The Story I Hate to Tell

Soldiers warming themselves by a winter fire in an illustration take from the "Pictorial History of King Philip's War," published in 1853.

Let’s sit in the saddle with Jonathan Fairbanks, named for the father who brought our family here to establish this New World, now very much in peril. It is March of 1676. Jonathan shifts his weight, dodging the hemlock boughs that reach for him as his horse follows an Indian footpath through ten miles of wilderness, picking its way over the frozen ground until his squad of mounted soldiers comes upon a cluster of Indians in a wigwam, a frightened family, converts to Christianity, said to be friendly to their cause. Jonathan’s hands are cold. Is his heart?

After eight months of war, Jonathan is an old soldier. This is his third campaign. The first two ended in failure. He has tasted the fear and fury of combat, wonders how and when the violence will end, knows that Indian raiders have just laid waste to Lancaster, home to his brother Jonas, then Medfield too, home to his brother George.

Perhaps Jonathan thinks of this as he looks down upon these shivering, hungry refugees of war; perhaps he thinks of his own wife and family, back home. Before him stand an old man, his son, several women, and a half-dozen children. Jonathan’s squad has been dispatched to find and fetch them.

Maybe Jonathan knows that Jonas and his oldest son are a month or so dead, victims of Nipmuc warriors; maybe he knows that the refugees before him are Nipmuc too.

The soldiers take the Indians' rugs, kettles, dishes, and a pewter cup for themselves. Spotting a girl of 10 or 12, Jonathan turns to his captain and asks if he can have her too.

Yes, his captain says.

Jonathan extends his cold hand toward the girl, pulls her into his saddle, and together with his comrades and her kin they ride thirty miles to Brookfield, another frontier town, vulnerable too, where Jonathan's squad rejoins a force of 600 men with orders to bring the war to the enemy and put an end to their devastations.

I wonder: can he feel her body trembling against his as they ride? Do they speak, or ride in silence? 

Here, in Brookfield, Jonathan and his girl must separate. She and the others “rescued” that day will be imprisoned among other Praying Indians—faithful converts to Christianity—on Deer Island, a barren, windswept bump of land in Boston Harbor. Colonial authorities are taking no chances; all Indians are suspect, even those who have embraced English ways. Food is scarce on the island. Some will freeze to death there.

Jonathan’s third campaign ends in failure too. Two months later, he petitions the governor and council to collect on his captain’s promise. Noting that he has spent “a considerable time abroad in the Country’s Service,” he asks if “your Honors would bee pleased to grant him the said girle,” adding that “hee shall willingly Satisfy the necessary charges the Country have been out upon her & bee obliged to pray for your Honors’ peace & prosperityes.” 

Chilling, isn’t it? Jonathan proposes an exchange of value and offers his well wishes, as if he were settling his taxes and not buying a young girl, a child—someone else’s child, the child, in fact, of a Nipmuc teacher, convert, farmer, and ally named Joseph Tukuppawillin, a man whose very name reflects a life lived in two worlds at once. Joseph was there that day at the wigwam. So was his wife. Perhaps they heard Jonathan claim their daughter.

In his petition, Jonathan doesn’t cite the girl's name. Does he even know it?

I’ve never been in war. I’ve never lived in fear. I’ve never held the depth of hatred that enemies come to hold for each other in the midst of life and death struggles. I do know that terrible things happen in war, changing those who survive it. Really, I’m in no position to judge. But I can’t imagine, I can’t accept, I can’t forgive the act of stealing another human being, let alone a child. I’d be surprised—alarmed, actually—if you don’t agree.

All of which, I think, makes it especially important to step beyond judgment to understand this man, Jonathan Fairbanks, and his moment as best we can—and having done so, to ask not whether he was a bad guy or a good one, but whether we would have acted any differently had we been living in his time and not ours. I’d like to think so, but I fear the answer is no. Our family history tells us that we all hold the capacity for great courage within us—and for great cruelty too.

So let’s dig a little deeper.

First, Jonathan was not our direct ancestor. You can think of him as one of our first uncles, the youngest son of the Jonathan who brought us here, and brother to Jonas, who is our direct ancestor in the long line of descendants that leads to my mom, to me, and to you. 

The war aside, Jonathan appears to have lived and died in Dedham, the town where he was raised. At the time he became a soldier, he’d have been in his late forties, and he lived until eighty or so. In the family genealogy written nearly 200 years after his death, the author lays flowers on his grave. “He was a man of vigorous constitution,” the genealogy says, “of good executive ability, and a highly respected citizen.” Perhaps the author, Lorenzo Sayles Fairbanks, had his family contemporaries—and potential book-buyers—in mind in saying so, because he hands them a bouquet too. “His descendants,” he adds, “wherever found, bear the stamp of their rich inheritance of sterling qualities of character, and among them there have been many remarkable instances of longevity.” 

To his great credit, though, Lorenzo goes from there immediately to Jonathan’s slavery petition, which he reprints in full, without comment beyond this: “The following Petition is here inserted as an interesting historical document.” 

Interesting indeed—and unresolved. There’s no record of whether Jonathan’s petition was granted, so we’re left to wonder.

Let’s say it was. If that’s the case, the young girl would have become a slave in Jonathan’s household in Dedham, assisting his wife, Mary, as she tended to the needs of their thirteen children. That’s right. Thirteen! Twelve of these children were alive when Jonathan volunteered as a soldier, with one more to come. Granting Jonathan’s petition would have been consistent with colonial policy during and after the war. If so, she might have been freed at age twenty, in line with that policy—or not, in line with documented practice.

If Jonathan’s petition wasn’t granted, and the girl survived Deer Island, she might have returned home after the war with her family, due to their service to the English cause. A reference in a book sympathetic to the Christian Indians and written just after the war suggests that could be the case. But, as with so many records from so long ago, the book is not entirely clear.

If Jonathan didn't get her and she didn't go home, the odds are that she was sold into slavery in the Caribbean as the war in New England wound down. She might have died on the voyage there, stuffed below deck with others doomed to the same fate; she might have lived to become a slave on a sugar plantation for the rest of her years, lost in the shuffle of unfeeling forces far beyond her control. 

I grew up thinking of slavery as the sin of the South. But the first colony to legalize slavery was actually Massachusetts, in 1641, in a law called the “Body of Liberties;” in fairness, in 1783 Massachusetts became the first state to abolish slavery too. Still, that means slavery remained a presence in Massachusetts through the American Revolution, in which the fifth generation of our ancestors took up arms against the British, again in the name of liberty. A Provincial Census taken in 1771 found that more than nine hundred Massachusetts residents owned nearly 1,200 “servants for life” between the ages of 14 and 45, leaving those who were younger or older uncounted.

Historians paid little attention to this ugly reality for years. But recent scholars, tuned to stories of oppression, have concluded that in colonial times, Native Americans accounted for most of those enslaved in New England, while many other Indians were shipped from here as slaves in the aftermath of King Philip’s War. These unfortunates numbered in the thousands, one scholar found; another concluded that Indians who allied themselves with the colonists were enslaved at the same rate as those who fought them. For colonists, he wrote, “slavery was a normal part of their mental framework.”

Apparently so. A Fairbanks House museum curator once told me he’d discovered that Jonathan’s brother George enslaved two Africans. The family genealogy makes no mention of that and I’ve never seen it noted elsewhere—but I’ve no reason to doubt the curator, a professional historian. I know nothing about George’s slaves: their names, their duties, where they slept, what they ate, how he treated them. But George, a barrel-maker by trade, did well in life, amassing 300 acres and serving as a selectman before drowning in 1682. The family genealogist called him a model pioneer.

For what it’s worth, Native Americans had long practiced their own form of enslavement, capturing women, children, and sometimes men in episodic raids on nearby rivals. Male captives faced torture and death; those who escaped that fate, along with women and children, were absorbed into their new tribe, helping to offset its population losses. Indians took English captives during King Philip’s War and those that followed too, holding them for ransom, as leverage in peace negotiations, or in hopes it would make the English less likely to ravage the native villages in which they were imprisoned.

Among those captives was James Travis, our second-generation ancestor on my dad’s side. I’ll get to his story in the next chapter. Before leaving this one, though, I want to share more of what I’ve learned about a third family—the Indian family—with whom Jonathan’s story intersected on that day outside the wigwam, in the depth of war and winter. I've written at length of our family's experiences in 1675 and 1676; how did this family of Nipmuc converts experience it?

I’ve already mentioned Joseph, the father of the girl Jonathan claimed. He and his three brothers—Job, James, and Annaweekin—were raised as Christians by their own father, an early Nipmuc convert named Naoas. James and Job were educated at Harvard; James became a printer in Cambridge and Job a teacher. Joseph embraced colonial farming practices, plowing his fenced fields, growing corn, raising cattle. He became a teacher and minister, and was among the family members who lived in an English-sanctioned mission village called Hassanamesit in today's central Massachusetts town of Grafton.

When war broke out, the family found itself caught in between their kin and the English, living in no man's land and no longer trusted by either side. Daniel Gookin, a military man and the author of the book sympathetic to Christian Indians, recorded Joseph’s own account of the consequences.

“I am greatly distressed ... on every side,” Joseph told him. “The English have taken away some of my estate, my corn, cattle, my plough, cart, chain, and other goods. The enemy Indians have also taken part of what I had; and the wicked Indians mock and scoff at me, saying ‘Now what becomes of your praying to God?’”

The war tore their family apart. The Nipmucs made captives of Joseph's family and his brother Job’s children, insisting it was for their own safety. Job was imprisoned by the colonists on Deer Island, as was James. Colonial authorities insisted it was for their safety too, and perhaps it was; hatred of all Indians ran high among the settlers. Annaweekin, who may have fought on both sides, was killed in an attack on an English town.

In December of 1675, as the winter and the war darkened, Gookin arrived on Deer Island to recruit two spies. The English, having ravaged a Narragansett settlement and made enemies of that tribe too, feared reprisals on their own settlements. They needed to know their enemies’ plans. Desperate to recover his children, Job volunteered. So did James. 

At risk with every step from warriors on either side, Job and James made their way to Menemesit, a Nipmuc village where hundreds of warriors had gathered, including Narragansett and Wampanoag fighters now united in opposition to the English. There the two brothers found their father, Joseph, his family, and the children. There too they learned of plans to raid a series of frontier towns, Lancaster and Medfield among them. Nipmuc leaders suspected the brothers of spying, but old acquaintances in the village vouched for them, saving their lives.

James was first to slip away and return to Boston with word of danger; colonial authorities ignored his report, dismissing him as untrustworthy. Job lingered, hoping to arrange a safe escape for his family. But when he learned that the first of the attacks was imminent, he waited no longer. He and Joseph prayed together, then made separate plans to escape and reunite later in Hassanamesit. Job slipped from camp in darkness and set out for Boston on snowshoes, a distance of more than sixty miles, finally knocking on Gookin’s door the night before the Lancaster raid. The troops Gookin dispatched in response arrived too late to save the town.

That’s where Jonathan enters the story. He was one of 600 troops raised in the month of February to find and confront the Indian raiders before they did more damage. So was Job, still seeking his children and seeing no choice now but to cast his lot with the English as a scout. They set forth at the end of the month.

As the soldiers marched, Job persuaded their commander, Major Thomas Savage, to let him go forward alone to find his family and bring them out of harm’s way before fighting began. But when another officer learned of the plan, he confronted Savage in front of the men, arguing stridently that Job surely intended to betray their presence and their plans. As murmurs of unease spread among his troops, Savage had no choice but to relent—so he sent Jonathan and the squad of mounted soldiers in Job’s place.

When the soldiers and their captives reunited with the main force in Brookfield, Savage sent Joseph and his family back to Boston with an armed escort. They were, briefly, welcomed by Gookin and other colonists sympathetic to their plight. But an angry crowd gathered outside the house where they were sheltered, Gookin wrote, and "did so abuse, threaten and taunt at those poor Christians, and they being thereby put into great fears," that Joseph's wife, their young son, and two others fled into the night. The son died of exposure; those who remained in the house were returned to Deer Island.

I don't know what ultimately came of this family of Nipmuc converts. As with the fate of the girl Jonathan claimed, the fate of her father, Joseph, isn’t clear. I’m aware of only two books that deal at length with the plight of the Praying Indians, and settles these questions. One is by Gookin, who was scorned by fellow colonists for his even-handed treatment of Christian Indians during and after the war. His book's title is a mouthful: An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England in the years 1675, 1676, 1677. The second book, Our Beloved Kin, is recent, and I've leaned on it just as heavily as Gookin's. While it’s an important, award-winning work, it is also a needlessly complicated book that leaves many threads dangling. It is, however, the only book about King Philip’s War I know that mentions a Fairbanks by name: Jonathan, for his effort to enslave the Nipmuc girl. And there is, I suppose, a small measure of justice in that.