Geographic Boundedness
The colonies included in this study shared a key spatial characteristic: all faced early and intense difficulties with their topographical and geographical boundedness. The ocean constrained the physical expansion of the mainland colonies along one border (east for Massachusetts, south for Rhode Island), while other polities, Native and European, impeded them on the others. Massachusetts had to contend with Nipmucs, the Pocumtucks and other tribes in the Connecticut River Valley area, Massachusetts and Wampanoags along the coast, as well as Penacooks, Pequots, and Mahicans. To the north and east, Abenakis and Haudenosaunees (Iroquois), as well as the French, undercut the Bay colony’s ambitions of geographical growth in what is now Maine and at times seemed to threaten its survival. Rhode Island faced Wampanoags in the northeastern part of the colony, Narragansetts and Niantics farther south, and the Pequot survivors of the 1637 Pequot War with the English, who joined Mohegan communities based primarily in Connecticut but whose territory also comprised the southwest corner of Rhode Island.23 Rhode Island and Massachusetts could only encompass more territory in direct conflict with the charter claims of Connecticut, New York, and Plymouth.24 The charter granted to Rhode Island and Providence Plantations by Charles II in 1663 overlapped with Connecticut’s 1662 charter to the west and Plymouth’s and Massachusetts’s borders to the east.25 The lands granted in these charters were often more imaginative exercises than an indication of what the English could actually control of Algonquian homelands, but they still gesture toward the multiple levels of contestation over place even within the English space of New England.
As an uninhabited archipelago, a mere twenty-one square miles of land that lies in the Atlantic 648 miles (563 nautical miles) from the nearest land (what is now Cape Hatteras on the coast of North Carolina), Bermuda differed from the mainland colonies.26 A preexisting topography separated New England from Bermuda, which had no established human sense of place. All inhabitants of the island colony were newcomers who simultaneously established its conceptual and physical landscapes. The island-born constituted a majority of the inhabitants by the mid-seventeenth century, an unusual demographic situation that offered an earlier hospitable environment for combinations of indigenous, English, and African beliefs and practices than in other colonies where the constant influx of African-born people and established indigenous communities renewed knowledge about cultural and religious practices. Bermudians of color were mostly insiders rather than outsiders to Christianity, a familiarity that white Bermudians largely recognized because they had grown up alongside one another and lived together in the same households. A similar shift away from African-born individuals did not happen in British mainland North American colonies until the beginning of the nineteenth century.27
In New England, even when the puritan Atlantic was at its strongest, it was a thin overlay on top of what for time out of mind had been, and remained, fundamentally Native space. The English colonized and laid claim to land that its original inhabitants had already adapted for human habitation and shaped through ritual practice. Archaeological research has uncovered human-made stone mounds and caverns devoid of the detritus that accumulates from habitation but that were built over a long period of time, indicating repeated and extended human engagement with the sites for purposes besides daily living. These mounds and caverns were organized around landscape features marking astronomically significant events such as the winter and summer solstices and the rising and setting of the Pleiades, a cluster of stars. One such stone feature complex is near what later became the “praying Indian” town of Hassanamisco and appears to have been constructed around 1,300 years ago. It lies near the source of almost all the major rivers that flow into what is now Rhode Island and the eastern half of Massachusetts and remained under direct Native control until 1715.28
The northeastern coast was contested space, not only in terms of competition over land and other resources, but also in how Europeans and Natives thought of resources and how they defined what it meant to share space. Although southern Algonquians varied in particular burial rituals, preferred family forms, governmental structures, and dialects and languages, they shared an idea of the space of the Northeast as a “common pot” on which all depended for sustenance, and in which those who could take control of more owed assistance to those who were weaker and so had less. The common pot was not a conflict-free paradise: those who had less owed allegiance and acquiescence to a lower place in the social hierarchy to those who had more. The English had a more exclusionary view in which the privilege of the powerful was to cordon off space and to exclude others from it and its resources. Puritans attempted to mold the northeastern coastal region to their experiences and expectations in order to make their own place. But Natives often turned colonial institutions to their own use to subvert attempted European control and reshaping of space, for instance by using writing to assert their own understanding of proper land use. Southern Algonquians perceived their multiple communities as strongly linked to homelands, to connections along waterways and through kin relationships.29
Natives in Northeast America cultivated relationships with kin and allied tribes, as well as made their own appeals to European monarchs, based on their understandings of connection between peoples and places. Native political topographies functioned quite differently and took little notice of differences among the English like those between Baptist and puritan. While their homelands did not match up with English-drawn colonial boundaries, Algonquians contending with southern New England demonstrated an astute understanding of the rivalries between English colonies as well as those between European empires.30 Although outside the bounds of this book, it is important to note that “Dawnland” or eastern Algonquian peoples such as the Wabanakis continued to exert powerful influence over English and French efforts farther north and east long after King Philip’s War had weakened most southern Algonquian groups.31 Natives were much more than pawns on a European chessboard; the English and other Europeans often only dimly perceived the complex political calculations of which they were only one part.
The late seventeenth century was a pivotal period for Native peoples in southern New England, with King Philip’s War, shifting intertribal alliances, and ever-expanding land encroachment by the English. Economic relationships also shifted after New England colonial governments disestablished wampum as a legal currency.32 While King Philip’s War and later conflicts were devastating to many southeastern Native tribes, Algonquians did not disappear from southern New England after 1676.33 However, after that point they could not marshal direct military opposition to the English, and it became increasingly difficult for individual Natives and Africans to win recognition or space from the English for their competing worldviews.
The late seventeenth century was also a difficult time in the puritan Atlantic. In the years after the failure of the Protectorate and through the reign of George I, the aim of a pure Protestant community seemed under attack from every direction. The period after 1660 saw the increasingly strict enforcement of the decrees and practices of the Church of England on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and on the western side, the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay charter, the institution and downfall of the Dominion of New England, and heightened warfare with Algonquian peoples, including the extremely bloody King Philip’s War. With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 ending the toleration of Protestants in France, it seemed as if Protestantism was in danger of being wiped from the face of the earth. In 1688 and 1689, royal officials’ attempts to hide the news that the Protestant William of Orange had taken over the English throne from the Catholic James II seemed to point to a Catholic conspiracy to put the colonies under the control of France and—by extension—the pope.34 For those who were convinced or hopeful that Protestant countries, especially England, were to take part in bringing about the new Jerusalem, the prospect of their apostasizing to Catholicism was seen as a portent of Satan’s imminent triumph.35
Disconnect between religious affiliation and political boundaries intensified anxiety about the fate of countries and empires. Once England became