John Endecott

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John Endecott
In office
1629 – 1630
1644 – 1645
1649 – 1650
1651 – 1654
1655 – 1665
Preceded by John Winthrop (1644 & 1649)
Thomas Dudley (1651)
Richard Bellingham (1655)
Succeeded by John Winthrop (1630)
Thomas Dudley (1645 & 1650)
Richard Bellingham (1654 & 1665)
Born circa 1588
Chagford, England (claimed to be)
Died March 15, 1665

John Endecott (c. 1588 – March 15, 1665), was a colonial magistrate, soldier and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

John Endecott was most likely born before 1600. His origins, as of yet, have not been discovered—although there is a building named after him in the English town of Chagford, locally claimed to be his birthplace. Almost nothing is known of him before his presence as one of the six original patentees of the Dorchester Company. This group of Puritan settlers bought land from the Plymouth Company, and settled it in 1628, two years before the arrival of John Winthrop's fleet. Endecott was chosen to lead the first expedition, and he settled with sixty other men in Naumkeag, which would soon become Salem, Massachusetts. The land had been previously settled by one Roger Conant, who had left Plymouth Colony two years before.

Nathaniel Hawthorne relates a story about these years, The Maypole of Merry Mount, where Endecott's strict Puritanism came into conflict with the previous settlers. Endecott was the local governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from April 1629 to June 1630, when John Winthrop brought the charter to Salem and became governor of the colony as well as of the company. Though he was no longer at the head of the colony, Endecott continued to serve in several important positions, including a stint as the leader of a failed expedition against the Pequot in 1636. Though it seems slightly out of character, Endecott strongly defended the religious dissenter Roger Williams, and, around that time, he was alleged to have cut the Cross of St. George from an English flag in protest of the use of the symbols of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as deputy-governor from 1641 to 1644, and governor in 1644–1645. At times he was also the commander-in-chief of the militia and a commissioner and president of the United Colonies of New England.

In 1636 Endecott led the Massachusetts militia in Pequot War.As with all histories, any single narrative will fail to reveal the whole of a given historical event. The combatants in the Pequot War were represented by different polities, different leaders, with different interests. From a distance of several hundred years, many of the polities involved may be unrecognizable to those of us today. In the embryonic colonial world of the early seventeenth century, there were several semi-independent colonies ensconsed in what is today called southern New England, and each colony was administered by its own leadership. Of course, in the same way that American Indian peoples belonged to independent village-states that often allied with one another to form confederacies long before the arrival of the English, there were numerous Algonquian peoples, defined by the polities to which they belonged, who oversaw the administration of their traditional territories. These disparate polities and their leadership included:

Contents

Before the war's inception, efforts to control fur trade access resulted in a series of escalating incidents and attacks that increased tensions on both sides. Political divisions between the Pequot and Mohegan widened as they aligned with different trade sources-- the Mohegan with the Puritan English, and the Pequot with the Dutch. The Pequot attacked a group of Mattabesic Indians who had attempted to trade at Hartford. Tension also increased as Massachusetts Bay Colony began to manufacture wampum, the supply of which the Pequot had controlled up until 1633.

In 1634, John Stone, a smuggler, privateer, and slaver, and seven of his crewmen were killed by the Western Niantic, tributary clients of the Pequot, in retaliation for atrocities committed by the Dutch, and more recently, by Stone.[1] A principal Pequot Sachem, Tatobem, had boarded a Dutch vessel to trade. Instead of conducting trade, the Dutch seized the Sachem and demanded a substantial ransom for his safe return. The Pequot quickly sent a bushel of wampum, and received Tatobem's corpse in return.

Stone, the privateer, was actually from the West Indies and had been banished from Boston for malfeasance. Setting sail from Boston, Stone had met his end near the mouth of the Connecticut River while kidnapping Western Niantic women and children to sell as slaves in Virginia Colony.[2] Colonial officials in Boston protested the killing. The Pequot Sachem, Sassacus, refused the colonials' demands that the Western Niantic responsible for Stone's death be turned over to them.

Then on July 20, 1636, a respected trader named John Oldham was attacked on a trading voyage to Block Island. He and several of his crew were killed and his ship looted. To this day, it is unclear who was responsible for John Oldham's death. In the aftermath of the Pequot War, the Pequot were implicated in the trader's death. However, in the weeks following, in the eyes of colonial officials from Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the Narragansett were the likely culprits. Knowing that the Indians of Block Island were allies of the Eastern Niantic, who in turn were allied with the Narragansett, Puritan officials became equally suspicious of the Narragansett.[3] Even so, the colonial English response to Oldham's death, the last in a series of escalating incidents, has traditionally been viewed as the beginning of the Pequot War.

News of Oldham's death became the subject of sermons in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In August, Governor Vane sent John Endecott to exact revenge on the Indians of Block Island. Endecott's party of roughly 90 men sailed to Block Island and attacked a Niantic village there. Most of the Niantic escaped, but 14 were killed, while two of Endecott's men were injured. The Puritan militia burned their village to the ground. Whatever crops the Niantic had managed to store for the winter which the English could not carry away with them were burned as well. Endecott then went on to Fort Saybrook.

The Puritans at Saybrook were not happy about the raid, but agreed that some of them would accompany Endecott as guides. Endecott sailed along the coast to a Pequot village, where he repeated the previous year's demand of payment for the death of Stone and more for Oldham. After some discussion, Endecott concluded that the Pequot were stalling and attacked. The Pequot ruse had worked however, and the Pequot were able to escape into the woods. The former Puritan Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony once again had to content himself with burning an Indian village and crops before sailing home.

John Endecott's Massachusetts Bay Colony forces had gone home, but Connecticut Colony Puritans were left to deal with the anger of the Pequot. The Pequot attempted to enjoin their allies, some 36 tributary villages, to their cause but were only partly effective. The Western Niantic joined them but the Eastern Niantic remained neutral. The traditional enemies of the Pequot, the Mohegan and the Narragansett, openly sided with the Puritan English. The Narragansett had warred with and lost territory to the Pequot in 1622. Now their friend Roger Williams urged them to side with the English.

Through the fall and winter, Fort Saybrook was effectively besieged. Any who ventured outside were killed. As spring arrived in 1637, the Pequot stepped up their raids on Connecticut Colony towns. On April 12, during a raid on Wethersfield, the Pequot killed nine men and women, a number of cattle and horses, and took two girls hostage. In all, the towns lost about 30 settlers.

In May, leaders of Connecticut Colony's river towns met in Hartford, raised a militia, and placed John Mason in command. Mason set out with 90 militia and 70 Mohegan warriors under Uncas to repay the Pequot. At Fort Saybrook, Mason was joined by John Underhill and another 20 men. Underhill and Mason proceeded to the principal Pequot village, near present-day Groton, but the Pequot chose to defend their fortified village. Ill-equipped to take it, Mason sailed east, and stopped at the village of Misistuck (Mystic).

Believing that the English had returned to Boston, Massachusetts, the Pequot sachem Sassacus took several hundred of his warriors to make another raid on Hartford. But John Mason had only gone to visit the Narragansett, who joined him with several hundred warriors. Several allied Niantic warriors also joined Mason's group. On May 26, 1637, with a force up to about 400 fighting men, Mason attacked Misistuck by surprise. He estimated that "six or seven Hundred" Pequot were there when his forces assaulted the palisade. Some 150 warriors had accompanied Sassacus, so that Mystic's inhabitants were largely comprised of Pequot women and children. Surrounding the palisade, Mason ordered that the enclosure be set on fire. Justifying his conduct later, Mason declared that the holocaust against the Pequot was also the act of a God who "laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven . . . Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies." [4] Mason also insisted that should any Pequot attempt to escape the flames, that they too should be killed. Of the 600 to 700 Pequot at Mystic that day, only seven were taken prisoner while another seven made it into the woods to escape.

The Narragansett and Mohegan warriors who had fought alongside John Mason and John Underhill's colonial militia were horrified by the actions and "manner of the Englishmen's fight . . . because it is too furious, and slays too many men."[5] Repulsed by the "total war" tactics of the Puritan English, and the horrors that they had witnessed, the Narragansett returned home.

Believing the mission accomplished, John Mason also set out for home. The militia became temporarily lost, but in doing so Mason narrowly missed returning Pequot Indians who, seeing what had occurred, gave chase to the Puritan forces to little avail.

The slaughter at Mystic broke the Pequot, and deprived them of their allies. Forced to abandon their villages, the Pequot fled -- mostly in small bands-- to seek refuge with other southern Algonquian peoples. Many were hunted down by the Mohegan and Narragansett warriors. The largest group, led by Sassacus, was denied aid by the Metoac (Montauk, or Montaukett) from present-day Long Island. Sassacus led roughly 400 warriors west along the coast towards the Dutch at New Amsterdam and their Native allies. When they crossed the Connecticut River, the Pequot killed three men that they had encountered near Fort Saybrook.

In mid-June, John Mason set out from Saybrook with 160 men and 40 Mohegan scouts under Uncas. They caught up with the refugees at Sasqua, a Mattabesic village near present-day Fairfield, Connecticut. Surrounded in a nearby swamp, the Pequot refused to surrender. Several hundred, mostly women and children, were allowed to leave with the Mattabesic. In the ensuing battle, Sassacus was able to break free with perhaps 80 warriors, but 180 of the Pequot were killed or captured.

Sassacus and his followers had hoped to gain refuge among the Mohawk in present-day New York. However, the Mohawk had seen the display of English power and chose instead to kill Sassacus and his warriors, sending Sassacus' scalp to Hartford, as a symbolic offering of Mohawk friendship with Connecticut Colony. Puritan colonial officials continued to call for the merciless hunting down of what remained of the Pequot months after war's end.

In September, the victorious Mohegan and Narragansett met at the General Court of Connecticut and agreed on the disposition of the Pequot and their lands. The agreement, known as the first Treaty of Hartford, was signed on September 21, 1638. Those Pequot who had survived the war and massacre at Mystic were distributed as slaves to the Mohegan, Narragansett and the Metoac.[6] Others were enslaved and shipped to Bermuda or the West Indies, or were forced to become household servants in Puritan households in Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay.[7] Moreover, colonists appropriated Pequot lands under claims of a "just war", and attempted to legally extirpate the Pequot by effectively declaring them extinct and making it a crime to speak the name Pequot. Those few Pequot who managed to evade death or slavery were later recovered from captivity from the Mohegan and assigned reservations in Connecticut Colony.

This was the first instance wherein Algonquian peoples of what is now southern New England encountered European-style warfare. The idea and reality of total war was essentially new to them. After the Pequot War, the uneasily allied colonies represented such a power that no Native alliance could stand against them for a generation. In 1675, a fairly long period of peace came to an end with King Philip's War.

The earliest accounts of the Pequot War were penned by the victors within one year of the war. Later histories, with few exceptions, remained more or less the same, restating arguments first used by the war's military leaders such as John Underhill and John Mason, as well the Puritan divines Increase Mather, and his son, Cotton Mather.[8]

There are disputes about these histories. In 2004, an artist and archaeologist teamed up to speculate over the sequence of events in the Pequot War, and even whether the accounts of John Mason and John Underhill were actually authored by them.[9] While most modern historians such as Alfred Cave do not quibble over questions of veracity or chronology, they do contend that Mason and Underhill's eyewitness accounts, as well as the contemporaneous histories of Mather and Hubbard, were more "polemical than substantive."[10] The cause of the outbreak of hostilities, the reasons for the Puritan's hatred of the Pequot, and the ways in which Puritans chose to deal with and shortly thereafter write about the Pequot, have begun to be re-explored.

Revisionist historians have rooted the history of the Pequot War within the larger context of European colonization and the geopolitical ambitions of contending Native peoples during the first half of the seventeenth century. These historians have doubts about the traditional histories as hegemonic narratives that valorize Puritans at the expense of a demonized Native population. Alden T. Vaughan, at first a critic of the Pequots, later wrote that the Pequot were not "solely or even primarily responsible" for the war and, further, that "The Bay colony's gross escalation of violence ... made all-out war unavoidable; until then, negotiation was at least conceivable."[11]

After John Winthrop died in 1649, Endecott was elected governor, and by annual re-elections served continuously until his death, with the exception of two years (1650–1651 and 1654–1655), when he was deputy-governor.

According to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, "Under his authority the colony of Massachusetts Bay made rapid progress, and except in the matter of religious intolerance in which he showed great bigotry and harshness, particularly towards the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)" (including religious executions), "his rule was just and praiseworthy. Of him Edward Eggleston says: A strange mixture of rashness, pious zeal, genial manners, hot temper, and harsh bigotry, his extravagances supply the condiment of humour to a very serious history; it is perhaps the principal debt posterity owes him. He died on the March 15, 1665."

Endecott was an ancestor of the later Massachusetts governor Endicott Peabody and of the United States Secretary of War William Crowninshield Endicott.

Endecott married for the first time, probably before 1628, Anne Gower. After her death, he was married to the daughter of Philobert Cogan, of Somersetshire. Anne Gower was named by governor Matthew Craddock as a cousin of his, and Endecott's second wife was a sister-in-law of the colonial financier and magistrate Roger Ludlow. Endecott had two children with his second wife, neither of whom, seemingly to his disappointment, followed him into public service. Despite his high position, Endecott was never wealthy, and he died in poverty.

  1. ^ Alfred Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 58-59.
  2. ^ Cave, The Pequot War, pp. 59-60.
  3. ^ Cave, The Pequot War, pp. 104-105.
  4. ^ Note that the term, "holocaust" means, "complete consumption by fire, or that which is so consumed; complete destruction, especially of a large number of persons; a great slaughter or massacre." See as well, John Mason's justification for incinirating Mystic in, A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the Memorable taking of their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637 (Boston: S. Kneeland & T. Green, 1736), p. 30.
  5. ^ William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 29; and John Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England: Containing, a True Relation of their War-like Proceedings these two yeares last past, with a figure of the Indian fort, or Palizado (London: I. D[awson] for Peter Cole, 1638), p. 84.
  6. ^ For first-hand accounts of Pequot enslavement and its logic, see Lion Gardiner, "Relation of the Pequot Warres" in History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent, and Gardiner (Cleveland, 1897), p. 138, and John Mason's account in the same volume.
  7. ^ For historical analyses of Pequot enslavement, see Michael L. Fickes, "'They Could Not Endure That Yoke': The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637," New England Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 1. (Mar., 2000), pp. 58-81; Ethel Boissevain, "Whatever Became of the New England Indians Shipped to Bermuda to be Sold as Slaves," Man in the Northwest 11 (Spring 1981), pp. 103-114; and Karen O. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 172.
  8. ^ For a contemporary account that resonates with Mason, Underhill, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather, see William Hubbard, The History of the Indian Wars in New England 2 vols. (Boston: Samuel G. Drake, 1845), II:6-7. For inherited narratives of Pequot villainy and Puritan righteousness in the eighteenth century, see Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1793); the magisterial Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, ed. David Levin (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1983): I:1084, in addition to Richard Hildreth, The History of the United States of America 6 vols (New York, 1856), I:237-42 for the nineteenth century; and Howard Bradstreet, The History of the War with the Pequots Retold (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1933) for the first half of the twentieth century.
  9. ^ Jack Dempsey and David R. Wagner (2004). Mystic Fiasco: How the Indians Won The Pequot War. 
  10. ^ Cave, The Pequot War, p.2.
  11. ^ Alden T. Vaughan, "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637," in Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.194.
  • Anderson, Robert Charles. The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620 – 1633, vols. 1–3. Boston, MA: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995.
  • Endicott, C. M., Memoirs of John Endecott (Salem, 1847), and a Memoir of John Endecott in Antiquarian Papers of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass., 1879).
Preceded by
none		 Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
1629 - 1630		 Succeeded by
John Winthrop
Preceded by
John Winthrop		 Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
1644		 Succeeded by
Thomas Dudley
Preceded by
John Winthrop		 Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
1649		 Succeeded by
Thomas Dudley
Preceded by
Thomas Dudley		 Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
1651 – 1653		 Succeeded by
Richard Bellingham
Preceded by
Richard Bellingham		 Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
1655 – 1664		 Succeeded by
Richard Bellingham
v • d • e
Governors of Massachusetts
Colony Endecott • Winthrop • T. Dudley • Haynes • Vane • Winthrop • T. Dudley • Bellingham • Winthrop • Endecott • T. Dudley • Winthrop • Endecott • T. Dudley • Endecott • Bellingham • Endecott • Bellingham • Leverett • Bradstreet
Dominion J. Dudley • Andros • Bradstreet
Province W. Phips • Stoughton* • Coote • Stoughton* • Governor's Council* • J. Dudley • Governor's Council* • J. Dudley • Tailer* • Shute • Dummer* • Burnet • Dummer* • Tailer* • Belcher • Shirley • S. Phips* • Shirley • S. Phips* • Governor's Council* • Pownall • Hutchinson* • Bernard • Hutchinson • Gage
Commonwealth Hancock • Cushing* • Bowdoin • Hancock • Adams • Sumner • Gill* • Governor's Council* • Strong • Sullivan • Lincoln, Sr.* • Gore • Gerry • Strong • Brooks • Eustis • Morton* • Lincoln, Jr. • Davis • Armstrong* • Everett • Morton • Davis • Morton • Briggs • Boutwell • Clifford • E. Washburn • Gardner • Banks • Andrew • Bullock • Claflin • W. Washburn • Talbot* • Gaston • Rice • Talbot • Long • Butler • Robinson • Ames • Brackett • Russell • Greenhalge • Wolcott • Crane • Bates • Douglas • Guild • Draper • Foss • Walsh • McCall • Coolidge • Cox • Fuller • Allen • Ely • Curley • Hurley • Saltonstall • Tobin • Bradford • Dever • Herter • Furcolo • Volpe • Peabody • Volpe • Sargent • Dukakis • King • Dukakis • Weld • Cellucci • Swift* • Romney • Patrick
* denotes acting

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