The Pilgrims

[AndersonD]

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I am researching the Pilgrims and am wondering if they were militant?

[Soloist]

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I am researching the Pilgrims and am wondering if they were militant?

I vaguely recall that the Indians saved the colonists and then they attacked the Indians after I think.

[HondurasKeiser]

I don't get the sense that the early Pilgrims were militant - perhaps the later arriving Puritans a bit more so. The land around which Plymouth colony was built had been recently depopulated by a plague and so there was no one to fight with upon their arrival. Squanto acted as mediator between the Pilgrims and the surrounding Wampanoag and for a time they lived in relative peace. Many of the Wampanoag converted to Christianity at this time and lived in what were called praying towns. Disease though took its toll and by the 1660's there were maybe 1000 Wampanoag left.

That and the continuing arrival of more colonists led the Wampanoag leader, Metacom to break the peace and attack the New England colonies in the 1670's.

All in all, I wouldn't say the Pilgrims or the Puritans were particularly militaristic - they didn't foreswear violence but neither did they show up looking to use violence as a first option.