John Winthrop’s A Declaration of Former Passages and Proceedings betwixt the English and the Narrowgansets

The history of puritan interactions with Native Peoples in early New England has long revolved around two flashpoints: the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. Yet in-between these conflicts, English colonies also declared and mobilized for war against Narragansett Indians and their Niantic confederates. This mobilization in 1645 was then the largest engagement against Native Peoples in 60 years of English colonization in the Americas. Key to the enterprise was the printing of 500 copies of a pamphlet, A Declaration of Former Passages and Proceedings Betwixt the English and the Narrowgansets, which aimed to convince readers that “God calls the Colonies to a warr [sic].” A treaty signed just as the first militiamen began marching toward Narragansett Country averted bloodshed, and scholars have since largely forgotten the conflict and the sources pertaining to it. But the pamphlet—one of the first issues of the Cambridge, Massachusetts printing press and a rare published work written by John Winthrop—reveals how a small group of puritan leaders leveraged Protestant just war theory to redefine the conduct of Anglo-Indian relations in the Northeast as well as the spiritual and civic bonds that linked English people across colony boundaries.