Pilgrim Charity and Pilgrim Cruelty Aren’t Easily Separated

In 1623, former Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow rushed west from Plymouth to visit Ousamequin, the Pilgrims’ Pokanoket ally and protector. Ousamequin was gravely ill and hadn’t eaten for days. Winslow found him surrounded by powwows “in the midst of their charms for him” and by women rubbing his extremities to keep him warm. 

The guest from Plymouth examined the Pokanoket leader’s mouth and discovered that his tongue was “exceedingly furred.” Winslow used his knife to scrape away pus and relieve Ousamequin’s swelling before feeding him some “conserves.” Within a half hour, Ousamequin had considerably improved, and Winslow treated others in the village who were ill. “I see the English are my friends and love me,” Ousamequin declared. “Whilst I live, I will never forget this kindness they have showed me.”

Winslow spent the night in conversation with Corbitant, another local native leader. They talked about religion after Corbitant asked Winslow why the English prayed before meals. Winslow explained that all good things come from God and it is appropriate to thank him. The Pilgrim visitor equated the English God with Kiehtan, a creator deity known to Algonquin peoples.

These were intimate, tender, and hopeful moments, but within weeks relations between the Plymouth settlers and the Natives took a very different turn. Ousamequin warned the Pilgrims that the Massachusett people, located to their north, intended to attack the English settlement. The Massachusett were traditional enemies of the Pokanokets, Ousamequin’s people. Ousamequin recommended a preemptive attack.

Pilgrim leaders heeded his advice. They sent Captain Myles Standish and a small party of men to an English outpost on the rim of Massachusetts Bay. Standish and his soldiers encountered two Massachusett men, Wituwamat and Pecksuot, who apparently boasted of having killed Europeans. The Plymouth visitors feigned good intentions, then surprised their Native counterparts. Standish grabbed a knife hanging from Pecksuot’s neck and stabbed him to death. Others in the group murdered Wituwamat. The English killed around nine Massachusett in all before returning to Plymouth. They brought Wituwamat’s head with them and displayed it on a pike above Plymouth’s fort.

“Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had killed any!” John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ pastor, wrote from the other side of the Atlantic. Robinson was baffled. Why had Standish acted in this manner? He lacked Christian “tenderness.” God would not approve of such barbarism.


How could the Pilgrims exhibit such a mixture of charity and cruelty? How could hopes for Native conversion devolve into bloody treachery and conquest? Were the Pilgrims hypocrites? Were they and their descendants not true Christians?

In The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People, Calvin Theological Seminary professor Matthew Tuininga argues that the English settlers of New England were not hypocrites. It wasn’t despite their Christianity that they conquered and decimated Native peoples. Instead, both evangelization and violence served the same broader purpose. Daniel Gookin, a Massachusetts Bay magistrate, referred to Native missions as a “War of the Lord” that freed souls from bondage to Satan. The Boston minister Increase Mather likewise referred to the 1675–1676 King Philip’s War as a “War of the Lord” in which God triumphed over his enemies. The English preferred peaceful conquest to bloody fighting. Either course, however, served the cause of Christ.

This book is a bracing corrective to simple morality tales. As Tuininga observes, prior generations of white Americans portrayed English colonists as well-intentioned men and women who established religious liberty and democracy in New England. Yes, Natives lost most of their land, but that was an inevitable byproduct of establishing conditions in which future Americans could flourish.

Nowadays the Puritans—Tuininga’s not-overly-accurate shorthand for most English settlers in New England—receive much more critical appraisal. While some American Christians still lionize the Pilgrims, contemporary books and curricula often depict them as rapacious racists who “used Christianity as a tool to justify the enslavement and genocide of innocent Native Americans.” Tuininga contends that “the reality is more complicated and disturbing.” Puritan theology “was not mere window dressing.” It animated both Edward Winslow’s anticipation of Native conversions and Standish’s murders of Wituwamat and Pecksuot. 

The Wars of the Lord is a landmark history of 17th-century New England. Most historians narrate events in a single colony, such as Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. Tuininga, by contrast, weaves together the histories of many English jurisdictions, not only the above but also New Haven, Saybrook, and Connecticut. The granular points of theology and church-state relations differed in the various colonies, as did the tenor of English-Native relations. Many scholars, moreover, take seriously either theology or political developments, specifically English interactions with Natives. As Tuininga notes, however, the Puritans “did not separate the spiritual and the secular.” He likewise maintains a broad scope.

If readers need encouragement to plunge into this capacious history, they should know that Tuininga combines sharp analysis with a readable and even entertaining narrative. There are familiar characters, such as the Pilgrims, Ousamequin (whom the Plymouth leaders called Massasoit), Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, and Mary Rowlandson, who wrote about her captivity during King Philip’s War (named for the Pokanoket chief Metacom, who went by “Philip”). Tuininga also introduces a procession of less familiar Native leaders, such as Awashonks, a female Sakonnet chief whose people supported but then abandoned Metacom during the mid-1670s war.

Awashonks is a paradigmatic example of Native persistence and adaptation. Like Metacom, she had rejected Christianity and resisted English encroachment onto her people’s land. As King Philip’s War turned in the favor of the English, though, Captain Benjamin Church of Plymouth Colony visited Awashonks with an overture of rum and tobacco. She wisely made him sample the rum to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. Then she struck an agreement with Church. Her men would fight for the English in exchange for “liberty to sit down in quietness on their lands.” The Sakonnets didn’t trust the English to honor their word, but they felt that an alliance with the settlers was their best chance.

King Philip’s War was a costly victory for the English. Approximately 10 percent of military-age colonists were dead, many towns were ravaged, and economic losses were immense. But fewer than half of all Natives survived the war. Many survivors were enslaved or reduced to servitude, and many more lost their land. Awashonks was right to be suspicious of English intentions. Her people lost almost all their territory.

It is surprising, perhaps, that the English also won the other “war of the Lord.” By the early 1670s, a large number of Wampanoags in what is now Southeastern Massachusetts had embraced Christianity, and the trend continued after the war as well. Certainly, some Natives rejected Christianity, as Metacom and Awashonks had done. But for many survivors, Tuininga explains, “Christianity became the key ingredient that held their communities together and enabled them to preserve their culture.”


One weakness of The Wars of the Lord is its overreliance on Puritan as an explanatory category. The label makes sense for the earlier portions of the story, those involving the Pilgrims (a separatist faction of the broader Puritan impulse within English Protestantism) and the founders of the Bay Colony.

It’s a less helpful term for the 1670s. Benjamin Church was the grandson of a Mayflower passenger, Richard Warren, who was one of the merchants who invested in the colony. Church and many other men of his generation probably did understand Natives as in some way in thrall to Satan, but they first and foremost were animated by a lust for land that transcended theological or religious boundaries. Missions to Natives, moreover, were never a central concern for most English settlers.

Tuininga’s narrative skill and solid research more than make up for this weakness, and the book’s greatest strength is his thoughtful approach to the American past. He ends his story with a conversation between Daniel Gookin and Waban, one of the earliest Massachusett converts to Christianity and the longtime leader of the Natick “praying town.” Waban complained to Gookin about the fact that the English did not accept Christian Natives as equal members of the body of Christ. Gookin pointed out that Jesus and his disciples also suffered unmerited persecution. “Waban, you know all Indians are not good,” Gookin observed. “So tis with Englishmen … and this we must expect while we are in this world.”

In his account of the dialogue, Gookin gave himself the last word, but the point was fair. English and Natives alike were a mixed multitude, and broad historical developments rarely hinge on the relative morality of opposing groups of people. Tuininga writes at great length about the “deplorable consequences” of English settlement without making them about “deplorable” individuals.

The Wars of the Lord is an antidote to contemporary political debates about the American past, which are not so much about the facts of history as about the relative importance placed on them. When it comes to 17th-century New England, should one focus on English settlements and the development of their religious and political institutions? Or on the Native peoples and their resistance to English conquest? How much time should one spend on the “deplorable consequences” for Natives versus the opportunities that drew waves of European immigrants to New England? 

Tuininga demonstrates that the best response to these and related questions is simply to write good history. In its message, moreover, The Wars of the Lord is an appropriate mixture of thanks and lament. Natives “lamented, and still lament,” he concludes, “the injustices and tragedies that devastated their people and the way Christianity was used to justify it.” Conversion did not erase the sting of conquest. At the same time, Native Christians remained “thankful for the gospel and the hope it provided.”

There is no reason 21st-century American Christians should not partake of these mixed emotions when reflecting on their nation’s past. It is hardly surprising that English colonists, despite their professed allegiance to Jesus Christ, put their own interests above those of the peoples they displaced. After all, as the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, “The good news of the gospel is not the law that we ought to love one another.” We, like our forebears, often fail to do so. “The good news of the gospel is that there is a resource of divine mercy which is able to overcome a contradiction within our souls, which we cannot ourselves overcome.” Thanks be to God.

John G. Turner is professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University. His forthcoming book is Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.

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