Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,816

This is the grave of John Mason.

Born in 1600 in Ravensthorpe, Northamptonshire, England, we first pick Mason up in the historical record in 1624, when he enrolled in the military. We know nothing about his childhood, except to say that we know he was educated. He was a pretty successful soldier during this period of the Thirty Years War, including in the Breda campaign, which forced that Dutch city to fall, and then in the Siege of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which took a long-time Dutch city on the Spanish side.

In 1632, Mason, who had converted to Puritianism at some point, followed his fellow religionists to New England. Since he had military experience as an officer, he was immediately appointed captain of the local militia in Boston. He was involved in a number of early military activities in New England, including the successful defeat of a pirate ship attempting to take Puritan boats just outside of Boston. He helped build the first fortifications on Castle Island in Boston Harbor. He was doing well in Massachusetts and was elected to the Massachusetts General Court to represent Dorchester. But then he decided to move to the new colony of Connecticut. He had to ask permission for this and it was granted. After all, for as much as Puritan leaders wanted to build up Massachusetts, expanding their power into new colonies and pushing back against Dutch incursions into what they called New Netherland also had a lot of value. So Mason moved to what is today Windsor, Connecticut, in 1635.

Shortly after Mason arrived, the Puritans engaged in the first mass genocide action in what would become U.S. history. Mason was absolutely central to all of this. This was the Pequot War. This all came about as the English entered traditional rivalries between tribes and so it wasn’t super shocking that an English trader or two was killed by one tribe in order that the English not trade with some other tribe. But the English responded to this as they did generally–maximum violence.

Now, military action between tribes was common in New England and elsewhere. But what war meant to them and what war meant to the English and other European nations were two very different things. There were rules in Native warfare, at least in New England. What you did not do was try to literally destroy the enemy’s existence as a people. But the English? They were used to fighting in Europe, where you killed as many people as possible and you didn’t care about the consequences. This is how they had treated the Irish and there were all sorts of atrocities on the continent as well. Mason was a well trained military guy. He brought these ideas of total warfare with him to Connecticut.

Again, in 1636, the English entered the state of war between New England tribes. They and their allies–the Narragansett and Mohegan–went to war with the Pequot. It’s not as if the tribes really conducted this war in some peaceful way–there were plenty of killings. There’s no need to romanticize what was going on without the English in order to say that the English, and Mason specifically, went way too far. About 30 English settlers had died in raids by the time Mason took over.

Mason was captain of the English forces. On May 26, 1637, they attacked the Pequot village at Mystic. At first the Pequot were able to defend themselves and caused a lot of casualties. Mason nearly died himself. But when the initial charge failed, Mason ordered the burning of the fort from the outside. They killed everyone inside, or nearly everyone. Probably 500 Pequot died that day. That was unheard of it in the area’s history of warfare. This mostly exterminated the Pequot as a people. There were a few survivors, but they mostly died in the aftermath, going west to escape the Europeans only to run into hostile Mohawks who finished many of them off.

What Mason did was a crime against humanity, if such a thing had existed back then. For his services, Connecticut promoted him to major and gave him a bunch of land. What Mason learned was that the only want to deal with Indians was either to kill them or threaten to kill them. In the winter of 1639-40, there were some pretty real food problems in southern Connecticut. Not sure if it was drought, flooding, or a very harsh winter. In any case, the cattle were starving. Connecticut sent some representatives north to negotiate with the Tribes for some corn. The Tribes refused the first group. So Mason went up there fully loaded and threatened them with a repeat of what he had done at Mystic if they didn’t sell. They sold, but it cost the English in the sense that any attempt to live peacefully with Native peoples was over because the Tribes realized the English were nothing more than violent thugs. This all also nearly led to the split of Connecticut Colony, as the guy who had initially tried to buy the corn was treated so harshly by Mason that he wanted the area where he was influential to join with Massachusetts Bay, which were led by slightly less genocidal assholes.

Mason was good enough as a soldier, if by good enough you mean violent enough, that Cromwell tried to get him to return to England in the 1640s and fight there, but he refused, preferring to stay in his mini-empire in Connecticut. He took over Saybrook Fort and was basically the chief military officer for the Puritans, in charge of dealing with the Tribes. Mason then bought a bunch of land from the Mohegans, what is today Norwich, and moved there. Those land claims were incredibly dubious and would not be confirmed by the English for about seventy years. The legal defense of them would eventually drain the family fortune. But in any case, that became Mason’s home base in the 1660s. He was deputy governor of the colony from 1660-69. He was acting governor between 1661 and 1663, when the real governor, John Winthrop, Jr., was in England pressing for Connecticut’s charter from King Charles II. In 1670, Mason mediated with Roger Williams over border claims between Connecticut and Rhode Island.

But by this time, Mason’s health was failing. He had cancer and it slowly grew and killed him in 1672. He was 71 years old. Mason had plenty of kids though and his descendants range from former first lady Lucretia Garfield and New Hampshire senator Jeremiah Mason to John Kerry and the excellent historian but horrifically awful former head of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust.

In recent years, the Pequot have protested over the Mason statue in Mystic, erected in the late 19th century as a sort of New England equivalent to the southern Civil War leader statues going up all over the place. It was moved to Windsor. I am pretty sure it is still up though.

John Mason is buried in Founders Cemetery, Norwich, Connecticut. This marker is probably not the exact place, but he’s somewhere in the small field there.

If you would like this series to visit other Mason descendants, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. James Rudolph Garfield, Secretary of the Interior under Theodore Roosevelt and son of the president, is in Mentor, Ohio. George Trumball Ladd, the psychologist and scholar of Asia, is in Yokohama, Japan. You know, in case you think I need to eat some more sashimi. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.