Metacom's War

10 Key excerpts on "Metacom's War"

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  Native Americans of New England

  • Christoph Strobel(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  14 King Philip’s War is, however, not only of relevance in terms of national history as Mandell points out but is also of importance in the history of indigenous–Euro-American relations of New England. While in the southern portion of the region King Philip’s War crushed Native Americans’ ability to resist militarily, in the northern reaches of Dawnland this conflict was merely one war among many.

  100 Years of Wars

  Between King Philip’s War and the American Revolution, the Native Americans of New England were tied into four major wars that the colonists referred to as King William’s War (1688–1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), King George’s War (1744–1748), and the French and Indian War (1754–1763). These conflicts were actually North American tangents of broader European, Atlantic world, and sometimes global wars. European and world historians thus refer to King William’s War as the War of the League of Augsburg (or the War of the Grand Alliance), Queen Anne’s War as the War of Spanish Succession, King George’s War as the War of Austrian Succession, and the French and Indian War as the Seven Years’ War (as it lasted in the European theaters from 1756 to 1763). These series of wars were part of a struggle between Britain and France over who would be the dominant power in Europe. They took place in Europe, but the rivalry also played itself out in a global theater as the two powers competed over and tried to strengthen their colonial holdings around the world. The Atlantic Northeast was at the center of the Anglo-French competition over power, and the Native Americans of New England often found themselves in the middle of this global war. This rivalry also played itself out in smaller regional conflicts such as Dummer’s War (1722–1727), during which the Wabanakis in northern New England attempted to push back English colonization efforts. This proliferation of conflicts meant that many of the indigenous people of Dawnland lived through an almost continuous era of war.

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  War and Colonization in the Early American Northeast

  • Christoph Strobel(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  31

  King Philip’s War plays a contentious role among historians engaged in the debate about the strategic conduct of Anglo Americans on the battlefield, and in their arguments of whether English colonists “Americanized” their conduct in conflict through the adoption of Native American tactics, or, if they continued to stick to European ways of fighting. Some historians argue that the English won this conflict by adopting Native American’s tactics and modes of fighting.32 Other scholars maintain that the English colonists’ adaptation of Indigenous ways of war were quite limited, had limited effectiveness, and their impact on the outcomes of the conflict were overblown. This school of thought argues that European combat behavior and strategies continued to prevail through King Philip’s War and beyond.33

  This same question was also debated among New English colonists during King Philip’s War. The seventeenth-century colonist and observer William Hubbard, for instance, dismissed efforts to adopt Native American fighting styles. He used the heavy casualties suffered by a force of colonists whose commander had “taken up a wrong notion about the best way and manner of fighting with the Indians,” as a lesson why such behavior was fraught with problems for the English. This officer, according to Hubbard, had ordered his “Company” to fight “with the Indians in their own way,” by “skulking behind Trees and taking their aim at single persons.” Hubbard advocated for colonists to reject Native American battlefield conduct and “to March in a body,” as practiced in European warfare. To Hubbard fighting in close European battlefield formation was not only strategically but also morally superior. Indigenous warfare distinguished itself in little more than “subtlety and cruelty.”34 Other colonists advocated different solutions. Realizing that too often English forces had been challenged and suffered heavy casualties during combat in wetlands or forests when marching in close formation, Benjamin Church, a New English colonist and military officer, came to advocate a different strategy. He advised the colonies that “if they intended to make an end of the War, by subduing the Enemy, they must make a business of the War, as the Enemy did.”35

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  European and Native American Warfare 1675-1815

  • Armstrong Starkey(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter FourTotal war in New England: King Philip’s War, 1675–6 and its aftermath

  King Philip’s War

  The end came for the New England colonists’ most feared enemy on 12 August 1676. The Wampanoag sachem Metacom, better known among the English as King Philip, was at last brought to bay in a swamp near his home at Mount Hope (now Bristol, Rhode Island) bordering Plymouth colony. His relentless pursuer was one of the most notable frontier commanders in American history, Captain Benjamin Church (1639–1718), leader of a picked company of English and friendly Indians. While we know nothing of Philip’s thoughts on this fateful day, he must have been exhausted and demoralized. The uprising which bears his name was in collapse and Church had already captured his wife and son. Philip’s own followers were falling away and, indeed, it was a deserter who led Church to his camp on the swamp’s edge.

  It was still dark as Church’s company advanced on the enemy position. One detachment was ordered to crawl on their stomachs as close to the camp as possible, taking care not to fire until first light to avoid hitting friends. Once discovered, they were to fire and fall on the enemy, each man shouting and making all the noise that he could. Church knew that, at the first sound of gunfire, Philip would flee into the swamp, a tactic that had often enabled him to avoid pursuit. Therefore he arranged an ambush placing Englishmen and Indians in pairs behind trees in the swamp, ordering them to kill anyone who should approach silently. Once he made this disposition, Church was confident that Philip was in his grasp. He took a brother officer by the hand and announced: “Sir, I have so placed them that ‘tis scarce possible Philip should escape them.”

  Suddenly a shot whistled over their heads. Captain Golding, the officer leading the assault party, had feared discovery by an Indian who had risen to relieve himself. His shot provoked a volley by the entire party which overshot the enemy Indians, who had yet to rise from sleep. Almost immediately they fled into the swamp, Philip himself rushing upon one of the ambush positions. He was struck twice in the chest by musket bullets and collapsed in the mud. He had been killed by an Indian. Church awarded Philip no honours of war. Instead he called his “old Indian executioner” and ordered him to behead and quarter the body. “Philip, having one very remarkable hand, being much scarred, occasioned by the splitting of a pistol in it formerly, Captain Church gave the head and that hand to Alderman, the Indian who shot him, to show to such gentlemen as would bestow gratuities upon him. And accordingly, he got many a penny by it.” It was thus that Philip, a symbol of fierce savagery and a name at which the world grew pale, was transformed into a curiosity.1

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  Red Ink

  Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period

  • Drew Lopenzina(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  3 King Philip's Signature Ascribing Philip's Name to Land, War, and History in Native New England (1660–1709) Surely then we have many of us cause to tremble. How sad it is to consider, that an Indian should write a letter to an Englishman and thus express himself, “When any hurt is done, you say that we have done it though we never did wronge to English-men and hope we never shall.” —Increase Mather, An Earnest Exhortation to the Inhabitants of New England To all Christian People to whom these presents shall come, Phillip, allies [alias] Metacom Cheiffe Sachem of Pocanakett in the Collonie of New Plymouth in New England sendeth Greeting. —Philip (Metacom), opening refrain in numerous land transactions between Philip and the colonists Written in Stone: Colonial Contests for Meaning On November 20, 1701, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather wrote in his diary how “I dare not go any longer, without my old Methods, of Praying with Fasting in secret Places … [to] address the Lord for His Blessing on my Church-History … which He has helped me to write, of His glorious Works in these American churches.” 1 Mather had embarked upon the writing of the Magnalia Christi Americana, his massive deterministic history of the Church of New England, and was engaging in something not unlike a vision quest, a secret fast, calling upon his God in a most private ritual to grant him the power and strength for the task ahead. Some twenty-five years earlier the sachem of the Wampanoag Nation, Metacom or Philip, may have undertaken a similar quest to determine the history of his people as well as a course of action that might lead them through the treacherous space of his contested, increasingly colonized homeland. He too must have fasted and sweat, sought spiritual counsel and called upon his spirit helper, or manitou, for power and strength to plot the difficult path before him

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  Snowshoe Country

  An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast

  • Thomas M. Wickman(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  22 In one sense King Philip’s War began as a dispute about jurisdiction over a frozen pond. The winter immediately prior to the war’s outbreak was severe. 23 On January 29, 1674–5, the body of Christian Indian John Sassamon was found under the ice of Assawompsett Pond, twenty miles southwest of Plymouth in present-day Lakeville, and it did not take long for English authorities to infer that he had been murdered for raising an alarm about an imminent attack supposedly being orchestrated by Metacom, the Wampanoag sachem and son of the late Massasoit. From Metacom’s perspective, whether the death was an accident, crime, or exe- cution, the case fell within his jurisdiction, and English insistence on tak- ing Native suspects to trial was a direct challenge to his sachemship and to indigenous sovereignty. Sassamon had been living beside Assawompsett Pond since 1671 and traveled frequently to Nemasket, about seven miles northeast of the pond, to preach to Christian Indians. In the fall of 1674, Metacom had sent Sassamon in a delegation to Awashonks, the female Sakonnet sachem, possibly to form an alliance in preparation for war against the English, and Sassamon had immediately alerted Benjamin Church. Sometime in December 1674, Sassamon encountered Metacom near Nemasket. Sassamon again became privy to Metacom’s quiet win- tertime deliberations, and as before, he went to the English with infor- mation that Metacom, also known as Philip, was preparing for war. By visiting Governor Josiah Winslow in Marshfield, Sassamon’s movements may have drawn Wampanoag scrutiny. Winslow was receiving multiple 22 Adams, “Private Diary,” 11, 15; John Cotton, Jr. to Sarah Mather, December 27, 1670, CRW 64; Edward Taylor, “Private Diary, April 1668–January 1672,” MHSP 1st ser., 18 (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1880–1): 16–17. 23 Volcanic activity thousands of miles away may have contributed to the cold conditions observed in New England in the winter of 1674–5.

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  God, War, and Providence

  The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England

  • James A. Warren(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Scribner

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 9

  “In a Strange Way”: King Philip’s War

  Paul Revere’s engraving of King Philip of the Wampanoags. Philip initiated the conflict that bears his name, but he didn’t exercise control over the trajectory of the conflict for very long.

  O n June 24, 1675, the chief sachems of the Narragansetts—Pessacus, Ninigret, Quinnapin, and Quaiapen, the sister of Ninigret—met with Roger Williams and three emissaries from the General Court of Massachusetts on the shore of Worden Pond, twelve miles southwest of Cocumscussoc. A crisis was at hand. Metacom—known to the English as King Philip—the son of Massasoit, great sachem of the Wampanoags, was on the verge of war with Plymouth Colony. Massachusetts and Plymouth had rapidly dispatched representatives to the major Indian tribes in the region. They wanted assurances from their sachems that their warriors would not join Metacom in an uprising, if, indeed, one was in the offing.

  Would the Narragansett confederation remain at peace?

  According to Williams’s account, the sachems were well aware of the crisis. They reported that “they had not sent one [warrior], nor would: that they had prohibited all their people from going on . . . [to Philip’s] side: that those of their people, who had made marriages with [the Wampanoags] should return or perish there: That [if] Philip or his men fled to them yet they would not receive them but deliver them up unto the English.”1

  This was all reassuring news to Williams and the emissaries from Massachusetts. But it was not the whole story. In fact, the Narragansetts were deeply conflicted about whether to join Philip’s uprising. Ninigret was by now in his late sixties. He had wrestled with the problem of ascending English power for decades and had in recent years found himself in weighty discussions of the English problem not only with his fellow Narragansett sachems and Philip, but with sachem Robin Cassacinamon of an independent band of Pequots near New London, and, astonishingly, even with Uncas.

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  Legends of American Indian Resistance

  • Edward J. Rielly(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Philip (Metacom, Metacomet), circa 1639–1676 Philip negotiates with Pilgrims at a treaty table, the proposed agreement spread out before him. (Library of Congress) Philip, often referred to as King Philip, was the sachem (chief or leader, a term used primarily in relation to New England native peoples) of the Pokanoket, one of the groups making up the Wampanoag tribe. He ascended to this largely hereditary position in 1662 after the deaths of his father, Massasoit (Ousamequin), and his brother, Alexander (Wamsutta). In some ways, Philip’s life was a microcosm of Indian–Euro-American history, first in the American colonies and later in the United States. The Wampanoags, centered in Rhode Island, initially welcomed the European immigrants, but later came to regret their embrace of the newcomers. Ousame- quin (more commonly referred to as Massasoit, a term that means “grand sachem” and that reflected his standing in relation to other Wampanoag sachems) befriended the Europeans who came to what would become Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. These individuals were known as Pilgrims but are often identified with a second group of immigrants—Puritans—in English history. In reality, the Pilgrims and Puritans, although theologically similar—both “puritan” in their religious attitudes—differed in that the latter were committed to purifying Anglicanism but remaining within the Church of England, while the Pilgrims (also known as Separatists) desired to break entirely with the established church. Pilgrims, rather than Puritans, were the founders of Plymouth Colony. The story of the first Thanksgiving is also the story of how the Wampanoags helped these individuals, who were fleeing oppression at home, to survive their early years in a new land. Tisquantum, a figure better known to American schoolchildren as Squanto, was a former English slave who returned to his native land only to find his people, the Patuxet, destroyed by illness.

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  History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts

  • Samuel Adams Drake(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Jazzybee Verlag

    (Publisher)

  X. KING PHILIP'S WAR.

  Middlesex had now attained a high degree of prosperity. Nearly half a century had elapsed since the landing at Charlestown. The handful of original settlements were already old; a new generation, native to the soil, was replacing the first comers; in population, resources, and influence the old shire had steadily advanced, and with that progress as constantly maintained her high character as one of the soundest and stanchest constituents of the commonwealth. But at this period the colony was called upon to meet a new danger, and to encounter reverses in which Middlesex bore a heavy share.

  What is known as Philip's War may be regarded as a most determined attempt to destroy the English, made by a chieftain able to grasp the idea that either they or his own nation and race must disappear. The haughty Philip had been made to feel that he was a mere vassal of the English. His unconquerable spirit revolted at the yoke. His endeavor to unite the New England nations in one desperate effort to free themselves from this galling subjection was the work of a great mind. The English had themselves furnished the idea of combination. They had confederated against the Indians, why not the Indians against the English?

  Moreover, the natives were no longer the despicable foes the English had found them forty years before. They had firearms, and knew how to use them.

  In celerity of movement, ability to encounter and resist hardship, craftiness in planning surprises, and in general knowledge of the country, they far surpassed the whites, whose tactics compelled them to act in a few large bodies, while the numerous small parties of the enemy spread devastation among the scattered frontier settlements, and by their appearance in some unexpected quarter confounded their assailants and their plans. Fortunately for them, perhaps, Philip was unable to accomplish his grand design of an Indian confederacy against the English to the extent he meditated.

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  Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England

  Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century

  • Ann Marie Plane(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  . . but presently presenting his Gun against them, he so frighted them, that they gave him an Opportunity to make an Escape from a Multitude of them.’ ” 7 Earlier sources, like Samuel de Cham-plain’s account of the 1608 attack on the Iroquois, and later ones like Frank 106 Chapter 4 Speck’s early twentieth-century informants in Maine and eastern Canada sug-gest considerable stability in the connection of insightful dreaming to Algon-quian practices of predictive visioning and divination in advance of hunting expeditions or wartime attacks, though doubtless there are many facets of this tradition obscured by colonialist misunderstanding. 8 King Philip’s War had also been a movement of nativist revitalization, a coalition among the many separate indigenous groups in the region. In at least one case, a set of visions explicitly inspired and propelled the Indian resistance. New England had seen such a movement before; Miantonomo of the Narra-gansett had led a resistance effort in the 1640s that was cut short by his murder, a death engineered by his Mohegan enemies and sanctioned by the English. But before his execution, the Narragansett sachem had worked to forge a pan- Indian alliance, including “all the Sachems from east to west, both Moquakues and Mohauks,” who were prepared to attack the English. They planned to “kill men, women, and children,” but that was all; they would preserve the cows, “for they will serve to eat till our deer be increased again.” 9 While Miantonomo’s movement had failed, evidence from the Maine fron-tier suggests that visions were once again afoot in the 1670s, some years before Philip of Pokanoket, an influential sachem of southern New England also known as Metacom, began sending emissaries to try to build his pan-Indian revolt. These northern traditions had a trajectory of their own. One man, a paramount sagamore (political leader) named Squando, proved a particularly influential visionary.

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  War and American Popular Culture

  A Historical Encyclopedia

  • M. Paul Holsinger(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Philip, the son of Massasoit (the Wampanoag chieftain who befriended the first Pilgrim settlers), tried for years to unite the many Indian tribes throughout New England against the white settlers. When the war that bears his name erupted in January 1675, the numerically stronger New Englan- ders had an opportunity to destroy the last vestiges of Native American oppo- sition to their control. The bloodletting was at times horrendous—in December 1675, for instance, more than 600 Narragansett Indians were burned to death when the New Englanders set fire to their enclosed fortifications. The Indians COLONIAL AMERICAN WARS 3 also killed at will, frequently destroying small white settlements, and occasion- ally taking prisoner such women as Mary Rowlandson, whose account of her captivity became one of the most renowned of all such narratives through the years of Indian warfare (see A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson). In the end, the European settlers were victorious; Philip's Indian allies were hunted down, captured, enslaved, and ultimately slaughtered. The chief himself was finally ambushed and killed in August 1676. His body was drawn and quartered, and his severed head was proudly displayed in Plymouth for many years afterward. The French and Indian War and the British victory over the French in Quebec paved the way for an independent United States of America less than two dec- ades later. Unlike earlier encounters between the two nations, however, the con- flict began in the woods of Pennsylvania and only later spread worldwide. The story of that war (as well as many of the earlier conflicts between the British and the French) has been told again and again, but probably nowhere better than in the writings of nineteenth-century American historian Francis Parkman. It is a tale of military men such as France's Marquis de Montcalm, Great Britain's James Wolfe, and even the twenty-two-year-old George Washington.

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