But he did speak for them and lead them in warfare. Philip’s powers were limited, and he led his people at their sufferance. Sachems were not kings in the European sense. Sassamon could read and speak English and had evolved into a go-between, serving as both an interpreter to the colonists and a secretary to the Wampanoag sachem (paramount chief), a man known to the English as “King Philip,” for whom the war is named. Sassamon had studied the tenets of Christianity under John Eliot, the foremost Puritan missionary to the Indians of New England, who had helped found 14 “praying towns” of converted Indians and had translated the Bible into Algonquian. The consequences would stretch into the next century and beyond.Īs with so many wars, the casus belli in this case was a comparatively minor event, the murder of a respected elderly “praying Indian” (Christian convert) named John Sassamon, a Wampanoag, or Massachusett, man who straddled the tense psychological fringe between the two cultures. People used to ruling themselves no longer did. As royal governors took charge, the New England colonies lost the freedom to manage their own affairs, which they had enjoyed since the 1630s. He later dissolved the United Colonies of New England, a military alliance formed to adjudicate disputes among the colonies and to direct the course of any wars from Boston. Plymouth Colony, the flash point of the war, had not initially sought a royal charter Charles gave it one. The war not only caught the eyes of English readers, it also caught the attention of recently restored British King Charles II, who sent envoys to assess the situation in New England.
New England’s tribes would never fully recover.
The English sold thousands of captured Indians into slavery in the West Indies. Indians attacked 52 of New England’s 90 towns, pillaging 25 of those and burning 17 to the ground. Two-thirds of the dead were Indians, many of whom died of starvation. The figures are inexact, but out of a total New England population of 80,000, counting both Indians and English colonists, some 9,000 were killed-more than 10 percent. It was also an especially bloody war-the bloodiest, in terms of the percentage of the population killed, in American history. The war ended the largely stable and, in many ways, mutually beneficial relationship between colonists and Indians that had endured some five decades. And it was not certain the colonists would win. King Philip’s War was not a localized clash like the Pequot War of the 1630s but full-scale warfare involving most of the New England region and many of the indigenous tribes, a total war that made no distinctions between warriors and civilians. I am determined not to live until I have no country’ ‘But a small part of the dominion of my ancestors remains. The war has intrigued historians ever since. Increase Mather’s A Brief History of the War With the Indians in New England. William Hubbard’s The History of the Indian Wars in New England From the First Settlement to the Termination of the War With King Philip in 1677 Benjamin Thompson’s “New England’s Crisis,” the first epic poem written in North America and the Rev. Known today as King Philip’s War (after the primary Indian war leader), the conflict stretched from 1675 to 1678 and was the subject of several important Puritan works, among them the Rev. While some questioned the veracity of the initial reports, the unrest quickly flared into a broad and bloody armed conflict. The reports told of lightning raids on towns by hundreds of warriors, barns and houses burned to the ground, farmers tomahawked in their fields, colonial militia columns wiped out in ambushes, women and children taken captive, and worse. In 1675, some 55 years after English separatists later known as the Pilgrims had founded Plymouth Colony (in present-day Massachusetts), newsletters began appearing in London describing horrible atrocities committed by Indians against the New England settlers. (Howard Pyle and Merle Johnson, Howard Pyle's Book of the American Spirit, Harper & Bros., New York, 1923) His death at the hands of an Indian allied with the colonists, depicted here, largely ended the fighting. The 1675–78 war began with a murderous act of betrayal tied to a Wampanoag chief known to New England settlers as King Philip.