanish had certainly laid waste to the First Nations Peoples of the Gulf Coast, Deep South, and Southwest in the 16th and 17th centuries — but this was the first time English colonists actively and consciously participated in wiping out an entire nation of people (though amazingly a few Pequot did survive and their descendants are with us today).
Summarizing the entirety of the Pequot War could fill several books and is too much for a column in a local newspaper, but I’ll do my best to highlight it here. In 1634, Capt. John Stone and his crew were killed by Pequots while trading on the Connecticut River after Stone attempted to kidnap a few Niantics. Stone had previously been banished from Boston by the Puritans for drunkenness, adultery, and suspicion of piracy.
While the Puritans had no love for Stone, they felt strongly that they could not tolerate the death of any Englishman at the hands of Natives. Then in 1636, John Oldham (also not a friend to the Puritans, but a friend of Salem’s founder Roger Conant and the fishermen of early New England — there is no record of Conant participating in the Pequot War, thank God) was murdered on Block Island by Niantics allied with the Narragansett for trading with peoples allied with the Pequot, as the Narragansett were trying to claim exclusive trading privileges with the English at that time. The English demanded justice and the Narragansett complied but the murderers of Oldham and his crew fled to the Pequot and were given sanctuary by them.
John Endicott then led approximately 90 men from Salem and Boston to attack Block Island, where they killed several Natives and burned every village there to the ground. Fearing the English were coming for them next, the Pequot began attacking English settlements in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts. In December of 1636, the Massachusetts General Court called for three regiments to be raised, the first of which mustered at Salem Common (the event we will celebrate every year on the Common).
There were several brutal battles of the Pequot War, but one I’d like to highlight occurred at Mystic, Connecticut, when English, Mohegan, and Narragansett forces surrounded a Pequot fortified settlement there. The English positioned musketeers at each entrance while the Narragansett and Mohegan shot flaming arrows into the village. As the Pequot tried to flee the flames, the English, under the command of Capt. John Mason, shot them dead.
At least 500 Pequot men, women, and children were killed. Mason declared it an act of God who “laughed at his enemies and the enemies of his people to scorn” and felt that he was the tool of God bringing the fires of hell to God’s heathen enemies, stating: “Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen.” The Narragansett and Mohegan confronted Mason about his slaughter of Pequot and abandoned the English while they murdered everyone in the village, but were later attacked by a Pequot war party and forced to rejoin the English as they retreated from the site of the atrocity.
While the East Regiment did not participate in the Mystic Massacre, as it was done by men from Connecticut, this was the war they were fighting in.
By 1638 the Pequot were broken. There was a last ditch effort by the Pequot leader Sassacus to seek shelter for his people among the Mohawk of upstate New York, but the Mohawk murdered him and sent his head to the English at Hartford, Connecticut.
In September of 1638, the last of the Pequot signed the Treaty of Hartford, which made all of the surviving Pequots slaves to either the Narragansett or the English, and forbade them from ever uttering the word Pequot ever again. This then prompted the Colony of Massachusetts to pass a law legalizing slavery and the sale of humans in order to make sure that the buying and selling of Pequots was legal — thus making Massachusetts the first state in America to have a law on its books specifically legalizing slavery (which was found to be a violation of the Massachusetts constitution after the new state constitution was ratified in 1781).
The Pequot War is, in my opinion, the most shameful moment in Massachusetts history.
The Pequots who became slaves of the Narragansett were able to maintain their identity, and their descendants survive today. Most Pequots who were sold to the English were later sold to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, but a few became household servants and slaves for the New England elite.
The East Regiment eventually became the Massachusetts National Guard. and I think it must be noted that most of the history of the Massachusetts National Guard is indeed honorable and something to be proud of. They were the first to stand up to the British and set in motion the events that led to our independence. They were the first to reply to Southern aggression and defend Washington D.C. from the Confederacy during the Civil War. They liberated tens of thousands of enslaved people from southern plantations, and thousands of Jews, Roma, LGBTQ people, trade unionists, suspected communists, and more from Nazi concentration camps during World War II. They have saved the lives of millions of New Englanders from all manner of natural disasters, and so much more! So much of that history is a history to be proud of, and overall, the Massachusetts National Guard has arguably a far more honorable history than probably any other military unit in the world.
But none of that proud history of the Massachusetts National Guard means that this horrible act of genocide shouldn’t be acknowledged, both by the Massachusetts National Guard and the city of Salem.
Today, the city of Salem lists “the growing Pequot threat” as the reason why the militia was formed. I think the least we can do is change that line on the city’s website. There was never any Pequot threat.
Benjamin Shallop lives in Salem and is the author of “The Founding of Salem, City of Peace”, an account of the early settlement of Salem and the surrounding area in the 1620s.