John Mason (military commander)

John Mason c.1600-1672, American colonial military commander, b. England. He was an army officer before emigrating (c.1630) to Massachusetts and then (1635) to Windsor, Conn. When the Pequot threatened to wipe out the new colonies on the Connecticut River, he and John Underhill led an expedition (1637) against them with the aid of other Native Americans under Uncas and Miantonomo and virtually destroyed the tribe. After this campaign—generally called the Pequot War—Major Mason was a distinguished political leader in Connecticut until his death.

Bibliography: See his narrative of the Pequot War in A Brief History of the Pequot War (1736, repr. 1971); biography by L. B. Mason (1935).

Mason, John (c.1600–72),arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (c. 1630), where he became the military hero of the Pequot War and later commander in chief of the colony and holder of various offices. From memory he wrote a simple, honest, and blunt account of the war, originally published in Increase Mather's A Relation of the Troubles Which Have Hapned in New‐England … (1677) and erroneously attributed to John Allyn. The work was edited by Thomas Prince as A Brief History of the Pequot War (1736).

Mason, John (c. 1600–72) born in England, commander of the Connecticut forces in the Pequot War (1636–37), a series of clashes between colonial settlers and local Indians. In an 1637 retaliatory attack, Mason's combined force of Connecticut and Massachusetts militia and other Indian tribes set upon a Pequot village, taking it by surprise and burning it and its inhabitants to the ground, killing any that managed to escape the flames. Mason who himself wrote the history of the encounter on the basis of which later historians condemn his cruelty.