Writing the history of the Pequot War, 1636-7

In this article I make three arguments. First, that the combination of direct personal experience and some twenty years of hindsight gives the ‘authorized version’ of the Brief History of the Pequot War by John Mason of ­Connecticut a uniquely valuable perspective on the notorious Mistick massacre. Second, that in other respects this version of the war, although largely relied on by modern historians, is highly misleading, spectacularly so in its delineation of the parts played by the colonists’ Indian allies, Mohegans and Narragansetts. Two other narratives, both embedded in later printed accounts, and one of them composed soon after the war’s end by John Mason himself, reward greater scrutiny than they have as yet received. Third, that Connecticut’s successful undermining of the wartime alliance between Massachusetts and the Narragansetts meant that the familiar version of Mason’s text was better attuned than all extant earlier narratives to the political constellation which emerged in New England in the aftermath of the Pequot war – a new alignment which remained in place up to and beyond the demolition of Narragansett independence in the war of 1675–6.