Introduction

Today, one can own, buy, or sell land with relative ease, and most members of the US middle class aspire to do so. One generally buys real property by taking out a mortgage, understanding that if one fails to pay, one is likely to lose one's home or business to foreclosure. After the debt, fees, and costs are paid, a former owner receives money remaining from a foreclosure sale, but does not get the property back. Although the crash of 2008 illuminated the crisis these commonplace ideas could generate on an epic scale, it is still difficult to imagine a more mundane set of propositions, or one that more ubiquitously structures our lived environment.

This routine manner in which foreclosure occurs today can be traced to practices of dispossession that colonists developed during the earliest days of settlement in America. The practices of both routine mortgage foreclosure and of treating land as a commodity object acquired and alienated for cash, in other words, have clearly identifiable and relatively recent historical beginnings. Moreover, the origins of these practices are intertwined: land acquired a legal status akin to that of chattel when foreclosure upon a mortgage first became relatively unconstrained by law.Footnote ¹ This colonial history tethers present experiences of dispossession by foreclosure to that past.

In England, mortgages had long made it possible to secure a monetary debt with land. However, the form of the instrument that first made it simple for a mortgagee to recuperate debt through the unrestricted seizure or sale of land, no matter that the debtor had not offered it as collateral for the debt, appeared during the British colonization of America. This new possibility of unilateral foreclosure allowed colonists to use land as security for credit, which in turn enabled credit transactions, real estate sales, and land conceived as real estate to become the basis of a capital market. Colonists began to use land like money and, indeed, in the eighteenth-century came to call money “Coined Land” (Waldstreicher Reference Waldstreicher and Matson2006, 198). With its new liquidity, land, by becoming a money equivalent, generated wealth of proportions that would eventually support the birth of a nation.

In this article, I revisit the history of the mortgage to trouble this conception of land, which has become as natural as breath.Footnote ² Foreclosure means to shut out, to close beforehand, to preclude a borrower from reclaiming his or her land. This story of dispossession in colonial America simultaneously concerns both material and discursive practices of foreclosure—that is, the interrelated practices of developing legal instruments for indigenous land seizure, and narrating history in a way that marginalizes these material practices. The account in this article concerns legally and historically foreclosed indigenous claims to lands. It comprehends indigenous people as economic actors, indigenous peoples as polities, and indigenous currency as currency, in a narrative about early America that has been largely eclipsed by other histories of the period.

For although scholars have found the shift that American foreclosure practice entailed remarkable, they have also begun its history conspicuously late, excluding transactions with indigenous people for indigenous land. As a consequence of this omission, the story of the American mortgage appears as a narrative about generative credit, rather than one about dispossession. I return to this history to explore the ramifications of recognizing indigenous people as participants in the colonial economy, as well as of failing to do so. Specifically, I examine the character of transactions between colonists and indigenous people in what I call a contact economy, and I outline the role of these proliferating transactions in determining the political, economic, and social intercultural dynamics in the rapidly expanding Euroamerican territory, thereby also shaping the legal institutions that developed during this time.Footnote ³

By the term contact economy, I mean a market whose dynamics are determined by negotiations and transactions between groups that approach one another with fundamentally different premises concerning trade and the value of the objects that they nonetheless exchange.Footnote ⁴ While trade partners in early America negotiated over those objects of exchange, they referred to different systems of value and held different conceptions of the capacities of those objects. Not only did indigenous political, social, and economic institutions contribute to the shape of the contact economy, but for colonists, creating leverage using difference was a major policy concern, since they understood indigenous people as gatekeepers to coveted resources. Instead of the classic Anglo-American account of contracts in which agreements proceed through a “meeting of the minds,” trade between natives and English settlers in early America commenced through miscomprehensions about trade agreements, both accidental and deliberate. Conceptions about trade not shared by parties influenced the power dynamic between these groups in the contact economy, and was a conscious means by which the English transformed it.

Here, I show how the differences between colonial and indigenous conceptions of, first, money, and then land, fueled colonial growth in New England. Land became a money equivalent through the colonists' adoption of indigenous money, insistence on European conceptions of property, and imposition of an English legal instrument on land, which they adapted for the colonial project—the mortgage. The contact economy of early America, driven by the goal of expansion, was inherently dynamic, characterized by one group's growth at others' expense. This analysis of the contact economy appreciates the costs of trade by recognizing that the English expropriated indigenous lands for the American real estate market. In episodes that determined the fundamental character of mortgages and money in America, the colonial economy grew thanks to credit and land acquisition.Footnote ⁵ Further, as the mortgage enacted a new equation between land and money, the money side of the equation represented debt. Indigenous debt created through colonial lending practices, often predatory in nature, enabled the seizure of indigenous land. Land therefore became a money equivalent not through positive sale, but through debt and loss; foreclosure was a tool of indigenous dispossession.

To tell this history of foreclosure, I draw on seventeenth-century deeds and account books, as well as the concepts and episodes described in nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century historical monographs on wampum and colonial land acquisition, classical political and monetary theory, and contemporary historical literature on mortgages and money in colonial America. In this article, my principal aim and object is reinterpretation rather than presenting original research. I synthesize literature that embraces colonial interpretations of indigenous practices with corrective accounts by Native American and ethnohistorians. In describing how the contact economy arose from interactions between indigenous people and European immigrants, I write in response to accounts that overlook native participation as a formative aspect of the colonial American economy, and I explore the conceptual consequences of these omissions. In other words, I seek to show how historical narratives are a part of history themselves. To do this, I illuminate the distortions caused by indigenous erasure that obscure the salience of this history today, and the persistent power of mythologies that have long justified the material practices of colonization.

Money

Understanding the monetary world of the American colonial contact economy requires reevaluating classic conceptions of money as well as historical accounts of money in early America. Because of their traditional coincidence, the world of early America is a theoretically and historically freighted site for revisiting theories of money, and thinking through its materiality and institutional design. Since colonial times, the precolonial world in North America has been conflated with ideas about a primitive, wild, simple world, which appear in narratives purporting to describe man's evolution and the beginning of civilization. Narratives like these, especially insofar as they are situated in America, generically represent the ideological complement to the material project of colonization: they arise from the narrative removal of the indigenous dispossession and the African slave trade on which the American colonial economy depended (Baptist Reference Baptist2014). Typically, in these schemes, a fiction about the developmental transition of one community masks the violence of contact between indigenous groups and settlers; the moment when one distinct social system confronts another is replaced with a moment of evolution.Footnote ¹³ Consequently, literatures that perform this erasure have not analyzed the interracial transactions that shook and transformed the social and economic world of early America.

The best-known work that interweaves these ideologically powerful mythologies about money, man's evolution into civil society, and America as wilderness is John Locke's Second Treatise. Written contemporaneously with the colonizing of America, its story of the transformation of the state of nature—generally read as a wilderness from which the bedrock of modern Western political society emerged, as if by spontaneous generation—begets its own power, and describes its own origin. Locke invoked the commonplace colonial conflation of America with a pre-political and pre-economic “state of nature.” He himself most clearly endorsed a colonial notion of evolutionary development in his theory of money, wherein he described the precivilizational state as characterized by the absence of money, famously writing that “in the beginning, all the world was America, and more so than it is now, for no such thing as money was anywhere known” (Locke [1689] Reference Locke and Laslett1988, 301).

Locke's text, still the touchstone of classical monetary theory, conceptualizes money as a way to accumulate and preserve value, eliminating waste and facilitating trade by furnishing an object desired by all at all times, a symbolic stand-in for material goods. Money, by this account, is a symbolic representation of goods, a means of overcoming their perishability. It is abstract and separate from the material economic relationships to which it refers. Locke's story about “America” imparted this scheme of a universal trajectory of progress to the generic classic account of money's development, in which, as Desan puts it, “[m]etal gradually rose like fat to the surface” and gold became the favored medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account (Desan Reference Desan2014, 27). Desan notes that these developmental narratives constitute a “conjured space” in which premoney “exchange was a murky broth of barter” (Desan Reference Desan2014, 27).

Consonantly, the literature on the early colonial economy follows the cues of classical monetary theory in describing the use of money as a progressive development, part of a general social awakening into political, institutional life. Scholars writing on colonial currencies generally argue that colonists in America were chronically short of specie through the seventeenth century, and having neither the means nor the authority to mint English coin, adjusted by using “money substitutes.”Footnote ¹⁴

Almost uniformly, writings on colonial American currencies describe the lack of institutional infrastructure in Euroamerica as the key difference between the American colonial and English economic environments (Nettels Reference Nettels1973; Priest Reference Priest2001; Carruthers and Ariovich Reference Carruthers and Ariovich2010; cf. Miller and Hamell Reference Miller and Hamell1986; Salisbury Reference Salisbury1996). However, the literature does not remark, as it might, on the significance of indigenous presence and the unique dynamics of trade between groups with unshared basic premises about money, trade, land, and the world. Instead, by emphasizing the absence of European institutional infrastructure, this literature characterizes the contact economy's system of exchange as a necessary regression to barter, a community concession to the absence of money and to survival concerns. Scholarship thus reinforces the association between the contact economy and the “state of nature,” precivilization, and prehistory, and frames its institutions and dynamics as utterly distinct from those that govern the present.

Despite the substitution of indigenous absence for indigenous difference within the accepted colonial narrative, the record shows that colonists who imported the mortgage to America encountered indigenous systems of money there almost immediately, and adopted local forms of currency to insinuate themselves into local markets. It is uncontroversial that colonists traded with “wampum,” or “sewan,” as the Dutch called it, both buying it with various goods and using it as currency to buy goods. It is also known that they used it in trade with other Europeans, as well as with members of Indian tribes. In acts now identified as barter, indigenous people and settlers also “traded all sorts of objects among themselves—grain, gold, cow and hides, promises, services, fish, and salt.” But although these superficial aspects of the colonial economy have become the trademark features of the “conjured” early world of money mythologies, the “wild simplicity” of the notion of premoney barter cannot capture the complexity of the process that unfolded through exchange between groups operating according to wholly different conceptions of goods, money, and exchange itself (Desan Reference Desan2014, 27). Settlers and indigenous people developed their trade relationships, agreed on the objects they exchanged, and brought their own presumptions about the nature of money to bear on this exchange. The monetary economy that emerged suggests that money, far from being a neutral, symbolic representation of material goods, operated as a material practice that fundamentally shaped those relations themselves (Desan Reference Desan2014, 27).

The objects that came to be known by the general term “wampum” were strings of shell beads with a number of different names, depending on their color, the kind of shell from which they were made, and their value. White beads were called wompi, and were made from the Pyrula Carica or Canaliculata periwinkle shells common to the southern coast of New England; Suckaúhock were black beads made from the dark part of the common quahog, Venus mercenaria, or round clam, and were worth twice as much as wompi. The shell cylinders were about one-eighth of an inch in diameter and one-quarter inch in length, and were polished and strung on hemp fibers or animal tendon; strings were called peage and traded by the fathom. Like any other money, wampum represented value, a medium of exchange, and a way of settling accounts.

Wampum entered the fringes of the European economy in 1622. The Dutch discovered “how much it facilitated their trade” when a Dutch West India Company trader named Jacques Elekens threatened to behead a Pequot sachem unless he received “a heavy ransom.” The sachem promptly delivered 140 fathoms of “sewan” (Salisbury Reference Salisbury1982, 148; Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 95). Thereafter, the Dutch began to purchase large quantities of wampum from the Narragansett and the Pequot, reinforcing the dominance of these tribes in the area. Meanwhile, the English had established themselves in Plymouth in 1620. In 1627, to try to prevent the English from becoming competitors for the Connecticut fur markets, another agent of the West India Company, Isaac de Rasieres, sold fifty pounds of wampum to the Pilgrims, hoping they would spread its use to tribes in Maine, and return to New Netherland to purchase more wampum from the Dutch (James Reference James1963, 63; Salisbury Reference Salisbury1982, 151).

The Plymouth traders had been building up their trade with the Abenaki and Algonquians by cultivating corn to trade for skins. But wampum could be traded when beaver pelts were thickest (late winter and early spring), unlike corn, which was harvested when pelts were thinnest, in the late fall (Salisbury Reference Salisbury1982, 151). The English quickly found alternate supply sources for wampum in Connecticut, Long Island, and Narragansett, and within two years, accomplished the Dutch goal of spreading the market for wampum to northern tribes. By cornering the market in wampum, they came to dominate European-indigenous trade (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 21; James Reference James1963, 63; Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 96). “The Plymouth men could hardly furnish wampum enough,” Rhode Island historian William Babcock Weeden wrote in 1884, and “control of this currency gave them an advantage which virtually excluded the fishermen and other traders from competing for the trade of the river” (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 21).

Settlers took up wampum to enter into local trade, but the currency meant vastly different things to the groups who traded it with one another. It is important to note that the only available literature on wampum is historical or anthropological, and the observations are thus filtered through the lens of outside perspectives, European scholarly traditions, and colonial interests.Footnote ¹⁵ Colonists had limited interest in wampum's meanings beyond its effects on native groups, such as its potential use for annexing indigenous labor to procure beaver pelts, or deescalating tension as a peace offering.

Still, by various accounts, the form of money made of shells possessed great ideological and symbolic meaning for the tribes that used it, who believed the shell substance, along with crystal, to be other-worldly in origin (Miller and Hamell Reference Miller and Hamell1986, 318). Weeden observed that wampum was more powerful than words. It could give force to words and could be used to remove “the hatchet fixed in the head” (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 13). Furthermore, it held a “literary office”: the beads served as a mnemonic record, “an ideogram in the bud”; they “conveyed the words, giving warrant and sanction to the first communication, then preserved the facts by this symbolic association” (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 13–14). Facts were “talked into” the beads, and belts could preserve words, faith, and honor. Southern New England tribes also used wampum belts to transmit authority and personal status, through rituals performed by Mourning Councils to lament a sachem's death and install a successor (Morgan Reference Morgan1907, 139–43). Because wampum carried power, “[l]esser individuals dared not accumulate too much of it unless they were willing to challenge those with higher prestige” (Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 95).

Colonial records indicate that wampum also bore significance for colonists not understood by their indigenous partners in trade. On one hand, the great value the wampum held for an increasing number of northeastern tribes endowed it with value for Europeans (Herman Reference Herman1956, 29). The beads “carried a permanent value through the constancy of the Indian desire for them,” since “[t]he holder of wampum always compelled trade to come to him” (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 6). But on the other hand, for colonists, the value of wampum to indigenous people only mediated its value on the international market. Europeans in America sought commodities that would repay their debts to European merchants, and wampum, like corn, could be traded for furs, for which Europeans would pay European money.Footnote ¹⁶ The value of wampum translated into pounds and shillings, or the profits in English money that its use would produce.

The colonists' world of commodity exchange was thus hybridized with cash assumptions: whether the objects exchanged were shell beads, silver, or fish, the count was in coin and the goal was to accumulate goods highly valued on international markets. Colonists' handling of trade and goods in America exemplified behavior to be expected of those already inculcated in a modern Western monetary system; as Desan (Reference Desan2014, 61) notes, “[t]rades made without money will take place in the shadow of the moneyed economy.” Internally, colonists' networks of debt relationships permitted community members to exchange goods and clear debts between themselves without using cash: the community relied on book accounts that individual settlers paid off at intervals (Banner Reference Banner2005, 55; Carruthers and Ariovich Reference Carruthers and Ariovich2010, 86–87). Colonial laborers were compensated in kind, with the use of “shop notes” that limited their expenditures to a particular shop and a narrow set of goods (Priest Reference Priest2001, 1375). Thus, “[e]ven trades made purely on credit—ongoing relations reciprocal enough to operate indefinitely without a token changing hands” were “rebalanced in the moneyed world” (Desan Reference Desan2014, 61). Colonial laws designated wampum and other commodities as currency, specifying that these products were receivable for payment of taxes and other public debts, and called them “country pay” (Nettels Reference Nettels1973, 208). The profits of international market sales were calculated according to expenditures on commodities valued in terms of English coin. Colonial assemblies created schedules of prices, assigning equivalents in shillings and pounds for certain quantities of wampum, corn, peas, pork, beef, tobacco, and tar, for example (Nettels Reference Nettels1973, 210); “[t]he legislators tinkered at the money question constantly,” in efforts to manipulate the market using fluctuating standards for these equivalents (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 24).

As a contemporary textbook widely used in business schools explains, value is created “by identifying an investment worth more in the marketplace than it costs us to acquire” (Ross, Westerfield, and Jordan Reference Ross, Westerfield and Jordan2013, 267). With European money, colonists could acquire raw materials to support their trade in America, to engage on the other end for vast profits in European money. Initially, the two goods most important to colonists were wampum and beaver skins, for they each offered ready access to other investments (Segal and Stineback Reference Segal and Stineback1977, 46): Weeden (Reference Weeden1884, 15) writes that while the colonist “desired corn and venison, all the world desired beaver”; “[w]ampum was the magnet which drew the beaver out of the interior forests,” and wampum, as we will see, would later be used to extract land.

When colonists traded beaver to Europeans for money, they derived profits from the gap between the values of these goods—wampum, beaver, and European money—for indigenous people and colonists. The value that European money did not have to indigenous people was key. In just one example, in 1629, a newly arrived settler named Francis Higginson met an English trader who had recently paid six shillings and eight pence for seed corn, which he had traded for beaver skins that netted him a profit of £327 on the London market (Salisbury Reference Salisbury1982, 185). The scale of this enterprise involved tens of thousands of beaver and otter skins delivered to trading posts each year during this era, and the Plymouth colony was able to pay off its English creditors with animal skins supplied by Abenaki hunters on the Kennebec River in Maine. In the 1640s, “even as their population was cut in half by disease and intertribal warfare, the Hurons produced 30,000 beaver pelts annually, and by the late 1650s, 46,000 pelts were pouring into Fort Orange alone” (Axtell Reference Axtell1992, 130–31).

Colonists were keenly aware of the differences between Indian and European conceptions of money, other objects, and their very traditions of exchange. Further, they sought to mobilize these differences, which characterized the colonial contact economy, to their own advantage. Because trade with tribes was indispensable to colonists, native ideas about cosmology, political life, and human relations to each other and to land strongly shaped the way trade and diplomacy emerged and developed between Indians and Europeans. Colonists' adoption of wampum, not only for trade with indigenous people, but as currency between themselves, may furnish one of the strongest examples of how the English pursued trade in America by adopting protocols and rituals rooted in native kinship obligations and gift exchange. The use of wampum helped colonists by giving them entry into the local economy, and also by defusing the tensions they created there. When faced with seemingly insoluble conflict, imperial officers and Anglo-American settlers alike used the gift of wampum for the ritual, healing significance it held for the Six Nations and Ohio Indians—to remove “the hatchet fixed in the head” (Jacobs Reference Jacobs1985, 43–44).

Colonial companies and governments were initially bewildered to find that English rules did not apply to the Indian trade. The English had assumed that Indians would bring more furs if they offered them better prices, in accordance with “the normal European reaction,” but noted early on that “the Indian did not react to ordinary European notions of property nor to the normal European economic motives” (Rich Reference Rich1960, 46–47). Contrary to expectation, an experienced Hudson Bay Company trader warned that “giving Indians larger Price would occasion the Decrease of Trade” (Rich Reference Rich1960, 47). At first, English merchants tried to convert Indians to English ways by “inculcat[ing] a notion of Property” in them. They hoped to make them “sensible of the Conveniency of having some Property,” not to “increase their real Necessities, yet it would furnish them with imaginary Wants,” and enlarge the market for European goods. However, exchange between tribes continued to be “articulated in the language of gift giving”; it expressed political, diplomatic relations and had the capacity to articulate collective relationships between sovereignties.Footnote ¹⁷ Even when indigenous people sought out European goods, such as kettles, glassware, or textiles, they did so for their similarity in substance to other materials they already valued, qualifying them by Indian, rather than by European “schemes of value” (Miller and Hamell Reference Miller and Hamell1986, 318; Salisbury Reference Salisbury1996, 452–53). “In effect, they became different objects,” whose significance Europeans did not fully understand (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 13; Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 94); as historian Jean O'Brien (Reference O'Brien1997, 6) has written, “Indians incorporated new items of material culture selectively and in Indian ways.” Fur traders found that no matter the circumstance, “nothing like the European equation could be established”: “[t]here was no question of setting a quantity of spirits against a quantity of furs” (Rich Reference Rich1960, 50). With reference to their own standards for building economic relationships, natives bargained shrewdly, playing European competitors against each other, as Axtell recounts, and “avoiding superfluities that had no place in their own culture” (Axtell Reference Axtell1992, 132).

Nonetheless, as the English arrived in greater numbers, both the contact economy and the power imbalance between the English and native groups grew. As Indians became increasingly enmeshed in trade relations with the English, systematic fur trade relations replaced earlier, more sporadic exchanges. Competition for wampum promoted dependence on European traders. It destroyed balances that had been implicit in Indian notions of reciprocity, established new local leaders, and contributed to shifts in the tribute obligations that previously existed between Indian villages (Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 96). Generally, the new trade combined with epic fatalities to create widespread political crises, altering power relations within and between Indian communities, as survivors formed new villages with relatives (O'Brien Reference O'Brien1997, 6).

Regarding the effects of the colonists' adoption of wampum, William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, remarked: “Strange it was to see the great alteration it made in a few years among the Indians themselves” (Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 96). Previously, Indian notions of status had been measured by “a handful of goods, whereas Europeans could accumulate wealth with virtually any material possession” (Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 98). As European arrival disrupted earlier status systems, wampum gained new importance for sachems seeking to acquire wealth to retain power. Tribes began to stockpile goods desired by Europeans in an effort to reconstitute their fractured social orders and adapt to their dramatically changing environment; “things began to have prices that had not had them before. In particular, one could buy personal prestige by killing animals and exchanging their skins for wampum or high-status European goods” (Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 97). To meet the intensifying European demand for wampum, tribes produced it in greater quantities, making greater quantities available to individuals across the social spectrum; south coastal Indians even shifted their settlement patterns in the 1630s, remaining in their coastal sites year-round to stockpile shellfish and increase production of the currency (Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 101).

But although indigenous practices began to resemble European ones after the “eliminat[ion of] many of the social sanctions which had formerly restricted individual accumulation,” indigenous and colonial accumulation of goods remained critically distinct during this period (Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 98). For indigenous communities, accumulation could alter orders of social status, and perhaps even the very meaning of proportions and social status. However much European influence in the contact economy encouraged indigenous accumulation, this accumulation could not translate into European notions of wealth. First, indigenous communities did not embrace the concepts of fungibility, investment, or interest on which credit and debt practices were premised. The flexible capacity of English money to draw abstract equivalences between the values of a vast range of trade objects according to a cumulative measure was foreign to them.

Second, even insofar as they sought to participate in this economic game, indigenous groups could not have valued English money like the colonists under the circumstances that conditioned the possibilities of profit for them: namely, they did not have access to the overseas European markets that motivated and validated colonial endeavors in America. In the precolonial northeast, trade in wampum and the other goods between villages in the New England area had been relatively local in character. As Cronon (Reference Cronon1983, 92–93) writes, “no entrepreneurial class existed whose chief role was to move commodities over long distances.” But Europeans “took hold of the traditional maize-fur trade network and transformed it from a system of binary village exchange to a link in the new Atlantic economy” (Cronon Reference Cronon1983, 94). For colonists, the markets of the American contact economy were appendages that fed into a European market, and Europeans possessed exclusive control over this cross-Atlantic nexus. Even as their trade in the early days established the dynamics of these relationships for years to come, it is doubtful whether the indigenous traders in this contact economy could fully understand English motivations, or the limited role that they had been assigned in the scheme of the economy the English were building. They were subject to its logic, but had limited access to its rules, stakes, and possibilities. This limitation was not incidental. It was due to a structural information asymmetry, and from the colonists' point of view, it was exceedingly profitable. Merchants in Europe would not have contracted directly with tribes; tribes were not competitors by design. The premise of the colonial investment market itself was that indigenous tribes participated in the market, but not as investors. Meanwhile, the colonists labored productively as middlemen whose role was to expropriate wealth and land from tribes.

Thus, through continuous trade concerning objects and agreements that held different significance for each group, indigenous traders' competitive economic position grew weaker while colonists accumulated wealth and political power. This growth attracted further immigration, nearly tripling the Bay Colony population between 1634 and 1638, strengthening colonial forces, and mounting pressure for land. When colonists began to spill into Connecticut, this further strained an only tenuously peaceful trade environment (Salisbury Reference Salisbury1982, 216–17, 225–26). The English took hostile Pequot responses to incessant colonial encroachment as an opportunity: in an infamous predawn surprise attack, they destroyed a Pequot village, slaughtering all but seven of 300–700 sleeping women, children, and old men. After another battle at Sadqua Swamp, the Pequot nation was declared dissolved under the Treaty of Hartford in 1638 (Segal and Stineback 1977, 110; Salisbury Reference Salisbury1982, 221–22).

After extinguishing the Pequots, the English moved swiftly to isolate the Narragansett, who had been English allies up until then (Salisbury Reference Salisbury1982, 229). In 1643, in response to growing indigenous resistances, the several colonies formed the Confederation of New England, which first exercised its power to find a pretext upon which to dispatch the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 31–32).Footnote ¹⁸ After Miantonomo was accused of plotting to murder the Mohegan sachem Uncas, Uncas captured and delivered him to the English. Perceiving that the Narragansett would never be so vulnerable again, the Commissioners prosecuted and convicted Miantonomo, and turned him over to Uncas for execution before English witnesses (Weidensaul Reference Weidensaul2012, 147–48).Footnote ¹⁹

These acts of aggression constituted critical turning points for English political ascendance in New England, and each resulted in explosive increases in commercial activity. After the Pequot massacre, settlers' need for wampum to access trade with Indians rose so high that Connecticut began to receive wampum for taxes at four a penny, and the Bay fixed the rate at six beads a penny for any sum under 12d (Trumbull Reference Trumbull1850, 12; Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 22). Miantonomo's death ensured the future of New England by extinguishing effective native resistance to English Puritan hegemony until Metacom's War at the end of the century.Footnote ²⁰ As Weeden (Reference Weeden1884, 31–32) wrote, “[t]hese astute men of the United Colonies, more cunning than Uncas, sacrificed the friendly Miantonomo for the good of the State, as they conceived it.” Directly after his death, wampum became legal tender in all the New England colonies, and the next year, in 1644, the Indian trade and the value of wampum together reached new heights (Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 73).

By 1645, peage was New York's most effective currency, and used widely in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; the inventories of deceased colonists commonly contained these strings of wampum. In the late 1640s, to deal with the problem of counterfeit wampum, Massachusetts “instituted a process more like coinage than anything which [Roger] Williams found among the Indians, and described in the familiar terms of the mint” (Nettels Reference Nettels1973, 211–12). Wampum was not only the primary medium of exchange between colonists as well as with Indians; there was little other money in the colonies. Indeed, as Weeden recounts, when an old English shilling was found on a highway in Flushing, Long Island in 1647, it was displayed as a public attraction, as it constituted a genuine curiosity to most colonists (Weeden Reference Weeden1884, 24–25).

Land

One century later, the presumption that land was equivalent to money had become a colonial commonplace, in continuing tension with indigenous peoples' conceptions of land, to which such an equivalence remained foreign. In 1742, in a conversation with Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor George Thomas about the poverty of the exchange of goods for land, Canassatego, who spoke on behalf of the Six Nations, protested: “We are sensible that the Land is Everlasting, and the few Goods we receive for it are soon Worn out and Gone.” Thomas replied: “What you say of the Goods that they are soon worn out is applicable to everything, but you know very well that they cost a great deal of Money, and the Value of Land is no more than what it is worth in Money” (Banner Reference Banner2005, 80–81). The disagreement about the value of land was the crux that drove the contact economy, and lay at the heart of its swift growth. As Stuart Banner (Reference Banner2005, 81) has noted, the difference in “how value was constructed” for settlers and indigenous people “was itself part of the engine that drove land sales,” and thus, indigenous land loss.

To expand colonial landholdings, colonists not only observed, but also made deliberate use of, the differences between European and indigenous conceptions of land. In New England, Indian ways of belonging on the land involved mobility based on kin relations between central village sites and seasonal change; “a large Indian sense of place connected many separate locations together in an intricately webbed landscape” (O'Brien Reference O'Brien1997, 21–22). In contrast, the English colonizers emphasized fixity on the land, bounded enclosures, and exclusive ownership to be enforced by a bureaucratic legal system providing procedures for property transfers and inheritance (O'Brien Reference O'Brien1997, 22). Although indigenous people could reach agreements concerning the common use of lands, the lands themselves could never be enclosed for absolute, exclusive individual ownership, nor sold for corn, fur, or wampum. But where colonists accommodated indigenous conceptions of currency, they were unyielding about European conceptions of real property. They partitioned, fenced, granted, and otherwise marked off land for their exclusive use, expressing their belief that the land was an object properly enclosed, with the capacity to be owned, bought, and sold. Concomitantly, they insisted that natives' rights with respect to the land after “sale” were extinguished.

In early New England, real estate both drove the growth of the contact economy and was created through it. Again, colonists in New England first imposed their notion of property on lands vacated in the aftermath of epidemics. From this foothold, they pursued trade and interdependence with native communities. A few years after spreading into the Massachusetts Bay in 1630, rapid population growth shifted the focus of the colonists' commercial exchange from “portable commodities, principally furs, to the land itself” (Salisbury Reference Salisbury1982, 164–66). Land became “the principal capital of seventeenth century America,” “the most precious commodity the Indian had to offer” (Martin Reference Martin1991, 123). In his study of the founding of New England towns in the seventeenth century, John Frederick Martin (1991, 123) observes that there were only two ways to expand landholdings, “the only plentiful source of capital”: “first, to convert more wilderness from public to private ownership; and second, to improve land and thereby (as Locke would later say) increase its value.” These methods encompassed the demand that indigenous people accommodate colonists' presumptions about land. One historian, aiming at circumspection, wrote that “[t]he settlers seem always to have evaluated the Indian land solely in their own terms: no evidence exists that the colonists understood land values in the natives' terms or ever consulted the natives in determining the price” (Kawashima Reference Kawashima1986, 59–60).

In the mid-seventeenth century, land increasingly became the subject of credit practices. One way colonists imposed their own conception of property on land was first to impose their own conception of money and credit on indigenous people. Colonists extended credit to indigenous people to draw them into debt, inducing them to then take out “mortgages” on which they would later foreclose. However, when colonists used the imported mortgage form to foreclose, they not only insisted on the English conception of land, ignoring indigenous understandings of belonging to a place, but they widened the existing breach between English and indigenous conceptions of land by abandoning age-old English hesitations about treating land in the manner of chattel, thus creating a brand-new American commodity.

Indeed, it appears that settlers adapted their economic practices for the Indian trade in order to exploit the difference between settler and Indian conceptions of credit, trade, and land. Peter Thomas (Reference Thomas1979, 171) understates the situation by commenting, “one is still not sure that decades later ‘credit’ was a concept which the [Connecticut River] Valley tribesmen fully understood.” Since “credit was alien to the local villagers,” it did not work well as a method for obtaining moveable goods; “the ‘sale’ of a trade good ‘on credit’ was too readily confused with the indigenous idea of a ‘gift’ for the distinction to be immediately apparent” (Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 170). Henry Smith argued that granting Indians credit was likely

William Pynchon, who established Springfield in 1636 and dominated the Indian trade in the region, contended that such contracts rarely worked, and vehemently opposed the use of credit to bring in maize or furs (Green Reference Green1888, 26; Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 119, 170–71).

When it came to land, however, colonists did not need to wait for tribesmen to deliver goods to settle their debts. They could initiate action to claim lands, and did so. Subsequently, the practice of extending “credit” to natives, who had no conception of the practice, “caused an inordinate amount of controversy, particularly after Indian land became standard collateral” (Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 171). The impact of this shift, Thomas writes, “was immediate and widespread.” Mortgage foreclosure became regular during the 1660s, leading to the colonial laws of the 1670s instituting foreclosure. Indeed, William's son John Pynchon did not hesitate to foreclose on fellow colonists' mortgages, as well as Indians', after advancing goods to them on credit (Pynchon Account Books 1652–1702; Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 324–35; Bridenbaugh and Tomlinson Reference Bridenbaugh and Tomlinson1985, 315). Thomas (Reference Thomas1979, 324) argues that “the move” to use land as collateral for credit, widespread by 1660, “may be seen as a logical extension of a practice which had become a cornerstone of the colonial economic system.”

In Springfield, William Pynchon used tremendous amounts of wampum to acquire a monopoly on the fur trade in the region: he extended credits to fellow townsmen for manufacturing wampum, or stringing together the beads, and sought to acquire the currency for local trade, but primarily to develop trade with the local natives.Footnote ²¹ After William returned to England in 1652, John continued to run the Pynchon store in the Connecticut River Valley for more than half a century, and accumulated one of the most extensive private landholdings in colonial Massachusetts. In the most extensive credit account he held for a native person, consisting of twenty-two transactions between September 23, 1659 and September 14, 1660, Pynchon allowed the Norwottock Sachem Umpanchela to take a variety of goods on credit, including numerous coats, wampum, “shag” cotton, and the occasional pair of breeches (Pynchon Account Books 1652–1702, Vol. 2). In July, to settle his outstanding debt of £75, Umpanchela executed a deed for land. Pynchon then assigned this land to the inhabitants of Hadley as West Hadley, now Hatfield. The books show no record of how the town of Hadley paid him, but Harry Andrew Wright (Reference Wright1941, 190) reports that “in other similar cases, he often accepted in full payment, a sizable tract in a wilderness that was about to become a settled community, as in this instance.” By the deed's terms, Umpanchela reserved some fields and land for the tribe's use, but later mortgaged them with additional cornfields at Nattacouse for three coats, two yards of shag cotton, and two yards of Kersey cloth (Pynchon Account Books 1652–1702, Vol. 2). Pynchon foreclosed on these lands for Hadley Towne in December 1660 (Pynchon Account Books 1652–1702, Vol. 2; Wright Reference Wright1905, 37–39).

Wright's account, titled “The Techniques of Seventeenth Century Indian Land Purchasers,” strongly indicates that Umpanchela's band fundamentally did not understand the Englishmen's conception of land. Wright wrote that the settlers at Hadley faced considerable difficulties in trying to remove “the squalid band [that] remained, a pest to be endured” on a parcel of land known at the time of Wright's writing as “Indian Hollow” (1941, 191, 194). Although Wright replicated the colonial refusal to acknowledge the difference between settler and indigenous conceptions of land, as plain as his racism is the fact that the natives did not fully comprehend or accept the terms of trade, especially those indicating that they were to leave. The settlers at Hadley, whom Wright describes as “once-bit twice-shy,” found the “situation too burdensome to be continued,” and persuaded Umpanchela to sell the lands he had reserved, leaving him with only five acres of fenced-in land that he had already agreed would become town property when he died. “Thus,” Wright reports, “did Umpanchela dispose of his great heritage for little more than ‘a riband to stick in his coat’” (Wright Reference Wright1941, 191–95).

Umpanchela's story presents a classic case of predatory lending, involving the deliberate cultivation of debilitating debt in order to extract mortgage on land, followed by foreclosure.Footnote ²² Pynchon's actions suggest that the contact economy furnished fertile ground for a highly destructive form of predatory lending: “equity stripping,” or loaning money based on the equity in a borrower's home with the knowledge that the borrower will not be able to repay it, in order to foreclose and “strip” the equity (Davenport Reference Davenport2003, 543). In this technique, the capital that one extends upfront can become the entirety of the price at which one acquires the land later, widening the price margin for which one can alienate it again on the market. An early merchant like Pynchon could further exacerbate this price margin by engaging in classic price gouging: as Peter Thomas observes, in contrast to the prices that Pynchon charged his subtraders, in his dealings with natives, “we find that there was a 55% mark-up for coats, a 66% mark-up for shirts, a 71–100% increase in the cost of ‘Bilboe rug’ and a 37% increase for shag cotton” (Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 305). Accordingly, “[b]y continuous steps,” Wright tells us, Pynchon “turned his merchandise and his wampum into cash or its equivalent,” accepting furs and land from Indians for wares, and accepting lands, produce, or labor from the English (Wright Reference Wright1941, 187–88).

Incommensurable indigenous and English notions of land were also at work when the English employed the technique of purchasing land from one member of a tribe who lacked authority to speak for the others, as they frequently did (Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 142–43). These exchanges are often described as if the principal problem were that others were unaware of the exchange, and thus could not agree to it. However, unlike the sale of jointly owned property by only one party today, the native parties to these transactions frequently lacked the authority to speak for the collective. Moreover, neither those who struck the deal, nor those left out, believed that they had sold or alienated their land because they did not believe that land could be so alienated. “Deeds” often recorded multiple sequences of transactions, or “confirming deeds” recording instances when parties not present at the original agreement came to contest its validity (see Wright Reference Wright1905). Wright bemoaned the costs of these tactics, since Pynchon and others frequently were pressed to give these individuals more wampum, cloth, and tools to quiet their claims (Wright Reference Wright1941, 193; see also Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 142–43). On rare occasions, natives brought actions for this reason to colonial courts, which more rarely produced settlements of wampum and occupation or use rights for claimants, but never restored ownership rights to the land (Hampshire County Waste Book 1663–1677; Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 327–29). In Hadley, we learn, “eventually the sorely-tried English” began to insist that all members of a tribe come at once to a sale (Wright Reference Wright1941, 193–94).

Wright (Reference Wright1941, 195) states frankly that Umpanchela's story “is a typical exposition of Pynchon's methods. Though varying in details, the fundamentals of his transactions were consistently similar.” By acquiring land for townships in this way, Pynchon held title to the townships until they reimbursed him for the purchase money, and also gave him land rights as a reward for initially financing the towns. In this manner, Pynchon initially purchased and helped to launch the towns of Northampton, Westfield, Deerfield, Hatfield, Suffield, Brookfield, Enfield, and Northfields, in addition to Hadley (Martin 1991, 49–51). Although Pynchon's success was unusual, his techniques were not. While the account books of other seventeenth-century traders did not survive, deeds and court records attest to other New England colonists' foreclosures on Indian land for unsecured debt during this period (including on lands claimed by Metacom, also known as King Philip), when traders regularly extended credit to indigenous communities (see, e.g., Wright Reference Wright1905, 46, 48, 74, 84; Smith Reference Smith1961, 269; Thomas Reference Thomas1979, 325–27; Bangs Reference Bangs2008, 436, 441, 447). Through such predatory lending, credit and its darker face, debt, became a mechanism of Anglo-American ascendance and indigenous decline as many colonists acquired large tracts of Indian land, from Massachusetts to Virginia and through the Connecticut River Valley, making foreclosure increasingly quotidian (Kawashima Reference Kawashima1986, 62; Banner Reference Banner2005, 55).

Mortgage foreclosure was used by individual traders, groups, and governmental associations, as illustrated in the following story about the land-grabbing efforts of Humphrey Atherton, a captain in the Massachusetts militia. During the decades following Miantonomo's assassination, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island disputed between themselves for Narragansett territory. In the midst of the subsequent uncertainty, Atherton “was determined to obtain Narragansett land by one means or another,” and early sought to convince John Winthrop, Jr., who would eventually become Governor of Connecticut, to join him in the endeavor. Though Winthrop disavowed his involvement in Atherton's projects, his name was on the list of Atherton's partners who paid for and received a share of the lands (Dunn Reference Dunn1956, 70–71).

When the Narragansetts protested these activities, Connecticut called on the New England Confederation in the spring of 1660 to punish them for their “disturbances.” That September, the Confederation Commissioners, including Winthrop, issued an ultimatum to the Narragansett sachems: if they did not pay 595 fathoms of wampum within four months to the governor of Connecticut “in expiation for their crimes,” Connecticut would use force to exact the sum. However, “[i]n case the sachems could not produce such a large supply of wampum, they were graciously to be permitted to mortgage the whole of the Narragansett Country to the New England Confederation.” Atherton intervened, and offered to pay the wampum to Governor Winthrop, if the Confederation would transfer the mortgage to his company. Atherton thus proposed a secondary purchase of a mortgage, or to trade in Indian debt itself, for value of potential foreclosure. “Winthrop balked,” Dunn writes, “but Atherton swore there was ‘nothing but plaineness' in the scheme, and he persuaded Winthrop to accept his wampum” (Dunn Reference Dunn1956, 69–72).

Atherton foreclosed on the entire Narragansett country within six months. Although the dispute over title to these lands did not end there, the episode shows how debt had become tangible leverage in transactions in the contact economy—an asset that colonists could create by extending credit in the first place, that they could thus trade among themselves. In other words, they created a secondary market in the contact economy for indigenous debt to circulate between settlers, by granting credit not on the basis of the borrower's ability to pay, but for the collateral attached.

While predatory lending created mortgage obligations, the constant shadow of force, whether in the shape of formal, military threats or more diffuse forms of coercion, decided outcomes in the context of the contact economy. In colonial America, as now, the crucial elements of predatory lending include targeting, threatening, deceiving, manipulating, and defrauding the most vulnerable borrowers, who have limited monetary resources, lack financial education, and are often elderly or nonwhite, or both. After Metacom's War, for example, Umpanchela's band finally found itself surrounded by hostile colonists and “deserted the Valley,” so that “all remaining Indian lands were taken over by the English” (Wright Reference Wright1941, 195). As O'Brien (Reference O'Brien1997, 132–43) demonstrates in her study of colonial Natick, even in the absence of formal mortgage agreements, debt often effectively prevented Indians from being able to refuse offers of sale, especially for land whose value had been diminished in value by white settlement and subsequent game shortages. Under such circumstances, without regulation or fear of retribution, predatory lenders targeted borrowers who “they believe[d] [we]re most vulnerable and susceptible to the lenders' predatory tactics,” who they believed would default on their debts, and who possessed objects that lenders were glad to take in lieu of monetary payment (Davenport Reference Davenport2003, 533).