Stories about my Mother 13
Hidden in amongst the intertwined branches of my mother’s tree, back through a long meandering series of maternal lines, is one of my 9th great-grandfathers, Lieutenant Thomas Leffingwell Jr. I was initially more interested in the woman he married, but then I started to realize who he was. He is considered by some literary historians to be one of the inspirations for the character of Natty Bumppo in James Fennimore Cooper’s series of novels called The Leatherstocking Tales which include, The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans.
In the stories, Bumppo is a white man who, although he was educated by Christians, grows up among the Delaware people. As an adult, he becomes a kind of Colonial-era superhero. Fearless and a crack shot with the long rifle he has many thrilling adventures alongside his Mohican foster brother, Chingachgook, and his nephew Uncas. Daniel Day-Lewis played him in the latest film version of The Last of the Mohicans.
The real man, my ancestor Thomas Leffingwell, Jr. was born in 1624, probably in the county of Essex, in England. At some point in the next two decades, he makes the journey across the Atlantic. In 1646, when he was twenty-two, he married a woman named Mary in Hartford, Connecticut. The reason I was interested in Mary is that she was either English or, according to conjecture, very possibly Mohegan. Her maiden name is thought to have been White or Whyte but it may have been Singing Lark.
This is where the genealogical record gets difficult to navigate. While there were several Thomas Leffingwells in Connecticut, there were countless Marys. Historically, nobody paid much attention to wives unless they did something out of the norm. Sometimes their gravestones will only say “wife of so-and-so” without saying what their name was. Inheritance was almost always through the male line. Traditionally, our last names have only ever come down to us through the male line. DNA, however, doesn’t have that cultural bias. We get just as much of our genetic material from our female ancestors as we do from our male ones.
The person on Ancestry.com who did the work on Mary makes a compelling argument that she was Mohegan. He claims that one of their descendants’ DNA had a significant percentage of Native American markers in it and that there was no other route it could have come from. He also cites a few written records he found to support his claim. Unfortunately, this person also says that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Last of the Mohicans, so their research accuracy leaves something to be desired. There is a danger in wanting to find a certain family connection. It means that you start by trying to prove you are on the same branch rather than being open to simply discovering what is there. You need to take all the information in, not just the parts that prove your claim.
According to my DNA testing, I don’t have any Native American genetic markers. That doesn’t mean that I’m not descended from some people who did. We don’t get an equal amount of our DNA from each ancestor. We get a little from this one, some from that one, and none from a lot of them. My sister might have the markers if my mother got any of them. Even if they don’t, eleven generations back are a long way for genetic material to travel and there’s only room for so much of it in each of us.
IF my 9th great-grandmother was indeed the Mary who was Mohegan, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility given who Thomas Leffingwell, Jr. was. If she was English, it would still leave Thomas with a notable life story.
By 1637, when he was thirteen, Thomas was in the Saybrook Colony in Connecticut. He probably would have sailed into Boston and then made his way south.
The death of so many Native American people from the diseases brought over from Europe by the White settlers left a kind of power vacuum in what is now Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The surviving tribes began fighting each other for control over both the land as well as for the fur-trading rights with the Europeans. On one side were the Wampanoag, who had established a relationship with the colonists in Plymouth to the north, the Narragansett who lived along the coast to the east, the Lenape who lived to the south and were the people who originally were living where I grew up in New Jersey, and the Mohegans, among others, to the west. On the other side were mainly the Pequot.
The Mohegans aligned themselves with the English, and the Pequots with the Dutch. When the Pequots attacked another tribe who were trading with settlers near Hartford, their relationship with the Dutch fell apart. Up until the European arrival, the Pequots had largely controlled the production of wampum. After arrival, the making of the currency became centralized in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, taking away their control.
The Pequots were being pushed out. Unsurprisingly, they fought back. There were raids and attacks from both sides and tensions escalated.
John Mason, who was also born in Britain, was an English soldier who had settled in Connecticut. In 1637 the Connecticut River towns put together a militia and put Captain John Mason in command. On May 26th, Mason’s forces along with Mohegan and Narragansett allies attacked the Pequot’s fortified village in what is now Mystic, Connecticut, set it on fire and massacred hundreds of them. The few survivors were captured and sent as slaves to the English colonists in Bermuda. Some were given to the tribes who had fought against them.
When Thomas Leffingwell arrived in Saybrook, he came to the attention of John Mason. By 1645, the Narragansetts and the Mohegans were now fighting each other. During the siege of Fort Shantock, a Mohegan stronghold, Mason sent Thomas in with supplies to relieve the Mohegans who were still allied with the British. The Mohegan leader, Uncas, was so grateful that he granted Leffingwell some land. Leffingwell settled there and founded what is now the town of Norwich, Connecticut.
Leffingwell had a long military career. When Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who had created the alliance with the Plymouth settlement died, his son Metacom succeeded him. Metacom took the name King Philip in his dealings with the Europeans. Tensions between the Wampanoag and the ever-expanding Plymouth colony increased until 1675 when a full-out war broke out between them. What we now call King Philip’s War is considered to have been the deadliest of all the colonial wars.
During it, Lieutenant Leffingwell commanded an expedition against the Narragansett and captured the son of their chief. Along with a man named Captain George Denison, he organized a volunteer militia that ranged through the woodlands to prevent any Narragansett from trying to settle there. George Denison is also one of my 7th great-grandfathers.
More than a thousand colonists died and over three thousand Wampanoag. The Plymouth Colony lost 8% of its adult male population. Over a thousand Wampanoag survivors were sold off as slaves and transported to the British-controlled islands of Jamaica and Barbados as well as to the European markets in Spain and Portugal.
After the war, Thomas Leffingwell worked as a surveyor. In 1671, the Connecticut Colony had agreed that 20,000 acres of land between what is now New London and Norwich, would permanently belong to the Mohegan people. European colonists, however, ignored the agreement and started chipping away at it. In 1704, the Mohegans filed a lawsuit to force the colonists to follow the agreement. Queen Anne appointed Leffingwell to be a commissioner in the hearings. Eventually, with Leffingwell’s counsel, she sided with the Mohegans. The colony, however, ignored the royal decree and reduced the Mohegan’s land to 5,000 acres. Their current reservation, where the Mohegan Sun Casino is, is now only 507 acres.
Uncas as the principal sachem or chief of the Mohegans at that time was forced to make some extremely difficult decisions for his people. Aligning with one enemy against another is always a double-edged sword – you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Did he make the right choice? In the little museum on the reservation, he is still revered. Under his leadership, his tribe survived.
If Thomas Leffingwell, Jr’s wife Mary truly was the Mohegan woman that the researcher online claims she was, then Uncas would be one of my 10th great-grandfathers. Mary Singing Lark was his daughter.
In Norwich, Connecticut at the end of a little road right next to I-395 is the town’s Founder’s Cemetery. It sits between two houses and has only one marker in it. The marker is for John Mason but on it are the names of the rest of the town’s early pioneers and first on the list is Sergeant Thomas Leffingwell. Standing on the small, grassy plot, you can see the traffic of the highway beyond the trees behind the monument. Turning my back on it and looking at the grass and the trees, I forced myself to turn the rushing cars into the cascading water of the river and I felt like I could almost imagine that far-off time.
Whether or not he married a Native American woman, Thomas Leffingwell, Jr. does seem to have advocated for the Mohegan tribe and been their friend. Did he, like the character of Natty Bumppo ever live with the tribe? I guess I have a bit more reading to do to find out. I want to believe that he was a genuine ally of the Mohegans. So many of my ancestors seem to have owned slaves and taken the land of whoever was in their way without a second thought. It looks like maybe, just maybe, Thomas Leffingwell, Jr. might have given it a second thought.
However fictionalized, James Fennimore Cooper has kept the story of this time in our history alive. Even as an echo, he’s kept my ancestor’s memory from completely fading away. I read The Last of the Mohicans when I was a kid. I’m going to have to add it to the stack, again.