King Philip's War

Date: 1675-1676

Place: New England

Tribes affected: Mohawk, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuck, Pocomtuck, Wampanoag

Significance: This general Indian uprising resulted in the crushing forever of Indian power in New England, except along the far northern New England frontier

The Algonquian tribes of New England lived in relative peace with the English settlers for a half century (with the exception of the Pequot War in southern New England, 1636-1637). Trouble brewed, however, between the Plymouth colony and the Wampanoags, who dwelled in the southern part of the colony, principally on Mount Hope Neck in Narragansett Bay. The total white population of New England in 1675 numbered about eighty thousand; the Indian population was between ten and twenty thousand, of whom about a thousand were Wampanoags.

The uprising of the Wampanoags in 1675 engulfed all New England in an Indian war. Several groups supported the English cause—the Mohegans, the small remnant band of Pequots called “Praying Indians” (so named because they had been Christianized), and, beyond the western New England border, the Mohawks. The Indian hostilities erupted spontaneously, although the Wampanoags and several other tribes had been planning to join in combined resistance to the English settlers. Causes of the war derived from pressures of white expansion into Indian territory and the insistence of the Plymouth colony on exercising sovereignty over the Wampanoags.

King Philip (also known as Philip, Metacom, and Metacomet), son of Massasoit, the early friend of the Pilgrims, became sachem (chief) of the Wampanoags upon the death of his brother, Alexander, in 1662. For nine years King Philip and his tribe managed to have good relations with the authorities of the Plymouth colony. Beginning in 1671, however, it was suspected that King Philip was plotting war with the English settlers. On September 29, 1671, King Philip signed a treaty with the Plymouth colony stating that his tribe should pay a fine of one hundred pounds (to be paid in goods) for having collected firearms and stating that the Wampanoags acknowledged Plymouth’s right to direct the Indians in matters of war and disposal of land. (King Philip did not live up to a pledge to surrender all firearms.) The Wampanoags were to recognize the sovereignty of the British crown and to abide by English laws. The execution by colonists in June, 1675, of three Wampanoags for having killed Sassamon, a Christian Indian and informant to the Plymouth government, was the incident that sparked the rebellion.

The First Months of the War

Apparently without any tribal assault plan having been formulated, young Wampanoag warriors, in June, 1675, destroyed houses and killed eleven settlers near Swansea. Plymouth and Massachusetts troops, under Majors James Cudworth and William Bradford, respectively, quickly responded by attacking King Philip’s stronghold on the Taunton River. King Philip showed great military skill. He struck at the towns of Dartmouth, Taunton, and Middleborough and, after hiding for a time in a swamp, escaped and took his band to the Nipmuck country in central Massachusetts. Throughout the late summer and early fall, Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Pocomtucks raided the towns of Mendon, Brookfield, Lancaster, Deerfield, Hadley, and Northfield. At “Bloody Brook,” just south of Deerfield, on September 18, 1675, Captain Thomas Lothrop and eighty Massachusetts soldiers, who were escorting a wagon train of provisions, were ambushed; all but eight were killed.

In order to coordinate their war effort, the Puritan colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth revived the New England Confederation (officially titled the Confederation of the United Colonies of New England), which had been formed in 1643 primarily for mutual defense. Two commissioners from each colony held sessions to determine intercolonial policy. The commissioners arranged for two armies to take to the field—one for the western theater of operations (commanded first by Major John Pynchon and then by Major Samuel Appleton) and another, led by the governor of Plymouth colony, Josiah Winslow, for a punitive expedition against the Narragansetts, who resided in the Rhode Island colony. This tribe was deemed by the English authorities to have violated their pledge of fidelity to the colonial governments and neutrality during the war. The Narragansetts refused to surrender Wampanoag refugees as they had promised to do. It was rationalized that the Narrangansetts inevitably would join in the Indian rebellion. An attack upon the Narragansetts, therefore, was justifiable in the Puritan way of thinking as “defensive” rather than “offensive” war.

Attacks and Counterattacks

On December 18, 1675, the Winslow expedition, consisting of troops from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Plymouth and 150 Mohegan Indians, assembled at Pettaquamscat and marched eastward to a palisaded fort of the Narragansetts (at the present site of West Kingston, Rhode Island). The Indians had gathered for the winter within the 5-acre fort, located in the “Great Swamp” on a tract of upland. Although the Indians thought that they were secure against attack, their safety was imperiled both by the swampwater being frozen and by an unfinished section of the palisade. The Englishmen, aided by an Indian guide, found the defect in the fort’s construction, and troops poured through the gap. The Narragansetts ran out of ammunition. During the battle of the afternoon of December 19, the invading army burned all the Indian dwellings and slaughtered three hundred men and a like number of women and children. Total English losses at the “Great Swamp Fight” were twenty killed and two hundred wounded—one-fifth of the English troops. Canonchet, the Narragansett sachem, and a large number of warriors escaped and soon were fighting alongside other Indians in the Connecticut River valley in Massachusetts.

From February through May, 1676, Indians attacked a score of English towns in the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies. Canonchet led a force of Nipmucks, Narragansetts, and Pocomtucks. Canonchet, however, visiting his people in the Narragansett country, was captured near the Patuxet River and immediately executed. Other setbacks soon doomed the Indian cause. King Philip sought aid from the Mohawks along the western New England frontier; the tribe declined and, moreover, made it clearly known that they sided with the English. The decisive blow to the Indians occurred on May 19, 1676, when Captain William Turner attacked a large encampment of Pocomtucks and other Indians at Peskecompsuct, located at falls of the Connecticut River (near Deerfield). Several hundred Indians were killed, with English losses being only one killed and a few wounded. Major John Talcott, with 250 Connecticut soldiers and a similar number of Indian allies, defeated an Indian force at Hadley on June 12. English troops began to conduct a war of attrition, denying the Indians provisions. Combined Connecticut and Massachusetts troops chased their enemy up the Connecticut River and into New Hampshire (not a separate colony at this time). Throughout the summer of 1676, Indians surrendered en masse. Fighting, however, spread to coastal Maine, with refugee Indians joining with the Saco and Abenaki tribes. Englishmen had to abandon the region between Casco and Penobscot bays. Sir Edmund Andros, governor of New York, constructed a fort at Pemaquid and negotiated a peace with the northeastern “hostiles” on April 12, 1676.

The Final Days

King Philip, with nowhere else to turn, returned to his native territory. On August 12, he was discovered in a swamp near Mount Hope and killed by an Indian auxiliary serving in a detachment led by Captain Benjamin Church. King Philip’s body was quartered and left to rot; the hands were sent to Boston, and his head went to the town of Plymouth, where it graced a pike on top of a watchtower for twenty years, the skull often containing a nest of wrens.

Many Indian captives were shot or hanged. Indeed, King Philip’s War had degenerated into a race war. Christian Indians were interned in concentration camps. Hundreds of Indians were sold into slavery at Cadiz, Spain, Tangier in North Africa, and the West Indies. King Philip’s son and wife met such a fate. Many young Indians were forced into servitude until age twenty-four. Indians not otherwise punished were forced into residence on small reservations.

The war cost the lives of about a thousand Englishmen, equally divided between soldiers and civilians. The three Puritan colonies found themselves with a total indebtedness of about ninety thousand pounds because of war expenditures. One-tenth of Massachusetts males of military age had been captured or killed. Several dozen English towns had been attacked, and some of these had to be rebuilt completely.

Indian lands were seized and sold, with funds used to pay war debts, provide pensions for invalided war veterans, and provide support for those impoverished by the war. During the war the English colonists had the double task of defending their villages and engaging the enemy in the field. Much of the war resembled modern guerrilla fighting, and the English learned the skills of Indian warriors. The war posed a challenge to the British crown. For example, during the early part of the war, the royal governor of New York, Sir Edmund Andros, had tried to aid the New Englanders, but the assistance was rejected; Connecticut and New York both claimed jurisdiction over the Narragansett country. The three Puritan colonies engaged in cooperation, though with some rivalry and jealousy. Rhode Island did not participate in the war. The experience was instructive for the British crown, which ten years later attempted to combine all the New England colonies, New York, and New Jersey under one consolidated government.

Bibliography

Bourne, Russell. The Red King’s Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675-1678. New York: Atheneum, 1990.

Church, Benjamin. Diary of King Philip’s War, 1675-76. Tercentary ed. Chester, Conn.: Pequot Press, 1975.

Leach, Douglas Edward. Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Lincoln, Charles M., ed. Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913.

Vaughan, Alden T. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965.

Webb, Stephen S. 1676: The End of American Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.