The Indian's Pedigree (1794): Indians, Folklore, and Race in Southern New England

By: Daniel R. Mandell

IN 1794, “Sawny of Pockonocker” wrote and published a broadside that contained a vicious yet revealing depiction of Indians in southern New England. Titled The Indian’s Pedigree: Qui Capet Ille Facit, it begins with a version of the familiar New Testament story of Jesus’ casting demons from a man and into a herd of pigs that run into a lake and drown. The author then embarks on a remarkable description of Indians as the children fathered by Satan on one remaining sow (Figure I).¹ GOOD neighbors all attend to me, And hear an Indian‘s pedigree; ‘Twas when the Savior of mankind, Had left the world of light behind.Submitted to a mortal birth, And preach’d glad [tiding?] here on earth, ‘Twas order’d that the eternal mind, [paper torn, and most of the line is illegible] mankind.His kingdom now was overthrown, And all his power on earth was gone: Tho’ Satan was put to his trumps, He did not long sit in the dumps.But he contriv’d another plan To keep his influence still with man, Since he so long on earth did dwell, ‘Twas hard to be confin’d to hell.He thought he would a race create, And human creatures imitate, Who being all inclin’d to evil, Should be fit servants to the Devil.When in the land of Gardarene, Our Savior had the legions seen, His presence all the Devils fear’d, They could not stand the power of God.Upon the hills and mountains high, A herd of swine was feeding nigh, Satan to cover his design, Pray’d he might enter in the swine.And that he might more private be, He drove them all into the sea, But one old sow a rooting was, Which suited well the Devil’s cause.And being minded to enjoy her, He did not with the rest destroy her. But took her up across his back, As Sawney’s Indians do their pack.Then spread his wings and thro’ the sky, To Stoughton‘s corner he did fly, And with this sow in pleasure sweet, A race of Indians did beget.A race perverse and prone to evil, The one half hog, the other Devil, Who many years roving about, On Stoughton plains did grunt and root.They by degrees their brussels [bristles] shed, Their ears grew short, more round their head, And still to make them more compleat, They were adorn’d with human feet.And in succeeding generations, They all have mix’d with other nations, The Devil’s kingdom now is spread, Where’er an Indian shews his head. Hogs we all know, who’re blest with light, To scratch and rub their sides delight, This is the natural reason which Makes all true Indians have the itch. So surely no one will deny it, For honestly they all came by it: Indians are of a restless mind, And are to travel much inclin’d. Remembering still their ancient mother, Where’er they go they herd together.	1
Figure ISawny of Pockonocker, The Indian’s Pedigree: Qui Capet Ille Facit (Boston, 1794). Broadside. Courtesy, The Library Company of Philadelphia.
The Indian’s Pedigree is noxious, but it provides a unique view of popular images and prejudices concerning Indians in the early Republic. Within this verse can be glimpsed the intersection of seventeenth-century Puritan notions of Indians and the Devil, eighteenth-century Anglo-American fears of social disorder, and emerging nineteenth-century northern American anxieties about race. It also contains a reference to the popular Sawney Bean legend of a Scottish cannibalistic family, making a particularly spicy brew of ideas and references. But this was not an abstract, distant narrative; it had a purpose and a source: the deep prejudice against Indians and other people of color who remained in southern New England. The Indian’s Pedigree is thus an unusual reminder of the persistence of folk beliefs and the deep pain of fear and prejudice in the early Republic.	2
Although the author (and printer) of this broadside is anonymous, one of the drawings at its top points to Ezekiel Russell, who ran a printing shop in Boston near the Liberty Tree between 1778 and his death in September 1796 (his wife continued to operate the business after his death). ² The image of the Devil at the head of The Indian’s Pedigree is an exact match for one in another lurid publication definitely published by Russell and also intended for popular taste, The Devil; or, The New-Jersey Dance. ³ Russell marketed this and his other publications in Boston, through rural peddlers, and with booksellers in small towns, and so The Indian’s Pedigree had not only a wide audience but might well have been intended for (and reached) farmers and small-scale artisans in the area where several groups of Indians remained in southern New England ( Figure II ). ⁴	3
Figure II”The Appearance of the Devil …” and “The Blasphemers Punished …,” from The Devil; or, The New-Jersey Dance … (Boston, 1797), 2, 3. Courtesy, The Library Company of Philadelphia.
The broadside’s place of publication and references to “Stoughton‘s corner” and “Sawny of Pockonocker” show that its bile was particularly directed at the Pokanoket (also known as Wampanoag) and Massachusett descendants—generally intermarried with blacks and whites by 1790—living in Punkapoag and neighborhoods around Bridgewater and Middleborough southwest of Boston. “Stoughton’s Corner” is a reference to two possible places in this vicinity. The first and earliest reference is the old name for the initial settlement of what became the town of Canton in 1797, which lay along the Punkapoag reservation established by John Eliot with members of the Massachusett tribe in the 1650s (Figure III, Stoughton’s Corner A). The second and later reference is to the intersection of Stoughton, Randolph, and North Bridgewater (modern-day Brockton), marked by a Baptist meetinghouse near what is today the center of Avon, on the road from Bridgewater to Randolph that goes through Stoughton (Figure III, Stoughton’s Corner B).⁵ This location and the nickname Pockonocker could have been identified by the author and his readers with the ten to fifteen families of Pokanoket descendants still living on two shrinking reservations in Middleborough (Betty’s Neck), Pembroke (Mattakeeset), and in scattered neighborhoods around Bridgewater and elsewhere throughout the region. All of the remaining Indians in the area at this time generally had poor reputations among Anglo-Americans for itineracy, intemperance, and disorderliness.⁶	4
Figure IIISoutheastern Massachusetts, circa 1794. Drawn by Rebecca L. Wrenn.
Although the broadside seems to target specific Native settlements, whites throughout New England would have understood its savage ren dering of Indians. The Indian’s Pedigree tells of how Satan “took [the sow] up across his back, / As Sawney’s Indians do their pack.” By the late eighteenth century, tramping Indian women and men carrying packs of their belongings and stacks of baskets to sell had become a common sight along the roads of southern New England.⁷ The poem notes that “Indians are of a restless mind,” and many Anglo-American observers were struck by how Natives were, as Natick minister Stephen Badger wrote in 1798, “strangely disposed and addicted to wander from place to place.” Such uncontrollable wanderers seemed an offensive source of disorder and degeneracy. Badger told the Massachusetts Historical Society that the Indians around his town “are generally considered by white people, and placed, as if by common consent, in an inferior and degraded condition, and treated accordingly.” He condemned such prejudice as encouraging settlers to take “every advantage of [the Indians] that they could, under colour of legal authority, and without incurring its censure, to dishearten and depress them.” Indians were quite aware that their Anglo-American neighbors considered them “inferior and degraded.” In describing his adolescence as an indentured servant, William Apess bitterly remembered that his people “were represented as having no souls to save, or to lose, but as partridges upon the mountains. All these degrading titles were heaped upon us…. prejudice stung every white man, from the oldest to the youngest, to the very center of the heart.”⁸	5
Some New England clergymen and magistrates were inclined to look kindly on the region’s Indians. In November 1787, Jeremy Belknap and other prominent Boston ministers founded the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians, and Others, in North America, primarily to organize and fund teachers and ministers among surviving Indian groups in New England. Four years later, a number of SPG members, led by Belknap, founded the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) to collect and control important historical documents.⁹ The MHS’s initial publications featured writings from John Eliot and Daniel Gookin that detailed the efforts, “sufferings,” and successes of Christian Indians in Massachusetts. In the 1790s, the organization also published correspondence from its members and friends, such as Badger and Mashpee minister Gideon Hawley, which portrayed surviving Indian groups in relatively sympathetic terms. These gentry tended to perceive the social hierarchy in categories of class rather than race and were quite capable of ranking Indians alongside the “lower sort” of whites. In 1800, Hawley told the secretary of the SPG that his Mashpee church members “are as well behaved and as much civilized, as the whites of their rank in life.”¹⁰	6
Beginning in the northeast during the early Republic, urban growth and socioeconomic transformations were reflected in an expanding gap between elite and popular (working-class) cultures.¹¹The Indian’s Pedigree might have been part of this development, as a reaction against this elite sympathy for Indians and as a reflection of more popular eighteenth-century Anglo-American fears and prejudices. The poem’s narrative suggests such an interpretation, as does the pseudonym chosen by the author, “Sawny,” and his reference to “Sawney’s Indians.” In early modern English plays, Sawney was the stereotypical Scotsman: rustic, coarse, unclean, and often brutal.¹² But there was an even more vicious meaning to Sawney. Alexander “Sawney” Bean (or Bain) was a folkloric Scottish villain, who around the sixteenth or early seventeenth century supposedly ran away from home with a woman “as viciously inclined” as he was to a cave along the shore in Galway, from which they robbed, killed, carved up, pickled, and ate unsuspecting travelers as “their own[ly] sustenance.” Also horrific was the way in which their family grew ever larger through incest; when the king finally led a small army to capture Sawney’s band, the family contained fourteen children and thirty-two grandchildren. After a hasty trial and conviction, the men were dismembered and bled to death, and the women and children were forced to watch this execution and then were burned in three separate bonfires. By the mid-eighteenth century, Sawney Bean and his family were subjects of ballads and literature in England and America.¹³ The subtitle of The Indian’s Pedigree, Qui Capet Ille Facit, is difficult to translate (it is ungrammatical Latin), but, considering the author’s pseudonym, it might mean that this story is Sawney’s own, reinforcing the metaphorical implication of the narrative that Indians in the region were not just the children of Satan and a pig but were also uncontrollable, dissolute wild men, criminals, and even incestuous cannibals.¹⁴	7
Some of the elements in the poem might have also had other, less direct implications and metaphorical meanings in New England. Indians served as projections of Anglo-American fears of their own disorder and, in the context of this particular narrative, their own potentially corrupt nature. Such fears seem particularly appropriate in the wake of the near–civil war of Shays’s Rebellion and the uncertainty of the new national government. Indians as “fit servants to the Devil” might have had a particular resonance for Anglo-Americans accustomed to Indians (and other people of color) working as indentured servants for white farmers, artisans, and sea captains. Apess himself was indentured at an early age before running away in 1813, and many, if not most, Indian families in southeastern Massachusetts had children serving with white families. Pigs were generally considered dirty, wild, unmanageable, and cannibalistic (they can eat their young and were rumored to have killed children); they were unclean animals that were forbidden under Old Testament rules (which New England Puritans knew quite well) and were therefore appropriate metaphors for Indians and the devilish disorders that they represented.¹⁵ “Stoughton‘s corner” might be taken as a reference or metaphor for country crossroads in general, and the name also contains a historic connection with the Devil: William Stoughton (1631–1701), who was born in Dorchester, not far from what became Stoughton’s Corner, and who a century before had presided over the Salem witchcraft trials in his capacity as head of the court of oyer and terminer.¹⁶	8
The larger connection that The Indian’s Pedigree made between Indians and Satan also shows that colonial folklore remained strong. In the seventeenth century, many Puritans believed that Indians were guided by the Devil and worshiped demons.¹⁷ In 1682, Mar y Rowlandson called the Indians who attacked her town “hell-hounds” and “black creatures” as well as “ravenous Beasts” and “Barbarous Creatures.” Ten years later, Cotton Mather considered whether the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem might “have some of its Original among the Indians.” One year after that, Mather explicated an even closer connection in his Wonders of the Invisible World, noting that confessing witches referred to Satan as “the Black Man,” and that “they generally say he resembles an Indian“—a kinship connection made explicit in The Indian’s Pedigree. Such descriptions seemed to disappear during the eighteenth century, as the Enlightenment exerted its influence (consciously or not) and Indians seemed more understandable, if not friendly. Most historians who discuss the shifting reading habits of farmers and the urban poor focus on the rising popularity of romantic novels as well as almanacs and the declining popularity of sermons and other religious literature. But The Indian’s Pedigree points to the persistence of folk culture along with the development of post-Revolutionary print culture.¹⁸	9
Russell and his readers clearly had a fondness for lurid folktales that reflected Puritan morality. The Devil is a story of “a party of young people” in New Jersey who had engaged in an immoral evening of dancing and drinking. When the fiddler’s time ended and he tried to leave, one of the dancers “swore more vehemently with horrid oaths, that ‘he would have a Fidler, if he went to hell for him and danced to eternity, ‘” whereupon “a black man” appeared “with a fiddle in his hand” and began playing—and did not stop. A month went by; people outside were unable to force the door or windows, but through the keyhole they could see “a number of people dancing on the stumps of their legs to infernal music, their feet being worn off, and the floor streaming with blood.” This morality play was meant as “an awful lesson to profligate youth” that “the great God takes notice of the words and actions of men, and often in this life gives them what they say they desire.” Russell’s Indian’s Pedigree displayed the same Puritan sense of Satan as very real and as an active agent of evil in the world and of the role that men of all races played—often on an everyday level—in the great cosmic drama. The persistence in New England folk culture of this connection between Indians and Satan, or at least popular depictions of Indians as demonic servants of evil, was clear in not only The Indian’s Pedigree but also in the continued publication and brisk sales of Rowlandson’s Narrative and subsequent captivity stories.¹⁹	10
In addition to this persistence of folk beliefs, a new perception of New England Indians as “blacks” emerged in New England after the American Revolution, not from any connection with the Devil, but from the growing trend of marriage between Indians and African descendants in the region. In the 1790s, the Reverend Gideon Hawley, who commented on this intermarriage in his correspondence to other ministers and magistrates in the state, often referred to his Indian congregants as “blacks.” This was also, of course, the period when enslaved African Americans were winning their freedom. Many left the towns where they served as slaves and moved to port cities.²⁰ As a result, issues of race and class entered a period of flux and were therefore particularly sensitive in the region. And, although New England’s Standing Order of clergy and magistrates might have seen class as salient, others in the region increasingly focused on race. The depiction of Satan copulating with the sow in The Indian’s Pedigree is a pornographic impression of bestiality that reflects a growing apprehension about interracial unions, as a small but noticeable number of whites married Indians and blacks.²¹ Lawmakers as well as printers reacted to this threat with alarm: in 1786, Massachusetts added Indians to its list of those barred from marrying whites, and Rhode Island did the same about twelve years later. Such anxieties meant that readers would have understood that the broadside was referring more generally to people of color, African as well as Indian, now all free and therefore even more dangerous.²² These free blacks were increasingly forthright about demanding their rights, and their white neighbors were increasingly worried about, if not angered by, their “insolence.”²³	11
This poem highlights the persistence of a quasi-religious perception of despised and menacing minority groups even as modern notions of race jelled in the infant United States. Those viewed as debased and potentially corrupting included not only Indians and blacks but also the Catholic Irish, who were just beginning to become a noticeable presence in southern New England. Indeed, women who married or had children with black men, referred to generally by Jeremy Belknap as the “lowest class” of white women, were often recorded as Irish serving girls. Just four years after The Indian’s Pedigree, a startlingly similar poem was published in the autobiography of the infamous New England counterfeiter and “confidence man,” Stephen Burroughs, which described the Irish as the offspring of the Devil and a pig. In 1794, the same year The Indian’s Pedigree was published, Burroughs, after pretending to be a minister, was chased by an outraged Rutland Presbyterian congregation into a barn; he climbed a haymow and delivered a mock sermon with a hymn that related how Saint Patrick’s ghost told an Irishman that the origins of his people began with Jesus’ casting demons into a herd of pigs. But, the saint continued: “One old sow a rutting was, / The floods did not destroy her: / The Devil, who provok’d to lust, / Was minded to enjoy her. / This spurious effort on the sow, / Produc’d a copulation; / From this original, I vow, / Proceeds the Irish Nation.” Burroughs might well have plagiarized this story from The Indian’s Pedigree since the two are so similar, although he made no reference to Sawney Bean. His “Sermon” not only demonstrates that Anglo-American racist humor was not limited to people of color but reminds us of the connections that Englishmen often made during the early colonial period between Irish and Indians.²⁴	12
Russell’s Indian’s Pedigree reveals how colonial folklore of devilish Indians survived after the Revolution but was reshaped by new anxieties about race and social disorder (emphasized by its allusion to the Sawney legend) into a new trope of Satan copulating with swine to create the Other. The broadside contains metaphors and references to specific places and peoples in the region and to broader conditions and concerns during the early Republic. Anglo-Americans in southern New England generally regarded the surviving Indians in their midst, not as fearsome and perhaps virtuous warriors, but as social and moral degenerates. As slavery in the northern states ground toward extinction, whites similarly perceived blacks as a threat to the communal order, particularly as more lived with and alongside the lower sort in the growing port cities. Although some clergy and magistrates showed more sympathy toward Indians and blacks, the fear and prejudice exposed by the broadside had deep roots in New England’s history and culture. Its vicious narrative had relatively little staying power, but it adds to our understanding of how and why bigotry and discrimination remained rampant in the region.²⁵	13
Daniel R. Mandell is associate professor of history at Truman State University, Kirksville, Mo. This article exists because of the assistance and advice provided by many others. In July 2002, during my Joyce Tracy Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, David Silverman showed me this broadside, suggested that I write this piece, and critiqued the first draft. Cornelia King and James Green at the Library Company of Philadelphia provided crucial information. Larry Cebula, Tom Clark, Clayton Cramer, James Farrell, Leon Jackson, Pilar Mejia, Joanne Melish, Prairie Mary, George Price, Harald Prins, James Roache, James Stewart, Bridget Williams-Searle, Natalie Zacek, and others suggested solutions to the puzzle of identifying Stoughton’s Corner, Sawny of Pockonocker, and the Devil + pigs = Indians idea in the poem. These suggestions were given largely in response to my query placed on three scholarly Internet listservs: H-Amindian, H-SHEAR, and H-OIEAHC. In a sense, this is a collaborative piece, made possible by the Internet. Eric Slauter suggested that Ezekiel Russell was the printer of The Indian’s Pedigree, which was borne out by additional circumstantial evidence discussed below. Fred Mautner helped to edit the initial draft, and extensive comments from anonymous reviewers for the Quarterly pointed to the revisions necessary for the final version. Notes¹ Sawny of Pockonocker, The Indian’s Pedigree: Qui Capet Ille Facit (Boston, 1794), The Library Company of Philadelphia.² Russell was born in Boston in 1744 and served a printing apprenticeship with his brother, Joseph Russell. He took up his own business in 1765 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with Thomas Furber, but the business failed, and Russell returned to Boston. For several months in 1771–1772, he published a newspaper, The Censor, which was supported, according to the whig printer Isaiah Thomas, “by those who were in the interest of the British government.” In 1774, perhaps driven by the wrath of whig patriots, Russell moved up to Salem and then over to Danvers, but about 1778 he returned to Boston and established a new shop at Essex Street near a “great elm” known as the Liberty Tree (Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America [1810], 2d ed. [1874; rpt. New York, 1970], 153–154, 178). Russell was Phyllis Wheatley’s first and last publisher during her lifetime (Eric Slauter to author, Apr. 17, 2003). Other noteworthy Russell titles found in Early American Imprints include: Oppression: A Poem; or, New-England’s Lamentation of the Dreadful Extortion and Other Sins of the Times (Salem or Danvers, Mass., 1777); A Poem, Occasioned by the Most Shocking and Cruel Murder That Ever Was Represented on the Stage; or, The Most Deliberate Murder That Ever Was Perpetrated in Human Life (Boston, 1782), in which William Beadle’s murder of his wife, children, and himself is described and attributed to Beadle’s deistic opinions; H. W., A Poem, Descriptive of the Terrible Fire, Which Made Such Shocking Devastation in Boston, on Friday Evening the Twenty-First of April 1787 … ([Boston], 1787); and The Young Convert’s First Experiences, etc…. (Boston, 1795). There are fifty different Russell publications in Early American Imprints, but this series does not include The Indian’s Pedigree or The Devil; or, The New-Jersey Dance: A Horrid Relation of Facts Which Took Place a Few Weeks Ago, in New-Jersey (Boston, 1797), discussed below. Although Russell and his wife were the printers, these stories might have been written by an anonymous woman who lived in his household and who “wrote ballads on recent tragical events, which being immediately printed, and set off with wooden cuts of coffins, etc., had frequently a considerable run”; see Thomas, History of Printing, 178.³ James Green, associate librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia, remembered The Devil and suggested this connection. Cornelia King to author, Feb. 27, 2003.⁴ Slauter to author, Apr. 17, 2003. See, generally, David Jaffee, “The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XLVII (1990), 327–346.⁵ Howard Hansen, Stoughton Historical Society, telephone conversation with author, June 2, 2004, identifying Stoughton’s Corner as old Canton center; James Roache, Canton Historical Society, telephone conversation with author, Nov. 12, 2002, identifying Stoughton’s Corner as the site of the Baptist church on the Stoughton map of June 26, 1794, in Daniel T. V. Huntoon, History of the Town of Canton, Norfolk County, Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1893). William C. Nell’s short biography of Hosea Easton, in his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution … (Boston, 1855), 33–34, with its description of his family’s conflict at the Baptist church at Stoughton’s Corner, pointed to this possible location. On Indians in the area during the eighteenth century, see Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln, Nebr., 1996), 15–17, 24–26, 30–32, 62–63, 67–68, 77–78, 100–101, 110–114, 121–122, 143–144, 152–154, 161, 171–172.⁶ Nahum Mitchell, History of the Early Settlement of Bridgewater, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts … (Boston, 1840), 56; The Plymouth County Directory, and Historical Register of the Old Colony … (Middleboro, Mass., 1867), 53, 57, 71, 79, 117; Henry S. Griffith, History of The Town of Carver, Massachusetts: Historical Review, 1637–1910 (New Bedford, Mass., 1913), 116; Mandell, Behind the Frontier, 71–73, 101, 110–111, 122–123, 134–135, 143–144, 172–173. Other published studies that look at Indian communities in the region after the American Revolution include John W. De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford, Conn., 1851); Paul R. Campbell and Glenn W. LaFantasie, “Scattered to the Winds of Heaven: Narragansett Indians, 1676–1880,” Rhode Island History, XXXVII (1978), 67–83; Laura E. Conkey, Ethel Boissevain, and Ives Goddard, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Late Period,” in William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed., Handbook of North American Indians, XV, Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Northeast (Washington, D.C., 1978), 177–189; Laurie Weinstein, “‘We’re Still Living on Our Traditional Homeland’: The Wampanoag Legacy in New England,” in Frank W. Porter III, ed., Strategies for Survival: American Indians in the Eastern United States (Westport, Conn., 1986), 85–112; Ann McMullen and Russell G. Handsman, eds., A Key into the Language of Woodsplint Baskets (Washington, Conn., 1987); Barry O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst, Mass., 1992); Laurie Weinstein, ed., Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England (Westport, Conn., 1994); Donna Keith Baron, J. Edward Hood, and Holly V. Izard, “They Were Here All Along: The Native American Presence in Lower-Central New England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” WMQ, 3d Ser., LIII (1996), 561–586; David John Silverman, “Conditions for Coexistence, Climates for Collapse: The Challenges of Indian Life on Martha’s Vineyard, 1524–1871” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000); Mark A. Nicholas, “Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod, the Whalefishery, and Seafaring’s Impact on Community Development,” American Indian Quarterly, XXVI (2002), 169–179. Collections with significant articles include Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation (Norman, Okla., 1990); Peter Benes, ed., Algonkians of New England: Past and Present (Boston, 1993). And see, particularly, Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, N.H., 1997).⁷ William Tudor, Letters on the Eastern States (1819), 2d ed. (Boston, 1821), 279–289; Sarah S. Jacobs, Nonantum and Natick (Boston, 1853), 316; Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; rpt. New York, 1937), 17; Charles Brooks, History of the Town of Medford … (Boston, 1855), 80–81;Samuel Orcutt and Ambrose Beardsley, The History of the Old Town of Derby, Connecticut, 1642–1880 (Springfield, Mass., 1880), 50; George Cooke, “Our Aborigines,” Winchester Record, I, no. 4 (October 1885), 274; Harriette Merrifield Forbes, The Hundredth Town: Glimpses of Life in Westborough, 1717–1817 (Boston, 1889), 170–178; John Avery, History of the Town of Ledyard, 1650–1900 (Norwich, Conn., 1901), 259–261. Lydia Sigourney wrote in an 1824 novel about her town of Norwich, Connecticut, set in 1784, that Mohegan women were often seen “walking through the streets of the town” with loads of baskets “and often the additional weight of a papoose, or a babe, deposited in a large basket, and fastened around the neck with a leather strap”; see Sigourney, Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since (Hartford, Conn., 1824), 34–35. Significant studies of New England basket makers include Frank G. Speck, Eastern Algonkian Block-Stamp Decoration: A New World Original or an Acculturated Art, Archaeological Society of New Jersey, State Museum, Research Series no. 1 (Trenton, N.J., 1947); and McMullen and Handsman, Key into the Language of Woodsplint Baskets.⁸ Stephen Badger, “Historical and Characteristic Traits of the American Indians in General, and Those of Natick in Particular,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 1st Ser., V (1798), 39–40; William Apess, “The Experiences of Five Christian Indians,” in O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground, 119. On fears of the “lower sort” in southern New England during the early Republic, see Douglas Lamar Jones, “The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History, VIII (1974–1975), 28–39; Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (New York, 1990), 252–261, 306–309; Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, 2001).⁹ The SPG was envisioned as an American successor to the colonial-era, London-financed Corporation for Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America (or New England Company), which until the Revolution had paid the salaries and expenses of Indian and Anglo-American missionaries to Natives, primarily in southern New England. The SPG and the Massachusetts Historical Society both limited their membership to ensure that only “the best sort” would be involved in these quasi-public organizations: the SPG was limited by its bylaws to fifty members, and the MHS was limited to thirty local and thirty corresponding members. See Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Act to Incorporate Certain Persons, by the Name of the Society, for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others, in North America (Boston, 1787); Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, 1999), 123; Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (Amherst, Mass., 1998), 84, 88.¹⁰ Gideon Hawley to Peter Thacher, Dec.7, 1800, SPG Papers, box 2, folder 16, Peabody Essex Library, Salem, Mass. On the emergence of a romantic concern for the “vanishing” Indian in the early Republic, see Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1965), 136–198; Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973), 89–116; Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978), esp. 86–95; Alden T. Vaughan, “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review, LXXXVII (1982), 929–953; Anne Marie Dannenberg, “‘Where, Then, Shall We Place the Hero of the Wilderness?’: William Apess’s Eulogy on King Philip and Doctrines of Racial Destiny,” in Helen Jaskoski, ed., Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays (New York, 1996), 66–82; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998), 191–240; Kim McQuaid, “William Apess, Pequot: An Indian Reformer in the Jacksonian Era,” in Alden T. Vaughan, ed., New England Encounters: Indians and Euroamericans, ca. 1600–1850 (Boston, 1999), 379–401; John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore, 2003), 176–179, 301–303.¹¹ Karen V. Hansen, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York, 1996), 49–257. On the other hand, Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), sees an eighteenth-century material culture of gentility creating a clear line between “cultivated and course” (183), with that line shifting during the early Republic to include the new American middle class—but still “exclud[ing] those who clung to rude ways” (424).¹²Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “sawney”; J. O. Bartley, Teague, Shenkin, and Sawney (Cork, Ireland, 1954), 149–160; Natalie Zacek to H-OIEAHC, Nov.7, 2002; Lance Gay to H-OIEAHC, Nov.12, 2002. Harald Prins noted that the larger meaning of this character is probably someone who inverts proper order, as in the Mayfair Games, “in which the commonplace social order was inverted and the Devil rules”; see Harald Prins to H-Amindian, Nov.6, 2002. To take this allusion further, perhaps it might be best to see Sawney as a trickster. Tricksters are often fools as well as foolers, and part of their character is to spread chaos wherever they go.¹³ John Nicholson of Kirkcudbright, “Sawney Bean and His Family” (1843), reprinted in Dorothy L. Sayers, Human and Inhuman Stories (New York, 1963), 39–43 (quotations on 39, 40); Steve Gimber to H-Amindian, Nov.6, 2002; Leon Jackson to H-OIEAHC, Nov.7, 2002; Larry Cebula to H-Amindian, Nov.8, 2002. A historian of folklore comments, “Sawney Bean and Dirk Turpin the Highwayman are the only two characters introduced to the popular press at that time which are still well known today”; see Ronald Holmes, The Legend of Sawney Bean (London, 1975), 18.¹⁴ The first letter in the subtitle is smeared; it could either be a Q or an S. “Qui” makes more grammatical sense than “Sui.” The subtitle is perhaps best translated, “The man who takes, makes,” although “capet” is an incorrect form in Latin; it should be “capit.” See Janet Davis to author, May 28, 2004.¹⁵ Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 2–9 (on the significance of implied meanings and metaphors), 154–160 (on Native Americans as projections of Anglo-American fears of disorder); Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” in Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War, 119–124; David J. Silverman, “The Impact of Indentured Servitude on the Society and Culture of Southern New England Indians, 1680–1810,” New England Quarterly, LXXIV (2001), 622–666; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England,” WMQ, 3d Ser., LI (1994), 614; Prairie Mary to H-Amindian, Nov.16, 2002; Prins to H-Amindian, Nov.16, 2002. Natives in southern New England initially hated pigs because the animals competed with them for shellfish and destroyed their corn, but they soon found that swine could be easily raised and integrated into their economies; see Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds,” WMQ, 3d Ser., LI(1994), 613–614. I could find no other literature that connects Indians and pigs, although Joanne Melish has found a 1806 broadside that connects Indians and rats; see Melish to H-OIEAHC, Nov. 13, 2003; Jeffrey Pasley to author, Nov.14, 2003.¹⁶ Stoughton also served as deputy president under Sir Edmund Andros during the infamous Dominion of New England; in 1692 under the new charter he was appointed lieutenant governor, and he became the de facto head of the colony when William Phips traveled to London in 1694 to answer charges of abusing his office. Stoughton remained head of the colony (with a brief hiatus during May 1699–July 1700) until his death. See John W. Raimo, Biographical Directory of American Colonial and Revolutionary Governors, 1607–1789 (Westport, Conn., 1980), 134–135.¹⁷ Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, 3–24; William S. Simmons, “Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans’ Perception of Indians,” WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXVIII (1981), 56–72; David S. Lovejoy, “Satanizing the American Indian,” NEQ, LXVII (1994), 603–621; Gerard R. McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards and American Indians: The Devil Sucks Their Blood,” NEQ, LXXII (1999), 539–557; Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York, 2002), 59, 135–136, 295–298.¹⁸ Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson … (1682), ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston, 1997), 70–71; Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum: An History of Remarkable Occurrences, in the Long War, Which New-England Hath Had with the Indian Salvages, from the Year, 1688, to the Year, 1698 (Boston, 1699), quoted in Lovejoy, “Satanizing the Indian,” NEQ, LXVII (1994), 619; Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World … (1693), 144, quoted in Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, 58–59; Jaffee, “Village Enlightenment,” WMQ, 3d Ser., XLVII (1990), 327–346; Eve Kornfeld, Creating an American Culture, 1775–1800: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2001), 54–61; St. George, Conversing by Signs, 6. James Deetz notes: “Folk culture is traditional and conservative; it exhibits great variation in space and relatively little change over time. Popular culture changes rapidly in time and shows great similarity over large areas” (Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life, rev. ed. [New York, 1996], 65). For a particularly enlightening discussion of the widening differences between folk (popular) and elite religious beliefs in seventeenth-century New England, see David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).¹⁹The Devil, 4, 6–7, 8; Lepore, The Name of War, 186–190.²⁰ On the end of slavery and the struggles of African Americans to establish their freedom, communities, and institutions in New England during the early Republic, see Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York, 1942); Joseph P. Reidy, “‘Negro Election Day’ and Black Community Life in New England, 1750–1860,” Marxist Perspectives, I, no. 3 (Fall 1978), 102–117;James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York, 1979); Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, Conn., 1982); Lamont D. Thomas, Rise to Be a People: A Biography of Paul Cuffe (Urbana, Ill., 1986); William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 14–16, 165; Shane White, “‘It Was a Proud Day’: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834,” Journal of American History, LXXXI (1994), 13–34; Nick Salvatore, We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (New York, 1996); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York, 1997); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); Lois E. Horton, “From Class to Race in Early America: Northern Post-Emancipation Racial Reconstruction,” Journal of the Early Republic, XIX(1999), 629–649; George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart, eds., To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton (Amherst, Mass., 1999); James Brewer Stewart, “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840,” JER, XIX(1999), 691–712;Sweet, Bodies Politic.²¹ On the Standing Order, see Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999); Field, Crisis of the Standing Order; Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York, 2003). On interracial marriage, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 543–547; Elise V. Lemire, “Making Miscegenation: Discourses of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States, 1790–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1996), 49–81; Sweet, Bodies Politic, 148–150, 179–181. During the same period, Gideon Hawley and others noticed a growing number of white as well as black men marrying Indian women and joining their communities; see Daniel R. Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760–1880,”JAH, LXXXV (1998), 466–501.²² Act of June 22, 1786, in Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from November 28, 1780 … to February 28, 1807, 3 vols. (Boston, 1807), I, 324; An Act to Prevent Clandestine Marriages, sec.5, The Public Laws of the State of Rhode Island … January, 1798 (Providence, R.I., 1798), 483, 611. On emerging concepts and issues of race in the early national period, see Jordan, White over Black; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971), 27; George B. Kirsch, “Jeremy Belknap and the Problem of Blacks and Indians in Early America,” Historical New Hampshire, XXXIV (1979), 202–222; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1979); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Vaughan, “From White Man to Redskin,”AHR, LXXXVII (1982), 929–953; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991), 384–391; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991); Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity,”JAH, LXXXV(1998), 466–501; Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,”AHR, CII (1997), 625–644; Melish, Disowning Slavery; James Brewer Stewart, “The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790–1840,” JER, XVIII (1998), 181–217; Sweet, Bodies Politic.²³ This would have been a particular concern around Bridgewater, where in 1790 free nonwhites formed more than 25 percent of the town’s population, more than in any other town in Massachusetts outside Boston; see United States, Bureau of the Census, Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790: Massachusetts (1908) (Baltimore, 1966). See, generally, Melish, Disowning Slavery; Sweet, Bodies Politic, 225–397. Beginning about 1800, the Easton family of North Bridgewater, which probably had Narragansett or Wampanoag connections, fought for its right to sit in the main part of the town’s Congregational church. The head of the family, James Easton, probably part Wampanoag and part African, was born in Middleborough in 1754, moved to North Bridgewater (now Brockton) about 1780, and was married there in 1783. Five or ten years after struggling (and failing) to win the right to sit in the main section of the North Bridgewater church, the Eastons tried to become members of the Baptist church at Stoughton’s Corner and created a major uproar when they insisted on attending despite racist opposition; the conflict finally resulted in their banishment. One of the sons, Hosea, became a tireless advocate for black civil rights in America. See Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 33–34; Price and Stewart, To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice, 3–6; James Roache, Canton Historical Society, telephone conversation with author, Nov. 12, 2002; George Price to author, Nov. 9, 2002.²⁴ Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn., 1986), 17–28; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 133–137. Knobel notes that “Anglo-Americans discovered at an early date how to use minority groups as points of reference for a metaphorical surveyors’ ‘triangulation’ that placed the whites just where they wished to be” (4). See also Jeremy Belknap, “Judge Tucker’s Queries respecting Slavery, with Doctor Belknap’s Answers,” MHS, Colls., 1st Ser., IV(1795), 209; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995), 40–41; Stephen Burroughs, Stephen Burroughs’s Sermon, Delivered in Rutland, on a Haymow, to His Auditory the Pelhamites … (Hanover, N.H.?1798?), 11(thanks to Larry Cebula for this reference; Cebula to H-Amindian, Nov. 8, 2002); Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” WMQ, 3d Ser., XXX (1973), 575–598.²⁵ The only extant subsequent depiction of minority groups as the offspring of Satan and a pig was Bumfoozle’s Genealogy, and Arristocracy, published in Taunton, Massachusetts, between 1830 and 1850, which pointed to African as well as Indian descendants in the region as the supposed children. But its primary target was the social reform movement, particularly temperance, and it was probably an anti-Whig broadside published by Democrats. Considering its opening racist message, it might have been published in the late 1840s and directed against not only the Whigs but also Free Soilers or others who supported an extension of political rights for African descendants (Bumfoozle’s Genealogy, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.). Thanks to Cornelia King at the Library Company of Philadelphia for this reference and a copy of the broadside.

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