the genealogy book
, on Christine's Martha's Vineyard roots, King Philip's War, Louise Glück + Taylor Swift,
Christine mentions that, as a counterpoint to my connection to the founders of Connecticut, that she is a descendant of the founder and first Governor of Martha’s Vineyard. Shall we go down to New England and begin making claims? As the late American poet Louise Glück wrote of those early European settlers of the American colonies in her American Originality: Essays on Poetry (2017), a book Christine gifted me as part of this most recent Christmas season: “We are, famously, a nation of escaped convicts, younger sons, persecuted minorities, and opportunists. This fame is local and racial: white America’s myth of itself.” Glück speaks of those founding myths of America in a way comparable to John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (2008), offering that those early American colonists, unlike those early settlers further north, into what would become the Dominion of Canada, were the true inheritors of Empire. “The myth elaborates itself in images and narratives of self-invention,” Glück writes, a bit further on, “drive and daring and gain being prized over stamina and fortitude. If the Englishman imagined himself as heir to a great tradition, the American imagined himself as the founding father.” The myth of America seems rich with founding fathers, and one of Christine’s antecedents, through her father’s line, is Thomas Mayhew (1593-1682), who established the first European settlement on Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, the Elizabeth Islands and other adjacent islands back in 1642.
I am curious to read up on Mayhew’s relatively respectful co-habitation with his Indigenous neighbours, the Wampanoag. Even with his efforts to convert them to Christianity, the original settlers and Wampanoag cohabited peacefully, even through the worst of the battles that surrounded them during King Philip’s War (1675-1676), a rather large series of skirmishes between locals and settlers that broke out across other areas of New England. If we are to hold to our ancestor’s wisdoms, after all, we also require to acknowledge their failures and folly. Unfortunately, as Christine mentions, she is also the descendant of William Salisbury (1622-1675), her ninth great grandfather, who was responsible for literally triggering what became known as King Philip’s War. Virginia Deagan’s “SOME DESCENDANTS OF WILLIAM SALISBURY” page at Rootsweb writes that: “William ordered his son, John, to shoot and one of the Indians was wounded, possibly killed. The next day, June 24th, the Indians went to Swansea and found William and his son, John, and killed them both and cut off their heads. It is said that King Philip’s War was started by young John Salisbury.” Another descendant, Sid Burkey of Milford, Nebraska, published the essay “Dear God, My Ancestors Started A War!?” on the Dismantle Discovery website (July 22, 2015), writing that:
These ancestors from the warring side of my DNA have the sorry place in history as the men who started the King Philips War of 1675 and ‘76. This was the opening shot of the war that ignited a horrible series of escalating atrocities, wholesale slaughter on both sides of the conflict, including the sale of many of the children of the Wampanoag Confederation into slavery. This incident erupted into what some historians call the “region’s bloodiest conflict and the turning point in the contest for control of land throughout New England.” The human and economic cost of the war was devastating to both sides, but the Wampanoag Native Americans never recovered. Proportional to population, casualties in this war were “greater than in any other American war”. Only a remnant of about 5000 Wampanoag live today, mainly in Massachusetts—the legacy of William Salisbury, who told his son John to shoot a protestor in the back. His young son Samuel, age 12 at the time, survived and raised a family—so here I am!
Wikipedia reinforces the troubling caveat that King Philip’s War was “the greatest calamity in seventeenth-century New England and is considered by many to be the deadliest war in Colonial American history.” I could ask what the hell you were thinking, William Salisbury, but I might just suspect.
Back in the relative peace of Martha’s Vineyard, Thomas Mayhew named himself Governor for Life, and attempted to institute a feudal jurisdiction, although it was one that didn’t survive the arrival of further generations of colonists across the period up to the American Revolution. The pure children of Empire, indeed. A century after Thomas Mayhew’s time, it was even one of his descendants, Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766), a prominent Boston clergyman, who coined the phrase “No taxation without representation.”
It was through Thomas Mayhew’s daughter, Martha, from whence Christine emerges. Martha Mayhew (1642-1717) married Rev. Captain Thomas Tupper Jr. (1638-1706), both born, raised, married, lived and eventually died in Sandwich, Massachusetts. This particular couple connects Christine, as well, to the sixth Prime Minister of Canada, Sir Charles Tupper (1821-1915), who is one of a trio of Fathers of Confederation through Christine’s father. A further descendant of Rev. Captain Thomas and Martha, as Christine more recently discovered, is American mega-star singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. Christine maps it out: Taylor Swift is her eighth cousin, three times removed. So for our young ladies, Taylor Swift is their eighth cousin, four times removed. This is probably more important to either of them than being related to dusty old politicians. Upon hearing this, Rose is so excited she’s shaking. Shake it, I say. Shake it off.