IN NOVEMBER 1675, THE United Colonies tapped New Plymouth’s governor, Josiah Winslow, to command an English attack against the Narragansetts. Winslow had wanted a resolute charge against hostile Indians, and now he would lead one. The campaign, though, did not target Philip. Instead, the English launched a preemptive strike against a formidable people who had tried hard to stay out of the war.
The Narragansetts were the traditional enemies of the Pokanokets, but mutual grievances against the English and newly formed ties of kinship had sanded away much of that enmity. Still, when the war began, Canonchet (son of Miantonomi, whom the Mohegans had executed in the early 1640s) and other Narragansett sachems wanted to maintain peace with the English. Nevertheless, the English heard multiple reports that armed Narragansett men were gathering with Philip. In the wake of the Swansea raids, for example, Roger Williams denounced Narragansett professions of fidelity as “words of policy [expedience], falsehood, and treachery.” When some Narragansett communities sheltered Wampanoags from Pocasset and Sakonnet, English concerns became acute.1
The English gave the Narragansett sachems a simple ultimatum. If they did not turn over the Wampanoag refugees, they would make themselves enemies of the English. Under intense pressure, Canonchet and other Narragansett sachems signed an agreement in which they promised to surrender all of the Wampanoags in their midst by October 28. Obligations of kinship and hospitality made it impossible for Canonchet to fulfill the agreement. The Narragansetts knew about the recent English enslavement and export of captive Indians. Narragansett sachems would not betray the Wampanoag refugees to the same fate. After the deadline passed, the commissioners of the United Colonies voted to raise a thousand soldiers and destroy an enemy of their own creation.2
Many of the Narragansetts—about a thousand persons in all—were living in a fort they had built in the Great Swamp in present-day South Kingston, Rhode Island. Natives from Pocasset and Sakonnet—including Awashonks—were there as well. During the first months of the war in the summer of 1675, Philip and Weetamoo had eluded the English by retreating into swamps. Canonchet and his people likely felt secure.
Troops from Plymouth and Massachusetts, joined by Pequot and Mohegan allies, converged at Wickford, Rhode Island. While Rhode Island’s Quaker-dominated government never allied itself with its puritan neighbors, it gave its blessing to the operation (which would occur within its claimed jurisdiction) and provided logistical support. On Saturday, December 18, the English army marched south and then slept outside during a night of heavy snow. “We lay a thousand in the open field that long night,” wrote Massachusetts soldier James Oliver. Well before sunrise the next morning, they resumed their march. A Narragansett captive led them to the fort and showed them the one vulnerable opening in its enormous palisade. After what Oliver described as “sore fighting,” English troops pushed their way inside and began setting homes ablaze. Soldiers butchered those who tried to escape. Reports disagree about the number of Narragansett fighters killed in the battle and the blaze, but it is clear that hundreds of noncombatants perished. The English also destroyed “piles of meat and heaps of corn.” For the Pequots, the fiery slaughter must have stirred painful memories of how their ancestors had suffered in 1637.3
In his memoir, Benjamin Church claimed that he had begged Josiah Winslow to stop the burning of the fort, primarily because it might have sheltered the English soldiers for the night. In the battle’s immediate aftermath, the English regretted the loss of shelter and provisions, but they expressed no scruples about the massacre of noncombatants. William Hubbard, minister at Ipswich and an early chronicler of the war, reported that the battle interrupted Narragansett women’s preparations for dinner. “They and their mitchin [meat] fried together,” he joked. Massachusetts Bay schoolmaster and poet Benjamin Tompson also reveled in the violence. “Here might be heard an hideous Indian cry,” Tompson wrote, “Of wounded ones who in the wigwams fry.” Tompson added that “had we been cannibals here might we feast.” After the many disasters of the war’s first six months, English settlers had thirsted for revenge. Now they savored it.4
The Great Swamp Fight, however, was not as decisive as the Mystic River massacre had been during the Pequot War. When daylight waned, the English trudged the nearly twenty miles back to Wickford on a “long snowy cold night.” About twenty English soldiers died in the battle, and around two hundred were wounded, including Plymouth Colony’s William Bradford and Benjamin Church. After reaching Wickford, the English troops buried another forty-two men who died from their wounds. (Bradford and Church recovered.) The soldiers who had survived the Great Swamp—unlike New England’s ministers and poets—were in no mood to celebrate. Furthermore, many Narragansetts had escaped. The next month, Narragansett fighters raided Pawtuxet, then fled to central Massachusetts. Winslow at first gave chase but then retreated with his troops to Boston. The army disbanded, having inflicted a heavy blow on the Narragansetts but without having achieved its objective.5
Since the Swansea raids, the war had steadily expanded. Half of all English settlements in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay had been attacked, and in Maine, English settlers precipitated fighting with the Abenaki in much the same way that their southern counterparts had provoked the Narragansetts. Meanwhile, Philip and his warriors had spent the winter in New York, and Canonchet had also given the English the slip. The English suffered further setbacks as the winter came to an end. A large force of Nipmucs burned Sudbury, only twenty miles from Boston.
In the spring of 1676, the war returned to Plymouth Colony. That March, Captain Michael Pierce of Scituate led a small company, including twenty Wampanoags, across the Pawtucket River. In an ambush, possibly organized by Canonchet, “a great multitude of the enemy” slew fifty English soldiers and about half of the Wampanoags. Two days later, the same Narragansetts attacked Rehoboth. Only one man died. The other settlers remained safe in their garrison houses, where they watched thirty-five homes burn. After the destruction, Rehoboth’s inhabitants spent three days burying corpses from Pierce’s ill-fated offensive. Minister Noah Newman compared the desolation to that which would accompany Christ’s Second Coming. He recalled the text he had used for his sermon the first day English blood was shed at Swansea: “Be still and know that I am God.” It was harder to retain such faith “in the worst times,” but Newman and most other settlers rejected calls to take refuge on the Cape. The minister taught that their suffering would end only when God stopped punishing them for their sins.6
The attacks were not limited to the colony’s western settlements. Two weeks before the ambush of Pierce’s company, the sachem Totoson organized an attack on the house of William Clarke, only two miles south of Plymouth on the Eel River. As with many raids and battles during the war, the strike came on a Sunday. Although Plymouth’s government had forbidden Indians to come farther north than Sandwich, one man convicted of the attack said that a Mashpee Wampanoag had visited Clarke to gain knowledge of his home’s defenses and stores. While Clarke and most other men attended worship, Natives killed eleven people at the garrison and carried off eight guns along with considerable gunpowder and money. Clarke’s wife and all but one of their children died. Boston’s Increase Mather explained that Clarke had brought his misery upon himself. The minister related a conversation in which Clarke had wished all of New England’s Indians hanged. When Mather objected, Clarke had remained adamant. “Their blood be upon me and my children,” he had vowed. Now it was, reasoned Mather. One of Clarke’s sons lived despite having been struck on the head by a tomahawk. According to early nineteenth-century historian James Thacher, he “afterwards wore a plate of silver over the wound” and thereby gained the nickname “Silver-Headed Tom.” In July, Plymouth convicted and executed several Wampanoags—one by beheading—for the deaths.7
In mid-May, Tuspaquin’s men raided Scituate, the colony’s largest town, killed one man, and burned homes before twenty of the town’s inhabitants drove them off.8 Outside of the Cape, there were no safe havens.
New Plymouth’s government struggled to mount a military response. Because men were reluctant to fight, the General Court repeatedly passed laws threatening those who refused impressment with stiff punishments. In the spring, Plymouth’s leaders turned down the Bay Colony’s request to join an intended offensive to the heart of Nipmuc country. Instead, Plymouth’s government begged Massachusetts to send troops to secure Rehoboth and its other western towns. Plymouth also rejected a Massachusetts plan to recruit Indian allies to “range” between Medford and Rehoboth. Colonial secretary Nathaniel Morton feared that Indians sent forth without sufficient English supervision would “be corrupted by the enemy.” Furthermore, he added, after Pierce’s defeat “we think we must at present do no more but scout about our town with what diligence we can.” The people’s spirits had begun to “run low,” he added. They were “very averse to going forth against the enemy.” Plymouth’s settlers had no stomach for fresh offensives.9
While the English mourned their spring 1676 casualties, the outlook was actually far bleaker for their enemies. The English were more numerous and better armed, and unlike in earlier decades, they controlled the coastal waterways. The Native peoples of southern New England were low on ammunition and provisions. Philip purchased some badly needed supplies from Dutch traders in New York, but the English could obtain food and bullets far more readily. Despite tensions among the colonies, the English were also far more united than their opponents. For the Wampanoags, and for several other peoples, King Philip’s War was a civil war. The fact that several Native peoples sided with the English was decisive, moreover. In February, Mohawk forces attacked Philip’s men and cost the Pokanoket sachem much of his remaining fighting strength. Two months later, Connecticut soldiers working with Niantic, Pequot, and Mohegan allies captured Canonchet, shot and decapitated him, and sent his head to Hartford.10
Even as Natives executed successful raids against the English that spring, many sachems believed that it was time to make peace. Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples began returning to their lands. They needed to plant crops in order to feed themselves. After nearly a year of war, however, colonial leaders wanted nothing less than complete victory and the punishment of those who had shed English blood. In June, Plymouth’s settlers finally responded to the depredations of the spring. The General Court voted to raise and send into the field two hundred men, including fifty allied Wampanoags.11
Benjamin Church, who had moved his family to Aquidneck Island, now paid another visit to Awashonks. She had returned to Sakonnet. When Church went to an agreed-upon meeting place, her men suddenly rose up out of the grass and surrounded him, brandishing their weapons. Church distributed rum and tobacco and then spoke with Awashonks. After the June 1675 nickómmo, Awashonks had sought to avoid becoming entangled in the war. She had fled to the Narragansetts, may have been present at the Great Swamp Fight, and then went to Wachusett in present-day north-central Massachusetts. In the late winter of 1676, she would have seen Mary Rowlandson and had spent time with Philip and Weetamoo.
After she returned to Sakonnet, Awashonks still did not want her people to take up arms against either Philip or the English. Benjamin Church insisted that she could not escape that choice any longer. He encouraged her to contemplate the example of the Pequots. Church stressed that after the Pequots had subjected themselves to the English, they had received protection against their enemies. They were now allies of the English. Awashonks, of course, knew that during the Pequot War, the English had massacred hundreds of noncombatants and then had enslaved scores of captives. Church urged Awashonks to save her people from the same fate. He promised that if Awashonks and her people submitted to the English, and if Sakonnet men fought against Philip, they “and their wives and children should have their lives spared, and none of them transported out of the country.” Church did not offer to help Awashonks retain any land, and he did not even promise that her people would escape enslavement or servitude, just that they would not be executed or exported. What Church pledged was enough. The Sakonnets knew what had become of captives taken by the English the previous summer. They did not trust New Plymouth’s officials, but fighting on their side now seemed the only option.12
Church sent Awashonks’s son Peter to Plymouth to confirm the agreement. Meanwhile, Church marched toward Pocasset with his new allies. On the way, he encountered William Bradford, who greeted Church with marked coolness. The two men did not like each other. Bradford, recently given the rank of major, was a careful and cautious commander. Church was creative and impetuous, and he alleged that Bradford ignored intelligence and squandered opportunities to assault Philip and Weetamoo. In accordance with the colony’s law, Bradford ordered Awashonks and her people to turn back and instead walk to Sandwich. He told Church to get Josiah Winslow’s approval before taking the Sakonnets into battle.
By that point, Peter and a few companions had reached Plymouth. “We have found you so perfidious,” Plymouth’s council informed the Sakonnet visitors, “that we must have some good security for your fidelity before we can grant your desires.” The Sakonnet men promised that they would fight against Philip, and they offered to turn over Succanowassucke, a Sakonnet man they said had stirred up some of their people to join Philip. The council accepted Peter’s offer of renewed and more abject submission, but it kept him as a hostage in order to guarantee Sakonnet compliance. Winslow, meanwhile, confirmed Church’s agreement and commissioned him to lead the Sakonnets against Philip and Weetamoo.13
Church found Awashonks and her people on the shore of Buzzards Bay feasting on eels, fish, and clams. Another dance followed. The Sakonnets formed rings around a fire. One at a time, leading warriors danced around the fire, named a people at war with the English, and struck their spears and hatchets into the ground. The next day, Church and his Sakonnet recruits returned to Plymouth.14
Bradford, Church, and their Native allies spent July pursuing Philip, Weetamoo, Tuspaquin, and the Narragansetts. Although Church later implied that Bradford’s caution was either incompetence or cowardice, the major’s forces killed dozens and captured scores of Wampanoags and Narragansetts. “I have done my duty and neglected no opportunity to face upon the enemy,” he asserted. At the same time, Bradford refused to emulate his more aggressive and vainglorious relation (Church’s wife was the granddaughter of Bradford’s stepmother). “I shall not put myself out of breath to get before Ben Church,” he vowed.15
But if Bradford captured scores, Church seized hundreds and received all of the credit. Church’s English and Native troops marched countless prisoners to Plymouth. Some captives then volunteered to switch sides in an attempt to save themselves and their families from foreign slavery. “Those [Indians] that are come in,” Barnstable minister Thomas Walley reported, “are conquered and help to conquer others.” Walley observed that “throughout the land where Indians are employed there hath been the greatest success if not the only success.” It was a “humbling providence of god that we have so much need of them and cannot do our work without them.” The English might not have won the war on their own. They certainly would not have won it as quickly.16
By the end of July, English troops closed in on their primary human targets. Church’s men captured Philip’s wife (named Wootonekanuske, according to the nineteenth-century historian Samuel G. Drake) and young son, and Weetamoo perished either during or shortly after a fierce battle near Taunton. Totoson, who had organized the July 1675 raid on Dartmouth and the March 1676 attack on Eel River, also died. Church continued tracking Philip, “putting his Indians in the front.” They took more captives, but Philip found refuge in a swamp west of the Titicut River and slipped away. Church returned to Plymouth, then headed west again. He received word that Philip was back near Mount Hope, in a “miry swamp.”17
This time Philip did not get away. He ran into an ambush, and a Pocasset man named Alderman shot him. During the first weeks of the war, Alderman had fled from Pocasset, taken refuge on Aquidneck Island, and provided intelligence to the English. Now, Alderman’s bullet struck Philip’s heart. The Pokanoket sachem “fell upon his face in the mud and water with his gun under him.”18
According to Church, an “Indian executioner” laughed and said that Philip “had been a very great man, and had made many a man afraid of him, but so big as he was he would now chop his ass for him.” The scene is probably fanciful, but the morbid humor captures the emotional relief the English experienced at the war’s end.19
There wasn’t anything fanciful about what came next. The executioner beheaded and quartered Philip, meting out the English punishment for treason. Alderman carried Philip’s head to Plymouth, and Church sent his “paws”—as Bay Colony secretary Edward Rawson referred to Philip’s hands—to Boston. Church’s men hung the other pieces of their enemy’s corpse on nearby trees.20
After Philip’s death, Plymouth’s forces killed Tuspaquin and several of Philip’s other key allies. The western Wampanoag sachems who had outmaneuvered English forces the previous summer succumbed to better-armed, better-fed, and more numerous foes. The English and their Algonquian and Mohawk allies also killed or captured their Nipmuc and Narragansett enemies, but the Bay Colony’s struggle against the Abenaki in Maine continued for more than another year. When Massachusetts asked for assistance against the Abenaki, New Plymouth demurred. Although its magistrates affirmed “the common English interest against the barbarous … enemy” and wished “to avoid anything that might favor of ingratitude,” Plymouth was not certain the lands in question lay within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts Bay. Moreover, Nathaniel Morton explained, Benjamin Church was “the only man with whom our Indians will cheerfully serve,” and Church was busy with his family. The United Colonies were never truly united.21
The wars of 1675–78 devastated communities across New England. As many as one in every ten adult English men died or suffered captivity, and dozens of English women and children perished. Economic losses were also enormous. In the town of Scituate, for example, twelve homes burned, and Native attackers destroyed crops and livestock. Among those killed at the Great Swamp Fight was Walter Briggs’s indentured “Irish man … which was his estate.” Survivors returned home with maimed bodies and minds haunted by the horrors they had witnessed. Theophilus Witherell, son of the town’s longtime minister, was “wholly disabled and so like to be.” He lived another quarter-century. Like Witherell, communities bore the scars of war for decades.22
Native losses were far more staggering. Many thousands were gone, killed on the battlefield, dead of disease and hunger, living as refugees to the west or north, or transported as slaves out of New England. Whereas the English population rose during the 1670s despite the ravages of war, the Native population of New England fell by half.23
In June 1675, the start of fighting in Swansea had coincided with a day of humiliation observed across Plymouth Colony. When New Plymouth’s General Court appointed another day of humiliation in June 1676, it also called on church members to “renew a covenant engagement to God for reformation of all provoking evils.” By now, the covenant renewal was a familiar ritual in New England. Church members confessed their apostasy from their founding ideals, asked God to forgive their sins, and renewed the covenant that bound them to each other and to God. The hope was that the occasion would remove a crisis and mark a new beginning for the community.24
In the town of Plymouth, the congregation observed a day of prayer, then called a meeting a week later at which members listened to the covenant they had entered into when they had joined the church. Minister John Cotton and Elder Thomas Cushman arraigned the people for having broken the covenant. The evidence was obvious. God had afflicted them with a year of war. God had used the Indians to slay settlers and destroy their livelihoods. In fact, they deserved more severe punishment, but God in his mercy now gave them an opportunity to repent and to stay his wrath. Congregants affirmed that they had violated the covenant, and they agreed to renew their bonds with God and with each other.
The church set aside an entire day in mid-July for the renewal. On that morning, Cotton preached on a text from Psalm 56: “Thy vows are upon me, O God.” Then in the afternoon, Cushman read an extensive confession on behalf of full church members, who acknowledged their manifold sins. They had engaged in frivolous conversation, quarreled with each other, neglected family prayers, kept away from the Lord’s Supper, and broken the Sabbath. Cushman urged them to reform and live as God required. In response, church members stood up, signifying their consent.
Cotton then read a second document on behalf of the church’s “[adult] children,” individuals who had come of age but had not owned its covenant for themselves. Some men and women were not sure that they had experienced spiritual regeneration. Others trembled at the thought of partaking of the Lord’s Supper unworthily because to do so might lead to their damnation. In the first few years after John Cotton’s installation, the church had admitted dozens of new members, but that momentum had dissipated. Many young men had died “by the rage of the enemy,” Cotton observed, but halfway members were really fighting against God. Cotton used words from the Book of Jeremiah to liken them to “a degenerate plant” descended from “a noble vine.” Now, they should promise “to walk steadfastly in that good old way.” If they could qualify themselves for full membership and the sacraments, they should not hold back. As the members had done, these women and men all stood up to signify their consent. Eight became full church members over the next two years.
Cotton insisted that the covenant renewals worked wonders. “God turned his hand against our heathen enemies and subdued them wonderfully,” he wrote. Within a month, Philip was dead. The magistrates decreed a day of thanksgiving.25
Plymouth’s residents assembled to pray, sing psalms, and listen to John Cotton’s sermon. Then Alderman and some of Church’s soldiers arrived with Philip’s head. Puritans described their days of thanksgiving as “solemn” gatherings. One suspects this day was unusually joyous.
According to Benjamin Church, Plymouth’s government paid Alderman the standard and “scanty” rate of thirty shillings for Philip’s head. English settlers knew what to do with the bloody prize. Just as the Pilgrims had done with Wituwamat’s head, Plymouth’s soldiers placed the heads of Philip and other enemy sachems on the town’s fort. Visitors saw Philip’s desiccated head for decades. Cotton Mather, who had an advanced sense of self-entitlement, “took off the jaw from the exposed skull” on one of his visits to see his Plymouth relations.26
“Our eyes saw the salvation of God,” John Cotton commented on the head’s timely arrival. It was a sign that God had finally answered their prayers. “Thus did God break the head of that leviathan,” Boston’s Increase Mather wrote, “and gave it to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.” Twenty-five years later, Cotton Mather put it more bluntly: “God sent ’em in the head of a leviathan for a thanksgiving feast.” God had succored the Pilgrims with a harvest in 1621. Now he nourished his people with Philip’s head.27