King Philip’s War

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King Philip’s War, (1675–76), in British American colonial history, war that pitted Native Americans against English settlers and their Indian allies that was one of the bloodiest conflicts (per capita) in U.S. history. Historians since the early 18th century, relying on accounts from the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, have referred to the conflict as King Philip’s War. Philip (Metacom), sachem (chief) of a Wampanoag band, was a son of Massasoit, who had greeted the first colonists of New England at Plymouth in 1621. However, because of the central role in the conflict played by the Narragansetts, who composed the largest Native American group then in southern New England, some historians refer to the conflict as the Great Narragansett War.

The war’s proximate cause was Plymouth Colony’s execution in June 1675 of three of Philip’s warriors. They had been tried and found guilty of murdering John Sassamon, a Harvard-educated “praying Indian” convert to Puritanism who had served as an interpreter and advisor to Philip but whom Philip had accused of spying for the colonists. His murder ignited a tinderbox of tensions between Indians and whites that had been smoldering for 55 years over competing land claims (including disputes over the grazing of colonial livestock on hunting and fishing grounds), interracial insensitivities, and English cultural encroachment on Native America. That was the case even with a somewhat intertwined Native American–English economy and the conversion to Christianity by some Indians.

Over the next six months, colonial militia and Native American raiding parties ranged over modern-day Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and even coastal Maine. Although the Narragansetts had attempted to stay neutral, individual Narragansett warriors had participated clandestinely in raids on colonial strongholds and militia. Soon colonial leaders deemed the Narragansetts in violation of a series of peace treaties, leading the United Colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut to amass the largest colonial army assembled to date in New England, consisting of 1,000 militia and some 150 Indian allies. In November 1675 Gov. Josiah Winslow of Plymouth Colony marshaled the colonial militia and rendezvoused in Rhode Island territory. The objective was to attack the Narragansett before they could muster a spring offensive. The militia burned abandoned Indian villages along the way.

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Beginning on the morning of December 19, during a bitterly cold snow storm, the militia and its Indian allies began their attack on the Narragansetts’ main fort, situated on an island amid a frozen swamp in what is now West Kingston, Rhode Island, an attack henceforth known as the Great Swamp Fight. By evening, the militia had overrun the fort and begun burning the homes and food supplies of the Indian defenders. Although determining numbers of casualties is always difficult, perhaps some 150 Indian inhabitants, many of them women, children, and the elderly, were killed or burned alive. Others escaped across the swamp, though many of them then died from exposure. The militia suffered about 70 dead and 150 wounded, some of whom died from their wounds. In the wake of the attack and ensuing slaughter, the Narragansetts wholeheartedly joined the anti-English war effort, albeit in a weakened state.

Meanwhile, raids by the English-allied Mohawks damaged Philip’s diplomatic entreaties to expand the conflict by enlisting other regional Indian groups. A colonial expedition after the Great Swamp Fight had some success but did not end the conflict. The Indian coalition, having come under the leadership of the Narragansett sachem, Canonchet, then embarked on a late-winter offensive in 1676 that pushed back most of the colonial frontier in the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Rhode Island colonies. In fact, much of the war’s extraordinary damage occurred during that phase of the conflict. The Narragansetts, for example, destroyed all white settlements in Rhode Island on the western side of the bay, including Providence, which they burned in March 1676. In the end, however, Native American opposition in Rhode Island was eradicated, and nearly all of the colony was opened to white settlement. Connecticut claimed most of the southern part of the colony by right of conquest for having defeated the Narragansetts.

By late spring 1676, other colonies began to follow Connecticut’s lead by incorporating friendly Indians into their forces. Benjamin Church’s Plymouth command, a non-Connecticut exception, had utilized Indian allies since the beginning of the war, and he succeeded in killing Philip in August 1676. By September the colonists and their Indian allies had destroyed much of the Native American opposition in southern New England, killing thousands of Native Americans and selling many into slavery and indentured servitude. Some 600 English soldiers had been killed in the conflict and 17 white settlements destroyed; some 50 additional settlements had been damaged. Only Connecticut emerged unscathed from the conflict, because of its unique relationship with local Native American groups.