An introduction to Thomas Stanton, by Stanton expert and historian Jane Edmundson. Copyright Jane Edmundson. (This is a work in progress and we look forward to more from Mrs. Edmundson.)

An Introduction to Thomas Stanton

Dramatically, Thomas Stanton’s life in the New World is upside down. It started with his heroic deeds at the Fairfield Swamp Fight, in 1637, and ended sadly with a long illness, its name and nature unknown, on December 3, 1677. In 1636 Stanton’s first recorded appearance in Connecticut was as interpreter for John Winthrop, Jr., at an interview with the great Pequot sachem, Sassacus, held at the mouth of the Connecticut River, today’s Saybrook. Stanton must have been about twenty-one years old and had learned the Algonquian language trading with the Indians in Connecticut. The subject of the talks was the 1634 treaty between Massachusetts Bay and the Pequots, who were seeking trade with the English. Neither side had lived up to its obligations, and, as a protest, Winthrop returned the traditional gift of furs sent to Winthrop’s father at the treaty signing. This was one of several provocative moves by the English that led to the Pequot War. It was a military although not a moral victory for the settlers, depriving the once powerful tribe of its liberty, its territory, and its identity for many years to come.

More happily, the interview was the beginning of a life-long friendship between Stanton and Winthrop, surviving in spite of the trials of working together in trying times. Perhaps the relationship lasted because there was a senior, Winthrop, and a junior, Stanton, who often asked for, and always received, help and support. Stanton reciprocated by providing his rare way with words. It has been said that he had a silver tongue, and he used it to good effect both officially and personally by intervening on behalf of others. Certainly Winthrop outranked the younger man socially and educationally, and, in this writer’s opinion, he was the only person in colonial Connecticut, who outranked Stanton in interest and sheer charisma.

They must have truly enjoyed each other’s company because at one time they contemplated the close confinement of a trip to England together. Unfortunately, Stanton was not as popular with his fellow Englishmen as he was with his fellow Americans, perhaps because interpreters were not always trusted, and perhaps because of the volatile temper he displayed in another interview that ended equally unsatisfactorily.

That next interview took place a year later, again at Saybrook. Lion Gardiner, the builder and commander of the new fort, was beleaguered by Pequots, whose patience with the illegal immigrants in their midst was growing thin. It had become very risky to set foot outside the palisade, as several ambushes had proved; on one occasion Gardiner himself had been “shot with many arrows” but his buff coat had preserved him.

Consequently, when Stanton was becalmed on the river, in the spring of 1637, Gardiner recognized an opportunity to communicate with his adversaries. He grabbed his pistol and his sword, and the two men positioned themselves on a huge tree stump about 190 feet [twelve poles which measure 16 feet each] outside the gates. Three men soon appeared, and through Stanton, Gardiner began a dialogue that he recalled many years later. What follows is merely a summary.

Gardiner told Stanton not to give any direct answers, as he was not authorized to negotiate without the approval of the authorities in Massachusetts. Also he was not to answer anything without telling Gardiner first, as he did not feel that he knew “the mind of the rest of the English.” The Indians called to them to come closer, but Gardiner “would not let Thomas go any farther than the stump of the tree, and I stood by him; then they asked who we were and he answered, Thomas and Lieutenant….”

The most telling question from the Pequots was, were the English accustomed to killing women and children?

“We said they should see that hereafter. So they were silent a space, and then they said, We are Pequots and have killed Englishmen, and can kill them as mosquetoes, and we will go to Connectecutt and kill men, women, and children, and we will take away the horses, cows, and hogs. When Thomas Stanton had told me this, he prayed me to shoot that rogue, for, said he, he hath an Englishman’s coat on, and saith that he had killed three, and these other four have their cloathes on their backs. I said, No, it is not the manner of a parley, but have patience and I shall fit them ere they go. Nay, now or never, said he; so when he could get no answer but this last, I bid him tell them that they should nott go to Connectecott, for if they did kill all the men, and take all the rest as they said, it would do them no good but hurt, for English women are lazy, and can’t do their work; horses and cows will spoil your corn-fields, and the hogs their clam-banks, and so undo them:….” 1

The Pequots scattered when Gardener signaled his men to fire his two small cannons over their heads. Two days later, on April 23, after the famous Pequot raid on Wethersfield, it was fortunate that the sackers’ aim was off or a “great canoe wherein the [captured] maidens were.” The shot missed, and the Swain girls were saved by the kindly care of Wincumbone, wife of a high-ranking Pequot sachem, Mononotto, and the good offices of Lion Gardener and a Dutch trader. However, nine English were killed and cattle slaughtered. It is also fortunate that a wind had come up and TS had sailed away, because the Indians in other canoes had donned the clothes of the men they had killed, and they jeered and hurled insults at the fort. Jeering was something that Stanton could not endure, and it was something at which the Indians seemed to have excelled. If he had witnessed the scene, his tantrum of the earlier encounter certainly would have made the history books.

That happy story is of the kindly treatment the girls received while in captivity. Wincumbone, the wife of Mononotto, a high Pequot sachem, saw to their care, and it is gratifying to report that when Stanton led her from the swamp at Fairfield she was treated with consideration, unlike many others. The surrenderers were promised their lives, but they were parceled out as servants, or sold as slaves in the Caribbean—not, it is to be hoped, what Stanton saved them for.

Stanton’s career went on from its auspicious beginning in that first crucial conversation through forty-two years of arduous public service, He was appointed a public officer and interpreter by the Connecticut General Court on April 5, 1638, and was required to attend all meetings where he might be needed. From then on, he heard first hand all matters of public concern. When the United Colonies of New England was founded in 1643 he soon began to interpret for them as well and so was thrust into the most important meetings of the period and into a life of danger, challenge, and accomplishment.

At the end of the Pequot War, Stanton endangered his own life and risked a dreadful death by entering the "dark and dismal swamp" to save the lives of 300 desperate Pequots who had taken refuge there. He saved the lives of 180 Pequot women, children, and old men and twenty local Indians, by talking them into surrendering before the final attack. Two months before the Fairfield Swamp Fight of July 13 and 14, 1637, the English had massacred between 400 and 700 Pequots at Mystic, Connecticut, and there were doubts as to how the colonists should handle this new situation. Even then, public relations were an important factor in policy making. John Mason, who had ordered the burning of the Mystic village, tried to talk Stanton out of going into the swamp, but he knew that Stanton understood “their language and manners,” and finally allowed the young man to try.

This was only the first of a lifetime of successful interventions, but he was attacked and had to be rescued when he re-entered the swamp and tried to persuade the warriors to surrender. This and the brouhaha at Cassacinamon’s dance many years later may have been Stanton’s closest call except for his difficulties with other Englishmen. His brother-in-law once drew his sword on him, he intervened in a contretemps in Rhode Island, and once he was embroiled in a scene when a dinner companion thought Peter Stuyvesant had surrounded his house in New Amsterdam.

After the war, in the autumn of 1637, Thomas Stanton married Anna Lord, sister of Thomas Lord, Jr., the physician contracted to the Three Towns, Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield (the nucleus of the spin-off colony of Connecticut), and Richard Lord, the future prosperous merchant.  an important man in Connecticut political affairs a grantee of the Connecticut charter of 1662. After the sword-rattling disagreement that seems to have ended between the two men, little is heard of the family relationship. However, there were two other brothers, one an ethical business man, the other a rascal who, according to the public records of the colony, deserted his wife with nothing but the clothes she stood up in.  That brother went to Virginia, and reports on his subsequent behavior are contradictory. 

Thomas and Anna’s long and seemingly satisfactory marriage survived what must have been a difficult forty years and ten children.  Often away on his trading and government business, Stanton nonetheless was a caring and concerned husband if two very appealing letters to John Winthrop, Jr., are adequate evidence.

There are many apocryphal tales told of the early years in which the Stantons lived in Hartford.  One of these is that he was a signer of the Fundamental Orders, the founding document of the colony.  He was not—no one was, but, as official interpreter, he was present at the meeting of the General Court when the Orders were adopted. No one actually signed the document because of the tenuous existence of the new colony under Massachusetts' commission. As the founding document of the colony and the first such among the colonies, it has provided for all time the epithet "The Constitution State," on our Connecticut license plates.  

Another distinction claimed for Stanton was that of magistrate of Massachusetts Bay.  This error was one of transcription, “Thomas Stanton” having been misread for “Israel Stoughton” in John Winthrop’s A Short Story, his retelling of the 1636 Anne Hutchinson trial.2 Stanton would have been about twenty-two years old and much too young for such a position.  More likely he was plying his wares amongst the Indians living along the Connecticut River while perfecting his Algonquian. 

The most egregious tale about Stanton’s early life is the one told and retold of his English origins. It has been believed that Stanton came from a landed, armigerous family in Warwickshire, that he attended Oxford University, leaving wealth and privilege to come to the New World. It is said that he walked from Virginia to Boston to satisfy his Puritan beliefs, learning the Algonquian language along the way.  It would have made a delightful introduction to his biography, but, alas, it has been disproved, not just once, but twice, the first time by Clarence Almon Torrey (in The American Genealogist, Volume 14, pp. 86-87) back in the 1930s and more recently by Eugene Cole Zubrinsky in The American Genealogist of January 2006 (a second article to follow).

Much time and energy has been spent on this subject, but as William Alonzo Stanton wrote in his genealogy of the Stanton family, ‘The Stanton Bible,’ it is what the Thomas Stanton of Stonington did that matters.  What he did was to save a great part of the future Pequot people and to set an example of human concern over the cultural abyss from the Stone Age to the Puritan era.  Not many colonists were willing or able, considering the cultural baggage they carried with them, to bridge that enormous gap, but one of those that tried has been given precious little credit.  He was a presence at the shoulder of better known men of the period, most notably John Mason, Lion Gardiner, and John Winthrop, Jr.  Gardiner wrote in his memoir of the Pequot War that the more important figures in history were ignored while lesser characters were immortalized undeservedly.

This writer has filled the margins of books and documents with the notation, "ph TS," meaning "phantom Thomas Stanton."  His record is more carefully and reliably documented than most men’s through the Connecticut Colony Records, the records of the United Colonies, known as the Acts of the Commissioners, the Connecticut Archives, and the Stonington Town Records, on which this article is based. What follows is essentially an outline of his life, a chronology of sorts, summarizing his more colorful moments.  It is filled with incidents which bear the burden of the story with the help of his letters. Little commentary has been attempted on these events, and it is hoped that unnecessary inference will not be dragged in to explain facts that should stand for themselves.

A note from the Author:

To the reader: My study of Thomas Stanton began quite by accident when I was doing my genealogy. I found so many different versions of his life that there had to be factual mistakes lurking everywhere. To try to learn the facts I began searching and just never stopped. It has been the joy of my own long life to become acquainted with this character in the early years of New England, but without the training in history that is necessary for the biography he deserves. For some unknown reason, no one else seems to have accumulated the bits and pieces about him scattered hither and yon in New England archives and histories. For instance, his name may be in the index but not in the text, or in the text but not in the index; his name may appear as an afterthought in a footnote, which may or may not be indexed; his deeds may be recorded while the doer is unnamed or are attributed to someone else. What remains is like a jigsaw puzzle with many, if not most, of the pieces lost by careless children.

What appears here is what I, an amateur historian, have found in print, winnowed imperfectly perhaps, but seemingly reasonable and, one hopes, true. It is presented as a background to the man and what he did. Other people in his life are some of the missing pieces, and as with all that will be found in this work-in-progress, they will appear only as they touch on the main character. The one most lasting perception of my twelve years in pursuing my nine-great grandfather through the wilds of the New World is that I can be wrong, that the truth is elusive even if the facts are all there on a platter. If you, the reader, find me there, remember that this effort is, in essence, only a beginning, a challenge to find anything more that has survived of this delightful, annoying, complicated man --- and then to put him and it all together.

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