King Philip's War

Based on Wikipedia: King Philip's War

On the night of June 27, 1675, a full lunar eclipse darkened the skies over New England. Several Native American tribes took it as a sign—an omen that the time had come to strike against the English colonists who had been steadily consuming their lands for over fifty years. What followed would become, proportionally, the deadliest war in American history.

One in ten military-age men among the colonists would die. Twelve towns would be completely destroyed. Hundreds of Native Americans would be executed, enslaved, or shipped to the Caribbean. And the landscape of New England would be fundamentally transformed.

This was King Philip's War.

A Name That Misses the Point

The man the English called "King Philip" was actually named Metacom—sometimes written Metacomet or Pometacomet. He was the sachem, or chief, of the Pokanoket people and the leader of the broader Wampanoag Confederacy. The English gave him the name Philip because of the friendly relationship between his father Massasoit and the earliest Plymouth colonists. It was meant as a compliment, a reference to the ancient Macedonian kings.

But there's something deeply ironic about naming this war after "Philip." The English treated him as a king—a single sovereign ruler whose word was law—because that's what they understood. European politics revolved around monarchs who owned territory and could dispose of it as they wished.

Native American governance worked nothing like this.

The Wampanoag were not a single nation with a single ruler. They were a confederacy of related peoples, each with their own leaders, including powerful women called saunkswkas who controlled significant territories. When English colonists negotiated land deals with male leaders like Metacom's brother Wamsutta, they often had no legitimate authority to sell land that belonged to female leaders like Weetamoo or Awashonks.

This fundamental misunderstanding—treating a complex political system as a simple monarchy—was one of the sparks that ignited the war.

Fifty Years of Mounting Grievances

The traditional story of colonial New England starts with Thanksgiving: friendly Natives helping the Pilgrims survive their first winter, followed by decades of peaceful coexistence. This narrative contains a kernel of truth wrapped in a mountain of omission.

Massasoit, Metacom's father, did maintain a long alliance with the Plymouth Colony. He had strategic reasons for this—his people had been devastated by European diseases that killed perhaps ninety percent of coastal Native populations between 1616 and 1619, and he needed allies against rival tribes. The English needed his help to survive. It was a genuine partnership, however unequal.

But as the decades passed, the balance shifted disastrously.

Between 1628 and 1640, thousands of English immigrants arrived during what historians call the Great Migration. They founded Salem, Boston, and dozens of smaller towns. Each new settlement pushed further into Native territory. By 1675, there were 110 English towns in New England, home to about 65,000 colonists.

The Native population, meanwhile, had collapsed to perhaps 10,000—devastated by repeated epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other diseases to which they had no immunity.

The colonists' livestock caused constant friction. Pigs and cattle, unfenced and free-roaming in the English style, regularly wandered onto Wampanoag farms and trampled their crops. When Wampanoag hunters killed these animals—or when the animals wandered into their hunting traps—the colonists demanded compensation. The complaints went one way.

Then there were the missionaries. Colonial preachers aggressively sought to convert Native Americans to Christianity, establishing communities of "praying Indians" who adopted English customs and religion. Many traditional Wampanoags saw this as a direct assault on their culture and identity. Metacom himself declared that he and other leaders "possessed a great fear that any of their people should be called or forced to be Christian Indians."

The Tipping Point

Massasoit died around 1661. His older son Wamsutta became the new grand sachem, but he died the following year under circumstances that many Wampanoags considered suspicious—he had fallen ill shortly after being summoned to Plymouth for questioning about rumored Native conspiracies.

Metacom, perhaps twenty-four years old, inherited leadership of a confederacy that was watching its world disappear.

In 1671, colonial officials forced Metacom to sign a peace agreement requiring the Wampanoags to surrender their guns. This was both practically devastating—firearms had become essential for hunting and defense—and deeply humiliating. The colonists treated a sovereign leader like a subject.

Then, in early 1675, a man named John Sassamon was found dead beneath the ice of Assawompset Pond.

Sassamon occupied an unusual position in colonial society. He was a Native convert to Christianity, an early graduate of Harvard College, and had served as a translator and adviser to Metacom himself. Shortly before his death, he had reported to Plymouth's governor that Metacom was gathering allies for an uprising.

The pond where Sassamon's body was discovered sat at the center of an ongoing land dispute. Plymouth colonists had been trying to purchase vast tracts around Nemasket, and Sassamon's death removed a key obstacle to that deal. Colonial officials arrested three Wampanoags for the murder, including one of Metacom's counselors—a man who had been blocking the land sale.

A jury of twelve colonists and six Native elders convicted all three. They were hanged on June 8, 1675.

Whether they were actually guilty remains disputed. What's clear is that under captivity, the accused men signed away all Wampanoag rights to the land around Nemasket. The territory became the town of Middlebury, open for English settlement.

The first shots of the war had effectively been fired.

The War Begins

Twelve days after the executions, a band of Pokanoket warriors attacked the Plymouth settlement of Swansea. They burned several homes, though they did not initially kill anyone.

On June 23, a local boy spotted a Pokanoket near his home. Someone told him to shoot. He did, and the man died.

The next day, Pokanoket warriors launched a full assault on Swansea, killing three colonists. Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay officials responded by sending an army to destroy the Wampanoag town at Mount Hope.

It's worth pausing here to note something strange about the war's outbreak. The initial raid on Swansea likely happened without Metacom's approval. He may not have wanted war—at least not yet, not like this. But events had their own momentum. Grievances accumulated over decades exploded in a matter of days.

The conflict spread with terrifying speed. The Nipmuc people of central Massachusetts joined within weeks. By summer's end, Native warriors were attacking towns across Massachusetts, burning and killing.

The Great Swamp Fight

The Narragansett people of Rhode Island initially tried to stay neutral. They had fought alongside the English in the Pequot War forty years earlier, participating in the infamous Mystic massacre that killed hundreds of Pequot men, women, and children in a single predawn attack.

That experience had horrified them. When Narragansett leader Miantonomoh tried to organize an alliance against the colonists in the 1640s, he was captured by Connecticut colonists and executed by the Mohegan sachem Uncas, shattering any hope of unified Native resistance.

Now, three decades later, the colonists decided that Narragansett neutrality was itself a threat. In November 1675, Governor Josiah Winslow assembled the largest army New England had ever mustered: about a thousand colonial militia and 150 Native allies.

On December 19, they attacked the Narragansetts' main fortification deep in a Rhode Island swamp.

The Great Swamp Fight, as it came to be known, was a slaughter. Colonial forces burned the Narragansett village, destroying their winter food supplies. An estimated 600 Narragansetts died, many of them non-combatants. The survivors, now homeless in the middle of winter, had no choice but to join Metacom's war.

What the colonists had feared—a united Native coalition—they had created through their own preemptive attack.

The Burning of New England

Under their new leader Canonchet, the Narragansetts transformed from reluctant neutrals into fierce combatants. The combined Native forces pushed deep into colonial territory.

The winter and spring of 1676 were catastrophic for New England. Native war parties burned town after town: Lancaster, Medfield, Weymouth, Groton, Marlborough. In March, they burned Providence itself, the capital of Rhode Island colony.

The colonists' militia, trained for European-style warfare, struggled against Native tactics. Warriors attacked in small groups, struck quickly, and vanished into forests they knew intimately. The colonists' initial response—large punitive expeditions marching through the wilderness—accomplished little except exhausting their own troops.

The tide turned for two reasons.

First, the colonists adapted. They began recruiting larger numbers of Native allies—particularly the Mohegan people and communities of "praying Indians" who had converted to Christianity. These allies understood the terrain and tactics that baffled the English. Joint forces of colonial militia and Native scouts proved far more effective than either group alone.

Second, the Mohawk people of New York decided to enter the war—on the colonists' side. The Mohawks were part of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy and had long-standing conflicts with the Algonquian peoples of New England. Their intervention created a second front that Metacom's forces couldn't sustain.

The Collapse

By summer 1676, the Native coalition was disintegrating. Canonchet was captured and executed in April. Food supplies were exhausted. Refugees from burned villages had nowhere to go.

On August 12, 1676, Metacom returned to Mount Hope—the same place where his people had their town destroyed the previous year. A colonial militia unit found him there. He was shot and killed by a Native ally of the colonists, a man named John Alderman whose brother Metacom had executed for suggesting surrender.

Metacom's body was beheaded and quartered. His head was displayed on a pike in Plymouth for the next twenty-five years—a grim trophy of colonial victory. His hands were sent to Boston. His wife and nine-year-old son were among hundreds of Native captives sold into slavery in the Caribbean.

But the war wasn't quite over. Fighting continued in northern New England, where the Abenaki people carried on resistance until the Treaty of Casco Bay was signed in April 1678—nearly three years after Swansea burned.

The Human Cost

The numbers are staggering, especially when you consider the small populations involved.

The colonists lost about 800 soldiers and perhaps 400 civilians—roughly three thousand people total, including those who died of war-related disease and starvation. This represented about one-tenth of all military-age men in New England. Imagine any modern American war killing ten percent of the country's young men, and you'll grasp the trauma.

For Native Americans, the losses were proportionally even worse. The Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples were effectively destroyed as political entities. Hundreds were publicly executed after the war. Hundreds more were enslaved and shipped to Bermuda, the Caribbean, or Mediterranean ports. Those who remained were stripped of their remaining lands and forced onto tiny reservations.

The land itself bore scars. Twelve English towns were completely destroyed. Many more were damaged, some abandoned entirely. The economies of Plymouth and Rhode Island colonies were ruined. It would take until 1700—a full generation—before English colonists reoccupied their pre-war boundaries.

What Was Lost

King Philip's War was the last serious Native American attempt to expel English colonists from New England. After 1678, the power balance was permanently broken. The survivors were too few, too scattered, too traumatized to mount another coordinated resistance.

Something else was lost too, though it's harder to measure. The war ended any pretense that Native Americans and English colonists might coexist as equal societies. The "praying Indians" who had converted to Christianity and helped the colonists win the war found themselves rewarded with suspicion and confinement. Massachusetts authorities interned many of them on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where disease and starvation killed large numbers.

The message was clear: there was no path to acceptance, no way to become sufficiently "English." The logic of colonial expansion demanded Native removal.

The Birth of American Identity

Historians have noted something unexpected about King Philip's War: it marks the beginning of a distinct American identity separate from England.

The New England colonists fought this war almost entirely alone. No English army came to help them. No European power intervened. They raised their own troops, developed their own tactics, made their own decisions. For the first time, they experienced themselves as a people apart—not merely transplanted Englishmen, but something new.

This self-reliance had political implications that would unfold over the next century. When tensions with England eventually boiled over into the American Revolution, the colonists already had a template for collective action against a common enemy. They had done it before.

The irony is bitter. American national identity—the sense of being a distinct people with a unique destiny—was forged partly through the destruction of the peoples who had lived on the land for thousands of years. The story of American independence begins with the story of Native dispossession.

Memory and Forgetting

King Philip's War has largely faded from popular memory. Most Americans have never heard of it, though they likely know vague stories about Thanksgiving and peaceful Pilgrims. The war complicates that narrative in ways that American culture has preferred to avoid.

In Plymouth, where it all began, you can still visit the site where Metacom's head was displayed for a quarter century. There's no marker. The triumph that colonists once celebrated has become an embarrassment too uncomfortable to acknowledge.

But understanding this war matters—not just for what it tells us about the past, but for what it reveals about patterns that repeated themselves across American history. The cycle of treaties made and broken, of Native lands steadily consumed, of resistance met with overwhelming force and collective punishment—King Philip's War was the template for what would happen again and again as European settlement pushed westward across the continent.

The lunar eclipse of June 1675 wasn't an omen of Native victory, as some had hoped. It was perhaps an omen of what was coming: a long darkness that would last for centuries.