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King Philip's War, sometimes called the First Indian War, Metacom's War, Metacomet's War, or Metacom's Rebellion,[1] was an armed conflict between Native American inhabitants of present-day southern New England and English colonists and their Native American allies in 1675–76. The war is named after the main leader of the Native American side, Metacomet, known to the English as "King Philip".[2] Major Benjamin Church emerged as the Puritan hero of the war; it was his company of Puritan rangers and Native American allies that finally hunted down and killed King Philip on August 12, 1676.[3] The war continued in northern New England (primarily on the Maine frontier) after King Philip was killed, until a treaty was signed at Casco Bay in April 1678.[4]
The war was the single greatest calamity to occur in seventeenth-century Puritan New England. In little over a year, twelve of the region's towns were destroyed and many more damaged, its economy was all but ruined, and much of its population was killed, including one-tenth of all men available for military service.[5] Proportionately, it was one of the bloodiest and costliest wars in the history of North America.[6] More than half of New England's towns were assaulted by Native American warriors.[7]
Nearly all the English colonies in America were settled without any significant English government support, being used mainly as an English safety valve to minimize religious and other conflicts in England. King Philip's War was the beginning of the development of a greater American identity, for the trials and tribulations suffered by the colonists without significant British government support gave them a group identity separate and distinct from subjects of the Parliament of England and the English Crown.[8]
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Plymouth, Massachusetts, was established in 1620 with significant early help from Native Americans, particularly Squanto and Massasoit, Metacomet's father and chief of the Wampanoag tribe. Salem, Boston, and several small towns were established around Massachusetts Bay between 1628 and 1640. The building of towns such as Windsor, Connecticut (est. 1633), Hartford, Connecticut (est. 1636), Springfield, Massachusetts (est. 1636), and Northampton, Massachusetts (est. 1654), on the Connecticut River and towns such as Providence, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay (est. 1636), progressively encroached on traditional Native American territories. Prior to King Philip's War, tensions fluctuated between different groups of Native Americans and the colonists, but relations were generally peaceful. As the colonists' small population of a few thousand grew larger over time and the number of their towns increased, the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, and other small tribes were each treated individually (many were traditional enemies of each other) by the English colonial officials of Rhode Island, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut and the New Haven colony. As their population increased, the New Englanders continued to expand their settlements along the region's coastal plain and up the Connecticut River valley. By 1675 they had even established a few small towns in the interior between Boston and the Connecticut River settlements.
The Native American population throughout the Northeast had been significantly reduced by pandemics of smallpox, spotted fever, typhoid and measles brought by contact with European fishermen, starting in about 1618, two years before the first colony at Plymouth had been settled.[9]
Shifting alliances between different Algonkian peoples and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), represented by leaders such as Massasoit, Sassacus, Uncas and Ninigret, and the colonial polities of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth Colony, Rhode Island and Connecticut, negotiated a troubled peace for several decades.
Metacom, known to the English as "King Philip", became Sachem of the Pokanoket and Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy after the death in 1662 of his older brother, the Grand Sachem Wamsutta. Well known to the English before his ascension as paramount chief to the Wampanoag, Metacom distrusted the colonists. Wamsutta had been visiting the Marshfield home of Josiah Winslow, the governor of Plymouth Colony, for peaceful negotiations, and suddenly collapsed and died just after leaving the town.
Metacom began negotiating with other Native American tribes against the interests of the Plymouth Colony soon after the deaths of his father Massasoit in 1661, the Plymouth colony's greatest ally, and his brother Wamsutta in 1662. For almost half a century after the colonists' arrival, Massasoit had maintained an uneasy alliance with the English as a source of desired trade goods and a counter-weight to traditional enemies, the Pequot, Narragansett, and the Mohegan. Massasoit's price was colonial incursion into Wampanoag territory as well as English political interference. Maintaining good relations with the English became increasingly difficult, as the English colonists continued pressuring the Indians for permission to buy land for new towns. The colonists' refusal to stop this practice, combined with Wamsutta's suspicious death, were some of the pressures that led to Metacom's (King Philip's) War.
John Sassamon, a Native American Christian convert ("Praying Indian") and early Harvard graduate, translator, and adviser to Metacom, contributed to the outbreak of the war. He spread a rumor to Plymouth Colony officials alleging King Philip's attempts to arrange Native American attacks on widely dispersed colonial settlements. King Philip was brought before a public court to answer to the rumors, and after the court admitted it had no proof, it warned him that any other rumors—baseless or otherwise—would be rewarded with further confiscations of Wampanoag land and guns. Not long after, Sassamon was murdered; his body was found in an ice-covered pond (Assawompset Pond), allegedly killed by a few of Philip's Wampanoag, angry at his betrayal.
On the testimony of a Native American witness, the Plymouth Colony officials arrested three Wampanoag, who included one of Metacom's counselors. A jury, among whom were some Indian members, convicted the men of Sassamon's murder; they were hanged on June 8, 1675 (O.S.), at Plymouth. Some Wampanoag believed that both the trial and the court's sentence infringed on Wampanoag sovereignty. On June 20, 1675 (O.S.) a band of Pokanoket, possibly without Philip's approval, attacked several isolated homesteads in the small Plymouth colony settlement of Swansea. Laying siege to the town, they destroyed it five days later and killed several inhabitants and others coming to their aid. On June 27, 1675 (O.S.) (July 7, 1675 New style date; See Old Style and New Style dates) there was a full eclipse of the moon in the New England area[10] that the various tribes in New England looked at as a good omen for attacking the colonists.[11] Officials from Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony responded quickly to the attacks on Swansea; on June 28 they sent a punitive military expedition that destroyed the Wampanoag town at Mount Hope (modern Bristol, Rhode Island).
The white population of New England totaled about 80,000 people, including about 16,000 men of military age. They lived in 110 towns, of which 64 were in Massachusetts. Many towns had built strong garrison houses for defense, and others had stockades enclosing most of the houses. Each town had local militias of essentially all eligible men that were expected to be individually armed and trained by each town. Their officers were usually elected by popular vote of the militia members. The region included roughly 10,000 Indians (exact numbers are unavailable), including about 4,000 Narragansett of western Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut, 2,400 Nipmuck of central and western Massachusetts, and 2,400 combined in the Massachusetts and Pawtucket tribes, living about Massachusetts Bay and extending northwest to Maine. The Wampanoag and Pokanoket of Plymouth and eastern Rhode Island are thought to have numbered fewer than 1,000. About one in four were considered to be of the warrior class. By then the Indians had almost universally adopted steel knives, tomahawks and flintlock muskets as their weapons of choice. The various tribes had no common government, and though the males were often feuding and fighting, spoke dialects of the same Algonquian language and shared similar cultures.[12]
The war quickly spread, and soon involved the Podunk and Nipmuck tribes. During the summer of 1675, the Native Americans attacked at Middleborough and Dartmouth (July 8), Mendon (July 14), Brookfield (August 2), and Lancaster (August 9). In early September they attacked Deerfield, Hadley, and Northfield (possibly giving rise to the Angel of Hadley legend).
The New England Confederation, comprising the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth Colony, New Haven Colony and Connecticut Colony, declared war on the Native Americans on September 9, 1675. The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, settled mostly by Puritan dissidents, tried to remain mostly neutral, but like the Narragansett they were dragged inexorably into the conflict. The next colonial expedition was to recover crops from abandoned fields along the Connecticut River for the coming winter and included almost 100 farmers/militia plus teamsters to drive the wagons. They were ambushed, with about 50 colonists being killed, in the Battle of Bloody Brook (near Hadley, Massachusetts) on September 18, 1675.[13]
The next attack was organized on October 5, 1675, on the Connecticut River's largest settlement at the time, Springfield, Massachusetts. During the attack, nearly all of Springfield's buildings were burned to the ground, including the town's grist mill. Most of the Springfielders who escaped unharmed took cover at Miles Morgan's house, a resident who had constructed one of Springfield's only fortified blockhouses.[14] An Indian servant who worked for Morgan managed to escape and later alerted the Massachusetts Bay troops under the command of Major Samuel Appleton, who broke through to Springfield and drove off the attackers. Morgan's sons were famous Indian fighters in the territory. The Indians in battle killed his son, Peletiah, in 1675. Springfielders later honored Miles Morgan with a large statue in Court Square, the center of Springfield's urban Metro Center.[14]
On November 2, Plymouth Colony governor Josiah Winslow led a combined force of colonial militia against the Narragansett tribe. The Narragansett had not been directly involved in the war, but they had sheltered many of the Wampanoag women and children. Several of their warriors were reported in several Indian raiding parties. The colonists distrusted the tribe and did not understand the various alliances. As the colonial forces went through Rhode Island, they found and burned several Indian towns which had been abandoned by the Narragansett, who had retreated to a massive fort in a frozen swamp. The cold weather in December froze the swamp so it was relatively easy to traverse. Led by an Indian guide, on a very cold December 16, 1675, the colonial force found the Narragansett fort near present-day South Kingstown, Rhode Island. A combined force of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut militia numbering about 1,000 men, including about 150 Pequots and Mohican Indian allies, attacked the Indian fort. The fierce battle that followed is known as the Great Swamp Fight. It is believed that the militia killed about 300 Narragansett (exact figures are unavailable). The militia burned the fort (occupying over 5 acres (20,000 m2) of land) and destroyed most of the tribe's winter stores.
Most of the Narragansett warriors and their families escaped into the frozen swamp. Facing a winter with little food and shelter, the entire surviving Narragansett tribe was forced out of quasi-neutrality and joined the fight. The colonists lost many of their officers in this assault: about 70 of their men were killed and nearly 150 more wounded. Lacking supplies for an extended campaign the rest of the colonial assembled forces returned to their homes. The nearby towns in Rhode Island provided care for the wounded until they could return to their homes.[15]
Throughout the winter of 1675–76, Native Americans attacked and destroyed more frontier settlements in their effort to expel the English colonists. Attacks were made at Andover, Bridgewater, Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough, Medfield, Medford, Millis, Portland, Providence, Rehoboth, Scituate, Seekonk, Simsbury, Sudbury, Suffield, Warwick, Weymouth, and Wrentham, including what is modern-day Plainville. The famous account written and published by Mary Rowlandson after the war gives a colonial captive's perspective on it. It was part of a genre known as captivity narratives.[16]
The spring of 1676 marked the high point for the combined tribes when, on March 12, they attacked Plymouth Plantation. Though the town withstood the assault, the natives had demonstrated their ability to penetrate deep into colonial territory. They attacked three more settlements: Longmeadow (near Springfield), Marlborough, and Simsbury were attacked two weeks later. They killed Captain Pierce[17] and a company of Massachusetts soldiers between Pawtucket and the Blackstone's settlement. Several colonial men were allegedly tortured and buried at Nine Men's Misery in Cumberland, as part of the Native Americans' ritual treatment of enemies. The natives burned the abandoned capital of Providence to the ground on March 29. At the same time, a small band of Native Americans infiltrated and burned part of Springfield while the militia was away.
The tide of war slowly began to turn in the colonists' favor later in the spring of 1676, as it became a war of attrition; both sides were determined to eliminate the other. The Native Americans had succeeded in driving the colonists back into their larger towns, but the Indians' supplies, particularly in powder and lead, nearly always sufficient for only a season or so, were running out. The few hundred colonists of Rhode Island became an island colony for a time as their capital at Providence was sacked and burned and the colonists were driven back to Newport and Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island. The Connecticut River towns with their thousands of acres of cultivated crop land, known as the bread basket of New England, had to manage their crops by limiting their crop lands and working in large armed groups for self protection.[18]:20 Towns such as Springfield, Hatfield, Hadley and Northampton, Massachusetts fortified their towns, reinforced their militias and held their ground, though attacked several times. The small towns of Northfield and Deerfield, Massachusetts, and several other small towns, were abandoned as the surviving settlers retreated to the larger towns. The towns of the Connecticut colony escaped largely unharmed in the war, although more than 100 Connecticut militia died in their support of the other colonies.
The New England colonists used their own or adjacent towns' supplies and were re-supplied by sea from wherever they could buy additional supplies. The Indians had no such resources. The English government was headed then by Charles II (1630-1685), who had been restored to power as the English king (under Parliamentary oversight) after the Restoration of 1660. His father, Charles I, had been captured and executed in the English Civil War (1642–1651) by the Puritan-led Parliamentarian government of Oliver Cromwell. King Charles II had little interest in supporting the Puritans of New England and didn't. The potential supporters in the Colony of Virginia were involved in Bacon's Rebellion (1676) and couldn't (or wouldn't) help the New England settlers. The settlers in New York had just permanently taken the cities and territory there from the Dutch in the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1674) and were in the process of setting up an English settlement controlled by an anti-Puritan government. They offered no support for the mostly Puritan New Englanders. The New France government of this period were Catholic and rabidly anti-British and were sponsoring on and off support for Indian tribes attacking the British settlements.
The war ultimately cost the New England colonists over £100,000—a significant amount of money at a time when most families earned less than £20 per year. Self-imposed taxes were raised to cover its costs. Over 600 colonial men, women and children were killed, and twelve towns were totally destroyed with many more damaged. Despite this, the New England colonists eventually emerged victorious. The Native Americans lost many more people—mostly to disease. They died, dispersed out of New England or were put on a form of early reservations. Some of them slowly integrated into colonial society. They never recovered their former power in New England. The hope of many colonists to integrate Indian and colonial societies was largely abandoned, as the war and its excesses bred bitter resentment on both sides.
The Wampanoag and Narragansett hopes for supplies of powder and lead from the French in Canada were not met, except for some small amounts of ammunition obtained from the French in Maine. The colonists allied themselves with the Mohegan and Pequot tribes in Connecticut as well as several Indian groups that had mostly converted to Christianity, the Praying Indians, in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. King Philip and his Indian allies found their forces continually harassed by combined groups of colonists and their Indian allies. In January 1675/76 (see Old Style and New Style dates for dating then), Philip traveled westward to Mohawk territory in what is now New York, seeking, but failing to secure, an alliance with the Iroquois. Reportedly, Philip's supporters attacked a group of Mohawks and tried to get the blame put on the colonists—Indians and colonists used virtually the same weapons then. Unfortunately for Philip, one of the attacked group survived and the Mohawks were infuriated. The New York Mohawks—an Iroquois tribe, traditional enemies of many of the warring tribes—proceeded to raid isolated groups of Native Americans in Massachusetts, scattering and killing many. Traditional Indian crop-growing areas and fishing places in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut were continually attacked by roving New England patrols of combined Colonials and their Native American allies. When found, any Indian crops were destroyed. The Indian tribes had poor luck finding any place to grow enough food or harvest enough migrating fish for the coming winter. Many of the warring Native American tribes drifted north into Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Canada. Some drifted west into New York and points farther west to avoid their traditional enemies, the Iroquois.
By April 1676 the Narragansett were defeated and their chief, Canonchet, was killed. On May 18, 1676, Captain William Turner of the Massachusetts Militia and a group of about 150 militia volunteers (mostly minimally trained farmers) attacked a large fishing camp of Native Americans at Peskeopscut on the Connecticut River (now called Turners Falls, Massachusetts). The colonists claimed they killed 100–200 Native Americans in retaliation for earlier Indian attacks against Deerfield and other colonist settlements and the colonial losses in the Battle of Bloody Brook. Turner and nearly 40 of the militia were killed during the return from the falls.[19] With the help of their long-time allies the Mohegans, the colonists defeated an attack at Hadley on June 12, 1676, and scattered most of the Indian survivors into New Hampshire and points farther north. Later that month, a force of 250 Native Americans was routed near Marlborough, Massachusetts. Other forces, often a combined force of colonial volunteers and their Indian allies, continued to attack, kill, capture or disperse bands of Narragansett, Nipmuc, Wampanough, etc. as they tried to plant crops or return to their traditional locations. The colonists granted amnesty to Native Americans from the tribes who surrendered or were captured and showed they had not participated in the conflict. The captured Indian participants whom they knew had participated in attacks on the many settlements were hanged or shipped off to slavery in Bermuda.
Philip's allies began to desert him. By early July, over 400 had surrendered to the colonists, and Philip took refuge in the Assowamset Swamp, below Providence, close to where the war had started. The colonists formed raiding parties of Native Americans and militia. They were allowed to keep the possessions of warring Indians and received a bounty on all captives. Philip was ultimately killed by one of these teams when he was tracked down by colony-allied Native Americans led by Captain Benjamin Church and Captain Josiah Standish of the Plymouth Colony militia at Mt. Hope, Rhode Island. Philip was shot and killed by an Indian named John Alderman on August 12, 1676. Philip was beheaded, then drawn and quartered (a traditional treatment of criminals in this era). His head was displayed in Plymouth for twenty years. The war was nearly over except for a few attacks in Maine that lasted until 1677.
The war in the south largely ended with Metacom's death. Over 600 colonists and 3,000 Native Americans had died, including several hundred native captives who were tried and executed or enslaved and sold in Bermuda.[20] The majority of the dead Native Americans and the New England colonials died as the result of disease, which was typical of all wars in this era. Those sent to Bermuda included Metacom's son (and also, according to Bermudian tradition, his wife). A sizable number of Bermudians today claim ancestry from these exiles. Members of the Sachem's extended family were placed for safekeeping among colonists in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. Other survivors joined western and northern tribes and refugee communities as captives or tribal members. Some of the Indian refugees would return on occasion to southern New England.[21] The Narragansett, Wampanoag, Podunk, Nipmuck, and several smaller bands were virtually eliminated as organized bands, while even the Mohegans were greatly weakened.
Sir Edmund Andros, appointed by James II as governor of New York, negotiated a treaty with some of the northern Indian bands in Maine on April 12, 1678, as he tried to establish his New York-based royal power structure in Maine's fishing industry. Andros was arrested and sent back to England at the start of the Glorious Revolution in 1689. In this revolution, James II (1633-1701, reigning 1685-1688), a Catholic, a younger brother to Charles II, and a strong believer in the Divine right of kings, was forced to flee to France in 1688 by the Protestant Parliamentarian forces. James II's appointments to the various colonial governors were replaced.
Sporadic Indian and French raids plagued Maine, New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts for the next 50 years as New France encouraged and financed raids on New England settlers. Most of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island land was now nearly completely open to New England's continuing settlement, free of interference from the Native Americans. As the increasing population needed new land for new towns, they easily accommodated. Frontier settlements in New England would face sporadic Indian raids until the French and Indian War (1754–1763) finally drove the New France authorities out of North America in 1763.
King Philip's War, for a time, seriously damaged the mostly second- and third-generation English colonists' prospects in New England. But with their successful governments and towns, low death rate, and their extraordinary population growth rate of about 3% a year (doubling every 25 years), they repaired all the damage, replaced their losses, rebuilt the destroyed towns and continued on with establishing new towns within a few years.
The colonists' successful defense of New England with their own resources brought them to the attention of the British royal government. Before King Philip's War they had mostly been ignored as uninteresting and poor English outposts. The English authorities soon tried to exploit them and their resources for the authorities' own gain—beginning with the revocation of the charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1684 (enforced 1686). At the same time, an Anglican church was established in Boston in 1686, ending the Puritan monopoly on religion in Massachusetts. The legend of Connecticut's Charter Oak stems from the belief that a cavity within the tree was used in late 1687 as a hiding place for the colony's charter as Andros tried unsuccessfully to revoke their charter and take over their militia. In 1690, Plymouth's charter was not renewed, and its inhabitants were forced to join the Massachusetts government. The equally small colony of Rhode Island, with its largely Puritan dissident settlers, maintained its charter—mainly as a counterweight and irritant to Massachusetts. The Massachusetts General Court (the main elected legislative and judicial body in Massachusetts) was brought under nominal British government control, but all members except the Royal Governor and a few of his deputies continued to be elected in the various towns, as was their practice over the prior 40 years. The "top" of the government was nominally under British government control, but the vast majority in the government continued on as before with elected local and representative legislative and judicial bodies. Only land-owning males could vote for most officials, but their suffrage was both wider and more universal than in nearly all other countries of this era.
Nearly all layers of government and church life (except in Rhode Island) remained "Puritan", and only a few of the so-called "upper crust" joined the British government-sponsored Anglican church. Most New Englanders continued to live in self-governing and mostly self-sufficient towns and attended the "Puritan" Congregational or dissident churches that they had already set up by 1690. As the population increased, new towns, complete with their own churches, militias, etc. were nearly all established by the sons and daughters of the original settlers and were in nearly all cases modeled after these original settlements. Very few people lived outside of an established town. The many trials and tribulations between the British crown and British Parliament for the next 100 years made self government not only desirable but relatively easy to continue in New England. The squabbles the New Englanders had with the British government would eventually lead to Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill by 1775, a century and four generations later. When the British were forced to evacuate Boston in 1776, only a few thousand of the by then over 700,000 New Englanders went with them.
King Philip's War joined the Powhatan wars of 1610–14, 1622–32 and 1644–46[22] in Virginia, the Pequot War of 1637 in Connecticut, the Dutch-Indian war of 1643 along the Hudson River[23] and the Iroquois Beaver Wars of 1650[24] in a list of ongoing uprisings and conflicts between various Native American tribes and the French, Dutch, and English colonial settlements of Canada, New York, and New England.
In response to King Philip's War and King William's War (1689–97), many colonists from northeastern Maine and Massachusetts temporarily relocated to larger towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire to avoid sporadic Wabanaki Indian raids.[4]