The Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture in History is sponsored annually by the East Carolina
University Department of History. The first Brewster Lecture was presented in 1982 as part of
the University's seventy-fifth anniversary celebration; the lectures have been published since
1984. The series bears the name of an esteemed Professor Emeritus of History who continues to
offer his generous support to the Department and to the discipline at large.
The lecture series seeks to achieve four essential goals: to provide students, faculty, and members of the community the opportunity to hear distinguished historians share their knowledge and mastery of the discipline; to stimulate an exchange of ideas and a continuing dialogue about issues of fundamental importance to the people; to illuminate the present through the reflective prism of the past; and to support a critical requirement of modem times, the continuing process of education.
The 1995 Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture is delivered by Ian K. Steele, Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario. A specialist in the British Empire in North America, Dr. Steele has written extensively about several aspects of the English colonial experience—colonial administration, maritime commerce, warfare, and Anglo-Indian relations. The East Carolina University Department of History is pleased to have Professor Steele deliver the fourteenth Brewster Lecture, "A Captive's Right to Life? The Interaction of Amerindian, Colonial, and European Values."
Roger Biles, Chair
Department of History
First Columbus crossed the Atlantic and "discovered" America in 1492. Then a few weeks or maybe a few years later Pocahontas saved Captain John Smith's life. (I am sure historians of early America will be indebted to Walt Disney Studios for years to come for new interpretations of Jamestown that will be based on the movie Pocahontas!) After this Virginia interlude, it was time to go to New England for Thanksgiving dinner with the Pilgrims. Then a few years later George Washing ton threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, Paul Revere mounted up for his midnight ride, and the American Revolution erupted. Thus, the colonial period ended, and the really important parts of American history-- the saga of the United States-- began.Of course, that is not exactly the way it happened. The colonial era of American history, if we define that period as the interval between the first English voyage to Roanoke Island in 1584 and the Declaration of Independence, is almost as long a period as from 1776 to 1995. The public's lack of knowledge of this early phase of American history is especially unfortunate since so many of the most important developments in the nation's history began long before independence.
The transference of English cultural values to North America is certainly one of the most significant developments of this era. After all, the men and women who moved to the colonies from England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not come to North America to create the United States of America. Instead, they came here to establish settlements based largely on what they had already known in England. English cultural values are only part of the story of colonial development, however. The early English settlers did not move to an uninhabited, virgin wilderness. North America was home to millions of Native Americans. Thus, one of the most important themes in the colonial history of North America is the clash of European and Native American cultures.
"Clash" is clearly an accurate description, as the early history of European and Indian interaction is replete with conflict. From almost the very beginning of contact. Englishmen and Native Americans resorted to violence to enforce their views. Warfare, of course, had long been a major force in European civilization, and the same is true for Native American societies before the Columbian voyages. The nature of warfare in these two cultures, however, was dramatically different. The scale of conflict, strategy and tactics, and the roles of combatants varied greatly. Indians and Englishmen also diverged in their treatment of captives, which is the subject of this evening's lecture.
We are fortunate tonight to have Professor Ian K. Steele of the University of Western Ontario as our guide for this excursion into the cultural and military history of colonial America. A native of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Dr. Steele received his B.A. degree at the University of Alberta and completed his graduate training at the University of London, where he received his Ph.D. I first became aware of Dr. Steele's wide-ranging interest in early American history in 1972 when I enrolled in his seminar on The First British Empire. Like many of those students I mentioned earlier, I was unaware of the long history or the significance of the colonial period. I was also naive enough to view the colonial era as essentially a warm up or a preview to the American Revolution. And like most Americans, I was sure that the center of the empire was on this side of the Atlantic. Two years of meeting on Monday nights around Dr. Steele's dining room table convinced me of the errors of my ways.
The First British Empire was a sprawling enterprise that grew as the English expanded beyond the British Isles and established colonies or trading posts in North America, the West Indies, Asia, and Africa. The so-called "thirteen" colonies were only part of this vast endeavor. Ian Steele has done much to illuminate the history of early English expansion. He focused on the political aspects of colonial administration in his first book, Politics of Colonial Policy. He first examined the different strategies and perceptions of warfare among Europeans and Indians in North American imperial conflict in his second book, Guerillas and Grenadiers: The Struggle/or Canada, 1689-1760. English expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was first and foremost a commercial undertaking based on maritime commerce. Dr. Steele focused on these topics for his next two books: Atlantic Merchant-Apothecary: Letters of Joseph Cruttenden, 1710-1717, and The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration a/Communication and Community, for which he received the Keith Matthews Prize, presented by the Canadian Nautical Research Society for the best book in maritime history published in 1986. Dr. Steele's research focus returned to North American conflict for his next two works. He received the Distinguished Book Award of the Society of Colonial Wars for Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the "Massacre." His most current book is Warpaths: Invasions of North America.
It is both my privilege and pleasure on behalf of Dr. Lawrence Brewster and my colleagues in the Department of History at East Carolina University to introduce Dr. Ian K. Steele as this year's Lawrence R Brewster Lecturer in History Dr. Steele's lecture is entitled, "A Captive's Right to Life? The Interaction of Amerindian, Colonial, and European Values."
Carl Swanson
Department of History
Human right to life may be a self-evident truth, but it is one that history incessantly denies. A ubiquitous sense of group belonging has strengthened family, tribe, and nation but has also supported sexism, jingoism, and racism. Generous communitarian values can readily be accompanied by notions that the crimes or sins of outsiders call for retribution against any member of the offending group. Violence against aliens serves to strengthen group solidarity, even when it involves complicity in brutality that violates the group's own norms. A spiral of intensifying inhumanity might therefore be predictable and the alien captive can be expected to be the consummate victim.
Even though the expansion of Europe brought alien encounters for many people, and much violence against aliens, an intriguing mystery is how this brutality was limited. Amerindians and Europeans, whose own tribal feuds had evolved some moderating rituals, now faced each other as new aliens. In discussing their adaptations, it is helpful to consider three competing martial value systems: the traditional Amerindian, the post-Reformation European, and the eighteenth-century professional European military who arrived in North America after 1755. In considering this sketch of a general typology, it is worth remembering that the treatment of prisoners was always susceptible to captors' individual pathologies; I have found no recorded case in colonial America of a soldier, militiaman, or warrior being formally punished by his own people for violating accepted norms concerning prisoners.
Although North American Amerindian societies varied greatly in 1500, they shared numerous assumptions about prisoners. None considered captured warriors to have behaved honorably except when they died defiantly. Captive warriors were presumed dead by their own people, and some who were later returned underwent purification ceremonies analogous to those for "making relatives" of adoptees. Scalps and prisoners were the obvious objectives of intertribal warfare; fortification and conquest of strategic strongpoints had little significance. Amerindian defenders did not expect to discuss terms upon which they would surrender a valuable position. Surviving records of Amerindian terms of surrender seem to represent European influence, as in the Fox surrender of 1716. When Amerindians controlled a victory over Europeans, surrender was usually unconditional. Escape was honorable but severely punished if foiled. A comprehensive exchange of prisoners was not a part of Amerindian peacemaking, but the return of some recently-captured prisoners might be both a token of intent to negotiate and a vehicle for discussion.
Amerindians regarded all members of enemy societies as legitimate prisoners, though women and children were more likely to be incorporated successfully into another society There were captives who became wives and served as diplomatic or social brokers between societies. The numerous Huron captives living among the Five Nations of the Iroquois in the 1650s, for instance, proved to be particularly effective preservers and transmitters of Christianized Huron values. Amerindian communitarian assumptions about property and its redistribution were not in serious conflict with individualistic perceptions of martial honor and reputation in the matter of "ownership" of prisoners. Acquiring resources, including prisoners, was an acceptable route to the honor derived from distributing them. In military actions, prisoners became the personal responsibility of their specific captors. Hence, the taking of prisoners, rather than their less-encumbering scalps, usually meant the end of a raid. In some societies a prisoner, like a scalp, was a personal trophy and clearly remained the property of his or her captor. Since status was linked to ability to gather and dispense resources, successful warriors could recover, maintain, or enhance their status by taking captives and making gifts of them. War chiefs who organized raids were sometimes awarded a proportion of the prisoners taken. Grieving clan matrons, whose suffering provoked "mourning war" raids by the Five Nations and "crying blood" expeditions by the Catawba, could also be arbiters of the lives of prisoners.
The varied fates of prisoners taken by Amerindians often appeared to survivors to be entirely arbitrary. Some might be killed along the trail either through individual acts of brutality or, more often, to prevent the column from being discovered or overtaken because of crying children or slow-moving captives. Few adult male prisoners were subjected to ritual torture and death, and authenticated reports of cannibalism were scarce. Traditionally prisoners might be fully adopted into communities or held as slaves outside the protection of clan membership. Prisoners also formed part of the justice system in many communities: repentant murderers within the Mohican or Shawnee communities could sometimes atone by offering a captive to offended relatives of the murdered. Prisoners could also be given as diplomatic gifts to other communities, or sold. The Apache, for example, routinely sold war captives to Pueblo communities for corn, textiles, and pottery.
The perceived usefulness of prisoners could influence their fate, and there were understandable differences between prisoners taken into hunting or into farming societies. Hunting, fishing, and gathering societies, like the Ottawa, Ojibwa, Abenaki, and Calusa did not grow much grain and therefore could not usually absorb many prisoners. Unless prisoners were excellent hunters or could be sold promptly and profitably, they were luxuries and liabilities. These hunter-warrior societies were economically and culturally more male-dominated than were farming societies, even before the rewards of the fur trade reinforced this tendency The martial reputation for ferocity that attended hunting societies was linked to a lack of incentive to take prisoners.
Amerindian farming societies, or those that combined hunting with reliable farming, could make more effective use of prisoners. If farmland was available, adult workers could raise enough corn, beans, and squash to sustain more than two persons each. Societies that lived on grown or purchased corn had another related use for labor. The grinding of early modem corn was a chore that consumed one hour a day for every adult person to be fed. Since women usually grew and ground the corn, female prisoners were better able than men to earn their keep in Huron, Iroquois, Delaware, Shawnee, or Powhatan societies. Communities like the Cherokee, who used both male and female slaves in their fields, could be less discriminating about the gender of their captives.
Farming societies sustained population densities at least seven times those of hunting societies and consequently were susceptible to proportionally higher losses during epidemics. The rapid adoption of numerous prisoners, especially women and children, helped epidemic-shattered societies to recover. The well-known Five Nations adoptions of numerous Iroquoian-speaking Huron (1649), Petun (1650) Neutral (1651), Erie (1657), and Susquehannock (1680) illustrate this situation. When native Mohawk came to be outnumbered in the 1650s by adoptees in their own villages, however, the limits of cultural absorption had been exceeded. The cultural disruption of the Mohawk led to the northward migration of Catholic Mohawk, including re-Christianized Huron adoptees, who peopled Caughnawaga (Kahnawake), contributed to the growth of Lac des Deux Montagnes (Oka), and added Mohawk to the Huron village of Lorette.
By the mid-eighteenth century, only one portion of the Amerindian-European frontier in North America could be said to involve Amerindian farmer-hunters who raided without a major outside market for their captives. These were the comparatively new and mixed upper Ohio villages peopled by Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo. When they participated in the conquest of the all-male garrison at Fort Necessity in 1754, they demanded no prisoners. In this clash, involving conflicting Amerindian and European military methods and values, Canadian and American colonials were allowed to negotiate what they regarded as a generous and humane outcome. In the attack on Braddock's column the following year, the very few prisoners taken by Amerindians included men who were tortured and women who were adopted; this army included very few women and children for capture. In the next decade, however, an estimated 2,000 captives were taken in scores of Ohio Amerindian raids conducted on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Women and children, who could help feed and populate an embattled society without threatening it, had apparently become a priority.
Amerindian views of fellow Amerindians as prisoners of war not only varied between hunters and farmers but also changed through interaction with Europeans. In 1701 Canadians brokered a large prisoner exchange between the Ottawa and Five Nations as part of a peace settlement. However, in 1712 the French declined to enforce terms they had helped negotiate, and as many as 1,000 Fox were slaughtered by Ottawa, Potawatomi, Miami, Illinois, and Huron after being given quarter. Onondaga orator Teganissorens had emphasized continuing differences between Amerindians and European colonists when he upbraided Governor Robert Hunter of New York the previous year: "We are not like you Christians for when you have taken Prisoners of one another you send them home, by such means you can never rout one another."1
Amerindian acceptance of substantial prisoner exchanges among themselves was a minor adaptation compared with the impact of colonial demand for captives. Whites bought and sold Amerindian slaves and "ransomed" white captives. For Abenaki, and especially those living at Canadian missions, this new trade in prisoners revived and sustained the resources and reputations off hunters in a region increasingly depleted of game. Captives could be part of tribal victory celebrations and could then be adopted and/or sold. The adopted were sometimes rented but were less likely to be sold than were other prisoners. Those white captives who were traded for supplies in New France were regarded as "ransomed" by the Canadian purchaser and would work off their debt with farm labor that was especially prized in wartime, when Canadian farmers were often preoccupied as militiamen.
When New England and New France were not at war, the Abenaki trade in English captives was less brisk because peacetime demand for labor in New France was markedly lower with the militiamen back on their farms. When Massachusetts objected to Canadian support of these raids in peacetime. Governor Michel-Ange Duquesne de Menneville replied that the Abenaki were slaveraiding, which English colonists should understand, and the captives were "slaves fairly sold" once bought by Canadians.2 Duquesne, whose own courtesies to prisoner/hostages were criticized as overly generous, was undoubtedly honest in claiming that he would have returned the captives had they been prisoners of war.
The sale of captives was a much larger trade in the southern British mainland colonies, though all colonies in eastern North America had some access to West Indian slave markets. Charlestown, South Carolina, was likely the greatest exporter of Amerindian slaves; of some 10,000 Amerindian slaves sold there before 1714, about 85% were exported. The Westo, Savannah, and Tuscarora took turns being slavers for the South Carolinians, before being taken as slaves themselves. The Apalachee missions of Florida were completely destroyed by Creek raiders accompanied and supplied, but not led, by their South Carolinian trading partners. Such slave-catching easily extended to a trade in runaway negro slaves and British army deserters.
The slave trade in captives ameliorated, but also expanded, Amerindian warfare. At the 1702 Battle of Flint River, 600 of 800 Apalachee combatants were spared in order to be sold into slavery. At the burning and storming of the Tuscarora stronghold of Neoheroka in 1713, nearly 400 of the 584 defenders were sold as slaves. The Ottawa learned from the Abenaki about the profits of the captive trade when they came down in 1757 to join the Fort William Henry campaign. This knowledge tempered the willingness of some Ottawa to kill and eat their prisoners. The slave trade required the precise use of surprise and paralyzing terror to take captives without maiming or killing potential slaves. This emphasized some aspects of Amerindian warfare, but also reduced the usefulness of some military techniques derived from the hunt. The slave trade also greatly expanded Amerindian intertribal warfare, as it did that of West Africa. Pawnee slaves were sold in New France by Ojibwa; Apalachee were sold in Charleston by Creek; and Cherokee were sold there by Catawba. The colonial practice of selling guns for slaves promoted a desperate Amerindian race to become slavers rather than slaves.
When they initially encountered European aliens, Amerindians had the advantage of numbers, the confidence of being on their own ground, and the solidarity of strong group identities. The "face to face" communities of clan and tribe were highly valued and though loosely governed and consensus oriented, could expect individual members to sacrifice their lives and possessions. There were sharp distinctions between some tribes, sustained by language and by violence that reinforced group identity, but some enemy aliens were fully adopted. Raiding to avenge group injury could become endemic, but belonging to a hostile Amerindian or white tribe was seen as a correctable fault in those who were not warriors.
It would take many encounters with the more alien Europeans to provoke a general "Amerindian identity," but Europeans eventually forced Amerindians to see a clearer distinction between races. Amerindians were considered a commodity by southern colonials who preferred exporting purchased captives rather than incorporating them. This large-scale traffic distorted and expanded traditional Amerindian slaving long before African slavery became significant in North America. New England's sale of Amerindian captives into West Indian slavery indicated similar assumptions. The prevalent notions of slavery adoption, or ransom of prisoners in underpopulated Canada were more like Amerindian perceptions. The comparable market in New France came to include white captives as well as Pawnee, neither of whom were promptly re-exported. This difference owed more to the accidents of location, economy and adaptation than to differing European cultural legacies.
Despite widely shared Amerindian assumptions about the capture, adoption, and exchange of prisoners, three distinct zones developed along the Amerindian-colonial frontier, zones that were determined by the trade in captives with European colonists. The substantial, if variable, trade in captives linked northern hunters to New France. Ohio Valley Amerindians raided for captives who were absorbed into their own communities. The much more populous Amerindian societies of the southern frontier were depopulated rapidly by an apparently limitless European colonial demand for slave labor.
Migrants from Reformation Europe to North America brought two ancient and complementary traditions about prisoners of war. Plato's proposed rules for war between Greeks represented one classical ideal. He argued that captured Greek prisoners should not be robbed or sold into slavery, though barbarians would still be treated as Greeks had been treating Greeks. Cicero urged Romans to be magnanimous to the conquered, sparing those who had not been bloodthirsty. Cicero also advocated the protection of prisoners and the parole of officers. However, he joined Plato in regarding barbarians as outside these considerations. The American colonial and revolutionary mantra about Amerindian "barbarians" and "bloodthirsty savages" reasserted this ancient moral distinction.
The medieval Christian belief in the just war also migrated to America with Europe's colonists. By this standard, men engaged in killing could justifiably be killed, but non-combatants of either gender should be spared. Combatants who were granted "quarter" upon surrender were to have their lives spared but could be sold into slavery or sent to the galleys like criminals. Rich prisoners could be ransomed for about one year's revenue from their estates and should be paroled in order to assemble that money. As was true everywhere, practice did not always conform to theory. Italian condottieri of the early sixteenth century took Christian prisoners without requesting ransom and actively recruited among them. Conversely, well-paid Swiss mercenaries brought extra terror because they took no prisoners at all. War against infidels and barbarians was not subject to any humane restrictions; even the ultimate weapon, the banned crossbow, could be used against these aliens. The distinction was not absolute because barbarians and infidels could be converted to Christianity. However, this possibility did not complicate the categories nearly as much as it might have done.
The Reformation had strained these limited civilities of western European war, since heretics were sometimes considered just as alien as infidels and barbarians. The practice of fighting under the red flag, which indicated that no quarter would be given, became more common in these wars fought to extirpate ideological enemies. The tribalism fostered by the Old Testament, which called for the execution of entire communities of disarmed Midianite or Israelite prisoners, again predominated; New Testament concern for individual rather than community responsibility for evil, or Christ's calls for mercy that included setting captives free, were generally ignored. Biblical ambiguities about slavery were exploited to suggest that prisoners of war could all be enslaved. Although deemed an unfortunate but endurable "natural evil," slavery was not always piously accepted as God's will in Reformation Europe. When Barbary and Algerian "pirates" captured seafaring Europeans, as retaliation for the expulsion of Moors from Spain and for comparable slave raiding by Europeans, a redemption industry developed that included two Spanish religious orders created exclusively to free Christian captives.
Although European migrants, colonists, and military officers brought their assumptions to North American conflicts, European prisoners taken in North America were cared for by local government and usually exchanged locally or returned to Europe rather than being sold into slavery The "civilized" and the Christian confirmed their sense of superiority by such humane treatment of fellow Europeans. There were a few notable exceptions to this comparatively good treatment. The hatred between Spanish Catholics and French Huguenots surfaced in the 1565 slaughter of soldiers who had been granted quarter at Fort Caroline, Florida, and in the Huguenot revenge two years later. As late as 1664, when Europe's diplomatic world was expanding to include the Americas, Dutch defenders of New Amstel on the Delaware River were considered to have forfeited their lives by refusing to surrender to English besiegers. The twenty-seven survivors were not put to the sword after the fort was overrun, but they were sold into servitude in Virginia.
Transactions for the exchange of white prisoners between colonial governments were frequent and could become quite complex. When New York officials sought to recover some Dutch settlers who had been captured and adopted by Canadian mission Amerindians, the Canadian governor reported that the adoptees were, unfortunately, not for sale:
... but they [the captors] will exchange them for Panis men or women.... We shall wait until the coming down of the Michelimakinac canoes to buy some prisoners at a lower figure than could be done now.3There were relatively few Canadian prisoners held in the British colonies, and they were prized by merchants to justify "flag of truce" trips that could mask illegal trade with Montreal, Louisbourg, or Martinique. Strategically, the British colonial manpower advantage made it useful to retain Canadian prisoners or exchange them only by the longest and most indirect routes. British prisoners held in New France could be more useful than those who had been exchanged: they occasionally smuggled out valuable military intelligence, and they consumed scarce victuals to the point of delaying Canadian military operations. Since virtually all of its garrison's food was imported, Louisbourg was particularly vulnerable to food shortages caused by its own military successes like the capture of Canso in 1744. French and Canadian privateers also endangered Louisbourg by dropping off captured prisoners but selling the captured ships and provisions elsewhere. French Americans had reason to be more interested in prisoner exchanges than British Americans.
White women and children were not usually taken prisoner by European colonials, but they were bought or "ransomed" from Amerindian allies. When Canada and the British colonies were not at war, these captives either worked off their debt or were ransomed by their relatives, parishes, or governments. The government of Massachusetts refused to participate in such ransoms, claiming that doing so only encouraged more raiding; neighboring New Hampshire, however, regularly ransomed its people. When Anglo-French war intervened, British captives of either sex who had been sold to Canadians were treated as prisoners of war.
Race was always more fundamental than gender in the colonial view of prisoners. All prisoners who were not white were an accepted part of plunder for seventeenth-century European soldiers and colonists in North America. Occasionally Amerindian prisoners were held hostage to provoke negotiation, as in Boston in 1687, Montreal in 1747, or Fort Prince George in 1759. To satisfy a royal whimsy, Mohawk prisoners might even be sent to man Louis XIV's Mediterranean galleys, but this caused enough Iroquois anger to prompt the return of the survivors. Most Amerindian and African prisoners were sold into slavery, from the first Spanish raids on the Calusa and Timucua of Florida to the attacks on the Caddo of the southern Great Plains. Virginians had sold Amerindian captives in the West Indies beginning in the 1630s, a half-century before African slavery became a significant part of Virginia's own tobacco economy. The South Carolinians had done the same from the foundation of their colony As late as 1760, North Carolina recruitment terms for the Cherokee War included personal ownership of captives as a major incentive. Colonial militia, British colonial volunteer regiments, and the troupes de la marine all sought Amerindian captives as plunder, occasionally to the obvious detriment of their primary military objectives. Another consequence of this preoccupation was evident in the 1716 peace negotiations between the defeated Fox and their Amerindian and Canadian opponents. The Fox were required to make war "in distant regions to get slaves, to replace all the dead who had been slain during the course of the war."4
Beyond the automatic identification of Amerindians as outside the bounds of military convention, Europeans made several adaptations concerning prisoners. Initially, prominent or promising Amerindians were taken back to Europe for display and advertisement, and were expected to become informants and interpreters on subsequent voyages. The Spanish took Francisco Chicora and Paquiquineo (Don Luis de Velasco), the French took Donnacona's sons, and the English took a considerable number, including the Abenaki Skidwarres and the Wampanoag Epenow. Invariably the European assumption that exposure to their civilization would turn these captive Amerindians into willing agents of European expansion proved erroneous.
Before the evolution of a colonial trade in Amerindian prisoners, Europeans readily used fire and sword on Amerindian defenders, indiscriminately killing all who tried to escape their burning towns or villages. De Soto did this at Mabila in 1541, claiming he was provoked by treachery. Captain John Underhill, a Netherlands-trained English soldier and instructor of the early Massachusetts militia, planned the slaughter of the Pequot that was carried out at Mystic Fort in 1637, and did the same to a Siwanoy village in Kieft's War seven years later. It is noteworthy that these atrocities occurred before the development of a regular trade in Amerindian prisoners to the West Indies. The emergence of the trade in Amerindian slaves generally replaced exterminating attacks with more profitable strategies. The context was clearly different by 1675, when a New England army slaughtered more than four hundred Narragansett of both sexes and all ages in the so-called "Great Swamp Fight." The attackers had been anxious to capture needed supplies as well as valuable prisoners but decided to set fire to both when the battle failed to go as planned. Although New Englanders did not buy Amerindians from Amerindians for resale, they routinely sold their own captives into West Indian slavery.
Another related adaptation by European settlers was the scalp bounty, which expanded and commercialized an Amerindian martial custom. The scalp bounty was variable in itself and in comparison with the bounty paid for prisoners. In the 1690s, for instance, the Canadian government encouraged the taking of male prisoners by offering twice as much for male captives as for females, with a scalp bounty set at the lower price. By contrast, Massachusetts escalated its scalp bounty in the same period to the point of offering no premium at all for prisoners. This perversion ofAmerindian custom sometimes created a land-based privateering industry, as in the Massachusetts-Abenaki war of the 1720s. Investor syndicates sent private armies to take scalps. If the bounties offered for scalps as opposed to prisoners was a barometer of fear, Connecticut in the 1740s was terrified. That government was paying £400 for a male Amerindian scalp, which was £25 more than paid for a prisoner.
Western European colonists had carried several layers of group identity with them to the New World. Their own clans, tribes, and regional cultures were being integrated into "new monarchies" that were becoming nations. Christendom and civilization represented even larger "imaginary communities" whose members, even as enemies, were seen as less alien than Jews, witches, gypsies. Moors, Turks, and the clansmen of the Celtic fringes. "Europeans could easily add new people to their ample category of aliens, whom they considered to be outside Christian conventions about prisoners and legitimate targets for enslavement or scalping by bounty hunters.
Enslavement of aliens in Europe had at least incorporated them into society, and Amerindians were even more adept at this. English North American colonists were more cautious, however, despite their labor needs. This indicates both that Amerindian slaves ran away and that colonists were not confident they could convert captives thoroughly. An intercolonial slave trade in Amerindians countered European urges to exterminate these aliens, while still removing them from valuable land. Canadians shared some of these views, but their economy was largely dependent upon AmerindianH trappers and they had numerous Amerindian allies whose presence often compromised and confounded Europeans' categories.
In western Europe, a new set of elaborate martial conventions had developed after the middle of the seventeenth century Pioneered by French aristocratic officers in the service of the crown, a ritualized, professionalized and "ennobled" military life was taught in the new officer training schools. The "law of nations," pioneered by scholars like Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius, were elaborated by eighteenth-century writers including Samuel Pufendorf and Emmerich de Vattel. Rituals of siege warfare evolved to help defending commanders pick the appropriate time to surrender in order to avoid either execution by their own government or slaughter by their attackers. After a stout defense that lasted until the wall had been breached at ground level, defenders were to withstand one assault on the breach, then raise the white flag. brief truce and conference could be held to ensure that this event or its equivalent had occurred. The coveted "honors of war" then allowed the defenders to keep their arms, standards, and personal effects and, after agreeing not to fight for a specified period, to proceed to the nearest post held by their own side without ever being taken prisoners of war.
Military officers captured in other circumstances were to be paroled in order to find a comparable prisoner held by their own government and were to return to captivity if unsuccessful. The pay of captured officers continued though they were not eligible for promotion. Cartels and exchanges of all prisoners became common, conducted according to a revealing hierarchical scale of values. A field marshall, for instance, could be exchanged for 3,000 soldiers.
Nonetheless, all ranks were now to be taken prisoner, were not to be treated as criminals, and were to be maintained until exchanged by cartel or as specified in most European peace treaties written after 1648. Elaborate state bureaucracies took over prisoners from armies without encumbering or terminating campaigns. The holding of substantial numbers of prisoners on both sides tended to encourage better treatment, or at least allowed threats of reprisals in the event of mistreatment. Prisoners also provided security against counterattacks on recently captured positions; all cultures agreed that prisoners would be killed if their guards were attacked. Prisoners' home governments were eventually to compensate captors for the upkeep of their captives, and could even provide supplements such as the French royal bounty, which improved the diet for French prisoners held by the British. Armies and navies actively recruited among prisoners of war and occasionally allowed other governments to do so as well. This new perception of prisoners of war coincided with renewed emphasis upon dynastic wars of maneuvre to control real estate and taxpayers, rather than ideas. The conventions reduced casualties by encouraging surrender in more circumstances than would have been likely otherwise.
European soldiers continued to distinguish between parties to the civilized "law of nations" and barbarians in three central ways. Firstly kin-ordered societies were not treated as nations in international law. Secondly, eighteenth-century European armies used guerilla elements like the Austrian pandours and the French chasseurs, as well as partisans. These useful irregular auxiliaries were regarded as fighting less nobly than the others; they were routinely shot upon capture. Thirdly, rebellious subjects were usually considered as criminals and consequently outside humane military conventions. Preposterous British claims to extensive Amerindian lands, made in the Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Paris (1763), should not be ignored as inconsequential puffery. These clauses claimed Amerindian subjects, meaning that the Abenaki were seen as rebels in the 1720s, as were many Amerindians m "Pontiac's Rebellion" of 1763-65. Whether regarded as kin-ordered tribesmen, as irregular warriors, or as rebels, Amerindians could readily be excluded from the peculiar new conventions of eigteenth-century European warfare, provided the Amerindians fought alone.
The "enlightened" new conventions of European warfare reached North America gradually carried by military governors naval officers, newspaper accounts of European warfare, training manuals, and by the terms of European peace treaties. Whenever European courts ordered the return of all prisoners, there were persistent difficulties in recovering captives from Amerindians. After the peace of 1697, when a New York mission attempted to repatriate captives in Canada, most of those adopted by Amerindians were so resistant to returning that a semblance of exchange could be achieved only by forcing those under twelve years of age to return. The Peace of Utrecht called for a general exchange of prisoners in 1714, but English converts to Catholicism were left at liberty to remain with the French or the Amerindians in Canada. The 1748 Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had a similar clause, but private efforts to recover captives became a complex five-year diplomatic wrangle over the return of some European captives and the redemption of others. These negotiations also sought the release of twenty-six Abenaki held in Boston for most of the war and three prominent Mohawk held in Canada for several years. Holding Amerindian prisoners was unusual, apparently intended to provoke separate negotiations with the opponent's Amerindian allies.
The rather confused mixture of military conventions operating in North America in the 1740s can be illustrated from the perspective of Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts. An English lawyer without military experience before becoming governor, Shirley became involved in four very different surrenders. in as many years. There were several curious features to the 1744 surrender of the New England fishing station at Canso, Nova Scotia, to a Canadian-led force. The remnants of four companies of British regulars and their families were all taken prisoner. The fifty women and children were soon sent from Louisbourg to Boston as the first act of what would be a release of all the prisoners by a governor who could not feed them. All attackers had been promised booty, but the soldiers were cheated when valuable captured stores of fish were treated by the victorious officers as personal effects of the prisoners and then immediately bought by the same officers at ridiculously low prices. The captives agreed to a peculiar clause that made them prisoners of war for one year. Louisbourg's governor, Jean-Baptiste-Louis Le Prevost Duquesnel, a career French naval officer whose experience went back to the battle of Malaga, had the prisoners subscribe to a more conventional parole of honor, promising not to tight for a year after their release. In a surrender that had not involved Amerindians, some semblance of recent European convention was observed.
A year later, Shirley organized the successful New England assault on Louisbourg, aided by the released Canso prisoners. Defending commander Louis Du Font Duchambon, a sixty-five year old officer in the Canadian colonial regulars, proposed surrender terms after withstanding nearly seven weeks of siege. As finally negotiated with New England merchant-prince William Pepperrell and Commodore Peter Warren of the British navy, the 900 civilians and the garrison were to be sent to France. These civilians, as well as commissioned French officers, could remain in their homes and practice their religion until transported to France. All the noncommissioned were to be put aboard British vessels immediately. French sick and wounded would be tended "in the same manner with our own," reflecting the precise sentiments attributed to Louis XV at Fontenoy that same year. Not only did Pepperrell and Warren accede to Duchambon's peculiar request for two covered wagons, on condition they "be inspected only by one officer of ours, that no warlike stores may be contained therein," they also offered that anyone whom the governor did not want the victors to see, including at least four Canso turncoats, could "go off masked."5 These terms were conditional upon prompt surrender of the Island Battery to let Warren's fleet into the harbor, a return of all New England prisoners, and an oath that none of the inhabitants of Louisbourg would take arms against the British for a year. It was only at the final stage in the negotiations that Duchambon asked for ritual aspects of the "honors of war." The conquered were allowed to leave the fortress with their arms and with colors flying, surrendering these to the British only until arrival in France, when they would be returned. Europe's new conventions had prevailed, though threatened by resentment over Amerindian raids in which British colonial scalps had been taken and cursed by New England troops were deprived of promised plunder.
The 1746 capture of Fort Massachusetts, though only 120 miles from Boston, might have been in another world. The small garrison surrendered to 400 Canadian militia and 300 mission Amerindians after gaining assurances that (1) they would not be given to the Amerindians; (2) their families would not be separated; (3) their injured would not be killed in transit; and (4) they all would be exchanged promptly These terms appeared to be violated, at least temporarily, as Amerindians were given some of the prisoners. These were promptly ransomed by the Canadian governor, however, and then confined with the others in Quebec's "prisoners' house" until all the survivors were exchanged. "Honors of war" had not even been discussed, if they were understood. Journals kept by four prisoners show very little resentment at their treatment, and the Reverend Benjamin Doolittle, attempting a careful account of the frontier war soon thereafter, argued that "the French treated our Men civilly and tenderly: So also did the Indians those with them according to their Manner."6
Shirley's fourth siege in as many years concerned the Acadian village of Grande Pre, Nova Scotia, where he had sent 470 Massachusetts volunteers to counter Canadian influence. In February of 1747 they were attacked by some 235 Canadians and Malecite, Micmac, and Abenaki. Most of the Massachusetts troops, billeted in private homes, survived the initial attack and assembled in a stone house that they defended so well that they were offered terms. The defenders sought specific "honors of war": being allowed to go to Annapolis, keeping their muskets, powder, and shot, as well as keeping their haversacks, packed with six days provisions. They were refused their more extravagant request for the return of an estimated 50 prisoners and the plunder already captured, but they were allowed to march to Annapolis, equipped as requested, provided they would not fight in that theater for six months. The sick and wounded were to be cared for by the Canadians and returned when well, except for one wounded captain who was paroled in exchange for all French prisoners held in Boston. Neither the Canadian militiamen nor the Amerindians had wanted to undertake a frontal assault on these well-positioned defenders, and both had already acquired enough plunder and captives to encourage them to head home. In the circumstances of Shirley's fourth siege, "honors of war" could be awarded and readily respected by colonials and Amerindians.
Arrival of European regulars in large numbers after 1755 brought dominance of the new martial values, but with reversions, anomalies, and adaptions that can only be hinted at here. After the 1755 Battle of Lake George, William Johnston treated captive General Dieskau with every civility while sending other French captives as gifts to help the Mohawk in mourning their dead. After General Montcalm had agreed to take the entire Oswego garrison to Canada following their defeat in 1756, about thirty wounded prisoners were killed by Montcalm's Amerindian allies. When Montcalm offered "honors of war" to the defeated garrison at Fort William Henry in 1757, an Amerindian attack on the parolees showed how Amerindians could frustrate European conventions. These conventions would have cost them the scalps, prisoners, and booty they had been promised. The "massacre" has been greatly exaggerated in James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans and by its movie versions, including Michael Mann's impressive 1992 movie filmed in Chimney Rock State Park, North Carolina. One consequence of at attack was that British regulars retaliated by refusing the "honors of war" to vanquished French regulars over the next three years at Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal. However, the defeated garrison at Fort Niagara was allowed the ritual honor of leaving the fort "with their arms and baggage, drums beating, and match lighted at both ends, and a small piece of cannon," but agreed to be sent to New York as prisoners of war.7
British regulars had some difficulties adapting to exclusively Amerindian opponents. In the Cherokee War (1759-61), though British regulars adopted tactics used by colonials in taking hostages and burning deserted towns, they unwisely sought the "honors of war" in surrendering Fort Loudoun in August of 1760. The Cherokee agreed, and the freed garrison began its two-hundred-mile retreat to nearest British fort. After two days on the mountainous trail, the British were attacked; all but one of the officers were killed, and the survivors were triumphantly taken prisoner by the Cherokee.
Although victims of their own conventions, the British regulars had already begun a major innovation in negotiating with Amerindians. Early in 1760 Colonel Archibald Montgomery made the return of all Europeans into a precondition for peace talks with the Cherokee. This strategy is not known to have been part of prior European, colonial, or Amerindian military conventions. The Cherokee promptly returned 113 prisoners but would not return more without ransom or some exchange of people or gifts. Amerindian communities on the Ohio frontier, anxious to make peace with the British later that year, faced the same demand, but it posed a more fundamental threat to these composite communities that had adopted hundreds of whites over the previous six years. All prisoners were to be returned without ransom or exchange, including those adopted and wishing to remain in Amerindian communities. Compliance was very limited, and British negotiators, hurrying to conclude expensive military operations, did not pursue the matter further.
The Amerindian War of 1763-1765 again pitted British regulars against Amerindians, and approaches to peace were complicated by the Amerindians' comparatively egalitarian organization of this war. Eventually, the British would elevate Pontiac to position in which he could be seen by Europeans as negotiating the peace. The more convincing test of Amerindian intentions, or of their abject surrender, was their compliance with the demand that all prisoners be returned as a precondition of peace. As early as June 1764, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern district, Sir William Johnson, who had been both an Indian trader and an adopted Mohawk chief, demanded the return of all prisoners as a prerequisite of peace. Colonel Henry Bouquet, armed with a recently won military reputation and enough hostages and bayonets to give authority to his demands, told Ohio Valley Amerindian legates that all prisoners were to be returned. "English men, French men, women & children whether adopted in your tribes, marry'd or Living amongst you under any denomination or pretense whatever" were to be returned along with the bi-racial children of captives.8
By requiring the return of European and colonial captives without any reciprocity at all, the British devastated communities that had by then absorbed prisoners for a decade and regarded the unilateral offering of prisoners as appropriate compensation only for murder. Pathetic and ecstatic scenes occurred at Muskingam River, at Fort Pitt, and at Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1764 and 1765. While some families were happily being restored, more were being destroyed. Amerindian husbands risked death in a war still raging in order to bring their European wives and their own children to wrenching separations. Some European spouses were reunited, others found that they had been presumed dead and had been replaced. Some white and bi-racial children of Amerindian language and culture had to be tied up to prevent them from running back to their homes. A weeping Pennsylvania mother could not find her long-lost infant among these Amerindian children until she sang her favorite German lullaby, which brought recognition from a twice-uprooted child to whom she could not otherwise make herself understood. Newspaper advertisements invited relatives to claim young persons who could not be identified. In their zeal to redeem all the captives, the conquerors were converting prisoners of war into prisoners of peace.
Europe's new military professionals were conscious of being members of kingdoms and of a European "profession of arms." Their elaborate rituals had developed through a mutual awarding of rights to be extended only to those who meticulously abided by these conventions. European violators were punished. Amerindians, still regarded as kin-based barbarians, as irregulars, or as rebels, were not party to these conventions. The new European professionals, unlike colonials, did not take or sell Amerindian prisoners of war though they took Amerindian hostages. Insistence on the return of every white prisoner as a prerequisite for peace talks was a dangerous adaptation if peace proved to be impermanent. This policy encouraged Amerindians to take more scalps and keep fewer white prisoners in the Amerindian War that erupted in 1763-1765.
Three recognizable views of war collided in colonial North America, each with its own conventions concerning prisoners. The treatment of captives was a sensitive, if trailing, indicator of the military culture dominant during specific engagements. These military value systems also interacted to create confusion in some instances and workable compromises in others.
Amerindians belonged to small kin-groups but easily adopted a wide variety of outsiders. Farming societies could adopt more captives, particularly women and children, than could hunting communities. Some captives were given as intertribal gifts and others were sold, but the Abenaki, Creek, and Tuscarora would take more prisoners and fewer scalps once European colonists developed an interest in buying and ransoming war captives. Such a symbiosis would be much harder to develop with the "enlightened" European professional soldiers, whose conventions no longer included the purchase or ransom of prisoners. Amerindians' non-racial concept of tribe and their minimal sense of a broader Amerindian "imaginary community" were very gradually changed in the face of persistent white insistence on racial distinctions.
European colonists in North America, despite their several conflicts, valued being fellow-Europeans. With a few brutal exceptions, colonists observed the humane conventions of the "law of nations" concerning the care and exchange of European prisoners. Membership in the larger "imaginary communities" of European civilization and Christendom also meant clear distinctions between themselves and the "barbarians" and "heathens." Amerindian prisoners became profitable booty with the development of the intercolonial slave trades, ameliorating an evident colonial unwillingness to take any Amerindian prisoners at all. Bounties on prisoners, usually higher than those on scalps, brought colonial governments directly into the prisoner trade. Colonists of New France and New Spain adapted more fully than the English, partly because their more successful missions had blurred the racial boundaries of Christendom but primarily because of their military and economic dependency on Amerindians. Canadians bought Amerindian and European prisoners to work on their farms until ransomed.
A new European professional military code came to North America in the eighteenth century. This code put prisoners into the protective custody of the victorious monarch and awarded the "honors of war" to defeated armies deemed to have fought bravely allowing them to avoid becoming prisoners of war at all. European colonists were introduced to these notions gradually through newspaper accounts of European warfare, training manuals, and the military and naval officers who served as governors. Although this new perspective influenced Anglo-French colonial surrenders in the 1740s, it became dominant only with the arrival of thousands of European regulars in the Seven Years' War. Colonists resisted the elimination of booty, including slaves, but generally recognized the advantages of this ennobling of the "profession of arms." The professionals offered new reasons for excluding Amerindians from these conventions, regarding them as irregulars, rebels, or people without the authoritarian state structure to ensure fulfillment of commitments. Amerindians found these new Europeans incomprehensible as allies and especially deadly as enemies because they had no interest in taking slaves. Peace became possible once the European regulars discovered that insistence upon the return of all captives, a new punitive prerequisite, was proof of broad Amerindian acceptance of a truce.
Significant limits on violence against captives in colonial America derived from Amerindian adoption and from intercolonial reciprocity Enslavement of Amerindians and ransom of colonists were developments that also encouraged the granting of quarter while making warfare more endemic. Adoption of eighteenth-century professional military conventions improved the treatment of white prisoners but meant that Amerindians were regarded as even more alien. "Enlightened" military conventions and the subsequent ending of the oceanic slave trade were both improvements in human rights, but both meant that Amerindians were even less likely to be taken as prisoners of war.
1. Edmund B. O'Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, Vol. 5 (Albany, NY 1855), 274.
2. Quoted in Emma Lewis Coleman, New England Captives, Vol. 2 (Portland, ME, 1926), 267.
3. Ansel Judd Northrup, Slavery in New York (Albany, NY, 1900), 307; J. C. Hamilton, "The Panis: An Historical Outline of Canadian Indian Slavery in the Eighteenth Century," Proceedings of the Royal Canadian Institute, new series, Vol. 1 (Toronto, 1898).
4. Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., The French Regime in Wisconsin, 1634-1760, Vol. 1 (Madison, WI, 1902), 343.
5. "Journal of Roger Wolcott at the Siege of Louisbourg, 1745," Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, Vol. 1 (1860), 144-47; Charles Henry Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley, (New York, 1912), 239-41.
6. Benjamin Doolittle, A Short Narrative of Mischief Done by the French and Indian Enemy on the Western Frontiers of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1750), 9.
7. Terms are reprinted in Brian L. Dunnigan, Siege - 1759: The Campaign against Niagara (Youngstown, NY 1986), 100-101.
8. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, HM 569; Pennsylvania Gazette, 15 Nov. 1764, #1873.
Return to the Lawrence F. Brewster Lectures in History Series Home Page.