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TERROR TO THE WICKED by Tobey Pearl

TERROR TO THE WICKED

America's First Trial by Jury That Ended a War and Helped To Form a Nation

by Tobey Pearl

Pub Date: March 16th, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-101-87171-3
Publisher: Pantheon

A seemingly open-and-shut murder trial opens onto complex class and ethnic relations in the early Colonial era.

In 1638, in the Plymouth Colony, a Nipmuc trader was robbed and stabbed by a gang of colonists. Before he died, he was able to tell the Colony’s governor, Roger Williams, enough about the attack that authorities were able to arrest the culprits. That arrest and the subsequent legal proceedings, writes former attorney Pearl, are significant inasmuch as they represent “the Plymouth Colony’s first significant murder trial.” The trial placed several contending forces in motion, set against the background of a war involving colonists and Native people—and, to complicate matters, Native people who fought among themselves, with the trader likely one who “fought with his Narragansett allies in the Pequot War on the side of [the] colonists.” That he spoke English and was an intermediary did not spare him from the assault perpetrated by a former soldier named Arthur Peach, who had camped with three other outlaws in the territory between the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples in the hope of evading both, having fled from a servitude contract with a prominent colonist. In the end, the trial involved a cast of characters straight out of the history textbooks, from Williams to Myles Standish and the sachem Massasoit, who tried to intervene on Peach’s behalf even as the jury also seemed inclined to take the renegade’s side in the matter. Pearl sometimes overwrites (“His elders passed down countless stories involving brave sojourners unexpectedly tested by angered gods, tricksters, mischief makers, or monsters—and the man coming toward him, Arthur Peach, was a monster”), but her narrative makes a solid bookend to Jill Lepore’s The Name of War in limning the complex relationships at work in a fraught place and time.

A sturdy tale of Native-White relations in Colonial America that have echoes in Native legal struggles today.