Mayflower

critical of Plymouth’s treatment of the Pokanokets. And for those with long memories, Plymouth had been so slow to come to the Bay Colony’s aid during the Pequot War that the Plymouth militia had missed the fighting. In the end, however, Massachusetts-Bay decided that it was in its own best interests to support Plymouth. Not only was the uprising a possible threat to its inhabitants, but the conflict might make available large portions of choice Indian land.
    In the middle of all this, Governor Winslow decided he needed to put his colony’s religious house in order. The latest troubles with the Indians were a sign that God was unhappy with Plymouth. It was time, therefore, that “we humble ourselves before the Lord for all those sins whereby we have provoked our good God sadly to interrupt our peace and comfort.” Winslow proclaimed that Thursday, June 24, be designated a day of fasting and humiliation.
    Plymouth Colony was rife with sin, but apparently none of those sins involved the treatment of the Indians. Winslow later insisted that “we stand as innocent as it is possible for any person or people towards their neighbor.” Even the trial for Sassamon’s murder was, in Winslow’s view, an exampleof English justice and magnanimity. In a letter to the governor of Connecticut, he claimed that Tobias and the other condemned men had “give[n] us thanks for our fair trial of them.”
    The result of this stubborn insistence on rectitude was to dehumanize the Indians so that they seemed the wanton and senseless instruments of God’s will. This meant that there was nothing to be achieved through diplomacy; if the English were to make any progress in their difficulties with the Indians, they must do it through prayer and the sword.

    Solid maple war club, inlaid with white and purple wampum, reputed to have been King Philip’s

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    By Monday night, companies of militiamen had begun to arrive at Taunton. The elderly James Cudworth of Scituate was designated the army’s commander with Major William Bradford, the fifty-five-yearold son of the former governor, as his immediate subordinate.
    Since they’d just arrived on the scene, Cudworth and Bradford were as ignorant as everyone else as to the movements of the Pokanokets. There was one man, however, who had firsthand knowledge of the territory to the south and the Indians surrounding Mount Hope Bay. Just the year before, Benjamin Church, a thirty-three-year-old carpenter, had become the first Englishman to settle in the southeastern tip of Narragansett Bay at a place called Sakonnet, home to the female sachem Awashonks and several hundred of her people.
    Instead of being intimidated by the fact that he was the only Englishman in Sakonnet (known today as Little Compton, Rhode Island), Church relished the chance to start from scratch. “My head and hands were full about settling a new plantation,” he later remembered, “where nothing was brought to: no preparation of dwelling house, or outhousing or fencing made. Horses and cattle were to be provided, ground to be cleared and broken up; and the uttermost caution to be used, to keep myself free from offending my Indian neighbors all round me.” Church was a throwback to his maternal grandfather, Mayflower passenger Richard Warren. By moving to Sakonnet, he was leaving his past behind and beginning anew in Indian country.
    But as became increasingly clear in the traumatic months ahead, Church had moved well beyond his Pilgrim forebears. The early days of Plymouth Colony had been devoted to establishing a community of fellow worshippers. Within the shelter of their wooden wall, the Pilgrims had done their best to separate themselves from both the wilderness and the ungodly. Church, on the other hand, was quite content to be living among the heathen—both red and white. In addition to Awashonks and the Sakonnets, with whom he developed “a good acquaintance…and was in a little time in great esteem among them,” there were the residents of Aquidneck Island, just across the Sakonnet River to the west. Mostly Baptists and Quakers, these were not the sorts with whom a proper Puritan socialized. Church, on the other hand, “found the gentlemen of the island very civil and obliging.” While his wife, Alice, and their two-year-old son, Thomas, stayed with relatives in Duxbury, he labored to prepare a new home for them.

    An engraving