Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 114.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this on May the Fourth be with you,

2023, in New Orleans.

We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning

without presentism.

The Pequot War of 1636 to 1638 was the first time that Europeans and the lands of today's

United States launched a fundamentally offensive war

to reduce an American Indian tribe to ruin.

There I said it.

Pious as they were, concerned as they were with God's favor,

the moral athletes of the Massachusetts Bay in the mid-1630s were the first Europeans who pretty much made it their business to wipe out an American Indian tribe.

The Spanish had done it on Hispaniola and elsewhere to the Teno.

But even 70 years after the founding of St. Augustine, the tribes in Florida were still going strong.

True, the Spanish had attacked the Calusa in Florida in 1614, a story we haven't told.

And as we have seen, done some nasty things in New Mexico.

But in no case had they wiped out a tribe, neither the French and

Champlain's colonies along the St. Lawrence. And perhaps most relevantly, neither had the Virginians,

who had certainly had their share of conflicts with the Powitt and Confederacy, but would not seek

to obliterate the tribe until 1644 and thereafter,

when Opa Cancana would launch his third ruinous war with the English settlers.

If you are a long-time and attentive listener, you will have some sense of the geopolitics in New

England by the mid-1630s. If you are new to this story, the best

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