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New scholarship on the intellectual justifications of European expansion has brought the question of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the center of early modern historical scholarship. But this scholarship has, for the most part, ignored the ideas of the indigenous peoples themselves. Yet in these encounters, Native Americans were not merely passive objects of European discourses. Rather, they responded to European claims with their own conceptions of law, property, and political authority. This paper uncovers these indigenous norms by looking at a little-studied legal genre: the appeals made by Native Americans to the British Crown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These appeals show that they were aware of (and able to exploit) the complicated politics of the British Atlantic world for their own ends, turning the Crown against the settlers in ways they hoped would preserve their rights, and in the process becoming trans-Atlantic political actors. Focusing on three such appeals —the Narragansetts’ in the mid-seventeenth-century; the Mohegans’ which spanned the first three quarters of the eighteenth; and the Mashpee’s on the eve of the American Revolution— this paper explores the way that these Native peoples in eastern North America were able to resist the depredations of the settlers by appealing to royal authority, in the process articulating a powerful conception of their legal status in a world transformed by the arrival of the English.

This chapter deals with the Native subjects and political situations William Bradford and Edward Winslow encountered. Prominent among the Native persons and groups the two describe are the Nemaskets, Corbitant, Wituwamat, the Tarentins or Micmacs, Uncas, Sassacus, the Narragansetts, the Pequots, and the Pequot massacre. The chapter furthermore delineates the actions of John Winthrop, William Brewster, John Oldham, and John Stone and events leading up to King Philip's War. Included also are comments concerning the Native words Bradford chose to set legal land descriptions and official boundaries. The author describes how that usage decision impacted subsequent American letters.

This chapter discusses Robert Child's confrontation with Massachusetts, which ultimately led to his leaving New England, and Uncas's resistance to John Winthrop, Jr.'s protection of the Pequots, which limited and ultimately forced a redefinition of Winthrop's original conception for the alchemical plantation. The difficulties these crises posed undermined much of the original vision with which Winthrop had started his project. Establishing the riverine plantation, Winthrop came to realize, would take decades, not days. The black lead mine, too, would take years to adequately test. To be sure, Child, who had retested the mine's ore samples and this time found silver content, remained enthusiastic about its potential, even while under house arrest in Boston, and he remained so once back in England.