Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:39:49.714Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Legitimacies, Indian Identities, and the Law: The Politics of Sex and the Creation of History in Colonial New England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Ann Marie Plane
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In an early-eighteenth-century legal contest on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, an Indian leader, Jacob Seeknout, appealed a ruling that undermined his political authority. Seeknout's lawyer, Benjamin Hawes, crafted an argument that intertwined the sexual legitimacy of Seeknout's ancestors with his political legitimacy; at the same time, Hawes also linked Indians' collective chastity as a “nation” to their sovereign status. This paper examines the economic, religious, criminal, and historical contexts of this argument, exploring the history of Indians' conjugal practices and their reinvention as the criminal acts of fornication. The case illustrates some of the diverse sources of early American law, links between these legal structures and colonialism, and the importance for scholars of attending to the local level in exploring the power of colonial law to shape new racial identities.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Winter 1998 , pp. 55 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1998 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. 1994. King Philip's Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England. William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 51:601–24.Google Scholar
Axtell, James. 1981. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. In The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, ed. James Axtell, 39–86. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Banks, Charles Edward. 1966. The History of Martha's Vineyard, Dukes County, Massachusetts. Vol. 2, Town Annals [1911]; rpt., Edgartown: Dukes County Historical Society.Google Scholar
Bragdon, Kathleen J. 1981. Crime and Punishment among the Indians of Massachusetts, 1675–1750. Ethnohistory 28:23–32.Google Scholar
Bragdon, Kathleen J. 1996. Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Kathleen M. 1996. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture.Google Scholar
Calloway, Colin G., ed. 1997. After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Campbell, Paul R., and LaFantasie, Glenn W. 1978. Scattered to the Winds of Heaven–Narragansett Indians, 1676–1880. Rhode Island History 37:67–83.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard. 1989. Law and the Colonial State in India. In Starr and Collier 1989.Google Scholar
Collier, Jane, Maurer, Bill, and Suárez Navaz, Liliana. 1995. Sanctioned Identities: Legal Constructions of Modem Personhood. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 2:1–27.Google Scholar
Comaroff, John, and Comaroff, Jean. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination . Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination. John Comaroff, Pierre Bourdieu, and Maurice Bloch, ser. eds. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, John L., and Roberts, Simon. 1981. Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Conley, John M., and O'Barr, William M. 1990. Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Language and Legal Discourse. William M. O'Barr and John M. Conley, ser. eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Conroy, David W. 1993. The Defense of Indian Land Rights: William Bollan and the Mohegan Case in 1743. Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103, pt. 2: 395–424.Google Scholar
Cotton, John Jr, Papers. Diary [166578] (manuscript). Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.Google Scholar
Cotton, Josiah. 1830 [1707]. Vocabulary of the Massachusetts Indians. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3d ser., 2:162.Google Scholar
Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. 1995. Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture.Google Scholar
Dukes County Court Records (DCCR). MS vols. Dukes County Court House, Edgartown, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Peter. 1992. The Mythology of Modern Law . Sociology of Law and Crime. Maureen Cain and Carol Smart, ser. eds. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Forbes, Allen. 1941. Other Indian Events of New England. Boston: State Street Trust.Google Scholar
[Freeman, Rev. James] 1968. Description of Dukes County, August 13th, 1807 [1815]. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2d ser., vol. 3; rpt., New York: Johnson Reprint.Google Scholar
Goddard, Ives, and Bragdon, Kathleen J., eds. and trans. 1988. Native Writings in Massachusetts. 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.Google Scholar
Hoffer, Peter C., and Hull, N. E. H. 1981. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New Englannd. New York University School of Law Series in Legal History, 2. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Katz, Stanley N. 1984. The Problem of a Colonial Legal History. In Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. P. Greene Jack and J. R. Pole, 457–89. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Kawashima, Yasuhide. 1986. Puritan Justice and the Indian: White Man's Law in Massachusetts, 1630–1763. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Lindemann, Barbara S. 1984. “To Ravish and Carnally Know”: Rape in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts. Signs 10:63–82.Google Scholar
Little, Elizabeth A. 1996. Daniel Spotso: A Sachem at Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, circa 1691–1741. In Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–1816, ed. S. Grumet Robert, 193–207. Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, and the Contemporary. Colin G. Calloway and Barry O'Connell, ser. eds. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Mandell, Daniel R. 1996. Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Massachusetts Archives Series (MAS). Microfilm. Massachusetts State Archives, Columbia Point, Boston.Google Scholar
Maurer, Bill. 1996. The Land, the Law, and Legitimate Children: Thinking through Gender, Kinship, and Nation in the British Virgin Islands. In Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History, ed. Maynes Mary Jo, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland, and Ulrike Strasser, 351–63. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mayhew, Experience. 1727. Indian Converts, or, Some Accounts of the Lives and Dying Speeches of a Considerable Number of the Christianized Indians of Martha's Vineyard. London: Samuel Gerrish.Google Scholar
Mayhew, Matthew. 1695. The Conquests and Triumphs of Grace: Being a Brief Narrative of the Success Which the Gospel Hath Had among the INDIANS of Martha's Vineyard. London: Nath. Hiller.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 1988. Legal Pluralism. Law and Society Review 22:869–96.Google Scholar
Murrin, John M. 1983. The Legal Transformation: The Bench and Bar of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts. In Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, ed. N. Stanley Katz and M. Murrin John, 540–72. 3d ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Namias, June. 1993. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
O'Brien, Jean M. 1997. Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land Holding and Identity in Na-tick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Plane, Ann Marie. 1993. “The Examination of Sarah Ahhaton”: The Politics of “Adultery” in an Indian Town of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts. In Algonkians of New England, Past and Present Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New.Google Scholar
England Folklife [1991], ed. C. Benes Peter, 14–25. Boston: Boston University Press.Google Scholar
Plane, Ann Marie. 1995. Colonizing the Family: Marriage, Household, and Racial Boundaries in Southeastern New England to 1730. Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.Google Scholar
Plane, Ann Marie. 1996. Lawful Marriage and Customary Marriage: Intercultural Negotiations in Colonial New England. Paper presented at “The Many Legalities of Early America,” conference of the Institute for Early American History and Culture and the American Bar Foundation, 22 November, Williamsburg, Va.Google Scholar
Plymouth Church Records , 16201859. 1920. Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, No. 22, Collections.Google Scholar
Plymouth Court Records, 16861859 (PCR). 1978. ed. David Thomas Konig. Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, with the Pilgrim Society.Google Scholar
Records of the Colony of New Plymouth (RCNP), 12 vols [185461]. 1968. ed. B. Shurtleff Nathaniel. New York: AMS Press.Google Scholar
Ronda, James P. 1981. “Generations of Faith”: The Christian Indians of Martha's Vineyard. William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 38:369–94.Google Scholar
Rowlandson, Mary. 1997. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, ed. Neal Salisbury Bedford Series in History and Culture. Natalie Zemon Davis and Ernest R. May, ser. eds. Boston: Bedford Books.Google Scholar
Salisbury, Neal. 1974. Red Puritans: The “Praying Indians” of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot. William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31:27–54.Google Scholar
Salisbury, Neal. 1982. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Salisbury, Neal. 1997. Introduction. In Rowlandson 1997.Google Scholar
Seeknout v. Sassechuammin. MS case. 29 April 1718. See Suffolk Files #12965.Google Scholar
Shepard, Thomas. 1648. The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth upon the Indians in New England. London: R. Cotes.Google Scholar
Silverblatt, Irene. 1994. Honor, Sex, and Civilizing Missions in the Making of Seventeenth-Century Peru. Latin American Studies Center Series, No. 7. College Park: University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Silverblatt, Irene. 1995. Becoming Indian in the Central Andes of Seventeenth-Century Peru. In After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakesh, 279–98. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, and Geoff Eley, ser. eds. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Simmons, William S. 1983. Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening. American Ethnologist 10:253–71.Google Scholar
1986. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Simmons, William S., and Aubin, George F. 1975. Narragansett Kinship. Man in the Northeast 9:21–31.Google Scholar
Starr, June, and Collier, Jane F. 1989. Introduction: Dialogues in Legal Anthropology. In Starr and Collier 1989.Google Scholar
Starr, June, and Collier, Jane F. eds. 1989. History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legul Anthropology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann L. 1991. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed. Micaela Di Leonardo, 51–101. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Suffolk Files. Massachusetts State Archives, Columbia Point, Boston.Google Scholar
Superior Court of Judicature (SCJ) Record Books, 1700–14 and 1715–21. Massachusetts State Archives, Columbia Point, Boston.Google Scholar
Supreme Court Judicial Records Center (SCJRC). Pawtucket, R.I.Google Scholar
Sweet, John Wood. 1995. Bodies Politic: Colonialism, Race, and the Emergence of the American North–Rhode Island, 1730–1830. Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.Google Scholar
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 1980. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 16501750. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Introd. Solon, T. Kimball. Trans. Vizedom, Monika B. and Gabrielle, L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Van Lonkhuyzen, Harold W. 1990. A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646–1730. New England Quarterly 63, no. 3: 396–428.Google Scholar
Wells, Robert V. 1980. Illegitimacy and Bridal Pregnancy in Colonial America. In Bastardy and Its Comparative History: Studies in the History of Illegitimacy and Marital Nonconformism in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, North America, Jamaica, and Japan, ed. Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and M. Smith Richard, 349–61. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Roger. 1973. A Key into the Language of America. ed. J. Teunissen John and J. Hinz Evelyn. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar
Winship, Winship, Parker, George, ed. 1905. Boston in 1682 and 1699: “A Trip to New England ” by Ward, Edward and A Letter from New-England” by J.W. Rpt., Providence, R.I.: Club for Colonial Reprints.Google Scholar