IN MID-JUNE 1675, BENJAMIN Church received an invitation to a dance. It came from Awashonks, who had called her subjects together so that they could make a momentous decision. Church took an interpreter, went to Awashonks’s village, and found “hundreds of Indians gathered together from all parts of her dominion.” Awashonks herself was “in a foaming sweat … leading the dance.” When she saw Church, she stopped moving.1
Awashonks told her English guest that Philip had sent representatives to her “to draw her into a confederacy with him in a war with the English.” What should she do? Church reassured her that Plymouth’s leaders were not preparing for war. She asked for a response from Philip’s men, who were still at Sakonnet. They “made a formidable appearance,” not least because of their bags full of bullets. Awashonks told Church that Philip had threatened that unless she joined his plot against the English, he would burn English homes near Sakonnet and “provoke the English to fall upon her.” Church, a bit uneasily, advised Awashonks to inform Plymouth’s governor of her loyalty and to place her people under his protection. Although some of the Sakonnet men made clear their preference for war, the “squaw sachem” asked Church to bear her peaceful tidings to Plymouth.2
Historians should use Benjamin Church’s self-glorifying memoir with caution, not least because the famed Indian fighter did not write it. Thomas Church wrote up Entertaining Passages based on his father’s notes shortly before the latter’s 1718 death. The elder Church perused the manuscript and had no objections. “And why would he?” asks historian Jill Lepore. The book “paints Church not only as the hero of every battle he fought but as the Puritans’ voice of reason and restraint.”3
Although the Churches blended fact and fancy in their memoir, other sources corroborate the basic contours of the nickómmo—an Algonquian dance and feast—that Benjamin Church had witnessed. Roger Williams learned about such occasions from the Narragansetts, but because he feared “partak[ing] of Satan’s inventions and worships,” he never saw one himself. According to Williams, Algonquian peoples held nickómmos after harvests, successful hunts, and other times of celebration, and also at moments of crisis. As Church observed of Awashonks, Williams wrote that the leader of a nickómmo sweated profusely while making “strange antic [grotesque] gestures, and actions even unto fainting.”4
A nickómmo served several purposes. The dance and feast confirmed relationships and alliances; sachems such as Awashonks and Philip fed guests and sometimes distributed goods to them. The nickómmo also established a setting in which the community could reach consensus on a decision and access the manitou (spiritual power) needed for its accomplishment. In June 1675, Sakonnet communities faced a grave choice. If Philip and the English went to war, on which side would they fight?
English settlers also held gatherings that month. New Plymouth’s magistrates asked John Cotton to draft a proclamation to the colony’s churches, asking them to observe a day of humiliation on June 24. Settlers were expected to fast, abstain from work, and beseech God to forgive the sins that had brought about his judgment. In this instance, Cotton declared, it was obvious that “the awful hand of God [was] upon us in permitting the heathen to carry it with great in[solenc]y and rage against us.” Cotton’s reasoning and language were common among late seventeenth-century New England puritans. If the people repented, God might “be entreated to go forth with our forces” and subdue the rebellious Indians. Otherwise, the wages of their sins might be death.5
There was no guarantee that fasting and prayer would produce the desired result, which rested on God’s sometimes inscrutable will. Even so, just as William Bradford recounted that badly needed rains followed one drought-inspired day of fasting, many New Englanders linked the communal rituals to the renewal of God’s favor. Accordingly, on June 24 in Rehoboth, the minister Noah Newman took Psalm 46:10 as his text. “Be still and know that I am God.” Newman reassured his congregants that God would be—as the verse from the Bible promised—“exalted among the heathen.”6
A puritan day of humiliation was far more reserved and somber than an Algonquian nickómmo. There was fasting instead of feasting, psalm singing instead of dancing. Nevertheless, the two occasions served similar purposes. The nickómmo and the day of humiliation brought communities together in the midst of crisis and steeled them for coming hardships. They were rituals designed to harness supernatural power and curry divine favor. In the months that followed, the prayers of neither people would be answered fully.
The Sakonnet nickómmo came on the heels of a high-stakes murder trial at Plymouth. The dead man was John Sassamon, the scribe and translator who had worked for John Eliot, Wamsutta, and Philip.7 Several years earlier, Sassamon had moved to Nemasket, roughly halfway between Mount Hope and the town of Plymouth, and preached to groups of praying Indians in the area. In March 1674, the Nemasket sachem Tuspaquin deeded twenty-seven acres of land at Assowamsett Pond to Sassamon. The interpreter’s daughter had married a local man, but Tuspaquin probably did not make the “gift” purely as a gesture of goodwill. Rather, a group of New Plymouth land proprietors—including Church, Constant Southworth, and John Thompson—had been pressuring Tuspaquin and others at Nemasket to sell their land, which lay within the newly formed English township of Middleborough. It is possible that Sassamon managed to acquire a prime tract of land for himself before the English proprietors bought it, or he may have tricked Tuspaquin by promising to preserve Nemasket from land-hungry settlers.8
In January 1675, Sassamon journeyed to Josiah Winslow’s Marshfield home and informed the governor that Philip endeavored “to engage all the sachems round about in a war” against Plymouth. Winslow disregarded Sassamon’s intelligence. Surely there was no Indian conspiracy in the dead of winter, a few months before the Wampanoags would plant their spring crops.9
A week or so later, several Native men discovered Sassamon’s corpse under the ice of Assowamsett Pond. Given the nature of Sassamon’s recent errand, Plymouth’s magistrates suspected foul play. Getting wind of the rumors, Philip went to Plymouth of his own accord. According to Winslow and Thomas Hinckley, the magistrates at the time believed Philip was complicit in Sassamon’s death but lacked proof. They warned the Pokanoket sachem that if they found incriminating evidence against him, they would “demand his arms to be delivered up,” as Plymouth’s leaders had required during the 1671 crisis.10
Soon there was testimony, not against Philip directly, but against several other men. William Nahauton, one of the Natick evangelists whom Eliot had sent to Philip in 1671, reported that a Christian Indian named Patuckson had witnessed the murder. Patuckson accused three men of having killed Sassamon: Tobias, a trusted counselor of Philip; Wampapaquan, Tobias’s son; and Mattashunannamo.
The magistrates sent for the suspects and ordered the exhumation of the corpse. A coroner’s inquest affirmed that Sassamon had been murdered. As in the 1655 death of fourteen-year-old John Walker, the magistrates also sought supernatural evidence. When Tobias “came near the dead body,” Boston’s Increase Mather recounted, “it fell a bleeding on fresh, as if it had been newly slain.” The fresh blood was taken as a sign of Tobias’s guilt. In an unusual display of leniency toward an accused murderer, the magistrates released Tobias on bond, taking as collateral the Nemasket lands of Tobias and Tuspaquin. Suddenly, land and lives were both at stake. Shortly before the trial, Tuspaquin turned the bond into a deed, making over “all” of his Nemasket land to Constant Southworth and other proprietors. As the historian Lisa Brooks suggests, Tuspaquin probably believed that by selling his lands, he was purchasing Tobias’s freedom. If so, he miscalculated.11
Plymouth’s General Court and magistrates had tried other Native defendants, but mostly for crimes committed against English settlers. On several occasions, the colony’s magistrates had supported Wampanoag complaints against settlers. In 1669, for example, they fined Thomas Mathewes for “unreasonably beating of the Indian Ned.” Plymouth had never tried a serious Indian-on-Indian crime, however. Recognizing the unusual and controversial nature of the proceedings, the General Court impaneled six Christian Wampanoag men to confirm the decision of twelve English jurors. Among those chosen were Hope, who had testified to his conversion at Mashpee, and Wanna, whose conversion John Cotton had described in his journal. Both men had sworn their fidelity and obedience to New Plymouth in 1671. Presumably, the jurors heard a report of the coroner’s inquest and the testimony of Patuckson. In early June, they convicted the three men, who were sentenced to die by hanging.12
In a letter to Connecticut’s governor John Winthrop Jr., Roger Williams stated that “many wish that Plymouth had left the Indians alone, at least not to put to death the three Indians upon one Indian’s testimony.” Plymouth’s magistrates, Williams implied, had ignored the Bible’s insistence that “at the mouth of one witness [a defendant] shall not die” (Deuteronomy 17:6). When the colony had revised its laws in 1671, it included a set of “General Fundamentals” that defined safeguards and privileges “essential to the just rights, liberties, common good and special end of this colony.” The passage from the Book of Deuteronomy was the basis for one of those liberties. In order to convict a defendant of a capital crime, Plymouth required at least two witnesses “or that which is equivalent thereunto.” Perhaps the bleeding corpse sufficed as the “equivalent” of a second witness.13
Was it an accidental death or murder? If it was murder, did Plymouth have evidence beyond Patuckson’s word that the three men were the killers? If they were, had the men acted on orders from Philip?
It is clear that Philip loathed Sassamon. Philip had not changed his mind about Christianity, which he understood as a threat to his authority and the stability of Native communities. There were more particular problems with Sassamon, however. At the height of the 1671 crisis, Philip had complained that his former interpreter had passed intelligence to the English. (Specifically, Sassamon had reported the presence of Narragansett sachems at Mount Hope).14 Nor did Philip hide his disdain after Sassamon’s death. In a mid-June 1675 conversation with Rhode Island’s John Easton, Philip alleged that Sassamon had tried to swindle him out of his land while working as his scribe. Given such affronts, the Pokanokets told Easton, Philip would have been within his rights as a sachem to have ordered Sassamon’s death. Philip had means, opportunity, and an abundance of motives.
Philip (Metacom), engraving by Paul Revere, from Thomas Church, Entertaining History of King Philip’s War (1772). (Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.)
While Philip freely confessed his dislike of Sassamon, he insisted that he and the convicted murderers were innocent. Sassamon had fallen and drowned. Patuckson owed the defendants money and testified against them to avoid the debt and gain favor with the English. The Pokanokets insisted that the case was crooked.15
On June 8, 1675, Plymouth hanged the three men. Executions in seventeenth-century New England were public spectacles; one can presume that a large crowd gathered at the gallows to watch the three men die. Astonishingly, Wampapaquan’s rope broke during his hanging. He then stated that his co-defendants had murdered Sassamon but that he had only watched. Of course, the other two men had just died and could not contradict him. Perhaps because the snapped rope suggested divine intervention, Wampapaquan earned a reprieve until the October session of the General Court.16
For the time being, Plymouth’s magistrates concluded that they lacked sufficient evidence to charge Philip as the mastermind behind Sassamon’s death. Roger Williams rejoiced that “the storm” had passed. His relief was premature.17
So was Wampapaquan’s. His turn of good fortune turned out to be very temporary. Before the end of the month, Plymouth’s magistrates no longer felt inclined toward mercy, and they revoked his reprieve. In order to make sure he did not cheat death a second time, they had him shot.
The executions provided the catalyst but were not the cause of the war. The alliance formed between Ousamequin and the Pilgrims had already broken down because of the expansion of English settlements, the pressure of land sales, and the insistence of New Plymouth’s magistrates that the Wampanoags were their subjects. Colonial leaders had pushed Philip to the brink of war in 1671 and had then imposed humiliating terms on him. Both sides were now quicker to resort to violence and less open to negotiation and compromise. Across New England, moreover, there were similar strains in the relations between Native peoples and colonial governments.
Whether or not Philip had been plotting against the English in January, he now sought allies for what might occur in the wake of the trial and executions. Just a few days after the hangings, John Browne at Swansea learned that a witness had spotted sixty “double armed men” at Mount Hope. The Pokanokets were on guard because they believed that Governor Winslow “intend[ed] to send for Phillip.” As Hugh Cole had reported in 1671, Browne informed Winslow that Indians—including Narragansetts—were streaming to Mount Hope. English settlers heard drums and gunshots. Indians allegedly lay in wait on the paths between Taunton and Swansea. “The truth is they are in a posture of war,” Browne concluded.18
Plymouth was caught off guard by the news but responded as it had four years earlier. Winslow insisted that other western sachems dissociate themselves from Philip, and the governor gained confirmation from Massachusetts Bay that it would support New Plymouth in the event of war. At the same time, Winslow demanded that Philip surrender his weapons, come to Plymouth, and submit. Philip countered that the allegations against him were false. He asked Winslow to excuse his people from surrendering their guns or paying a fine, and he refused to attend the court. In fact, he expected “great danger” should he venture to Plymouth.19
Swansea’s English inhabitants were also fearful. They had settled in several clusters, one of which lay on and around the neck of land that leads to Mount Hope. There, on Saturday, June 19, Pokanoket men ransacked the home of Job Winslow, cousin to New Plymouth’s governor. The next day, Indians burned two homes. New Plymouth’s settlements were vulnerable. According to Josiah Winslow, only a few homes were built with brick or stone. Most houses were “of timber, covered with boards and shingle.” They burned readily. Outside of Plymouth itself, most towns had no fortifications, though Swansea had garrisoned a few homes, including the house of the town’s Baptist minister, John Myles.20
Winslow relayed news of the depredations to Bay Colony governor John Leverett. There were some in Boston who grumbled that Plymouth “had ungroundedly enterprized this war” but, unlike in 1671, Massachusetts quickly sent several units of soldiers. Plymouth’s own troops headed west under the command of Captain James Cudworth (soon given the rank of major), who had refused to resume his military responsibilities in 1674 but now volunteered with war possible within the confines of New Plymouth itself. Captain William Bradford—son of the Mayflower passenger—was Cudworth’s second-in-command. As they reached Swansea, the soldiers joined the settlers huddling in the few safe houses.21
Meanwhile, the skirmishes turned deadly. The Natives shot at the garrisoned soldiers, burned more homes, and killed livestock. The first death came on June 23, when an “old man” instructed a young “lad” to shoot at several Indians whom they saw near an English house. A shot mortally wounded one Native man.22
The next day, as families across the colony gathered for the court-appointed day of humiliation, Philip’s men retaliated. Six or seven Swansea settlers were killed, some while fetching corn from their fields, others while returning from church. Among the casualties were the young man who had fired the previous day’s fatal shot and his father. Most of Swansea’s inhabitants took refuge in the several garrisons. Even at the safe houses, however, the English were not safe. In a letter to Governor Winslow, Cudworth detailed a night of terror. Gershom Cobb was shot and killed while on sentinel duty, and two other men were gravely wounded. One of the wounded men was Alexander Canady (Kennedy). Cudworth reported that there was “some hope” Canady would recover, and he did. Cudworth said that for the other wounded man, there was “no hope of life.” He identified the man only as “Mr. Miles his Negro.” Cudworth’s letter informs that an enslaved African American man was one of the first to die in what became known as King Philip’s War.23
The garrison dispatched two men to fetch Matthew Fuller (son of Mayflower passenger Edward Fuller; nephew of Mayflower passenger, deacon, and physician Samuel Fuller) to treat the wounded. The messengers never reached their destination. As Cudworth reported, “The men were stripped of their upper garments, one having his head cut off and carried a way [and] the other his head flayed, the skin and hair off from his skull and both their right hands cut off and gone.” Several representatives from Massachusetts Bay traveling to Mount Hope saw the mutilated corpses, turned around, and headed back to Boston.24
On June 26, there was a complete eclipse of the moon. Massachusetts soldiers marching toward Swansea halted as the landscape around them fell dark. It seemed a bad omen. When the moon shone again, some of the men thought they saw an Indian’s “scalp” or “bow” in its light. After they resumed their march and reached their destination, Cudworth, Bradford, and their Massachusetts counterparts prepared to attack Mount Hope.25
As they passed through the burned-out southernmost settlement of Swansea, the Plymouth and Massachusetts soldiers found pages ripped out of a Bible, scattered on the ground as a symbolic rejection of Christianity. Next, they came to a group of eight poles on which their enemies had mounted five English heads, two scalps, and one set of hands. The shaken and enraged soldiers tossed the remains of their countrymen into the river and then swept across the peninsula. They killed several of Philip’s men and ransacked his village, but they failed to capture the Pokanoket sachem. He had crossed to Pocasset.26
Throughout the war, English and Natives alike mutilated corpses and hacked off heads and hands. In late June, Roger Williams reported that Philip had sent several English heads as an overture to the Narragansetts. In the town of Plymouth, the authorities executed an Indian spy and took his head to the door of Governor Winslow’s Marshfield residence. Severed body parts served diplomatic purposes, functioned as symbols of triumph and warning, and sowed terror.27
After failing to catch or kill Philip on Mount Hope, English leaders regrouped and considered how best to pursue their enemies. From Swansea, James Cudworth advised that the English use the Wampanoags’ own tactics against them. Small parties of soldiers should “waylay them in the bushes and … cut off what we can of them.” Cudworth knew that English troops who blundered down paths exposed themselves to ambush and had little chance of locating their intended quarry. Governor Winslow, however, rejected his commander’s suggestion, which he considered a “base skulking way” of warfare. Winslow instructed Cudworth to wait for additional troops to relieve Swansea and then make “a more honorable and resolute charge on the enemy’s quarters.”28
In early July, English troops made several irresolute charges into what Captain Bradford described as “great” and “hideous” swamps in search of Philip and the Pocasset sachem Weetamoo. Each time, ambushes forced the inexperienced and confused settlers to retreat. Cudworth soon gave up. “We shall never be able to obtain our end in this way,” he stated, “for they fly before us from one swamp to another.” English soldiers burned Pocasset homes and found Native encampments, yet both fighting men and noncombatants eluded them. At one point, a frustrated Cudworth went all the way to Plymouth to complain about the need for more supplies. Winslow sent him back west the next day. Cudworth and Bradford decided that their best move was to cordon off Philip and Weetamoo and starve them out. Believing that a smaller number of soldiers could keep Philip and Weetamoo hemmed in, Cudworth and Winslow agreed that most of Plymouth’s men should return home. It would soon be harvest time.29
While Philip and Weetamoo evaded Cudworth’s troops, the Nemasket sachem Tuspaquin looted and burned Middleborough, while another western sachem, Totoson, laid waste to Dartmouth. Totoson’s men killed several Dartmouth inhabitants and took captive a woman named Dorothy Hayward. According to Boston minister William Hubbard, her captors soon freed her to repay the kindness she had previously shown in caring for an Indian child. They dressed her wounds and brought her to her town’s edge, a rare instance of mercy in a war full of cruelty.30 Meanwhile, English settlers in other western towns grew desperate. Confined in their garrisons, they watched their homes burn and their crops remain unharvested. Some families in Dartmouth, Middleborough, Swansea, Taunton, and Rehoboth took refuge in Plymouth and other eastern communities.31
For several years after the Mayflower crossing, the Pilgrims had lived fearfully within their palisaded town. Early settlements dotted the coasts, surrounded by what seemed a vast and almost impenetrably confusing interior. The onset of war partly re-created these circumstances. Many English settlers now lived in hastily fortified towns, not daring to walk along the paths that connected them. They sometimes went long stretches without messengers and mail. “For all travelling was stopped,” wrote Benjamin Church, “and no news had passed for a long time.” Two Plymouth messengers carrying letters did not reach their destination. “Their horses are found, but no men,” informed correspondents in Connecticut. At the same time, Natives hostile to the English seemed to pass through the wilderness undetected.32
At the end of July, Philip, Weetamoo, and their people crossed the Taunton River and headed west and then north. Several dozen Mohegan Indians (who had recently come to Boston to confirm their alliance with the English), praying Indians from Natick, and some fresh English recruits tracked the Wampanoags and caught up to them about ten miles north of Providence. Finally getting the open battle they had sought, the English and their allies inflicted casualties. In the end, though, Philip, Weetamoo, and most of their people retreated into yet another swamp and slipped away. Philip headed northwest into Nipmuc country, and Weetamoo turned back toward the Narragansetts.
Despite Benjamin Church’s attempt to secure her fidelity to the English, Awashonks also fled. She knew what had occurred in Pocasset, where the English burned homes and executed two “old men.” One year later, her son Peter explained that Awashonks’s people left because they feared English reprisals. Awashonks first tried to take refuge on Rhode Island. Obstructed by that colony’s patrols, they next hid in the swamps while, according to Peter, “the English army came and burnt our houses.” With no other favorable alternative, they went to the Narragansetts. As had been the case throughout the early 1670s, the Sakonnets were divided among themselves. Mammanuah fought alongside the English, while others joined Philip and Weetamoo.33
With the flight of the western Wampanoag sachems, the fighting moved away from New Plymouth. While colonial leaders discussed how best to pursue Philip, the inhabitants of towns such as Swansea, Dartmouth, and Middleborough returned home, harvested crops, and rebuilt their houses.
For many settlers and many Wampanoags, life did not return to normal. Dartmouth’s Dorothy Hayward was only the first of dozens of English to be taken captive during the war. In mid-July, a party of Nipmucs struck the Massachusetts town of Mendon, and English settlements in the Connecticut River Valley came under attack that fall. During the raids, Indians seized captives, mostly women and children. Algonquian peoples had long used captives to replenish populations diminished by war and disease, and they also held prisoners for ransom and as a strategy for negotiation.
The most famous English captive was Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife taken in February 1676 when Nipmucs and Narragansetts raided Lancaster, Massachusetts. In her enormously popular The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Rowlandson described the horror of the raid in vivid detail. She watched her town’s attackers kill a wounded child, and she saw a neighbor “chopped into the head with a hatchet, and stripped naked, and yet was crawling up and down.” After choosing captivity over death, she was sold into the household of Weetamoo and her Narragansett husband Quinnapin. Rowlandson also encountered Philip, who appeared friendly and offered her tobacco. Her relations with Weetamoo were frosty; her mistress once snatched a Bible from her hands and threw it outside. Rowlandson described severe hunger, but no torture or abuse. After three months, she was “redeemed,” set free when the English paid a twenty-pound ransom. “It is good for me that I have been afflicted,” Rowlandson concluded her narrative by quoting the 119th Psalm.34
Some individuals moved from one form of bondage to another. In June 1676, Narragansett attackers shot to death and then beheaded Hezekiah Willett near his home in Swansea. The Narragansetts took captive Jethro, an African slave attached to the estate of Thomas Willett, Hezekiah’s father. Five days later, Jethro escaped after spotting English forces nearby. Apparently Jethro had some facility with the Algonquian language, as he reported that Philip was “sound and well” and that the Wampanoags and Narragansetts planned to attack Taunton. With Jethro’s information, William Bradford promptly organized an effective defense of the town.35
Jethro’s service to the colony raised questions about his future status. Should he be sold? Had he earned his freedom? Would he now become the property of another descendant of Thomas Willett? Josiah Flynt, minister at Dorcester (in Massachusetts Bay), inquired about Jethro. Flynt was married to Thomas Willett’s daughter, Hester. If Jethro was to be sold, Flynt would buy him. If Jethro was freed, Flynt hoped that Jethro “might be sent to him.”36
The Boston merchant John Saffin, Thomas Willett’s son-in-law and the administrator of his estate, brokered a deal. Jethro would “remain a servant unto the successors of the said Captain Willett” for two years and then be “set at liberty.” As was more typical for indentured servants, the arrangement emphasized the responsibility of Jethro’s master to provide him with meat, drink, and clothing. In the summer of 1677, Boston’s Reverend Increase Mather moved next door to a house owned by “Jethro the Negro,” possibly the same man.37
Although English captives such as Mary Rowlandson gained renown, the English seized a vastly greater number of Native men, women, and children.38 Captives were prized booty for soldiers and their commanders, who received payment for bringing them in. Following precedents established in the wake of the Pequot War, English magistrates and courts consigned many Indian captives to slavery or other forms of servitude. For colonial officials, the opportunity to sell captives yielded funds that helped balance budgets strained by wartime expenditures. Enslavement, and the export of captives in particular, also cleared lands of Native inhabitants and cleared the way for English settlement. These actions resembled those of English officials in other colonies. For instance, in the midst of Bacon’s Rebellion, the Virginia legislative assembly in 1676 declared “that all Indians taken in war be held and accounted slaves during life.” In other words, captives would be slaves for the rest of their lives, not servants for a fixed term. English settlers in Virginia defended this practice against criticism from royal officials.39
Plymouth and Massachusetts forces took captives during their July and August 1675 campaigns at Mount Hope and Pocasset. After the raid on Dartmouth, Wampanoags in the vicinity were fearful of English reprisals, and as many as 160 came to Dartmouth’s garrison to surrender. The exact circumstances are unclear. Benjamin Church later claimed that the English had promised favorable terms, but in a contemporary letter, Josiah Winslow stated that the Indians had come “in without any assurance or invitation from us.” Regardless, the Wampanoags probably expected to surrender their arms, swear their loyalty, and provide men to serve as scouts and soldiers for the English. Lieutenant John Ellis was unsure how to proceed, so he put the surrenderers on an island and hoped they would stay put until he received orders. Governor Winslow sent Constant Southworth to bring the prisoners to the town of Plymouth. The magistrates were disinclined to show them mercy. “They are known many of them,” wrote Winslow, “to be of those that have burned that town, and killed many of the inhabitants.” The governor wondered whether it would be possible to “distinguish aright between the innocent and the guilty.”40
It was easier not to bother with such distinctions. After Southworth brought the captives to Plymouth, the colony’s war council decided that they were all guilty. Some had been “actors in the late rising and war.” The rest, including the women and children, were “compliers.” They had broken their covenants with Plymouth. They had not informed the settlers of Philip’s plot. They were rebels and enemies. If the soldiers or magistrates had reason to believe that some of the men had shed English blood or burned houses, they probably executed them. The council decided to sell most of the captives “unto servitude.” Similarly, in early September the council condemned to “perpetual servitude” fifty-seven Wampanoags who had “come in a submissive way” to Sandwich. They expected mercy. Instead, New Plymouth’s leaders declared that they were now slaves for life.41
On September 22, ship captain Thomas Spragg sailed from Boston on the Sampson with nearly two hundred Indian slaves, their transport arranged by Massachusetts Bay treasurer John Hull. According to Boston merchant Nathaniel Saltonstall, Spragg’s human cargo included eighty Indians from Plymouth Colony captured by the Bay Colony’s Samuel Mosely and another forty-five seized by the Mohegans, allies of the English. In all likelihood, some of the Wampanoags who had surrendered at Dartmouth and Sandwich also were aboard the Sampson. Spragg was bound for Spain.42
A century earlier, Richard Hakluyt—a leading English promoter of colonization—promised that England would help Indians and Africans shake off the shackles of slavery. Hakluyt lamented that the Spanish forced captives “into galleys, where men are tied as slaves, all yell and cry with one voice Liberta, liberta, as desirous of liberty and freedom.” By contrast, Hakluyt vowed, an English empire would be one of “humanity, courtesy, and freedom.” In the 1610s, John Smith objected when Thomas Hunt sold Wampanoags as slaves in Spain. Now, the leaders of New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay exported captured Indians to the Spanish slave markets.43
Spragg unloaded some of the captives in the southwestern Spanish port of Cádiz. The British trader John Mathews acquired the Indians and sold thirty men to Captain Thomas Hamilton, who bought them to pull the oars of his galley. Hamilton, stationed in Tangier, was enthused about his new labor force. Although nine of the Indians had died due to “bad usage on board,” he expected the remainder to be “as good if not better than the Moorish slaves.” Hamilton hoped that he might purchase a yearly “recruit” of enslaved Natives from across the Atlantic. Given that he pleaded with his superiors to provide the funds he needed for his English crew’s provisions and bedding, the conditions for the slaves aboard his galley must have been wretched. The British Navy decommissioned the vessel in 1676, and Mathews and Spragg sought to regain possession of the slaves. The whereabouts of the Indians after this time are unknown.44
A few English settlers criticized the enslavement and export of Indian captives, especially of those who had surrendered to colonial authorities. In a letter to Bay Colony magistrates, John Eliot warned that such measures would likely prolong the war—Indians would not surrender if they feared being sent to Barbados or Cádiz as slaves. For Eliot, though, it was not just a question of military strategy. “To sell souls for money seemeth to be a dangerous merchandise,” Eliot upbraided the magistrates and merchants. Eliot observed that the English had long “condemne[d] the Spaniard for cruelty upon this point.” Bay Colony leaders, he charged, were hypocrites. By exporting captives, moreover, colonial leaders removed them from the blessings of Protestant Christianity.45
Barnstable’s minister, Thomas Walley, shared Eliot’s concerns. In a letter to Plymouth’s John Cotton, Walley lamented “that rash cruelty of our English toward innocent Indians” and maintained that “the severity shewed towards the squaws that are sent away” discouraged those Wampanoags who might have fought as English allies. Unlike Eliot, though, Walley did not make any formal protest against the practice. Benjamin Church later claimed that he opposed the export of Indians, but he played a central role in the subsequent seizure and enslavement of many Wampanoags and Narragansetts. Indeed, there was no significant opposition from within New Plymouth to the colony’s treatment of captives. In October, the General Court compensated Josiah Winslow for the “emergent charges” that had fallen on him over the course of the summer. The governor received “the price of ten Indians, of those savages lately transported out of the government.”46
Christian Indians found themselves confronted with other types of captivity and confinement during the war. This was especially true in the Bay Colony. Once the Nipmucs began their raids on Massachusetts towns, English settlers and soldiers regarded all Natives as possible collaborators. At the end of August 1675, the Massachusetts Council declared that Christian Indians had to remain within a mile of their towns. The magistrates gave permission for settlers to shoot with impunity any Indians they encountered outside of those bounds. Beginning in October, Massachusetts removed praying Indians from their communities and interned them on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. Hundreds of men, women, and children suffered a hungry and cold winter. More than half of the island’s prisoners perished. Again, John Eliot protested in vain.47
At the same time, Nipmucs raided the more western praying towns and offered their inhabitants—many of whom were Nipmucs themselves—a stark choice. They could leave the towns and fight against the English, or they could flee to the English and end up on Deer Island or on Barbados. In response to both English policy and the raids, hundreds of Christian Indians abandoned the praying towns in the fall and winter. Some fled to their kin and former communities, and others took their chances with the English. Regardless of their actions, praying Indians were vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty, caught between two warring peoples who both looked upon them with disdain and suspicion.48
New Plymouth also restricted the movement of Indians within its jurisdiction. In December 1675, the colony’s war council decreed that the Cape Cod Wampanoags could not come any closer to Plymouth than the town of Sandwich. Council members worried about the “great damage [that] may accrue to the colony by the southern Indians [in] their frequent resort to Plymouth.” What about those Wampanoag communities north of Sandwich? In February, the council commanded the Indians at Nemasket to leave their homes and enter confinement on Clark’s Island. It is likely that those interned included Christian Wampanoags preached to by John Cotton and the late John Sassamon.49
Despite the internment and restrictions, on balance Christian Indians in New Plymouth fared better than those in the Bay Colony. Most remained in their communities, and at least in some instances they maintained good relations with the English. For example, even as some Sandwich settlers took refuge in garrisons, the town granted “liberty to the [Mashpee] Indians to set up a house to meet in on the Lord’s day.”50 It is difficult to say why Plymouth Colony settlers and officials treated Christian Indians with relatively less suspicion and vindictiveness. The 1671 crisis had already given the colony’s Christian Wampanoags an opportunity to demonstrate their fidelity to the English. Also, Richard Bourne had a closer relationship with the Mashpee Wampanoags than any Massachusetts Bay minister had with any single praying town. Bourne was an effective advocate for his congregants, and John Cotton also had a long-established commitment to Indian missions. As was always the case in seventeenth-century New England, local jurisdictions and individual personalities mattered a great deal.
The first several months of the war had brought disaster to numerous English and Wampanoag communities. Both sides endured displacement, the loss of property, captivity, and death. Collectively, however, Wampanoags suffered to a much greater degree. Hundreds had become slaves, and the English had forced many more to abandon their communities. Even so, the fighting was inconclusive. Plymouth and Massachusetts troops had ranged across Mount Hope and Pocasset, but Philip, Weetamoo, and Awashonks had fled. Both they and the war would return.