Land of Promise

The Pequot War was not a war of conquest initiated by the governments of the Connecticut or Massachusetts Bay Colonies. Settlers at the edges of those colonies, together with Dutch settlers, made their way incrementally and often without explicit official authorization into territories that the Pequots held, and the Pequots sought to discourage this by similarly incremental reprisals. This pattern of mounting local conflict, resolved by a crushing armed response from the white community, was to be repeated across the continent during the Anglo-American expansion that reached the Pacific in the 1840s and was completed in the 1880s. Likewise prophetic was the fact that kidnappings, killings and house-burnings inflicted by the Pequots seemed like wanton unprovoked atrocities to the English, who believed that their economic expansion followed from doing God's will.

In addition to devout attendance on public and private worship, Englishmen labored in their divinely appointed callings. They built dwellings, cleared the land of rocks and trees, prepared the soil for planting, sowed and harvested; they set up as blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and shoemakers. Woodland trails became thoroughfares threading outward from the seaports, as the faithful carried articles for trade to the hinterland, or sought timber for construction in the towns, or for export to shipbuilding centers in England. Puritan traders also acquired furs and tobacco for the domestic market and for export.