“Worse Than Nero's Deeds”: Saints, Martyrs, and Antichrists in King Philip's War

English colonists drew on tropes martyrdom and persecution in order to remake their identity in the context of violent confrontations with Native Americans during King Philip’s War of the 1670s. They claimed that the war itself was provoked by the “martyrdom” of John Sassamon, a Christian Wampanoag who tried (and failed) to maintain affiliation with both English and Native American elites. Then in letters and narrative accounts of the war, colonists imagined themselves as persecuted by cruel Indians, and described these encounters as a continuation of the martyrdoms under Queen Mary, or the persecutions of the early Christians under the Roman emperors. Framing themselves as helpless saints persecuted by cruel enemies enabled them to cope with the physical devastation and providential uncertainty of the war, as well as, at times, to elide their role as aggressors.
       Native American converts were often caught in the middle of the cross-fire. Already sensitive to charges of heathenizing, English men and women protected their identity by villainizing these “Praying Indians” who had no affiliation with the Wampanoag. As more and more English towns burned all Native Americans came to look like enemies, even locals with long-established trading relationships. Yet before the end of the hostilities the rhetoric of martyrdom was employed in defense of the sincerity of these local Native Americans. A Puritan judge, Daniel Gookin, used the cultural resonance of the position of the martyr to argue on behalf of their lives and livelihoods. According to Gookin, it was the Praying Indians who carried the mantle of the persecuted church, representing true Christianity to the shame of the English who would join Antichrist in persecuting them by destroying their property and their bodies. This paper thus addresses the multivalent history of martyrdom as a category of religious legitimacy in early New England.