46. King Philip's War

0:00Volume 1, Chapter 46, King Philip's War Since the massacre of the Pequots in 1637, there had been no open warfare between whites and Indians in New England. The expansion of the white settlers encroached seriously on ancient Indian lands, hunting grounds and fisheries. Generally, the land was sold voluntarily by the Indians. by the Indians. But, as previously noted, the Indians had no firm concept of private property and land, as landed property was held communally, and inalienably, by the tribe. The Indians, therefore, regarded the purchases as a form of lease, and thus could not help being hostile to the whites clearing the forest for agricultural purposes.

0:52More justifiable was the Indian resentment at the white government's arrogant insistence on imposing white colonial laws and sovereignty over the Indians. Indians were hauled into white courts to settle disputes, even all-Indian disputes, and for failing to pay tribute to obey such rigorous white laws, obviously incomprehensible to the Indians as observing the Sabbath and not blaspheming. Blasphemy, in fact, was punishable by death. And particularly significant was the New Englanders' penchant for confiscating Indian land as punishment for Indian infractions. Furthermore, the Narragansett Indians, who had been induced by Roger Williams to remain friendly during the Pequot War, were continually threatened by the Atherton Company's pressure for Their Lands. The murder of the Narragansett chief, Meantanomo, had moreover gone unavenged because the Mohegan chief, Uncas, who had done the deed with the connivance of Massachusetts Bay, remained under white protection. In addition, the Mohegans, Shawtucks and Kawisets, Indians in alliance with the whites, were protected by the white governments, though they repeatedly pillaged and murdered the Narragansett and Nipmuc Indians of southern New England.

2:22In 1660, the venerable Indian chief Massasoit died. As chief of the Wampanoags of western Plymouth on the eastern shores of Narragansett Bay, Massasoit had saved the original pilgrims from starvation and had sheltered Roger Williams in his lonely trek to Narragansett Bay. He He was now succeeded by his elder son, Wemsutta, or Alexander. At this point, Plymouth began a series of outrageous harassments of the Wampanoags, who had by this time been driven into the Mount Hope Peninsula on Narragansett Bay, now the site of Bristol, Rhode Island. On mere rumor, and with no real evidence, Plymouth ordered Alexander into the general Alexander went to court in 1662 to defend himself against the absurdly vague charge of plotting mischief.

3:19Having successfully defended himself against this accusation, Alexander unfortunately died, giving rise to suspicion among some Indians that he had been poisoned by the Whites. Shortly afterward, Alexander's successor, his brother, Metacom or Philip, was similarly hauled into court to defend himself against similar rumor-based charges. He, too, was found innocent. In 1671, vague rumors about Philip's unfriendliness toward the whites were again heard, and at this time the Plymouth magistrates wanted to adopt the hardline policy of Striking Hard and Destroying the Wampanoags.

4:06The other colonies held Plymouth back, however, and persuaded the colony to agree to a meeting in April of Philip and several leading Massachusetts citizens, as well as Plymouth officials at Taunton. Philip, incidentally, insisted that Roger Williams be present as a guarantee of fair treatment, and this request was granted. At Taunton, the Plymouth authorities made the arrogant demand that the Wampanoags render themselves defenseless by surrendering all their arms to Plymouth, and this despite the fact that no evidence against Philip was ever revealed. Seventy guns were surrendered. In addition to this humiliation, Philip and several secums were again forced to appear in September and gratuitously subjected to the insulting warning that he must amend his ways if he expected peace, and that if he went on in his refractory way, he must expect to smart for it. The Indians again submitted and consented to pay a yearly tribute of five wolves' heads to the colony.

5:19Three years later, the harassment by Plymouth of the Wampanoags came to a climax. Casamon, a Christian or praying Indian, who had once been employed by Philip as a private secretary, now informed Plymouth of suspicious goings on and possible conspiracies of some kind at Mount Hope. Once again, Plymouth proposed to haul Philip into general court to answer privately disclosed This time, Philip heard of the proceedings, and in March 1675 came of his own accord to the court to defend himself. The authorities admitted they had no evidence of Philip's guilt, but were displeased that not all of the Wampanoag's arms had been surrendered.

6:08They again harried Philip with the warning that if they heard any further rumors, even unproven ones, and even unproven ones, they would insist on confiscating all of the Wampanoag's arms. Shortly after Philip left Plymouth, the informer, Cosimon, was found murdered. Before a jury composed of whites and Indians, three Wampanoags were tried, convicted and executed for the murder, albeit on the flimsy evidence of only one Indian eyewitness. The execution was carried out despite Roger Williams' warning of the untrustworthiness of such Indian testimony. Here was the final straw in the accumulation of humiliations and provocations heaped upon Philip, capped by a further warning from Plymouth that Philip send away many Indians of other tribes who had now come to Mount Hope.

7:07The provocations had gone far enough. But five eminent Quakers, leaders of Rhode Island, headed by the Deputy Governor John Easton, now tried to persuade Philip, in a final peace conference, to agree to impartial arbitration. Philip was willing to arbitrate, but was also convinced that the other colonies would never agree. A few days later, on June 20, the Wampanoags retaliated for the execution with a raid on In the neighboring town of Swansea, burning a couple of houses. In a few days, the raids on Swansea escalated into a few killings. King Philip's war had now begun. A joint force from Plymouth and Boston now captured Mount Hope, but the Indians managed to escape from the peninsula. Philip proceeded to burn and ravage several Plymouth towns, Dartmouth, In the middle of July, the war took a more ominous turn. The Nipmuc Indians in Massachusetts entered the war and ravaged the Massachusetts town of Menlin and Brookfield. They successfully ambushed an armed troop sent for a peace parley. All-out war now commenced. Town after town was devastated. The northern Connecticut Valley towns of Northfield and Deerfield in Massachusetts had to be abandoned.

8:34The Temporarily Reactivated New England Confederation met on September 9 and decided on a united and intense war effort. The three colonies agreed to contribute 1,000 armed men to the United Force, and a quota was assigned to each colony. Massachusetts would supply 527 men, Connecticut 315, and Plymouth, which had started it all, 158. The military conscription reached every male between 16 and 60. Massachusetts decreed death for any refusal to serve, and Connecticut prohibited the emigration of any eligible person. The following spring Massachusetts also forced its citizens into farm labor draft.

9:24The officials were authorized to impress men for the carrying on of the husbandry of such persons as were called off from the same into the service, who had not sufficient help of their own left at home to manage the same. Any labor conscript who failed to report was fined, and if this failure was accompanied with refractoriness or contempt upon authority, then the malfactor was liable to the death penalty. All men driven from their homes by the Indians were to be conscripted automatically for military duty in the places of their refuge. All trade with the Indians, not on government account, was forbidden on penalty of confiscation of all the trader's property.

10:09And finally, no person in Massachusetts was to leave the town of his residence without getting the permission of the local military committee. It would not be surprising if some of the more reflective citizens of Massachusetts began to wonder who their enemy was, the Indians or their own government. The New England Confederation in the summer of 1675 faced the question, should it limit the war to its existing confines, Bearing in mind the usual fight attitude toward the Indians, we are not surprised that New England chose the latter alternative.

11:00The particular problem was the land-rich Narragansetts, by far the most powerful of the New England Indians. Despite harassment, the traditionally friendly Narragansetts showed no sign of joining Philip's anti-white crusade. And even the almost fanatically pro-Puritan historian of New England, John Palfrey, admits that the Confederation found not one scintilla of evidence of any sort of conspiracy between Philip and the other warring Indian tribes, let alone the peaceful Narragansetts Provocation against the Narragansetts had been particularly virulent in early 1675. The son of Uncas, the white-protected Mohegan chieftain, murdered a relative of the Narragansett chief, Kanonchit. Yet the whites refused to take any action to punish the murderers. They refused, as well, to take the case to an impartial of Justice, and to permit any armed action against UNCUS, thereby closing every door of redress to the Narragansetts.

12:10In July 1675, soon after Philip launched his attack, the Confederation Commissioners of Massachusetts and Connecticut sent a strong military force to negotiate a new treaty of friendship with the Narragansetts. By mid-July the Narragansetts had signed a treaty agreeing not to permit Wampanoag invasion of their land and to turn over to the whites any Wampanoag refugees. By October it was learned that the Narragansetts had instead harbored some Indian refugees. Though a breach of the treaty, the Narragansett decision to give haven to refugees of war was hardly a casus belli, indeed offering asylum to refugees from war is a simple humanitarian act.

13:02But the commissioners of the New England Confederation did not react this way. Instead, they delivered to the Narragansetts an ultimatum that if the refugees were not delivered up, the utmost severities of war would be visited upon them. The Confederation promptly raised another 1,000 men under the command of Plymouth's Governor Winslow and marched in a war of aggression against the Narragansetts. This action triggered a war hysteria that swept Boston and the rest of New England. Even some harmless, praying Indians living near Boston were set upon and murdered by white mobs.

13:48The highly respected Daniel Gouken, who was friend and superintendent of the Christian Indians, was told that it would not be safe for him to appear on the streets of Boston. In a final flurry, Massachusetts again persecuted the Quakers. Some Puritans disseminated the notion that the Indian War was God's punishment of New England for relaxing its persecution of the adulterous Quakers. Other Puritans, characteristically, theorize that God was punishing New England for the new fashions in wigs and fancy hairdos. Winslow's march into the Narragansett country was made without the consent and against the will of the government of Rhode Island.

14:34Hence, the invasion was a flagrant violation of the Rhode Island Charter. But the confederation was heedless of this fact and heedless also of the devastation that this extension of the war to the Narragansetts would reek on the Rhode Island settlements. In fact, the Rhode Island government proposed to take the whole dispute to arbitration and the Narragansetts approved. Implacably, hard-line Plymouth refused. The Winslow forces invaded of Rhode Island, and by the typically white tactic against the Indians of surprise attack on December 19, captured the main Narragansett fort at the later side of South Kingstown, Rhode Island. In this terrible swamp fight, about 1,000 Indians were slaughtered, including some 300 women and children. This was the turning point of the war, as it broke the and the Great Narragansett Power. How had Rhode Island arrived at its peace policy? During the late 1650s and 1660s, the Quakers had made enormous strides in converting a colony already individualistic and libertarian in spirit. In particular, the Quakers were dominant in Newport. In 1672, the increasingly irascible Roger Williams had once more called his old enemy

16:04and the litigious William Harris into court. This time the charge was disloyalty and high treason for favoring Connecticut's claims to the Narragansett lands. At the same time the administration of Governor Benedict Arnold, in league with Williams, passed rigorous measures to suppress agitation against high taxes, largely by the Quakers, and to confiscate The Property of Disloyal Plotters Against the State It was clear that Roger Williams had been outstripped as a champion of liberty and freedom of advocacy. The result of Arnold's despotic act was an alliance between the two opposition groups, the Quakers and the Harris Forces, which jointly came to power in the Rhode Island elections of May 1672.

16:57The world's first Quaker government, with Nicholas Easton, now a Quaker as governor, now embarked on a highly liberal course. Harris was immediately released from prison and made an assistant of the province. The laws suppressing anti-tax agitators were quickly repealed as an invasion of the liberties of the people. And in an Act of August 13, 1673, conscientious objectors were now exempted completely from military service for the first time in America. The Act declared that since Rhode Island already refused to force Quakers or other conscientious objectors to take an oath, how much more ought such men forbear to compel their equal neighbors Against Their Consciences, To Train, To Fight and To Kill.

17:53In detail, this historic act provided that no person, that is, or hereafter, shall be persuaded in his conscience that he cannot or ought not to train, to learn to fight, nor to war, nor to kill any person or persons, shall at any time be compelled against his During the Anglo-Dutch War, however, the Easton administration seriously compromised pacifist Quaker principles by instructing the and magistrates and town military officers to build the colony's defenses.

18:49And after the Dutch recaptured New York, the Quaker-dominated assembly gave authority to the governor to appoint military commanders and to provide military training for the citizens. In the polarization of ideology that took place, Roger Williams was pushed even further in a statist direction. When he had already shown himself many times to be willing to abandon the principle of freedom of speech and advocacy of political ideas, he now showed himself ready to abandon his most cherished principle, religious liberty. In the summer of 1672, the great founder of the Quakers, George Fox, visited Rhode Island.

19:36In August, following the visit, Roger Williams engaged in a four-day long great debate, first in Newport and then in Providence, with three of Fox's leading disciples. The public debate attracted large crowds and Williams rode all the way from Providence to Newport to participate. That Williams was bitterly opposed to the Quaker creed was, of course, his privilege and to be expected, but he also went so far as to call for moderate legal penalties against Quaker uncivilities, which should be restrained and punished. These incivilities, let us note, expressly included such harmless Quaker practices as refusing to take off their hats and using the forms thee and thou. All these were examples to Williams of irreverence to superiors in and Office, as was the Quaker refusal to bend the knee or bow the head to civil authority out of pretense that Christ amity, even in civil things, respecteth no man's person.

20:46Moreover the Quakers refused to perform the ordinary civil duties to the state. Williams also denounced the freedom of trade practiced by Quaker merchants in bootlegging liquor to the Indians. Here, Williams portrayed jealousy of his Quaker competitors in trading with the Indians, for he denounced Quakers for selling ammunition and liquor to the Indians more cheaply than their competitors. All this was far from being a mere exaggeration uttered in the heat of debate, for it was repeated in Williams' ensuing anti-Quaker pamphlet, George Fox digged out of his burrows. Here Williams again called for moderate legal punishment of these crimes of disrespect to superiors and echoed the very argument of Reverend John Cotton against himself three decades before that such punishment would be as far from persecution properly so called as that is a duty in command of God unto all mankind.

21:53It is no wonder that one of the debaters, William Edmundson, was moved to transgress the bounds of polite debate and rudely cry at Williams, old man, old man, for which, by the way, he was reprimanded by Coddington and other leading Quakers present. Perhaps Williams was angered far more by the apt reproof of William Harris, who reminded Williams of his former large and the large profession of liberty of conscience. At any rate, Williams' abandonment of religious liberty had little impact on the citizens of Rhode Island, who were more true to his original principles than was Williams himself. In fact, Quaker conversions in the colony proceeded all the more rapidly after the debate.

22:41William Harris was soon converted, and even some of the venerable Samuel Gorton's followers were converted to the Quaker faith. And so Rhode Island came to have a Quaker government at the start of King Philip's War with the now Quaker William Coddington governor since 1674. It was a government that maintained Rhode Island's position against Connecticut land claims, but strongly insisted on a policy of neutrality and peace. It was also convinced that King Philip's War was an unnecessary conflict caused by the unfair treatment and persecution of the Indians by the other New England colonies. Now, despite the destruction of the Great Swamp Fight, Conanchet had managed to escape with seven hundred of his warriors when they proceeded to retaliate against Rhode Island, burning and devastating Warwick, Patuxet and Providence. The Coddington administration now risked its own popularity by sticking to Quaker and Libertarian principle and refusing to levy taxes on everyone to engage in a costly defense of the mainland towns. The assembly decided that each town should provide

23:58for its own military security and in March 1676 urged the mainland citizens to take refuge John Aquidnic Island, even promising the settlers land for each new family on the island. The Quakers also refused to repeal the exemption of conscientious objectors from the draft. The Rhode Island Assembly also provided that no Indian in the colony could be made a slave. Most of the mainlanders took advantage of the proposed refuge and were joined by many people from Plymouth. A group of purist Quakers refused to nurse wounded confederation soldiers who had been shipped to the island on the grounds that this would be taking part in an unjust war.

24:47Governor Coddington, in a most un-Quaker-like reaction, forced them to do so. In a letter to the Massachusetts governor, Coddington noted wryly that Quakers were nursing Roger Williams remained as a captain and as part of a defensive garrison, but Cononchit, Though bitter at almost all whites, told Williams that, You have been kind to us for many years, not a hair of your head shall be touched.

25:38And this in the midst of a desperate, inevitably hopeless war against overwhelming odds. In June, Kananchet, son of Miantonomo, met the same fate as his father. Captured by the white forces, he was turned over to his own Indian enemies and was promptly butchered. For the Narragansetts, the rest was mopping up. By the end of the year, almost all the women, children and aged had been slaughtered by the troops. The remaining warriors were fleeing north to Nipmuc territory. Just as the war was ending, Rhode Island was succumbing to War Hysteria. Under pressure, the Quakers began to compromise their principles once again. Governor Cottington, who had already forced purist Quakers to tend wounded Confederation soldiers, agreed in April to provide a military garrison at Providence, and Quaker assemblymen led in setting up this garrison. In May, Walter Clark, a compromising Quaker, was elected Governor and stepped up military preparations. Roger Williams now provided for the coerced sale into servitude of the Indian prisoners and did the same to the hapless Indian refugees

27:01who had found their way to Providence, formerly a town of refuge. Captain Roger Williams, among the handful of others who had remained in devastated Providence during the war, reaped the gains of the sales of the Indians into servitude. Was it for this that conanciate had spared the head of Roger Williams? It should be noted, however, that Williams refused to allow the Indians to be sold into permanent slavery. Apparently, nine years of involuntary servitude were not so long a term as to offend his libertarian instincts. Finally, Williams and a few other magistrates held a military court-martial in August and executed several of the Indian prisoners.

27:49To the last Indian, Roger Williams warmly participated in the populace's demands for execution, and in the clearing of the town of all the Indians to the great peace and and Content of All, the All presumably not including the Indians who had been sold into servitude. The elections of May 1677 demonstrated the political futility of compromise. The war party led by Benedict Arnold swept the Quakers out of office. One of the first acts of the new assembly was to repeal the exemption of conscientious The New Act thundered that some under-pretensive conscience had taken the liberty to void the power of the military and therefore of the civil power itself.

28:45As a result, Rhode Island was now destitute of required military forces, though who the new enemy was supposed to be was not explained. To return to King Philip's War, with the destruction of Canachet and the Narragansetts, only fighting to the north remained. There the Wampanoags and their allies fought valiantly on through the winter and spring of 1676, holding their own in raids and sorties against far superior military odds. But the Indian guerrilla warfare was defeated, in the long run, by the Indians' shortage of food. They did not have the food supplies to permit them to fight in moss. Throughout the entire war, the Indians could find food only by pillaging settlements, and that source inevitably dried up after a few months. The Indians could not take the root of successful By April and May, the Nipmucks had been largely annihilated, and by the end of June the remainder of the Narragansetts had gone the way of the fallen Karnache.

30:03The war now began to accelerate toward its end. Only King Philip and his Wampanoics remained, and he was deserted by informers and defecting tribesmen. Driven into his old lair at Mount Hope, Philip was betrayed by an informer. In a white sneak attack on August 12, King Philip was shot. His skull was publicly exhibited on a pole at Plymouth for the next quarter of a century. King Philip's war was thus over by the end of August 1676, and New England faced the question of what to do about those scattered Indians who had not been exterminated. Faced with the problem of Indian prisoners, New England did not hesitate. Mass deportation into slavery. Most of the Indian captives were shipped to the West Indies to be sold into slavery. But Indians, in contrast to African Negroes, were notoriously unsuited for slave labor and died quickly in slavery. Those slaves Those slaves for whom the Confederation could not find purchasers were set ashore on deserted coast and abandoned to their fate. There were several objectors to this barbarity, including

31:19one of the heroes of the war, Captain Benjamin Church, and the saintly John Elliot, longtime friend and missionary to the Indians. Elliot warned the Confederation commissioners that To sell souls for money seemeth to me dangerous merchandise, but more typical was the sentiment of the colony's leaders concerning what to do with the little nine-year-old son of Philip, now a prisoner of war. The child was finally sold into slavery in the West Indies, but some ministers urged a more severe penalty. One minister insisted that the Bible did permit murder of innocent The Eminent Rev. Increase Mathur opined that though David had spared the infant haded, yet it might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful.

32:10Although the little heir to Philip was not killed outright, over a dozen leading Indian sacum prisoners were executed, And the mostly friendly praying Indians were, during the war, herded into concentration camps from which they could not go further than a mile unless accompanied by a white man. Violation meant imprisonment or death. Many of these were later conscripted into military service for the whites. And even after the war, the praying Indians, as well as other remaining Indians, were either herded into prescribed and supervised villages and deprived of their arms or ordered to remain as indentured servants in white families, there to be taught and inducted in the Christian religion.

33:01Now virtually wards of the white government, the Indians were prevented from assembling. One Indian in each group of ten was appointed by the government to be held responsible for all the deeds of the others in his cell. The hard-line policy of total victory or the virtual extermination of the Indians of New England had, in little more than a year, succeeded in its highly dubious objective. But at what cost? Fully six percent of the men of military age in New England or about a thousand men had been killed. Twenty towns in New England had been totally destroyed.

33:47Of the ninety towns in Massachusetts and Plymouth, twelve had been destroyed. And fully half of the towns in New England had been severely damaged. The monetary cost was fearful. A total of £90,000 had been spent by the government to prosecute the war. The war debt of Plymouth alone has been calculated at greater than the total valuation of personal property of the colony at that time. A direct sequel to King Philip's War took place in the far north as soon as the Maine War had ended. In the fall of 1675, the Tarentine Indians of Maine had ravaged Falmouth and other towns of the Maine coast.

34:34With food scarce, the Tarentines concluded a treaty with the Whites in December and promised to remain peaceful from then on. The Indians complained, however, of ill-treatment at the hands of the Whites, and particularly chafed at being prohibited from purchasing ammunition, so necessary for hunting game. The fall of Philip the next August stimulated the Tarantines to go on the war path again, and the English had to abandon every settlement between Casco Bay and the Penobscot, that is east of the densest concentration of settlements north of the Piscataqua. Massachusetts organized a military force in the area headed by Major Richard Waldron, the eminent merchant of Dover.

35:20of Dover. At this point on September 15, 400 Indians came peacefully into the white camp to parlay for peace, and Major Waldron employed a typical white stratagem to seize them. Convivially, Waldron proposed a mock battle between the two forces. The Indians shot their muskets into the air as part of the war game, but the whites held their fire, surrounded the Indians and disarmed them. One half of the Indians, supposedly identified either as murderers of white colonists or as violators of the old treaty, were sent as prisoners to Boston. Naturally, the rest of the tribe promptly resumed its attacks and other main settlements were devastated or abandoned. The war continued during all of 1677, with little success for the whites. Finally, the colonial government decided that a peace policy might be wiser after all. In August 1677, the Indians concluded peace with Edmund Andros' representative The Indians agreed to surrender all prisoners without a ransom and to refrain from molesting the settlers. In return, the white governments were to pay the Indians an annual tribute of a pack of corn for each family settled in Maine.

36:57When King Philip's War began, Sir Edmund Andros decided to take advantage of New England's distraction by seizing Connecticut in behalf of New York, or at least the great bulk of Connecticut west of the Connecticut River. Since the Duke of York's charter was now brand new, cogent legal argument held that the Nichols Treaty of 1664, granting the territory west of the river to Connecticut, was now invalid. In this aggressive design, Andros was encouraged by the Duke of York. In May 1675, Andros informed the Connecticut Assembly of his intention of assuming jurisdiction. To Connecticut's reminder of the favorable award of the royal commission, Andros again replied that the Duke's charter superseded the commission. Connecticut again refused and suggested a friendly conference.

37:51Governor Andros, however, was not the man for friendly conferences when violence could be employed. He denounced Connecticut's stubbornness as virtual rebellion. With King Philip's War now breaking out in June, Andros informed the Connecticut Council on July 7 that he was dispatching, post-haste, his troops to the Connecticut River. Professor Don aptly summarizes the Connecticut reaction. Whether Andros' soldiers were to be used against the Indians or against the Connecticut government was unclear, but the council members could guess. They sent a company of militia, commanded by Captain Thomas Bull, to Saybrook with the instructions to protect the seacoast from the approach of an enemy, either red-skinned or red-coated.

38:43Andros managed to reach Fort Saybrook first, but there he was confronted with armed and glowering local militiamen. Andros had expected to find the militia away fighting Indians and to seize the undefended fort. Instead, the militiamen were preparing their cannons. In this crisis, the Connecticut General Assembly stood fast. It directed Captain Bull to tell Tell Andros to go to Mount Hope if he really wanted to fight Indians, but to resist if he tried to land his troops. Andros, his bluff called, contented himself with reading aloud a proclamation of the Duke's Charter. The Connecticut force countered with a proclamation of its own, protesting Andros' illegal actions and calling Andros a disturber of the public Peace. Feebly protesting this as slander, Andros sailed back home. Connecticut had successfully resisted the loss of its self-government by the imperialist seizure of Andros and New York.

39:53Interestingly enough, the Hartford government's reaction was to commend Bull and the other officers, but to complain that they acted too mildly. Andros's reading of the Duke's This charter, they said, should have been drowned out by the drums of Connecticut troops.