Hero, Villian, And Diplomat: An Investigation Into The Multiple Identities Of Commander John Mason In Colonial Connecticut
Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: The standard scholarly accounts of the war adopted a European perspective.In doing so they relied upon primary source documents in which Europeans meticulously recorded native-settler interaction.Early memoirs by contemporaries of the war such as John Underhill and Lion Gardener simultaneously position the English as pious victors and the Pequots as vicious losers overcome by their righteous opponents.According to these sources the English, commanded by John Mason, fought the war to eliminate any surrounding "savages."This view of English superiority leading to their dominance is furthered by Louis B. Mason in his work The Life and Times of Major John Mason of Connecticut (1935).Louis Mason depicts his distant relative John Mason as a hero who eradicated any Pequot threat to the spread of English culture, civilization, and influence.Celebrating English victory was the dominate approach to the Pequot War for centuries.1 This position on the war began to change from about 1974 as antiimperial arguments became popular when discussing colonial interaction.With the emergence of the Indian movement, following the lead of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, scholars began to rethink their position concerning early native-settler interaction.Historians now tended to present the Pequot War as a battle of White versus Red in which a racist and technologically superior society brutally crushed the indigenous inhabitants.Scholars, drawing upon the model of genocide provided by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, compartmentalized participants involved in the Pequot War and forced them into either an English or Pequot camp.According to Lemkin, genocide was defined as the "deliberate destruction of an ethnic group or nation." 2 With the development, adoption, and application of this term in the political realm the popularity of using "genocide" to describe an incident increased dramatically.1 See
Author: William Lee Dreger
Institution: Miami University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2338027803