A copper alloy medal measuring 14 by 10 centimeters, ovoid in form with a perforation at its upper edge for suspension, was struck by the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1676 and presented on June 20 of that year by Edward Rawson, secretary of the Colony, to the chiefs of Native American tribes who had aided the English during King Philip's War. It is held at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York under catalog number 23/9269 and is documented in the museum's Infinity of Nations exhibition as the only confirmed surviving example of its type. The medal was acquired by the Museum of the American Indian, predecessor to the NMAI, in 1960 from Jester Antiques, described in acquisition records as possibly a British firm, with no documented provenance before that sale. The circumstances that brought the medal from its 1676 recipient to a British antiques dealer in the 20th century are unrecorded. It is among the earliest documented Indian diplomatic medals issued by any English colonial authority in North America and the earliest surviving example from the New England colonies.
Material and Craftsmanship
The medal is struck from copper alloy, a deliberate material choice that distinguished it from the silver medals that would later become the standard for British and American Indian diplomatic gifts throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The use of copper alloy rather than silver reflects either the Colony's constrained material resources during a war that had devastated its economy or a conscious designation of the medal's rank within the hierarchy of diplomatic gifts, or both. Indian peace medals of the colonial period ranged in diameter from approximately 2.5 to 15 centimeters, made of silver or brass, and the Massachusetts Bay example falls within the established size range for medals intended for presentation to leaders of significant but not paramount status.
The obverse of the medal bears an image derived directly from the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which the Colony had used since its founding charter of 1629. The seal depicted a Native American figure in profile holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, with the arrow pointed downward in a conventional peace gesture. A speech scroll emerging from the figure's mouth bore the words "Come Over and Help Us," framing English colonization as a response to an indigenous invitation rather than an imposition. This text, drawn from the New Testament Book of Acts, was the Colony's foundational self-justification for its presence in New England: the Puritan mission to convert the indigenous population. By placing the Colony's seal image on the medal presented to allied Native leaders, the General Court made the medal's message circular and internally contradictory. The image of a Native person asking for English help was given to actual Native people as recognition of the help they had provided to the English.
The perforation at the top of the medal was drilled to allow suspension on a cord or chain, enabling the recipient to wear it as a pectoral ornament. Wearing the medal publicly announced the bearer's alliance with the issuing authority. Among Native recipients of colonial peace medals generally, the medals were incorporated into personal regalia and worn at diplomatic meetings, ceremonies, and inter-tribal encounters, where they communicated the wearer's political affiliations in a visual language intelligible to both Native and European observers.
Form and Features
The medal's ovoid form, 14 centimeters in height and 10 centimeters in width, is larger than a man's palm. Its size made it visible when worn suspended against the chest without requiring close approach to read its imagery. The copper alloy surface would have carried the engraved or struck imagery clearly in its original condition, with the natural warm tone of the metal making the image legible from a short distance. No reverse imagery is documented in the NMAI catalog entry, suggesting the reverse was blank or carried only minimal markings.
The seal image, as a derivation of an existing emblem rather than a purpose-designed medal image, gave the piece an institutional character distinct from later purpose-struck peace medals. The medal announced the Colony's identity and authority through its existing seal rather than through imagery specifically commissioned for the diplomatic relationship. This made the medal simultaneously a personal gift to its recipient and a portable reproduction of the Colony's founding legal and religious self-concept.
Function and Use
The medal was issued at a specific turning point in King Philip's War, the armed conflict from 1675 to 1678 pitting Wampanoag sachem Metacom, called King Philip by the English, and a coalition of Nipmuc, Narragansett, and allied tribes against the New England colonies and their Native allies. The war was, in proportion to population, the deadliest armed conflict in American history. By the spring of 1676, the English position was critical. More than a dozen colonial towns had been reduced to ashes. Every expedition to locate and engage the resistance had failed. The English had by this point committed an act that would define the war's moral character: in October 1675, the Massachusetts General Court had ordered the internment of more than 1,000 Christian Indians, called Praying Indians, who had lived in 14 designated Praying Towns established by Puritan minister John Eliot since 1651 and who had offered their services as scouts from the war's beginning. The Colony rejected this offer and instead confined these converts, primarily Nipmuc and Massachusett peoples, to Deer Island in Boston Harbor through the winter of 1675 to 1676 without adequate food or shelter. Missionary Daniel Gookin, who documented the internment, estimated that more than half of those confined on Deer Island died of cold and starvation before spring. A planned raid by English settlers to kill the remaining survivors was foiled only by a tip to colonial authorities in February 1676.
By the spring of 1676, facing what NMAI documentation describes as "frequent and violent" raids with every colonial expedition failing to find and engage the resistance, the General Court reversed its position and authorized large-scale recruitment of surviving Deer Island internees as scouts. Gookin, who had protested the internment throughout, recorded that "after our Indians went out, the balance turned on the English side." Praying Indian scouts from Natick and other surviving communities, alongside Mohegan warriors who had been allied with the English from the war's beginning, provided the intelligence and tracking capability that colonial forces lacked. The medal was struck and presented on June 20, 1676, to the chiefs of the tribes that had provided this assistance, formally acknowledging the decisive contribution that the Colony had spent the previous year imprisoning rather than accepting.
King Philip was betrayed and killed on August 12, 1676. His body was beheaded and quartered by English soldiers. His wife and nine-year-old son were sold into slavery in the West Indies. The medal's presentation in June 1676 preceded this conclusion by less than two months, issued while the war's outcome remained uncertain and the Colony's dependence on Native allies was total.
Cultural Context
The Praying Towns were John Eliot's central project, established between 1651 and 1675 as Christian indigenous communities where converted Native people lived under English-style governance, spoke English, adopted English agricultural practices, and attended Christian services in their own Algonquian language using a Bible Eliot had translated, the first Bible printed in British North America. By 1674, 14 praying towns existed, with the largest at Natick, Massachusetts, established in 1651 with approximately 145 individuals. The communities represented the most intensive experiment in Christian conversion of Native peoples in the Thirteen Colonies. The Colony's decision to intern their residents at the war's outbreak rather than accept their offers of military service was understood by Eliot, Gookin, and other English observers as both unjust and strategically self-defeating. It was also experienced by the interned communities as a catastrophic betrayal of the terms under which they had reorganized their lives, religious practices, and social structures to meet colonial expectations.
The medal presented on June 20, 1676, to chiefs whose men had fought for the Colony after surviving the Deer Island internment or while their relatives remained interned there carries an internal historical tension that the NMAI exhibition documentation makes explicit. The medal's imagery, depicting a Native person asking for English help, was given to Native people whose help the Colony had initially refused, then accepted under military desperation, as formal recognition. The image was the Colony's founding self-justification. The medal's occasion was a military emergency created by the Colony's own prior decisions.
The broader tradition of Indian peace medals of which this object is the earliest surviving New England example extended from European colonial practice through the early history of the United States, with British, French, and Spanish colonial authorities all using medals to formalize diplomatic relationships with Native leaders from the 17th century onward. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1790 that peace medals "confer no power, and seem to have taken their origin in the European practice of giving medals or other marks of friendship to the negotiators of treaties." The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804 to 1806 carried a large supply of Jefferson peace medals for distribution to tribal leaders, with explicit instructions to recover any French or Spanish medals and replace them with American ones, framing the medals as instruments for asserting replacement of prior political relationships.
Discovery and Preservation
No documentation of the medal's movement from its 1676 recipient to its 1960 acquisition by the Museum of the American Indian survives. Edward Rawson, who presented the medal on June 20, 1676, was the secretary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a position he held from 1650 to 1686, making him the Colony's chief administrative officer for the entire period of the Praying Town system's operation and its destruction. His presentation of the medal to allied chiefs was an official government act. The recipient or recipients are not named in the surviving documentation. The NMAI catalog entry records only that the medal was presented to the chiefs of tribes who had aided the colonists and that it was purchased by the MAI from Jester Antiques in 1960.
The American Numismatic Society in New York holds the most extensive collection of Indian peace medals from the broader tradition, containing examples of nearly every medal issued across the British, French, and American periods. The Massachusetts Historical Society holds British-era medals including examples from George II and George III. The NMAI medal is documented as the only confirmed surviving example of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's 1676 issue.
Why It Matters
The Massachusetts Bay Colony peace medal of 1676 is the earliest confirmed surviving Indian diplomatic medal from any English colonial authority in New England and one of the earliest in North America, predating the standardized British and American medal systems by decades. Its presentation on June 20, 1676, to the chiefs of tribes whose military contribution had reversed the course of a war the Colony had been losing documents in physical form the moment of the Colony's formal acknowledgment of a debt it had spent the preceding months creating by imprisoning rather than accepting the allied indigenous communities it now rewarded. The medal's imagery, reproducing the Colony's foundational seal depicting a Native American asking the English to "Come Over and Help Us," placed on a medal given to Native people whose help the Colony had rejected and then desperately sought, makes the object a compressed record of the central contradiction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's relationship with the indigenous communities it had converted, confined, and ultimately depended on for its military survival.