On this date in 1676, the assassination of Metacom — known to New England colonists as King Philip — brought some measure of finality to a war that had been, at least as a practical matter, over for several months. As Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy, Metacom had organized a fearsome series of assaults against the English frontier beginning in the summer of 1675. Motivated by the completely sensible wish to drive the nettlesome European settlers into the sea, Metacom was also eager to reshape the balance of Indian power in the region and reverse a half-century of economic and political decline. Originally allied with the Plymouth colony, the sixty or so groups that comprised the confederacy had endured the gradual erosion of territory and cultural autonomy; as the Massachusetts colony evolved, its Puritan leaders pressed farther into Wampanoag land. The beneficiaries of this expansion included the Mohegan — a traditional rival — and the Iroquois confederacy, which menaced the Wampanoag from the west.
During the early 1670s, Metacom quietly recruited allies among the Narragansett, Nipmuck, and Pocumtuck among other tribes, urging them to retake their lands before it was too late. The plot nearly succeeded, as the Wampanoag and their allies came closer than any American Indian group ever would to eliminating the English from their midst. From July 1675 through March 1676, the Wampanoag and their allies pulverized the western towns and farming villages of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. More than half of the 90 English settlements were destroyed; Providence, abandoned by its terrified denizens, was reduced to ash. Avenging themselves against their historic English allies, the Wampanoag struck Plymouth in March 1676, A colonial counter-offensive — including a massacre at Great Swamp in Rhode Island — disrupted the Indian campaign, while assistance from the Pequot, Mohegan, and Mohawk deprived the Wampanoag of access to supplies and food. This proved to be one of several decisive factors in the eventual English victory. By late spring and summer of 1676, the Wampanoag were effectively defeated. On August 12, Metacom himself was shot to death at Mt. Hope, Rhode Island. His body was dismembered and his head donated as a trophy to the town of Plymouth, were it was hoisted on a pike and displayed to the public for two decades. The fate of the Wampanoag was extraordinary — survivors scattered throughout the region, while captives were executed or sold off to Enlgish sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
Metacom’s War was renowned for its almost unfathomable brutality. Hundreds of colonists and an even greater number of Indians — combatants and civilians alike — were tortured, mutilated and killed in the most extravagant ways. Even more than a struggle over land and power, it became for the English a race war, a campaign of elimination that carried God’s blessing. Upon hearing news of the Great Swamp massacre, where more than 600 Indians perished, Cotton Mather rejoiced at the “barbeque” and thanked the Lord for unburdening the world of so many devils. English soldiers later recounted their delight at discovering packs of famished stragglers, whose torture and execution they luxuriously described in private letters and public accounts. As the conflict progressed, the interior “Praying Towns” — consisting of Christianized (and segregated) Indians who adopted the language and culture of their colonial mentors — were evacuated and relocated to the coast. For generations to come, New Englanders assigned blame for the war to the schemes of a ”fifth column” of treasonous, Christian Indians. The war reinforced English racial ideology, which insisted that savages could never be successfully absorbed, no matter how earnest the effort.
The war also generated a renewable sense of English preference in the eyes of God. Unable to conceive of themselves as real-world aggressors, the settlers of New England convinced themselves that the Indian war was an affliction sent by God to chasten them for their spiritual errors — their high self-regard, their attachment to worldly possessions, their abandonment of righteous living. A gesture of paternal tough love, the war was seen as having rejuvenated English identity; it was not, in other words, taken as a geopolitical lesson on the consequences of empire. This interpretation of the conflict was articulated most famously by a minister’s wife named Mary Rowlandson, who was forced to join the “murderous wretches” and “merciless heathens” after her village of Lancaster was sacked in February 1676. As Rowlandson explained it in her famous captivity narrative, which has been in near-constant republication since the war’s end:
It is good for me that I have been afflicted. The Lord hath showed me the vanity of these outward things; that they are the Vanities of vanities, and vexation of spirit. That they are but a shadow a blast a bubble and things of no continuance If trouble from smaller matter begin to arise in me, I have something at hand to check myself with, and say, Why am I troubled? It was but the other day, that if I had had the world, I would have given it for my freedom, or to have been a servant to a Christian. I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles and to be quieted under them, as Moses said, Exod. xiv. 13. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.
20 comments
August 12, 2008 at 1:27 pm
TF Smith
Plenty of archetypes in this conflict, including the failed alliance – Metacom/Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh all tried to create multi-tribal alliances against the English/Americans, and all, ultimately, failed to sustain those alliances because of inter-tribal divisions (and their technological and organizational disadvantages, obviously).
On a detail regarding M/P’s death: it’s an older source, I know, but Josephy describes it as occuring during an ambush, after the initial volleys, and describes M/P as being shot face-on as he ran toward the colonists’ perimeter. Is there some scholarship that shows it occuring differently?
August 12, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Vance Maverick
I think your windup is unfair to Rowlandson. Her sentiment is not objectionable (compare Mather’s). It looks narcissistic in the frame of later memory — the colonists remembering the events as being about the affliction of one, rather than a war between two brutal parties.
Looking up “barbecue”, I see the dictionaries say the word had only very recently been borrowed (via Spanish) from an indigenous Caribbean word. We may have butchered them, but we were happy to do the same their food and lexica along the way.
August 12, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Vance Maverick
…to do the same to their food….
August 12, 2008 at 2:20 pm
davenoon
Yeah, but her narrative was also an important touchstone for arguments about the universal perfidy of the Indians, and especially the treachery of the “praying” sort. As for the narcissism, I’ve always (unoriginally) seen that as being endemic to Puritan culture, so of course MR is only one more iteration of that.
I’m really glad you found that detail about “barbecue.” One of Jill Lepore’s arguments in In the Name of War is that the English wound up doing the kinds of things to the Wampanoag and Narragansett that only the Spanish were believed capable of doing in their empire. It’s telling, I think, that Mather would turn to a Spanish word (or a word ripped from the Spanish colonial context). to describe the Great Swamp massacre…
August 12, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Vance Maverick
Fair enough. Though I’m sympathetic to the brand of “narcissism” on display in this paragraph, I have to admit that your minor rhetorical unfairness drives a perfectly valid point. And if I want rhetorical fairness, I can always wait for Eric.
August 12, 2008 at 3:28 pm
professordarkheart
I’m not sure that it takes the frame of later memory to make MR’s narrative look narcissistic. This is a woman who compares herself to Jacob bereft of his sons when her own child dies and then later in her captivity, writes: “My mistress’s papoose was sick, and it died that night, and there was one benefit in it–that there was more room.” The colonists’ interpretation of the wars as an affliction sent by God is pretty fundamentally bound up with their inability to see the Indians as fully human.
That said, I’ve always taken the above passage as MR’s not-wholly-successful attempt to comfort herself in a post-captivity mental and spiritual state that we’d almost certainly call PTSD:
Rowlandson, in a way that Mather never would, seems to hint that the settlers see themselves as having been tested by God partly because it’s the only to recover from the trauma of the war; to see it as “as a geopolitical lesson on the consequences of empire” would leave them without any comfort at all “in the night season.”
August 12, 2008 at 4:51 pm
urbino
It’s safe to say this particular episode comes up more often here than on any other blog I read. And always provokes considerable discussion.
August 12, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Vance Maverick
The past isn’t dead — it isn’t even past.
August 12, 2008 at 5:21 pm
davenoon
That’s a really good point — I nearly quoted that passage as well, though you assessed it better than I would have. Reading her account of the battle at Lancaster is really difficult. Extraordinarily violent. It’s hard to imagine making it through that experience in one piece.
Students always chuckle (and I abet the chuckling) when they read her euphemisms about victims being “knocked in the head,” but when we think about what that means in the context of this kind of war — where gunfire probably killed few people, with most of the dead bludgeoned and hacked to death — you can see why the term might come in handy.
And the edition I had at hand was from 1853 or so, and it came with a recommendation that MR’s narrative was good reading for kids.
August 12, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Jason B
This is interesting stuff. Seems to be a lot of settler/indigenous combat anniversaries this time of year. First there was your post on Black Hawk’s war, and now this one, and were heading into the time for the Dakota war.
But I suppose we could recount something like this just about any day of the year.
August 12, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Hemlock
On the reservations, ghost stories relating to Metacom’s War contribute to tribal narratives that project the triumph of New England Algonquians over the modern liberal state. Such ghost stories are often tied to reservation space and place. The Great Swamp, for example, is a defining feature of both reservation landscape and Narragansett identity.
In a parallel fashion, Jill Lepore contends that New England publishers framed the British as Wampanoag ghosts. Another person further found that Boston Revolutionaries such as Joseph Warren and John Hancock used Metacom’s war as a prelude to the Revolution in orations and propaganda. “Our ancestors defeated the Indians, we’ll defeat their specters.” Such nationalist narratives reveal a seeming contradiction in the Boston Tea Party “noble savage” paradigm. I emphasize “seeming.”
Other interesting and unexplored facets of Metacom’s War are the New England native peoples sold into slavery in Africa. I’m not sure there are any sources on this topic, but I’d bet Africanists could do a more effective job at researching it than Lepore and other early Americanists (Lepore touches light on it). Any records of their fates or even experiences would provide ample fodder for an Atlantic analysis of postwar economic and cultural systems.
August 12, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Matt McKeon
Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower” is a recent, popular treatment of King Philip’s War that incorporates some recent scholarship on the native Americans of south east Massachusetts.
John Demos’ “The Unredeemed Captive” is a story similar to Rowlandson’s, a white woman kidnapped during a violent raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, which some interesting consequences, well worth a look.
The cycle of Native American/European contact seems to go:
accidental contact, exchange of disease, intentional contact, mutual beneficial relationship, nearly unlimited war.
August 12, 2008 at 10:24 pm
davenoon
I used to own a copy of Demos’ book — it was assigned in a class I once TA’d for in grad school — but I…ahem…didn’t…ah…actually read it.
That was 13 years ago. Has the statute of limitations run out on that?
August 12, 2008 at 10:31 pm
dave's advisor
That’s very disappointing, dave. And there’s no statute of limitations on academic crimes.
August 12, 2008 at 10:32 pm
dave's advisor
Also, these are not the sort of things one crows about, young man.
August 21, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Vance Maverick
Reading the much-linked Scheiber article on Cindy McCain and her family’s role in McCain’s career, I was reminded of this — in his first campaign ad, McCain said of his POW experience,
August 21, 2008 at 12:43 pm
ari
“Enriched”?
August 21, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Vance Maverick
Well, he had married Cindy by then.
August 22, 2008 at 4:07 pm
andrew
Isn’t there a long-running tradition (for lack of a better word) of prison as transformative experience? (cf. dissidents or, literarily, Edmond Dantes)
August 25, 2008 at 9:16 am
re-ney-ssance « by the wayside
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