Some years ago, in preparation for a conference, I read Harvard College’s 1650 charter. I learned that the school’s goal was “the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.”
So Harvard was chartered to serve Indian as well as English youth? That surprised me. My knowledge of Massachusetts Indians had stopped in elementary school, with Squanto aiding the Pilgrims.[1] So I wondered, what was the relationship between Massachusetts settlers and Native Americans?
I am learning the answer, as I audit a course on U.S. agricultural history.[2] Agriculture is an important part of the story of that relationship, which fell apart in a disastrous war in 1675. “No problem vexed relations between settlers and Indians more frequently in the years before the war than the control of livestock,” wrote Virginia DeJohn Anderson in a pioneering article on the causes of the conflict known as King Philip’s War.[3]
For about 50 years after the Pilgrims’ arrival, there was an uneasy, albeit increasingly tense, peace between Native Americans and English settlers in Massachusetts. The natives did, indeed, introduce corn cultivation to the settlers. For their part, the settlers attempted to make the natives into Christians. They set up fourteen “praying towns,” in which Indians who adopted the English way of life, including raising livestock, could live comfortably.[4] Undoubtedly, those Indians were the ones who were to be educated at Harvard.
But conflict was inevitable. One reason was that while both Indians and English were farmers, they farmed differently and each way of life damaged the other’s. How did that happen?
To begin with, the English settlers brought domesticated animals to the New World—oxen, cattle, and hogs—that were unknown to the indigenous Americans. Following English tradition, the settlers grew grain (primarily corn) in fenced-off fields. They let their livestock roam, identifying ownership by “earmarking” the animals, parallel to branding in the nineteenth-century American West.
The Algonquian peoples were farmers, too. The women grew corn, beans, and squash from spring to the fall harvest, as the men hunted and fished. After harvest, it was time for serious hunting trips, while the women gathered forest products such as berries and nuts. The next year the Indians would plant their crops elsewhere. Thus, they did not have settled villages.
The English lived close to the Indians. They tended to settle in or near former Indian areas that had been emptied out by disease. (Devastating European diseases like smallpox, influenza, and measles, to which the Indians had no immunity, had reached the Indians before the Pilgrims arrived.)
Because the Indians did not fence their fields (as their fields changed each year), the settlers’ animals, especially hogs, often invaded them and ate the crops. The hogs also foraged for forest products, reducing the food and space for deer and other wild animals, and interfered with traps the natives had set.
The Native Americans tried to use the English authorities to obtain restitution for their lost crops, but it was difficult, partly due to unfamiliar courts and magistrate systems. In turn, the English claimed that the natives were killing their livestock, and they had more effective recourse to the courts. They also, in their own view, held the moral high ground. To the English, Indians’ mobility meant they were uncivilized, they didn’t understand the concept of property, and they lacked the godly impulse to “improve” what they had.
Making it all worse was the fact that the English system led to soil exhaustion. Unlike the natives, the English didn’t move from plot to plot; they grew one major crop, which reduced the soil nutrients, and they didn’t keep livestock on their property so they didn’t have animal manure for fertilizer. The upshot: They needed more land. And while land was often purchased from (or exchanged with) the Indians, [5] land was running out.
Conflicts increased, and the result was King Philip’s War, so named because the settlers’ name for Metacomet, the Wampanoag leader, was King Philip. The war went on for a year.
“It was also an especially bloody war—the bloodiest, in terms of the percentage of the population killed, in American history, “ writes Anthony Brandt on HistoryNet. “The figures are inexact, but out of a total New England population of 80,000, counting both Indians and English colonists, some 9,000 were killed—more than 10 percent. Two-thirds of the dead were Indians, many of whom died of starvation. Indians attacked 52 of New England’s 90 towns, pillaging 25 of those and burning 17 to the ground. The English sold thousands of captured Indians into slavery in the West Indies.”[6]
The upshot: “New England’s tribes would never fully recover.”[7]
And what about those students at Harvard? Only five Massachusetts Indians attended Harvard before the twentieth century, and only one received a degree. [8 ] That was Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, who graduated in 1665. He died the next year of tuberculosis.
Statue of Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who made peace with the Pilgrims, on Cape Cod. Image by Paul Oka on Creative Commons.
Notes
[1] Also known as Tisquantum.
[2] HI 360 at North Carolina State University, Tyler Gray Greene, instructor. Most of this post is based on what I learned there, but any errors are my own. (Corrections welcomed!)
[3] Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England.” William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 4 (Oct. 1994): 601-624, at 601.
[4] Anderson, 605.
[5] Christopher W. Hannan, “Indian Land in Seventeenth Century Massachusetts.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 29, no. 2 (Summer 2001), retrieved from HJM’s online archive at http://www.westfield.ma.edu/mhj/.
[6] Anthony Brandt, “Blood and Betrayal: King Philip’s War.” HistoryNet.com, n.d., https://www.historynet.com/blood-and-betrayal-king-philips-war.htm.
[7] Ibid.
[7] “Harvard-College Monitor’s Bill,” in A Selection from the Miscellaneous Historical Papers of Fifty Years by Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1918), 1-5, at 5.
The agricultural conflicts are almost entirely overlooked in most curricula, at least at the elementary and secondary level. It would be a good subject for teaching mediation: how might the conflict have been mediated?
Of course, one always has to remember that many of the tribes were already in conflict with each other, and any time one tribe went to war with settlers, or settlers with each other (as in French and English, English and colonists) others chose sides as hoping to be with the winners.
Another element was the tremendous loss of life among Native Americans even before the settlers came. The settlers would have faced quite a different environment, as you know, if so many Indians hadn’t died of disease.
Thanks for the information, Jane. I knew Dartmouth College was founded in 1769 with a charter much like Harvard’s with respect to educating Native Americans and this makes me wonder if other of the early American colleges emulated the Harvard charter.
Jack: I’ve done a quick check and it seems as though only Harvard, Dartmouth, and William and Mary (1693) mentioned Indian students in their charters. Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) accepted a few Indians in colonial times. There does seem to have been a “missionary” spirit to teach (and proselytize) Native Americans, but that interest tended to wane, and potential students were not very responsive. (Few were probably prepared, also.)
As you may know, Eleazar Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth, started off with Moor’s Charity School, which did enroll some 150 Indian students over Wheelock’s lifetime. (It must have been more of a K-12 school.)
“Thus, American Indian missions in the colonial colleges were lamentable failures,” wrote Bobby Wright in 1991. His article is the source of my information: “The ‘Untameable Savage Spirit’: American Indians in Colonial Colleges,” Review of Higher Education 14, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 429-452.
Absolutely fascinating essay, Jane. Thanks for sharing. Like most other folks in their 60s, my history lessons all started w the founding in 1776, so I am always thrilled to read about what happened before then.
Joe, my elementary-school history tended to start and end with “the explorers” — Columbus, Vespucci, Cabot, Champlain, Magellan, Pizarro, Cortez, De Soto. (Perhaps I exaggerate a little — the story of the Pilgrims was in there, too.)