Reviews of Books

A Seventeenth-Century Murder Mystery

Reviewed by Philip Ranlet, Hunter College

Books and articles about King Philip, the Wampanoag sachem Metacomet for whom the bloodiest war in colonial New England was named, have multiplied in recent years. Igniting King Philip's War focuses on a different figure: the Massachusett John Sassamon, the Christian Indian whose death in January 1675 led to the fighting. The June 1675 trial and execution of Tobias, a leading advisor of Philip, and two other Wampanoags for Sassamon's murder infuriated young Indians at a time of rising tensions between the natives and the English, and King Philip's War immediately ensued.	1
Yashuhide Kawashima, who teaches early American history and legal history at the University of Texas at El Paso, has undertaken a difficult task. There is little hard evidence concerning Sassamon's death or the Plymouth Colony inquest that looked into it. Nor is there much information about the controversial murder trial. For that matter, not very much is known about Sassamon. Unable, therefore, to write a typical legal history of a trial, Kawashima has crafted an account of Indian-English relations in seventeenth-century New England that emphasizes the "clash of legal cultures" (p. 23), Indian and English, culminating in the Sassamon murder trial. From that point on, the separate Indian legal system, previously recognized by English authorities, began to disappear as all Indians, even those who had opposed Philip, gradually came under the jurisdiction of colonial law.	2
For Kawashima, the clash of legal cultures began with another famous Indian-English conflict, the Pequot War of 1637. That conflict, too, was precipitated by a murder, in that case of an English trader named John Oldham, in retaliation for which the United Colonies launched a military strike. In the wake of the English victory, one colonist, an Irish servant named Arthur Peach, was executed for the murder of an Indian. The larger and more enduring consequence of the war was institutional: under the Treaty of Hartford (1638), the Indian signers were required to forswear vengeance for personal injuries and to bring disputes to colonial authorities for legal resolution. That was the English expectation when John Sassamon was found dead in the early winter of 1675.	3
Sassamon was a protegé of the Puritan missionary John Eliot, who sought to Christianize the native people. As Kawashima depicts him, Sassamon was caught between cultures, not totally at home in either English or Indian worlds. He served ably with the English against the Pequots, became an Indian missionary, and served for a time as a secretary to King Philip, who needed an able translator. Unfortunately, Kawashima credits the story that Sassamon tried to steal King Philip's land by changing the sachem's will in his favor. That grievance was mentioned by Philip and his counselors to Rhode Island magistrate John Easton only after Sassamon's death; it has the air of blaming the victim for his own demise.	. . .