Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England 9781501729508

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COLONIAL INTIMACIES

Colonial Intimacies --------~0~-------

INDIAN MARRIAGE IN EARLY NEW ENGLAND

Ann Marie Plane

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2000 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 1485o. Frrst published 2ooo by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2002 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plane, Ann Marie, 1964Colonial intimacies : Indian martiage in early New England I Ann Marie Plane. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8or4-329r-x (cloth : acid-free paper) ISBN o-8014 -8363-8 (pbk. : acid-free paper) I. Indians of North America-Marriage customs and rites-New England. 2. Indians ofNorth America-History-Colonial period, ca. I6oo-rJ7s. 3· Marriage customs and rites-New England-History-Sources. 4· New England-History-Colonial period, ca. I6oo-I775· I. Tide. E78.N5 P53 2000 306.8r' 089973074- dc2r

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For my own Daniel and Sarah, and in memory ofmany other Daniels and Sarahs

My conscience is to me a thousand witnesses that what I speak is the very truth.... thou mayest in two or three hours travail over a few leaves see and know that which cost him that writ it years and travail over sea and land before he knew it. And therefore I hope thou wilt accept it, which shall be my full reward. -William Wood, New England's Prospect, 1634

Contents

List oflllustrations Preface Prologue

Vlll

ix XVl1

Introduction

I

r. "Amongst their nation" 2.

I4

"My heart did love the having of two wives"

4I

3· "They had made a Law against it"

4· "In their Families"

s.

"They ... take one another without Ceremony"

6. "At the Marriages of their Sachems" Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Index

I29 I

53

Illustrations

FIGURES 1.

2. 3· 4·

5·

Engraving, Theodor de Bry, [America], "Their sitting at meat," 1590 Detail, Henry Whitfield, Strength Out of Weakness, 1652 Tide page, Henry Whitfield, The Light appearing more and more towards the peifect Day, 1651 Sketches of meetinghouse, Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1683-1747 Tide page, Experience Mayhew, A Discourse shewing that God Dealeth with Men as with Reasonable Creatures, 1720

6. Ezra Stiles, sketch of the Moheges' wigwam (exterior) at Niantic, Connecticut, 1761 7· Ezra Stiles, sketch of the Moheges' wigwam (interior) at Niantic, Connecticut, 1761 8. Ezra Stiles, sketch of George Wawkeet's wigwam (exterior) at Niantic, Connecticut, 1761 9· Portrait of the Reverend James MacSparran, 1735, by John Smibert 10. Portrait ofNinegret II, ca. 1681 n. Ninegret genealogy, including polygynous marriages 12. Kate Ninegret's claim to royal blood (patti-centered genealogy) 13. Kate Ninegret's ancestry (traced matrilineally) 14. Ezra Stiles, wigwam sketch juxtaposed to map of Connecticut River valley, 1761 15. Portrait of the Reverend Samson Occum, ca. 1751-56, by Nathaniel Smibert

25 47 49 79 104 107 108 109 138 156 158 169 170 173 175

MAP 1.

Southeastern New England

2

Preface

A

t the beginning of the eighteenth century John Saffin, a wealthy New England landowner and judge, recorded a few lines of advice on love and marriage in his private book of "commonplace" sayings. "Marriage is rather a Felloship of Dearest Amity, than disordered Love meerly carnail," he wrote, "which is as Different from Amity as the burning sick heat of A Feaver is from the Naturall kindly heat of A Healthfull Body." 1 Try as he might for moderation, however, Saffin was a man beset by unruly and unfulfilled passions. His first wife, Martha, died in the smallpox epidemic of 1678, 2 and Saffin clung to her memory until his death, despite marrying twice more. In old age he spent coundess hours writing odes, palindromes, memoria, and even a poetic dialogue in her honor, penning such syrupy lines as these: But 0 unto her Husband (he knew well) In Conjugal Affection [she] did Excell Cornelia, and Artemesia faire Pandora, and Valeria (Ladys Rare) famous for Love unto their Husbands were, yet to my Dove they scarely could Compare. 3

Martha became all the more glorious in memory as the failings of Saffin's other partners became more apparent. His second wife, Elizabeth Lidget, suffered from "distraction'' (mental illness) until her death. 4 His third wife, Rebecca Lee, at times refused to live with the embittered and quarrelsome old man, who took refuge in privately recording misogynous sayings about marriage, copying jokes that likened choosing a wife to lotteries that offered "many blankes to one Prise" or to reaching for the single tasty eel hidden "in a

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Preface

bag full of snakes." 5 In 1710 Rebecca offered reconciliation, and the Reverend Cotton Mather (who was married to Rebecca's sister) begged the judge toreturn to his wife, to "take your quarters where she has hers, and enjoy [her] best assistances ... to render your old age honourable and comfortable." Mather reminded Saffin of the "disreputation" that would come on both man and wife should he decline Rebecca's offer. He urged his brother-in-law to live by the "Scotch" proverb "By-gones be by-gones, and fair play for the time to come." 6 Saffin would die just a few days later, the peace he sought proving elusive to the very end. His disordered personal life made his hankering for "a Felloship ofDearest Amity" even more poignant. All eight of his sons predeceased him, leaving him without a male heir, and by the end of his life, he had failed to find another "pretty gentlewoman" who might equal his lost love, the admirable Martha, in "Conjugal Affection." 7 Saffin's unhappy experience of marriage seems sadly familiar; in his time, as now, marriages and sexual unions could run the gamut from lovingly supportive partnership to violent-even murderous-conflict. Doubtless because of the joys and tensions that accompany them, intimate, romantic, and sexual relations have always offered a fruitful ground for the reflections of poets, storytellers, philosophers, artists, and moralists. Yet the companionate marriage that Saffin so desired has never been a universal goal. Different societies have endowed coupling with an array of roles and meanings. Indeed, Saffin's own idealized notion of marriage represented a novel, elite form of union-a romantic aspiration that remained foreign to most of his colonial contemporaries. More widely shared was the belief that orderly marriages were the foundation upon which all other social bonds rested. Marriage and the married couple stood both literally and metaphorically at the center of early modem European economic, kinship, and political relations. Even though English men and women, including John Saffin, often failed to live up to moralists' visions of orderly union, most of them embraced these ideals. But colonial New England also contained other cultures with vastly different understandings of conjugal union. For the region's indigenous peoples, unions between men and women could be lasting, or, if the parties so desired, they might be easily broken. Men from elite families often took more than one wife, in relationships that served important political, economic, and diplomatic functions. Households did not necessarily form around a single heterosexual couple, nor did they remain fixed in location or composition from season to season. In short, when the English arrived, they brought with them certain ideas and practices that shaped their particular institution of marriage. And just as

Prefoce

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they guided natives in how to plant fields with European crops or how to build a framed meetinghouse, English missionaries and magistrates also tried to convey to Indians the primacy of marriage among all other human relationships. Some hoped to stamp out polygyny and divorce; others hoped to encourage men to take leading roles as heads of household; still others were less interested in Indians' families than in incorporating Indians into English families as servants. All this helped to create new bonds, a new sort of"lndian marriage" out of the variety of relations that had previously characterized native conjugal life. In what ways did these new modes of relationship affect native society, and in what ways did natives adopt, alter, or resist these new forms? How successful were the colonists in instilling their own ideas about marriage among residents of New England's Indian towns? In this book I undertake to answer these central questions. In order to do so, I tell a multitude of stories-many of them heretofore quite obscure-of Native American men and women. Taken together, the experiences of many individuals reveal the range of relationships and the changes to native ways that occurred over the first century and a half of English colonization in New England. One example is the life history of Hannah Tiler, a native woman on Martha's Vineyard. Tiler was described in some detail by Experience Mayhew, an eighteenth-century missionary who chronicled the island's native peoples. Mayhew noted that "the [early] part of her Life was no better ordered than the Lives of Persons in a State of Nature generally be. Nor was the Husband she married after she was grown up, a Person of so good