Arguing over Symbols...The Pequot Wars and A Statue of A 17th-Century Englishman in Hartford, Connecticut

Intro This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Stone-cold killer"

The American mind (wrote Henry Adams, a historian).“stands alone in history for its ignorance of the past”.

How the culture wars can show what’s right with America

The Economist | Dec 11th 2021

"When national representatives can scarcely agree to pay the government’s salaries or cover its debts is a poor candidate for exploring how to tell its national story. And America is not failing to disappoint. At the national level, the debates over American history are as unsatisfying as the other culture wars between leftist inquisitors and Trumpist berserkers, who thrill to each other’s excesses while exhausting everyone else

 

 

Listen to this story

Enjoy more audio and podcasts on

The struggle is more edifying at the local level. There, the debates are not about broad-brush claims of lionising bigotry or erasing history—not, in other words, about abstract representations of representations—but about the bronze or stone symbols themselves. Should that statue in the town square stay or go? One such debate is under way in Hartford, Connecticut, over the marble statue of an Englishman that has glowered from the north façade of the state capitol for more than 100 years.

In the 17th century, John Mason was a deputy governor and acting governor of Connecticut who helped write the charter giving the colony unusual autonomy from the British crown. But he became a hero to the first settlers and their descendants as a soldier, in what is known as the Pequot war. One history from the middle of the last century, for example, credits Mason with saving the embryonic colony from extinction by “the Red Threat”. “The Pequot menace was removed from the valley for ever,” it reads, in an account typical of the victors.

Mason accomplished this through an atrocity: on May 26th 1637, he led soldiers in setting fire to a Pequot fort and then killing the more than 400 people inside, whether warrior, woman or child. It was a decisive moment in entrenching the English colonists and in setting a standard for their treatment of natives. On the capitol, Mason is depicted in battle dress, sword in hand.

“There is no doubt Mason engaged in what we now call genocide,” Rodney Butler, the tribal chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, said last month, in a recorded message, during a hearing of the state commission that is supposed to recommend the statue’s fate on December 14th. “I ask you, is this a man we should celebrate in this great state of Connecticut?”

There is no moral way to answer yes, even if the thumbnail description of the attack oversimplifies matters that historians and archaeologists are still piecing together. That period in the Connecticut River Valley was a time of precarity, terror and shifting alliances among natives and English and Dutch settlers. The Pequots had recently besieged settlers in Saybrook, killing and wounding 20, and then attacked the village of Wethersfield, killing nine men and two women and abducting two girls. At the time there were maybe 250 able-bodied Englishmen in all Connecticut. Mason’s 76 soldiers were backed up by some 300 allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes, who were eager to expel the dominant Pequots from the region.

“We were wholly unprepared for the brutality that ensued,” Marilyn Malerba, chief of the Mohegan Tribe, told the commission, while arguing for the statue’s removal. “It was not our form of conflict.” She spoke, like others, as though the battle happened just a few years ago. Listening to the speakers, including a descendant of Mason out to defend the family name, it was easy to understand the observation of Kevin McBride, an anthropologist, that “the Pequot war is still being fought in many communities.”

Walter Woodward, the state historian, argued that if the statue stayed in place it could serve not to celebrate but to educate, about the real nature of history and its actors. Connecticut’s past, he said, “is filled with injustice, pain, inequity and violence”. He noted that while past legislators had placed a dozen statues of early leaders in the capitol’s alcoves, they had long since stopped trying to tell Connecticut’s story, leaving eight alcoves vacant. Why not provide a truer, grittier account, “rather than continue to think that we’re going to make the state capitol a multi-century cathedral of secular saints?”

Built in the 1870s, the capitol, with its kaleidoscopic interior, is more like a cathedral crossed with a genie’s lamp. It is a monument itself, not just to democracy but to an exuberant era when not only settler cruelty but also Yankee ingenuity made Hartford wealthy and cultured, a city that counted Mark Twain among its residents and Charles Dickens among its visitors. The Colt Armoury, which churned-out patented revolvers, was for a while the largest private weapons manufacturer in the world.

The Mason line

Hartford, like much of Connecticut, is more ragged today. Yet the pride of the speakers in their state was refreshing and not without grounds, including the success of some native tribes. The day before the hearing, Mr Butler announced the opening of the Mashantucket Pequots’ latest casino, in Puerto Rico; several days later, the Mohegans completed a $1.55bn round of financing for the resort they are building on Yeongjong island in Incheon, South Korea. There is a lot to celebrate as well as to dispute, as there always is. It is high time for the people of Connecticut and other states to also start disagreeing about what statues they should be creating.

This is not the first time Americans have argued over their symbols; it is not even the first time the people of Connecticut have argued over a John Mason statue. They tend to have these disputes once a generation, then forget again. The forgetting is the problem. The American mind, wrote Henry Adams, a historian, “stands alone in history for its ignorance of the past”. Whether a given statue stays or goes, a continuing argument among citizens would be the best representation of American striving. Without that, the statues will just fall mute again. As Daniel Menihan junior, another leader of the Mashantucket Pequots, put it, the Mason statue “has been there for a very long time, and it hasn’t educated many people at all”. ■

For exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our correspondents in America, sign up to Checks and Balance, our weekly newsletter.

Read more from Lexington, our columnist on American politics:

A racial-history lesson from the son of a slave (Dec 4th)
Pete Buttigieg’s impossible job (Nov 18th)
Glenn Youngkin and Ivy League populism (Nov 6th)

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Stone-cold killer"