Pequot War - Historical Accounts and Controversies

Historical Accounts and Controversies

The earliest accounts of the Pequot War were written by the victors within one year of the war. Later histories, with few exceptions, recounted events from a similar perspective, restating arguments first used by the war's military leaders, such as John Underhill and John Mason, as well the Puritan divines Increase Mather and his son Cotton Mather.

Recent historians and other specialists have reviewed these accounts. In 2004, an artist and archaeologist teamed up to evaluate the sequence of events in the Pequot War. Their popular history took issue with events, and whether John Mason and John Underhill wrote the accounts that appeared under their names. The authors have been adopted as honorary members of the Lenape Pequot.

Most modern historians such as Alfred A. Cave, a specialist in the ethnohistory of colonial America, do not debate questions of the outcome of the battle or its chronology. However, Cave contends that Mason and Underhill's eyewitness accounts, as well as the contemporaneous histories of Mather and Hubbard, were more "polemical than substantive." The causes of the outbreak of hostilities, the reasons for the English fear and hatred of the Pequot, and the ways in which English dealt with and wrote about the Pequot, have been re-evaluated within a larger context than daily colonial life.

Revisionist historians have placed the background of the Pequot War within the context of European history, in which religious wars gave rise to increased violence, and Dutch and English colonization in North America, as well as the geopolitical ambitions and struggles of contending Native peoples during the first half of the seventeenth century. Such historians have doubts about traditional histories, characterizing them as hegemonic narratives that valorize Puritans at the expense of a "demonized" Native population. Alden T. Vaughan, a noted historian of colonial America, at first was a critic of the Pequot. Later he wrote that the Pequot were not "solely or even primarily responsible" for the war. He went on, "The Bay colony's gross escalation of violence ... made all-out war unavoidable; until then, negotiation was at least conceivable."