Transcription
This video is part of a collaboration called "War is Hell, No Matter the Era." Myself and a bunch of other educators here on YouTube have all drawn from our respective areas of expertise to tell stories from the ugly side of military history; stories which suggest that large numbers of people systematically murdering each other may not be our species' healthiest or most productive pastime. A little card thingy should be popping up on your screen right now that will link you to the entire playlist. I definitely recommend you check it out because some of those channels in there are real hidden gems.
So, when I think of conspiracies in American history, my mind goes straight to the 20th century. And I'm not talking about Roswell, back-into-the-left Illuminati nonsense. I'm talking about the real stuff: the CIA overthrowing democratically elected Latin American governments; the CIA assassinating opponents to their authoritarian puppet regimes in Latin America; the CIA smuggling ex-Nazi scientists to safety in Latin America after information about their human experimentations at concentration camps came to light. You know, just your normal, everyday, average American foreign policy stuff. But, of course, governments and institutions underhandedly consolidating their own power is nothing new.
And if we look back at 17th-century Massachusetts, on the English home front of King Philip's War, we find what may very well be the first genuine conspiracy in American history. Now, full disclosure, though: I draw from a number of other sources here and there. There's also a lot of research of my own. I do admittedly owe my central thesis to historian Kyle Zellner and his book, *Rabble in Arms: Massachusetts Towns and Militiamen in King Philip's War*. Which is this book; it is this book. I just throw away the dust covers because I...I don't know, they're just a pain in the ass to deal with.
All right, let me set the stage here. By the time King Philip's War broke out in 1675, the first generation of Massachusetts Bay colonists had died off, and their children had supplanted them as the civic leaders of the colonies. That first generation was famously devout, idealistic, and, I would argue, revolutionary. And already, just a few short years after their deaths, they were already being mythologized into paragons of virtue; the heroes of New England's Dawn Age. The first generation had come to America primarily for ideological reasons; nonetheless, they soon began to take advantage of the more material benefits of life on a new continent.
Over the past half-century, the founding families of many Massachusetts Bay towns had grown wealthy and influential on the rocky coast. Maritime commerce, fishing, and slave trading were big business, while animal agriculture and the fur trade led English entrepreneurs deep into the wooded interior and fueled colonial expansion. Even at this primeval stage of manifest destiny, large-scale cattle farming in particular created an insatiable hunger for land that displaced and alienated local Native Americans. The founding families had gotten into these industries early and cornered the market, which caused drastic socioeconomic stratification among the second generation of colonists.
The quintessential example of a top-heavy, late 17th-century Puritan town was Ipswich, a bustling seaport on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Of all the colonies' towns, it was second only to Boston in population and prosperity, but nearly half that wealth was controlled by just a handful of elite families; families that also enjoyed effectively hereditary positions in local government. Ipswich's selectmen typically stayed in office for long periods, with the same leading citizens re-elected annually as a matter of course. Ipswich's meteoric commercial rise attracted entrepreneurial newcomers who, in the founders' view, threatened Puritanisms. Well, purity—a major source of angst amongst the godly people of New England in the late 17th century—was a decline in religiosity among the population at large, ironically due in part to the founders' own shift from ideological goals to commercial ones.
So, as fresh waves of East Anglian immigrants arrived in Ipswich seeking new opportunities, the founding families acted swiftly to close ranks against transients, social climbers, and the ungodly. In 1659, local leaders decreed that any residents who did not already have a house built in town would be permanently excluded from utilizing common land. In one fell swoop, this ordinance removed any incentives for outsiders to move to Ipswich and made it almost impossible for any poor citizens to rise above their station. Ipswich elites then began steadily pressuring local undesirables to leave town. In 1660, the elites petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts Bay for a land grant deep in Nipmuc country, in what is today Worcester County. But not to settle themselves; this new plantation, which would grow into the town of Brookfield, would serve as a dumping ground for Ipswich's low-class, sinful, or otherwise objectionable families.
Now, we could argue that this was the genesis of the fabled Eastern Massachusetts NIMBY. However, I should add that this kind of consolidation of political and economic power represented a pretty perverse departure from the core ideals of the Puritan movement, which had long been characterized by radical egalitarianism. There were a number of circumstantial and ideological reasons that Puritan Massachusetts stratified in the mid-17th century, and I'm not going to get too much into that here. If you'd like to learn more, you should check out my video, "In Defense of Puritanism," which basically traces the whole history of the movement in England and America. It's pretty trippy and a lot of fun, and I think it might just be the best thing on this channel, so you should watch it.
While the founding families of other Puritan towns weren't quite as ruthless as those of Ipswich, this was by no means an isolated case. Increased socioeconomic stratification was a measurable trend in just about every major commercial center of the colony; basically, wherever there was wealth in Massachusetts, it was concentrated in the hands of a lucky few. And the same people who controlled the money prescribed cultural expectations and religious dogma. Naturally, this led to a lot of class tension, and colonists of the lower and middle classes wrangled against the elites' arbitrary authority. It was this factious and gentrifying colony that found itself suddenly under vicious attack in late June of 1675; the beginning of 14 months of blood and terror that we call King Philip's War.
King Philip's War started as a violent dispute between Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag Nation but quickly spiraled out of control into a region-wide conflict. Just two weeks after the outbreak of hostilities, the war came north to Massachusetts Bay when native raiders attacked the town of Mendon. Two weeks after that, in early August, the Nipmuc Nation definitively joined the war on the Wampanoag side when they destroyed a company of militia that was marching through their territory. This was a famous ambush that the English would later call "Wheeler's Surprise." They then chased the survivors to the aforementioned town of Brookfield, which they then besieged for two days before withdrawing. Though trouble with the Wampanoag had been brewing all year, Massachusetts was largely unprepared for Nipmuc invasion. With their heartlands in today's Worcester County and central Massachusetts, the Nipmuc were perfectly poised to strike at both the isolated English settlements of the Connecticut River Valley to the west and the colony's soft underbelly of Middlesex County in the east.
Panicked, the General Court sent word to towns all across the colony, ordering them to form militia committees for the impressment of troops. And who made up these militia committees? Town leadership, of course; the same men who had maintained political and economic strangleholds on their communities for years; the patriarchs of elite families quickly awarded themselves with leadership positions in the new army. Almost all these men were on the older side, and though a number of them had combat experience, it was in battles fought decades prior. Major General Daniel Dennison, the highest-ranking military officer in Massachusetts, was a career politician in his 60s; a bureaucrat and legislator who had represented Ipswich in the General Court for many years. Major John Pynchon, the 50-year-old commander of all English forces on the Connecticut River Valley, was the son of the founder of Springfield and had grown wealthy selling English goods to local Natives. Captain Daniel Henchman was a Bostonian landlord in his early 50s who, in the years before the war, was developing a 25-acre farmstead in a remote plantation that would later grow into the city of Worcester. Later in life, he administered the settlement of the area and represented Worcester in the General Court. Captain Richard Beers was a luminary of Watertown in his late 60s who had served as a court representative for 13 years and a selectman for 31. Captain Thomas Lathrop, mid-60s, was the first selectman of Beverly and head of the militia committee; he had taken a leading role in the civic, religious, and military affairs of the town ever since its founding.
The only early-war military commander of note who broke this mold was Captain Samuel Mosley, who I've mentioned once or twice before on this channel. Unlike the patriarchs, he was born in America, not England; a rough-hewn sailor in his mid-30s. Mosley had been a privateer in Jamaica as a young man. Returning home, he married above his station, taking to wife the niece of the governor of Massachusetts. This familial connection gained him desirable appointments just prior to the outbreak of war. Mosley was propelled to colony-wide fame when he went to sea and captured three notorious Dutch pirate ships that had been harassing New England shipping in the summer of 1675. Mosley was passed over for an official military command, but not to be deterred, he declared himself a captain, raised a company of a hundred volunteers, and went to war anyway. Mosley's infamous company was an international crew of criminals, pirates, and war dogs; a far cry from the shire levies of the Puritan patriarchs. And ultimately, unsurprisingly, these cutthroats later proved to be a far better asset to the English war effort, and Mosley would be brutalizing Native American non-combatants long after many of the patriarchs were cold in the ground. But the enormity of Mosley's deeds is a long story for another time; perhaps around a campfire.
So now that the elites had done the important work of appointing themselves majors and captains of the militia, all that remained was the small matter of impressing all the grunts. Now, it's a common misconception that English militiamen in King Philip's War were volunteers. There were a couple of exceptions, but that's largely not true. Massachusetts was pressing soldiers into service from the very beginning, and the decision of who was to go to war was left entirely up to the local authorities of each town. This aspect of Massachusetts government was actually pretty consistent with Puritan egalitarianism; not every central government would allow local authorities this amount of leeway in such an important and urgent matter. But in practice, Puritan localism meant the town elites were basically unaccountable. Puritans were way ahead of the curve in terms of decentralized government, but they hadn't quite figured out checks and balances yet. Town leaders were given a number from authorities in Boston and told, "Give us this many men," and they looked out over their stratified communities and saw in this crisis an opportunity; an opportunity that would strengthen their own position and shape their troubled towns into gleaming cities on a hill. And so they organized what might be the very first conspiracy in American history.
Close examination of the impressment records for Massachusetts Bay in King Philip's War reveals that militia committees targeted local undesirables for military service at strikingly disproportionate rates. Let's go back to Ipswich for a second. Of the 88 men pressed into service there, 60 were from the lowest economic stratum of society. Only about a quarter of Essex County residents were poor or impoverished, meaning that lower-class men in Ipswich were impressed at a rate 43 percent higher than their representation in the general population. Additionally, 23 of the men impressed in Ipswich had, at some point, broken the law; that's 26 percent of pressed men, which is, once again, astronomically higher than the rate of criminality in the colony in general. Some of the impressment decisions seem to have been personal. One resident of Ipswich named Samuel Hunt had made an enemy of powerful local patriarch Samuel Appleton with a legal dispute over the ownership of a horse. Samuel Appleton was on the militia committee, so Samuel Hunt went to war. A servant named George Stimson had burglarized the house of patriarch Daniel Epps and threatened Epps's children, so George Stimson went to war. A poor man named John Chubb had repeatedly offended town leaders by addressing opulently above his station, so John Chubb went to war. Conversely, avoiding the press was sometimes as simple as rubbing shoulders with the right people.
The town of Andover was geographically divided between a prosperous northern village whose leading inhabitants enjoyed familial connections to the movers and shakers in Boston and a less affluent southern village that the north viewed as socially subordinate. Though the southern village had elite families too, only one of their patriarchs ended up on the militia committee. This man was able to save his own son from the press, but his neighbors weren't so lucky. Most of Andover's soldiers came from the southern side of town, while the clique of northern elites only sent one son of their own to war; in all likelihood, a volunteer. The fishing village of Marblehead had a Puritan leadership but one of the least Puritan populaces of any Massachusetts town south of the Saco River. Its deep harbor and lack of viable farmland meant that Marblehead was anchored inexorably to the sea, socially and economically, and most residents were transplants without significant ties to the area. And Marblehead was notoriously irreligious; the town didn't even have a meeting house until 1684. There seems to be little doubt that town leaders deliberately targeted the most problematic of Marblehead's dockrats for impressment. Late in 1675, 83 percent of the men impressed for service in the dangerous winter campaign against the Narragansett were fresh off the boat from abroad, having no records in Marblehead at all prior to the war. Or, clearly, this was a dangerous time not to live up to the Puritan ideal. Alcoholics, Sabbath breakers, debtors, fornicators, and pew gigglers all across Massachusetts soon found themselves forced by law to march for the frontier.
I would argue that this was a deliberate attempt by town leaders to purge their godly communities of people who they viewed as unsavory characters. Even those pressed men who weren't considered undesirables were chosen with the public good in mind. The muster rules also show a high concentration of the unmarried, the landless, and second sons; basically, the expendable men these godly Puritan communities could safely afford to lose. But these poor men were not just the hapless victims of this conspiracy; they probably knew precisely what the elites were up to and did not take it lying down. Impressment was deeply unpopular among the lower class, and evidence shows that there were high levels of draft evasion during King Philip's War; so much, in fact, that militia committees were forced to impress many men who were clearly unfit for service. In their memoirs, competent soldiers like Benjamin Church would later lament at length how useless most levied men had been in combat. Predictably, plump old rich men leading an army of inexperienced troops who didn't want to be there did not do wonders for the English war effort in the early part of King Philip's War.
In the late summer of '75, the army of Massachusetts Bay was bogged down in the Connecticut River Valley, playing a losing game of whack-a-mole against the hostile forces of the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Pocumtuk Nations. Unable to keep pace with the speed and ferocity of native attacks, the army faced setback after setback, culminating in the most famous English defeat of the war that September; the Battle of Bloody Brook, when Captain Lathrop was killed, along with most of his men, by a well-laid native ambush. According to Puritan historian Increase Mather, the men of Lathrop's company had left their guns in their wagons and wandered off trail to pick grapes when the attack commenced. Bloody Brook was not the first time a patriarch had been killed in King Philip's War, but this particularly deadly disaster was a real "come to Jesus" moment for the Puritan elite; or maybe "come to Satan"—a wake-up call; let's just call it a wake-up call; an unmistakable sign that one, the English were losing the war, and two, the privileges of rank and command didn't mean diddly squat in the face of a hail of native musketry. But the Puritan patriarchs never understood, for all their conniving, was that on the battlefield, all men are created equal; rich man or poor man, small fry or big name—get through the skin, and they bleed just the same.