"What's "Sacred" about Violence in Early America?" Topic

"Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World

One of the most chilling images in early American history is the deliberate firing of Fort Mystic during the Pequot War of 1637. Five hundred Indian men, women, and children died that day, burned alive along with their homes and possessions by a vengeful Puritan militia intent on doing God's will. "We must burn them!" the militia captain famously insisted to his troops on the eve of the massacre, in words that echo the classic early modern response to heretics. Just five months before, the Puritan minister at Salem had exhorted his congregation in strikingly similar terms to destroy a more familiar enemy, Satan; "We must burne him," John Wheelwright told his parishioners. Indians and devils may have been scarcely distinguishable to many a Puritan, but their rhetorical conflation in these two calls to arms raises a question: Was the burning of Fort Mystic a racial or a religious killing?…"

Main page

link

Armand

Neither racial or religious. It's war. That's it. The reason doesn't really matter because…it's called war.

Apparently, this concept is so unbelievably hard to understand for some reason.

Augustus +1

Thanks

Armand

1637? So, not really "Early America", more "Colonial America", or "Pre-America".

Presumably Augustus you don't subscribe to the Geneva Convention; it's war anything goes. Funnily even Putin thinks there should be rules, even if he expects to use one set and his opponent another.

The Puritans, in both England and the New World justified what would today be called war crimes by reference to biblical precepts. 1 Samuel 15:3 is probably the best known, but I suspect there are others.

(smile)

Armand

Luckily that sort of thing only happened in America and never anywhere else.

Ha!…

Armand