Savage, Thomas, 1608 - 1682

Thomas Savage was the son of William Savage of Taunton, Somerset, England, who immigrated to Boston in 1635.  Two years later, he married Faith Hutchinson, the daughter of William and Ann Hutchinson.  A member of the colony’s Artillery Company, he became its captain in 1651 and captain of the Second Boston Militia Company the following year.  He represented Boston, Hingham, and Andover to the Massachusetts General Court.  In the summer of 1675, Governor John Leverett appointed Savage, James Oliver, and Thomas Brattle as the colony’s agents to mediate with Philip.  Shortly thereafter, he took command of a force of English that set up fortifications at Swansea, Mount Hope, and Pocassett.  The following year, Savage, under orders from the United Colonies, assembled an army of six hundred Massachusetts and Connecticut men at Brookfield, Massachusetts and marched them to protect Hadley.  He held fairly progressive views on Indians for his time, arguing that “Christian Indians should be treated as ‘citizens’ and trusted to fight” for the English.  In fact, a number of Indians served under his command, including the Punkapoag, William Ahauton.  Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip’s War, 87-101. Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 54, 57, 98.  Louise A. Breen, Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630-1692 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12.  Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.