Red-White Power Relations and Justice in the Courts of Seventeenth-Century New England
Abstract
Recently, there has been considerable disagreement over how well or badly Puritan magistrates treated Native Americans who appeared before them. No one has, however, systematically compared, colony by colony, the penalties assessed red and white offenders who committed similar seventeenth-century crimes. Nor do most observers recognize that European dealings with the Indians constituted a dynamic, changing reality that depended significantly on how secure the early whites considered themselves from any native threat. This essay will attempt to describe how Puritan legal policies toward and punishment of red offenders developed variously throughout southern New England, with particular reference to that issue. Although the New England colonies dealt with Indians in a far from uniform manner, we shall see that white men generally exhibited considerable fairness only when they believed that their safety was at stake. They demonstrated an ethnocentric and, by late century, even racist unfairness once they had achieved some dominion over the Native American peoples around them. When that point was reached, the sentences Calvinist justices handed down to red and white offenders reveal remarkable differences. In the earliest years of white settlement, it was expedient for the Pilgrim and Puritan newcomers to deal fairly with the Indians. Few in number, these transplanted Europeans could hardly afford to alienate nearby tribes. Although the Massachusetts, the Pennacook confederacy of what would become New Hampshire, the Abenaki of Maine, and the Cape Cod residents had been decimated by epidemics from 1616 to 1619, the Narragansetts to the south and Pequots to the west could still muster sizable contingents of warriors. Even the Massachusetts and Wampanoags, despite heavy losses, collectively outnumbered the early English.