When the Pilgrims Met the Native Americans
By Francis
J. Bremer
March 12,
2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
TERROR TO
THE WICKED
America’s First Trial by Jury That Ended a War and
Helped to Form a Nation
By Tobey Pearl
It’s always
about the Pilgrims. Even during the pandemic, the 400th anniversary of the
voyage of the Mayflower has been marked with public events, exhibits and
academic conferences in England, the Netherlands and the United States.
Numerous books have explored new angles on an old story, some of them directing
attention to the Native population, the people who inhabited the land they
called Dawnland. In “Terror to the Wicked,” Tobey Pearl, a lawyer and educator,
focuses on an important episode in the story of colonist-Native relations.
In the
summer of 1638 an English indentured servant in the Plymouth Colony, Arthur
Peach, ran away from his master. He was joined by three other servants. As they
journeyed through the wilderness they encountered a Native whom they attacked
and robbed. The Native, Penowanyanquis, though mortally wounded, escaped and
was able to tell his tale to Roger Williams in nearby Providence before he
died. While one of the runaways escaped, Peach and two of his fellow
perpetrators were put on trial in the Plymouth Colony for murder. The English
jury convicted all three and they were speedily executed. The story as such is
well known and speaks to the willingness of an English jury to provide justice
in a case where Englishmen murdered a Native.
Pearl has
not unearthed any facts that have not been previously reported in many studies
of the Plymouth Colony. She adds conjecture to what the sources actually tell
us, with speculation about what Peach and his associates may have been feeling,
the possible motivations of major characters and the supposed thoughts of the
jurors, to mention just a few examples.
One can’t
go beyond one or two pages without encountering something that “may have,”
“possibly” or “likely” happened. John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, must
have been present at the trial and the executions, though there is no evidence
that he was. Many pages are devoted to imagining the details of a discussion
between Roger Williams and the Wampanoag Massasoit. What sources consider
possible, Pearl presents as certainty. For such supposition to be persuasive
readers have to be confident in the author’s deep knowledge of the times and
culture, but there are too many factual inaccuracies and jumblings of
chronology to provide that confidence in this case. An example is the citation
of the famous 1670 English trial of William Penn and William Mede that
established a jury’s right to act against a judge’s instructions, which Pearl
seems to employ to support the independence of the jury in the 1638 Peach
trial.
“Terror to the
Wicked” is well written and draws upon important new insights into Native
culture. But the underlying arguments that this was “America’s first trial by
jury” and that it “ended a war” (as the subtitle has it) are misleading. As for
being the first trial by jury, Plymouth’s governor William Bradford recorded
that in 1630 “John Billington the Elder … was arraigned; and both by grand, and
petty jury found guilty of willful murder by plain and notorious evidence. And
was for the same accordingly executed.” As for the claim that this trial “ended
a war,” the Pequot War was essentially over; churches in Plymouth and other New
England colonies had celebrated a day of thanksgiving for their victory 10
months earlier. The Peach trial was important, but Pearl’s reasoning
exaggerates how important it was. It was not, as she asserts, “the trial of the
century.”
Francis J.
Bremer is the author of “One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the
Beginning of English New England.”
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