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King Philip

Nine Men’s Misery: ‘Oldest Veterans Memorial’ Honors Tortured Plymouth Colonists

On the wooded grounds of an old monastery in Cumberland, R.I., a pile of stones stands next to a cement pillar with a plaque on it. Called Nine Men’s Misery, people describe it as the oldest veteran’s memorial in the United States. It commemorates the death of nine men killed by Narragansett Indians during King Philip’s War.

Forty miles to the south lies another monument in another woods. A granite obelisk off a hiking trail marks the massacre of an estimated 700 Narragansett men, women and children by colonial militia. Known as the Great Swamp Fight, it led directly to the death of the nine men in Cumberland.

Together, the old stone markers tell at least part of the story of the Narragansett involvement in King Philip’s War. And over the years, the message of one of those monuments changed.

The message of the other has stayed pretty much the same. And it remains a monument to a myth.

From Nine Men’s Misery to the Great Swamp Fight. Map courtesy Google maps.

King Philip’s War

For many years King Philip, also known as Metacomet, had followed in the footsteps of his father, Massasoit. He maintained peace between his tribe, the Wampanoag, and the colonists, as his father had with the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony.

But over the next decades the English encroached on far too much of the Wampanoag’s land. They forced the Indians to agree to a humiliating treaty and then unfairly condemned three Wampanoag to death.

To prepare for war, King Philip, assembled an alliance of native tribes to fight the English colonists.

King Philip’s War started in June 1675 without the Narragansetts. They had signed a treaty of neutrality with Massachusetts Bay Colony. And Rhode Island, led by an aging Roger Williams, tried to stay out of the war as well.

It wasn’t to be.

King Philip

The war that followed devastated both sides. It destroyed about a third of New England’s towns and cost Plymouth Colony eight percent of its adult male population. As many as a thousand Indians were sold into slavery, and 5,000 died in battle, of sickness or starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north.

The Great Swamp Fight

King Phillip decided to take advantage of the Narragansett pledge of neutrality. He sent noncombatants — women, children, the old and the infirm — to safety in the Narragansett winter settlement in the Great Swamp. But on Dec. 19, 1675, Benjamin Church led a 1,000-man militia from Plymouth, Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies into Rhode Island. They marched to the Great Swamp, now in South Kingstown, and they massacred an estimated 700 Indian men, women and children.

In 1906, descendants of the colonists and members of the Narragansett tribe dedicated a 20-foot-high granite obelisk to commemorate the battle.

Three Narragansett women stood in the rain and unveiled a marker that read,

Attacked within their fort upon this island, the Narragansett Indians made their last stand in King Philip’s War and were crushed by the united forces of the Massachusetts Connecticut and Plymouth Colonies in the “Great Swamp Fight,” Sunday, 19 December, 1675.

This record was placed by the Rhode Island Society of Colonial Wars, 1906.

In the 1930s, an Indian historian named Princess Red Wing held a much different kind of ceremony at the Great Swamp. She helped redefine the meaning of the battle site – as a tragic massacre rather than a glorious battle victory.

Native Americans have held the Great Swamp Massacre Ceremony annually since then. They light fires, call the roll of fallen soldiers, sing, dance and give speeches. And by doing so, they make it clear that neither the Great Swamp Fight nor King Philip’s War extinguished the Narragansett people.

By Astoddard73 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51159108

The Great Swamp Fight memorial

Pierce’s Fight

The Great Swamp Fight drew both Rhode Island and the Narragansetts into King Philip’s War.

In retaliation for the massacre, the Narragansett leader Conanchet organized several tribes into two armies. One army in Massachusetts attacked and destroyed most of the settlements in central Massachusetts. The southern army burned towns in Rhode Island along Narragansett Bay.

On March 26, 1676, the Narragansetts baited a trap for a Plymouth Colony militia led by Capt. Michael Pierce. Pierce marched his men to what is now Cumberland, where they spied several Indians who appeared wounded. Pierce’s militia chased the Indians to a bend in the Blackstone River. There, Pierce realized the Indians had lured him into an ambush.

The Narragansetts overpowered the colonial militia after a battle known as Pierce’s Fight. Exactly how many Indians took part in the fight will probably never be known, but scholars claim 1,000 is a reasonable estimate. The militia, including friendly Indians, numbered about 65.

Nine Men’s Misery

The legend of Nine Men’s Misery begins sometime after Pierce’s fight ended. A rescue party supposedly came across nine scalped dead men and buried their bodies. They then stacked a pile of rocks as a memorial to the slain soldiers.

Nine Men’s Misery marker, placed in 1928

According to the myth, the Indians captured nine men who were part of Pierce’s militia and tortured them to death. Or the Indians seated the prisoners on a rock and did a war dance while they decided what to do with them. Because the Indians couldn’t agree on a form of torture, they simply tomahawked and then scalped the prisoners. One account even had the Indians carving smiles onto their faces to mock the promises broken by the colonists.

The Narragansetts went on to burn Providence and other towns, but the colonists soon captured and killed Canonchet. The war pretty much ended on Aug. 12, 1676 with the shooting death and dismemberment of King Philip, though skirmishes continued for more than a year.

A Tangled Tale

In 1790, some medical students started to dig up the bodies to study their anatomy, but outraged locals stopped them. The bodies were then reburied, the rocks reassembled and the myth of Nine Men’s Misery continued.

A century later, an order of Trappist monks bought the property and built a monastery on it. In 1928, they cemented a pile of rocks together on the alleged site of Nine Men’s Misery, and the Rhode Island Historical Society placed a marker next to it. The marker reads:

Nine Men’s Misery

On This Spot

Where They Were Slain By

The Indians

Were Buried the Nine Soldiers

Captured in Pierce’s Fight

March 26, 1676

A Myth May Have Some Truth

In 2011, a graduate student named Lawrence K. LaCroix investigated the facts surrounding Pierce’s Fight. He found no evidence, written or archaeological, “to support an association with Captain Pierce, the King Philip’s War, or even the 17th century.”

LaCroix concluded Nine Men’s Misery was mostly legend, but it had some semblance of truth.

He found that someone unearthed skeletal remains somewhere in Cumberland, probably a mile south of Nine Men’s Misery. Then around 1790, after the medical students went grave digging, someone reburied the bodies at or near Nine Men’s Misery.

Soon after the monks bought the property in 1900, the bodies were once again disinterred. The Rhode Island Historical Society accepted them and kept them in the basement of the John Brown House, which it owns.

Then in 1976, the remains of the nine bodies were ceremonially reburied elsewhere.

The monastery burned down in 1950, and the monks sold the property to the town. But the legend of Nine Men’s Misery continues, for example, in promotional materials for Blackstone Valley tourism.

Perpetuating that myth, concluded LaCroix,

reinforces nineteenth century public attitudes toward patriotic inspiration, obstructs the construction of a more factual battle account and unfairly biases readers’ perceptions of Native Americans.

With thanks to Lawrence K. LaCroix, Captain Pierce ‘s Fight: An Investigation Into a King Philip’s War Battle and its Remembrance and Memorialization.

The Great Swamp Fight Memorial , 41 Great Swamp Monument Rd., West Kingston, R.I. Image by By Astoddard73 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51159108.

Nine Men’s Misery is at Diamond Hill Rd., Cumberland, R.I. This story was updated in 2022.

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William Apess Leads the Bloodless Mashpee Revolt of 1833

William Apess was the perfect person to lead the nonviolent Mashpee Revolt of 1833, an uprising against the Massachusetts government. The commonwealth had controlled the tribe’s lands, but not to the tribe’s benefit.

William Apess (from his autobiography)

Apess (who occasionally spelled his name Apes) was born in 1798 in Colrain, Mass., of Pequot descent. He had a tumultuous family life. His abusive grandmother raised him until the age of five. He was then removed from the home and placed with the Furman family as an indentured servant.

Apess worked for the head of the Furman household as a cooper, and the Furman family saw to it he had six years of schooling.

Despite his kind treatment by the Furmans, Apess’ childhood was a mixed bag. He moved on from the Furman family to live with a Connecticut judge. Later he worked as a household servant for a retired general. The Furmans were Baptists, his later homes Presbyterian, and Apess chafed at the rote repetition of prayers.

Methodism

Frustrated by his indentureship, Furman ran off and joined the army at 15. Later he worked as a laborer in upstate New York. All the while, he grew closer to Methodism. He attended camp revivals, and found inspiration in the spontaneity and fervor of the services. The Methodist meetings were open to all races, an additional appeal.

Apess also wrestled with his own demons. He had a mischievous side and liked to drink, a weakness he worked to control. With the encouragement of friends, he took up public speaking and began ‘exhorting’ at church services. He grew into a full-blown preacher, much in demand.

A Methodist revival meeting around 1839

A Son of the Forest

In 1829, now in his early 30s, Apess published his autobiography: A Son of the Forest. It paints a picture of a matured preacher, and one sensitive to injustice. He talks about the elders in the church hierarchy who placed barriers in his way. And he takes umbrage that the army never paid bonuses promised to soldiers, himself included.

He also analyzes his own upbringing. For example, he writes, he supposes the reader will say, “What savage creatures my grandparents were to treat unoffending or helpless children in this manner.”

But, he writes, that treatment had a cause: the whites.

…[B]ecause they introduced among my countrymen ardent spirits; seduced them into a love for it, and when under its baleful influence, wronged them out of their lawful possessions — that land where reposed the ashes of their sires.

Not only that, he wrote,

…[B]ut they committed violence of the most revolting and basest kind upon the persons of the female portion of the tribe, who until the arts, and vices, and debauchery of the whites were introduced among them, were happy, and peaceable, and cheerful, as they roamed over their goodly possessions.

As a result, the Mashpee scattered.

…[And] now, many of them are seen reeling about intoxicated with liquor, failing to provide for themselves or families, who before were assiduously engaged in supplying the necessities of those depending upon them.

By 1829, Apess was ripe for a confrontation. In the Mashpees reservation on Cape Cod, he found his perfect battleground.

The Mashpee Revolt

Apess had heard rumor that the Mashpees, who numbered several hundred, were in difficult straits and that the tribe was unhappy with the way the state administered its reservation. As he worked his way through Massachusetts, preaching, he began forming a plan. He would go investigate the circumstances of the Mashpees himself. Though a Pequot, he felt kinship with the Mashpees.

Upon arriving in Mashpee, he quickly learned the truth of the rumors. The state overseers allowed the Mashpees’ neighbors to steal from tribal lands. The overseers collaborated with local sea captains and others to cheat the Indians out of pay. The overseers also reached an agreement with white families who took in Indians that they would not educate the children.

And the Congregational minister assigned to the town, funded and overseen by Harvard College, neglected the Indians. Instead, he preached to the small group of white people who attended his church. Rev. Phineas Fish was taking hundreds of dollars in aid intended for the Mashpee and keeping it.

An Indian Methodist minister who could read and write, was well schooled in the ways of the government and held a jaded view of the way whites had treated American Indians was the perfect match to put fire to the Mashpee revolt.

Mashpee. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Declaration of Independence

Apess offered to assist the Mashpee if they wished, but only if they voted to accept him into their tribe to give him standing. The tribe accepted him.

Apess then helped the tribe shape its demands and drafted what amounted to a Mashpee declaration of independence. To the government, the tribe sent three resolutions:

Resolved, That we, as a tribe, will rule ourselves, and have the Constitution; for all men are born free and equal, says the Constitution of the country.

Resolved, That we will not permit any white man to come upon our plantation, to cut or carry off wood or hay, or any other article, without our permission, after the 1st of July next.

And finally:

Resolved, That we will put said resolutions in force after that date, (July next,) with the penalty of binding and throwing them from the plantation, if they will not stay away without.

Harvard, Too

To Harvard, the tribe sent three additional resolutions:

First,

That we will rule our own tribe and make choice of whom we please for our preacher.

Second,

That we will have our own meeting house, and place in the pulpit whom we please to preach to us.

And third,

That we will publish this to the world; if the above reasons and resolutions are not adhered to, and the Rev. Mr. Fish discharged.

The Old Indian Meeting House in Mashpee.

The Mashpee Revolt Takes Shape

When July rolled around, the tribe put its plans into action. A neighbor named William Sampson approached tribal lands and loaded a cart with wood when Apess approached him with six others – Joseph, Jacob and Nicholas Pocknett, Aaron Keater, Charles D. Grasse and Abraham Jackson. They informed him he could not take any wood. Then they unloaded his cart and sent him home.

News of the incident spread quickly. The tribe’s enemies characterized the Mashpee Revolt as a threat of violent uprising. The governor then sent a contingent of negotiators to Mashpee to meet with the Indians.

Apess explained their grievances. The governor’s men urged the Mashpees to have patience. They would present their case to the government. But then Apess and the six men who stopped the theft of wood were arrested and charged with riot, assault and trespass.

Apess was offended at the suggestion that he and the Mashpees would use violence against the government.

The plight of the Mashpee received a sympathetic airing in Massachusetts newspapers, and for a time it appeared real change was coming. The state did release some of its control over the Indian lands and returned self-governance to the tribe. But laws designed to protect Indian property from neighboring towns were rarely enforced.

Harvard remained steadfast in its support of Rev. Phineas Fish, and he continued preaching to the white congregation he had assembled.

Demons

As for Apess, he did a short stint in jail for his part in the protest. His sense of anger at the treatment of the Indians grew. In his account of the protest: Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, he wrote:

Many and many a red man has been butchered for a less wrong than the Mashpees complain of.

In 1836, Apess’ growing fervor for the Indian cause took center stage when he delivered a Eulogy of King Philip. In it, he praised the Indian leader, likening him to George Washington.

Apess’ personal demons, however, continued to plague him. His struggles with alcohol contributed to the breakup of his family and debts cost him his Massachusetts’ property. His frequent drunkenness cost him the support of his friends. By 1839 he had relocated to New York City, and he died there that year.

Images: Old Indian Meeting House By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002569. This story about the Mashpee revolt was updated in 2022.

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