It’s instructive that, even as the Mayflower was riding at anchor in November 1620, the first Puritans to set foot in what would become Plymouth Colony immediately ransacked a Nauset store of corn and desecrated a graveyard. Tuininga, a professor of theology, writes that the Puritans had no inborn prejudice against the Indigenous people on racial grounds, but they did think of them as heathens in need of salvation. That salvation, Tuininga suggests, was supposed to be one of friendly persuasion, even as the Puritans established policies that required settlers to purchase land from its Native owners. There wasn’t much emphasis on fair trade, sad to say, and in time, “as colonists occupied nearly all the best land,” the Indigenous peoples of the Massachusetts colonies rose up. It’s no small irony that many of those who revolted were “praying Indians,” living in 14 towns that were usually alongside or near Puritan settlements. Those praying Indians were theoretically extended the same rights as colonists, at least at first, but they “often lacked the resources to file appeals or pay fines” and so were at a constant disadvantage in their dealings with the Puritans. As Tuininga notes, the series of conflicts that ensued came at great cost: numerous English towns, among them Providence, Rhode Island, were put to the torch. They were even more ruinous for New England’s Algonquian population, whose numbers were estimated to have fallen from 11,000 to 5,000. He adds that this didn’t square with the Puritan line that they sought “benevolent spiritual conquest” rather than conversion and subjugation at gunpoint. Though stiffly written compared to Jill Lepore’s essential Name of War (1998), Tuininga’s book does a good job of sorting out the complexities of one of America’s bloodiest, if little-known, conflicts.
