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Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed during that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts. Ad free included with Prime History as.
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It happens, it's June 1675. Wampanoag warriors from the same tribe that welcomed the pilgrims to Plymouth 55 years earlier raid the Swansea colony of Massachusetts. King philip's war has begun. Well, I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday that conjures images of Pilgrims and Indians peacefully feasting together in 1621, an indelible origin story for what would become the United States a century and a half later. Although it wouldn't really be an origin story for quite a while after 1776. Here is a clip I've played before one of Ronald Reagan's Thanksgiving messages, where he weaves mythic tales into the fabric of national greatness.
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My fellow Americans. Over 350 years ago, a small band of Pilgrims, after gathering in their first harvest Plymouth Colony invited their friends and neighbors who were Indians, to join them in a feast of thanksgiving. Together they sat around their bountiful table and bowed their heads in gratitude to the Lord for all he had bestowed upon them. This week, so many years later, we too will gather with family and friends and after saying grace, carve up a turkey, pass around the cranberries and dressing, and later share slices of pumpkin pie. We Americans have so much for which to be thankful. Think of the great expanse of our nation, the rolling hills of our immense farmland. Even in years of drought, as this year has been, the plows and the sweat of America's farmers call forth from our good Earth more food than we can possibly eat. So much food that, taken together our harvests of wheat, corn, soybeans, fruits, vegetables, and all the other bounty of our land make up one of our most important exports.
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C
We may be so familiar with that story that we hardly question it. But what if we chose a different reference point to understand our origins? Not of the Pilgrims and Indians at Plymouth Rock, but at war, a vicious, genocidal war characterized by massacres, torture and enslavement that occurred on what was then the frontier, as historian Jill Lepore wrote in her 1998 book the Name of War. Always brutal and everywhere fierce, King Philip's War, as it came to be called, proved to be not only the most fatal war in all of American history, but also one of the most merciless. 17th century New England was, after all, a frontier at once a dividing line and a middle ground between at least two cultures. The same cultural anxieties and land conflicts that drove Indians and colonists to War in 1675 would continue to haunt them after the war had ended. Not only that, she says, but their descendants and their distant relatives. People from other parts of Europe and from more western parts of America would fight uncannily similar wars over and over again. King Philip's War was not, as some historians have suggested, the foundational American frontier experience or even the archetypal Indian war. Wars like it have been fought before, and every war brings its own stories, its own miseries each yet, she says, there remains something about King Philip's War that hints of allegory. In a sense, King Philip's War never ended. In other times, in other places, its painful wounds would be reopened, its vicious words spoken again and again. That is Jill Lepore in her 1998 book. Yet how often do you hear about King Philip's War? It happened just a century before 1776, a date we're all familiar with as we look ahead to America 250. But the English colonists would never have been powerful enough to challenge Parliament had they not survived a different war 100 years earlier. David Silverman has taught Native American, colonial American and American racial history at George Washington University since 2003. He is the author of six books. The latest will be published next the Chosen and the Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States. David Silverman, welcome back to the podcast.
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E
Thank you for having me.
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C
So you've been on a bunch before to talk about Thanksgiving and how that is a reference point in our minds for American origins. We're gonna talk about what probably is a more important reference point, King Philip's War. But first you've got a book coming out that actually covers this ground and then some. The Chosen and the Damned Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States is coming out next year in February.
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E
Sure. The basic point of the book is that indigenous people have been fundamental to the making of race in the history of the United States and its colonial predecessors and that this race making has taken place in the context of a long structural genocide. King Philip's War is one of many wars that factor into that story. During wars of this sort, the identities of white and Indian tend to become crystallized, articulated much more forcefully than they are in peacetime, and then have lasting effects.
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C
Europeans and Indians. Within each group there's a ton of diversity. I mean, the Indians were at war with one another, the different tribes, you had different European settlers, maybe in New England. While you would know better than I, why don't you pick it up from there? Just to tackle that issue of how we get these two general groupings when within each one there had been always so much diversity.
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E
Well, that's exactly right. In the case of King Philip's War, what you see is an English population demonizing an entire population of what they characterize as Indians. And one of the defining characteristics of King Philip's War was the English colonists in New England refusing to make distinctions between native enemies, Native people who are neutral and even native friends. Thus driving many native people who did not want to take up arms against the English into the war. After the war, that omnibus label Indians gets applied to the survivors of the conflict. And the English end up reducing native people in, in the region really to third class status, forcing most of them into, into debianage. You know, for that matter, during wars of this this sort, diverse indigenous peoples very often rallied together as Indians. A term that they appropriated from the English and a concept that they appropriated from the English. And you certainly see that in the case of, of King Phillip's War and many other colonial wars.
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C
We'll return to the consequences of the conflict in a little bit. But back to my first point. You've been on the show, we've talked about the myths of the first Thanksgiving and how that holiday has evolved over time, its origins. And this image we have in our hands as an origin point for the United States. The Pilgrims and the Indians having a feast in 1621, which at the time was a non event, it was hardly remembered at all. And today it's all we remembered. I have to say I had never heard of King Philip's War until I picked up the book I'm holding in my hands right now, 15 or so years ago, the Name of War by Jill Lepore. It was first published in 1998. Why don't we know about King Philip's War?
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Americans in general aren't taught a great deal about violence. Between colonists and later white Americans and native people. And I think there's a clear reason for that. It's embarrassing. You know, the United States likes to think of itself as a champion for human rights and likes to think of itself as an anti genocide force in the world. But when you take seriously the history of white Indian conflict, it becomes very difficult to avoid the conclusion that this warfare was genocidal. You know, better to ignore it entirely. At least that's been the approach in the 20th century. You know, I will note in the 19th century when Americans were much more comfortable with white supremacist ideas, the country was triumphalist about this history. It didn't ignore it at all. In fact, it depicted it in monuments and artwork all over the country, including in the United States Capitol. It exists there to this very day. It's really a 20th century development that white Americans have become uncomfortable with this violent history.
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C
And it would be difficult to teach school kids some of this stuff based on what happened during this war. There's some symbolism here. King Philip's war was fought over the course of about a year, 1675 to 1676, a century before the Declaration of Independence. We're about to come upon America. 250 next year. Ken Burns documentary is making headlines. I've started to watch the first two, three episodes. In my next episode of this podcast, I'm actually going to be interviewing two of the filmmakers, a director and a writer who are historians themselves. And native peoples play a prominent role in that documentary. But yeah, it's not something that we think too much about this period between say 1621 and 1776. Well, we do think quite a bit about the revolutionary period, starting with the Stamp act. Right. In 1763. But there's a whole century and a half here, from the so called first Thanksgiving to the Declaration of Independence, when European or colonist Indian relations develop, evolve, become very violent. Right.
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E
No question about it. And if you wanted to, you could articulate the entire history or narrate the entire history of the colonial era as a series of colonial Indian wars. It's one after another after another after another. Right. It's an indigenous continent to which colonists are forcing their way in.
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C
Yeah. And in the Ken Burns documentary, they don't shy away from showing how men like George Washington be Franklin had their eyes on western lands which were of course occupied or inhabited by native people. So let's start with the basics here. King Philip was not a king and his birth name was not Philip. Who was he?
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E
His title is Sachem, you might say, is another word for chief. Sachems operated at several different levels. Every Native community, so let's say village, had a sachem, usually a male, occasionally a female, from an elite lineage whose job it was to manage issues of common concern to the community. So the allotment of planting grounds diplomacy with neighboring groups, arbitrating disputes within the community or between communities. But there were also leaders known as paramount sachems. And so in the case of King Philip, if you will, he is not only a village chief, he is a regional chief, which is to say that he's the leader of a constellation of literally dozens of. Of native communities stretching from Narragansett Bay on the west side to the end of Cape Cod on the east, and then north all the way to the south shore of Massachusetts Bay. What his role was as paramount sachem was to lead these various communities in diplomacy with their indigenous neighbors. He collected tribute, which is to say taxes from these various communities in the form of corn and furs, shell beads and labor, and then use that wealth to handle his political affairs, arbitrating disputes between. Between the communities, punishing communities that refused to pay him tribute, leading those communities collectively in war against their neighbors. How did he acquire this position? He inherited it from his father. And his father was Usamiquin, means yellow feather in English, better known probably to your listeners as Massasoit. This is the Wampanoag leader or Sachem who greeted the mayflower passengers in 1621. He wasn't the first choice as paramount sachem. His brother Wamsudda was supposed to inherit the office, but he died early in 1662. And so at that point, King Philip takes over the office. His given name is not King Philip. It's. It's Pameticom or Metacom or Metacomet. It appears variously in. In the colonial records. But when his father, Usamiquin, or Massasoit, dies, Pameticom and his brother Wamsuda go to Plymouth Colony and say to the. The English, hey, you know, this is a transitional moment in our lives. We'd like you to give us some new names. And the English name Wamsutta Alexander. And they name Pemticom Philip, you know, after these classical Greek heroes. And from that point forward, Pemticom uses the name Philip whenever he's engaged in diplomacy with the English.
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C
So there's ongoing diplomacy from the very beginning, as you say, the Wampanoag chief, Massasoit, his second son Metacom, picks up the mantle and approaches the English at Plymouth Colony. So he does this after his brother Wamsutta dies. He had actually been arrested by the English in Plymouth Colony on suspicion of plotting war. There was the New England Confederation on the other side here. This was established to deal with Indians after the pequot War of 1636-1637. Right. Tell us a little bit about the Pequot War and why this matters.
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E
Oh, sure, it matters for a couple of reasons. When the Pequot War occurs, this is 40 years before, before King Philip's War. Massachusetts is only 6 years old. Plymouth Colony is but 16 years old. The English population is but a fraction of that of the Native population. Now, that said, the Native population is divided into many, many different groups. The reason the Pequot War happens, there are a handful of murders which the English blame the Pequots for, incorrectly, it appears for, but I blame the Pequots for nevertheless. And the English position on these murders is that they demand the Pequots to turn over the perpetrators to English justice, which the Pequots simply refuse to do. And this is actually a point that's worth highlighting. Throughout Indian colonial history, it doesn't matter where or when you're talking about Native people will compromise on lots of different fronts. When it comes to. To English demands. I think hosting Christian missionaries is probably the best example of that. They'll sell land, they'll trade on terms that. That the English want. Sometimes they will even in a very theoretical way, accept the King of England as their. Their sovereign. Doesn't mean a great deal to them. But symbolically, where they will not compromise is on allowing the English to extend their jurisdiction over Native people, particularly when it comes to capital cases like murder. From the Native perspective, the English are guests in their land, not invaders. They are guests in Native people's land and thus should comport themselves in accordance with Native rules. No Native leader could maintain his authority, or for that matter, probably his life, if he dared attempt to hand over his people to a foreign power for arrest, trial and execution. So the Pequots refuse these English terms, and then the two sides degenerate into war because the English want to send a message to Native people that if any Native people dares to take an English life, the consequences will be severe. Now, in this particular case, in the case of the Pequot War, the English emerged victorious largely because they're successful. And this is another pattern in colonial Indian wars, they're successful at recruiting Native people to their side. The Pequots, Narragansett and Mohegan enemies side with the English and effectively turn out to be the difference maker in this war. And so collectively, the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, the Narragansett and the Mohegans destroy the Pequots as a group, effectively ending their status temporarily as an independent polity. And those people, they don't kill, they sentenced to slavery either in New England among the English and Native people, or they sell abroad.
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C
You know, preparing to speak to you, I read a little bit about the Pequot War. When we think of war in a modern sense, maybe set piece battles, regular militaries, this was more a series of massacres and ambushes and cruelties, right?
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E
Almost all Indian colonial wars take that form. The reason actually has less to do with English ways of war than it has to do with Native ways of war war. Native people are not going to engage in a line battle in an open field with English soldiers. They're simply not going to do it. The way that Native people war is you attack your enemy by surprise when you have an advantageous position. And what you want to do is maximize the enemy's casualties and minimize your own. When Native people go to war, they are not professional soldiers under the leadership of an officer who's unrelated to them. They're an extended kin group, brothers, uncles and nephews, cousins and like. And so no deaths are acceptable.
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C
And it's not like the Europeans or the colonists had an army, right? I mean, where they were using militia, did they have officers?
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E
They have militia with officers who are appointed by the governors of their respective colonies. And every male of fighting age within the colonies was expected to drill regularly with the local militia in the event of war.
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C
I mean, it was a necessity, right? Given all the violence there, you had to be able to protect your home, your.
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E
And you know, let's keep in mind, you know, a number of these, these colonists actually had been professional soldiers in, in Europe, fighting in particular in the low countries, you know, the modern day Netherlands in war between Protestants and Catholics there and in Ireland, where England was also colonizing.
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C
So out of this conflict we do get the New England confederation. And as I mentioned before, Massasoit Second Son Metacom, known as King Philip, approaches the New England Confederation to do diplomacy. What was society like on the eve of the war? I read a passage from The History of Massachusetts.org, an online resource. King Philip's war was obviously not just a civil war pitting Indian against Indian. The English and the Indians as part of the same society, with their polities interwoven, fought a civil war by fighting one another, looking closely at the political culture of the Indians and the English. We see that Philip sought to preserve his people's sovereignty by incorporating them into the English political system. The English, in turn, viewed Philip and his followers as subjects, traitorous ones, after they waged the war in 1675. So it sounds like there's an intermingling coexistence, that they weren't living separate. Why don't you pick it up from there?
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E
Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to call it a civil war. I think that's a bit overarched. But it is certainly true that their polities had become inextricable from one another at this point. So let's look at some of the basic conditions of this war. The most fundamental point that's worth noting is that the English have become a population majority by this time. And it's a product of two developments. One is, quite frankly, the English reproduce like rabbits. You know, they start with a migration of roughly 15,000 people, but that migration comes to a complete stop. I do mean a complete stop by 16:40. No one comes to New England from abroad after that time. Mostly a religious migration, responding to conditions in. In England. And the conditions change after 1640 with the Civil War. But these people produce massive families. And here it's. It's also worth noting they come with a fairly equal ratio of women to men, which is very rare for colonies. Colonies usually represent fraternities in terms of their demographics. Not here you have not only young men, but young women. And those young women start having children right away. And on average, they're having eight kids over the course of their adult lives. Eight kids. And the kids are surviving. And what that is is a recipe for a population explosion. Meanwhile, the native population is dropping dramatically through cycles of epidemic disease, one after another after another after another.
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C
Smallpox, things like that.
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E
Yeah, smallpox. Overwhelmingly. The plague. Such matters.
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C
You know, because I was going to ask before, and I forgot when you were talking about the Pequot War, when you said the English population was a fraction of the Indians that had. The Indians wanted to come together and get rid of all the English settlers. They could have, but they didn't.
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E
Indeed they could have. And, you know, in retrospect, believed they should have. So the English have become a majority. They're also expanding. They're expanding geographically. Sometimes they're purchasing land from native people. In the case of the Pequots, they conquer land from native people. Sometimes these deals are fair. Very often these deals are not. But the point is, the English are expanding across the land and forcing Native people off the land. Native expectations early on when they're making these land sales is that the two groups are going to share the land together. That's not the English expectation at all. The English expectation is when they purchase land, it belongs to them alone and the land passes into their polity's jurisdiction. Which is a notion that makes Native people puzzled indeed. But the English now have the strength to force those interpretations of the land sales on Native people. For every English person, there's several head of livestock, cows, horses, sheep, pigs, which are overrunning the landscape and destroying the native environment. In many respects, so is this. They also serve as four legged property claims. So when Native people kill these animals, it becomes a jurisdictional dispute with the English.
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C
So there was tension, there was a, maybe even a powder keg here.
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E
And then one more critical element, Christian missions. The English have been evangelizing native people and by the eve of King Philip's war, they have convinced about half the Wampanoags, mostly on Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, to become Christians. And when the native people do that, they cut off their tribute payments, their taxes, in other words, to King Philip, and put themselves under English protection. Powder keg. That's the exact right way to characterize.
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C
Things because the triggering event here, as bad as it was, wouldn't have been enough to trigger the kind of war that came afterward had there been good relations or the lack of these tensions with these clashing civilizations. So here's the. The incident that incites the war. January 1675. A Christian Indian, John Sassamon, he goes to Plymouth Colony and he warns their leaders that King Philip is planning to attack English settlements. The English ignore the warning. Sassamon is murdered. His body is found in an icy pond. Historian David Silverman, pick it up from there.
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E
Sure. What happens is a jurisdictional dispute of the sort that precipitated the Pequot War 40 years earlier. So the English have two witnesses to this murder. You know, one is a first hand witness, the other is a secondhand. Both of them are Christian Indians. And you know what they say is that three of Philip's men killed John Sassamon, you know, for leaking Wampanoag intelligence to the English, strangled him and then buried his body under the ice of assawamps at Pond a short distance west of Plymouth. So the English then demand Philip to turn over these men to English justice. Philip will not do that. And so the English go in and arrest these guys themselves, try them, and then indeed execute them, which is an egregious breach of the authority of King Philip as the Wampanoag Sachem. So, you know, if the English can exercise this kind of power over Wampanoag life and limb, what is there left of the integrity of the Wampanoag polity now? Let me know. In the years leading up to this, this moment, the English have become increasingly aggressive in pushing their authority on the Wampanoags. Repeatedly. They had charge correctly, I think, by the way, but they had charge that Philip was plotting with the Narragansets and other native people to form an anti colonial uprising. And each time, they levied massive fines on Philip and confiscated his land. You know, what Philip thinks is, you know, now that they've taken this step of arresting these guys, trying them and executing them, what's to stop them from coming in and seizing me and executing me? And the answer is nothing. And what he can tell is, if this continues, we're going to be left landless. We're going to be left with no authority over our own affairs. We are effectively going to be servants of of the English. And so he says, enough. We're going to go to war over this.
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C
The conversation with David Silverman continues. Oh, hey.
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E
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- [27:43]
C
Whoa.
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F
So is Saldana.
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G
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E
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E
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F
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G
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E
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G
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A
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G
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- [28:13]
F
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- [28:15]
G
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- [28:18]
E
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F
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- [29:13]
C
Does war break out right away?
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E
It doesn't break out right away. During that interim period, the English investigate the crime. You know, the witnesses come forward, they find the body, they conducted an autopsy on the body. They conclude that Sassaman was murdered before he had entered the water. They're convinced that this was, was a murder. You know, they're going about the investigation and then the trial in accordance with their own sense of due process. Now, that's not the Wampanoag sense of due process.
- [29:45]
C
Right?
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E
The Wampanoag say you don't have any authority over crimes between Wampanoag people in Wampanoag country, period, full stop.
- [29:52]
C
Cassassimon was an Indian, but go ahead.
- [29:55]
E
Well, yes, though he had lived his life with the English, gone to Harvard College, he worked with the English and the Wampanoags. Who he is and where he belongs is, you know, really a fuzzy kind of matter. Hence the, the affair itself. So before war breaks out, there's this fascinating discussion between Philip and a delegation of magistrates from the colony of Rhode Island. You know, Rhode island knows if war breaks out, it's going to take a great deal of the damage because it lives surrounded by native people and single population is small. So this delegation goes and meets with Philip. Philip just unloads a litany of grievances on these men to try to explain why he seems poised to take up arms against the English. And he lists all of the reasons that we've already discussed here. The missions, the wandering livestock, the landed expansion, English aggressive assertion of its jurisdiction. But then he makes a really poignant statement about how he sees the morality of this all. And what he says is, you know, when my father welcomed you people into this country, so he's saying, my father, Mass Soyot. My father, Mass Soyot, welcomed the Mayflower pastors. He was a great man. And you were, as a little child, he could have wiped you out. That's not what he did. He held back your enemies. He Gave you ample land, more land than the Wampanoag people themselves have. Now he gave you ample land. He taught you how to plant, where to fish, on and on. But now let's look where things are. You're the great man. You, the English, are the great man, and we, the Wampanoags, are the little child. And how do you treat us? You exploit us in every way that you can contrive. There's no living with you people is effectively what he says. I'm not here to come up with a peaceful arbitration of this dispute. There's no end to it. We're going to war.
- [31:52]
C
And both sides sense that this is a turning point in the making. Right? That this is existential for the Wampanoags.
- [31:59]
E
It certainly is existential. You know, there is no chance in this war that the natives are going to push all the English back into the sea. There is a possibility, however, if the Wampanoags can recruit a broad coalition of allies, of indigenous allies, which, you know, they appear to have been trying to do over the course of. Of the previous 15 years. A native diplomacy is very slow. Then they might be able to restrict the English to Boston proper and maybe Plymouth, or just keep them isolated on. On the coast. And that appears to have been their primary goal.
- [32:38]
C
So a couple of weeks after the murderers of Sassamon are hanged by the English, we get something called the Swansea Raid. This looks like the first major outbreak of violence. A series of raids by the Wampanoags against the Swansea Colony of Massachusetts, killing colonists, pillaging, destroying property. English officials respond by sending their military to destroy Philip's home village of Mount Hope, Rhode Island. The war spreads during the summer of 1675 as the Wampanoag, joined by Algonquin warriors, attack settlements throughout Plymouth Colony. And it seems that the New England confederation is a little slow to respond to this or at least come together as a unified force. They don't declare war against King Philip until September of 1675, when something called the Battle of Bloody brook takes place. 700 Nipmuc Indians ambush a militia group escorting a wagon train of colonists. Almost all the colonists and militia killed in the fighting known as the Battle of Bloody Brook. So before we go any further, who's on whose side here? Who are the sides?
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D
Right.
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E
Well, that. That is a developing matter in real time. So, you know, when the war starts, Philip's coalition is not in place. A broad number of allies are not ready to leap to his defense. What the English believe they can do is isolate him and his immediate following of warriors and nip this problem in the bud. So they send a militia to try to do this. The problem with the English is they have no respect for other Native people's neutral rights. Let me be clear about what I'm talking about here.
- [34:17]
C
Sure.
- [34:18]
E
When I say Philip and his immediate followers, I'm talking about Philip, his close relatives from other communities and their warriors. This isn't even all the Wampanoags. This is a small portion of the overall Wampanoag tribe, at most half. And so the English start following Philip and his men as they keep retreating to other communities, seeking sanctuary from them. And the English will ride in guns a blazing into these communities, thus driving those communities into the war. Eventually, the Wampanoags in arms manage to escape into central Massachusetts, around what's modern day Worcester, Massachusetts, about 40 miles west of Boston, where they take sanctuary among the Nipmoks. The Nipmucks had been nursing grievances against the English, mostly having to do with landed expansion and the spread of Christian missions. The Nipmucks take up arms alongside Philip against the English. So by the time we get to the fall of 1675, it's effectively half the Wampanoags and most of the Nipmucks against the English. The English, meanwhile, have recruited the Mohegans, the reconstituted Pequots, and a number of Christian Wampanoags from Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard to their side. They also have the support of literally thousands of Christian Indians who live cheek by jowl alongside the English of Massachusetts Bay. So at this point, most Native people are either neutral or on the side of the English.
- [35:56]
C
Wow. So as the violence spreads across really all of New England. Right. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode island, we're seeing raids, counter raids, massacres, enslavement. Can you describe the kind of warfare this was? I know we touched on it a little bit earlier with the Pequot War, but this seemed to be much more widespread or covering a larger geographic area.
- [36:18]
E
First and foremost a circle of Native people supporting Philip Groves. So the English effectively drive the Narragansett people, the most powerful group of native people in the area, the Narragansett's of Rhode island, into the war. By launching a preemptive attack against them In December of 1675, the Narragansets had been taking in Wampanoag women and children. The English demand that they turn the Narragansets turn those refugees over. Narragansett simply won't do it. And the English conclude the Narragansets are about to enter the war. Let's strike first. They launch a winter attack against the Narraganset, so called Great Swamp Fort, massacre hundreds of people and drive the survivors into the war. They also drive the various native groups, Sokokis, Pucks, Norbitox, and others in the Connecticut River Valley around modern day Springfield, Massachusetts, into the war by demanding them to turn over their weapons. You know, these natives say, no way. We're disarming and taking you at your word that you won't take advantage of that, that situation. They joined the war. And so collectively, all these various native peoples are effectively making English life outside of the most populous English towns impossible. They're launching dawn raids on these various outlying communities in which, you know, they start attacking as soon as the English emerge from their houses in the morning. Those English who survive will flee to a block house, a fortified house in the middle of town. Meanwhile, the natives will go around slaughtering all the livestock and putting all the outbuildings to the torch. They do this in town after town after town until tens of thousands of livestock are dead. Roughly 3,000 Englishmen lose their lives. Sixteen towns go up and up in flames, and the line of English settlement is getting pushed farther and farther east.
- [38:09]
C
Let's ask a question. The victims were men, women and children, right? There was no quarter given to anyone, is that right?
- [38:15]
E
Or, you know, Native people, if they can, will capture women and children when they war against other Native people. The goal is to capture women and children for eventual absorption by the group and kill the men. But they will also kill children who can't make it back. I mean, they don't want to be caught by the pursuing enemy, so they will kill anybody who can't make the march. So, yes, this is a basic pattern in colonial Indian wars. Native people make no distinction between men, women, children and the elderly. And colonists make no distinction between men, women, children and the elderly. It is total war.
- [38:53]
C
Yeah. What's so striking about this war is it's genocidal.
- [38:57]
E
No question. The two groups want to wipe each.
- [38:59]
C
Other out, and they do when they have these attacks. You mentioned the great swamp fight. It's estimated 300 people, at least Indians, including women and children, were killed in the attack or died from exposure to the winter element. Some were burned alive at the stake. There was also torture perpetrated by both sides.
- [39:19]
E
No question. Colonialism is a bloody business. It's horrific. It brought out the very worst in human beings.
- [39:25]
C
Let me share something that Jill Lepore wrote about this conflict. She Says here, when both the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags fought against the English colonists, the colonists assumed that the two tribes had formed a powerful alliance. But when colonists from both Plymouth and Massachusetts allied, the Indians assumed that each colony must have a separate grievance. These twin reactions, the colonists fear of a widespread Indian conspiracy and the Indians perplexity at the ties that bound all colonists to a distant monarch, suggest just how poorly the two peoples understood each other's political cultures and systems of government. For the Indians, the colonists misunderstanding of the nature of Indian political authority had far reaching consequences. The most important of which was the denial of Indian sovereignty, a perception that formed the underpinnings of the legality of their enslavements. I think you said this earlier, the English basically did not respect jurisdictional matters. Right. Neutrality.
- [40:24]
E
Nope.
- [40:24]
C
She's talking here too then about Indians that are captured after these horrible massacres and battles were enslaved.
- [40:31]
E
Yes, it probably comes as news to most of your listeners because one of the most important developments in historical scholarship over the last 15 years is the recognition that in the North American and for that matter, Caribbean and South American colonies, you are as likely to encounter indigenous slaves in colonial settings as African slaves, really through the early 18th century. So for the entirety of the 17th century, Native American slavery was as common in the colonies as African slavery. And you know, we're talking to the tune hemispherically of roughly five and a half million native people enslaved during the long colonial era. So, you know, that's a massive number.
- [41:22]
C
I did not know it was that high. I don't think most people know that.
- [41:26]
E
No, most people do not know that, you know, because it was poorly documented, you know, where the African slave trade is taxed and all of the slave voyages took out insurance. So we have like really good documentation on the numbers of people involved. This is effectively a black market kind of enterprise in the colonies. The government of England had a very fuzzy notion of what's going on on the ground. Yes, Indian slavery is common and that includes in New England. After the Pequot War, the English enslaved hundreds of native people. After King Philip, they enslave a couple thousand, some of whom they put to work in the colonies, but many others of whom they sell, especially to the Caribbean. Places like Barbados had an insatiable demand for bound laborers.
- [42:11]
C
So we're getting down to the end of 1675, early 1676. It's the winter. King Philip's Confederacy continued to assault English colonies throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Maine. The Indians attacked Plymouth Plantation itself, forcing most of its citizens to the coast and led by Chief Kenochet, annihilated Providence, Rhode Island. So as a historian, you studied this war, this conflict. How can you tell who's winning, who's losing? The ebb and flow of war. What's the end game here?
- [42:43]
E
That's a great question, you know, because Native people never say, this is our strategy, this is our purpose. But we can intuit the pattern. They appear to be doing precisely what you articulated, which is pushing the English back to their strongholds on, on the coast. What do the English want? Well, I mean, they want to crush the Native resistance, seize the land and the labor of those who had risen up to them, sure.
- [43:09]
C
But it seems like they're having a big problem doing that at this point.
- [43:12]
E
You're right. It is very difficult to determine who's, who's winning. What we can tell is that the tide is turning by the late spring and early summer of 1676. Now it appears that what Pecom and his allies were hoping is if we can't push the English back to the coast, we need a place to retreat if we effectively have to give up southern New England. And the place they want to retreat is Iroquois territory, or Haudenosaunee territory, west of Albany, across the Finger Lakes region of what's now upstate New York. The Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee confederacy, was a Five nations confederacy. Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas. Mohawks are the easternmost nation. And it's clear that in the winter of 1675-76, Philip is in diplomacy with the Mohawks, trying to draw them into the war on the side of the anti colonial coalition and to try to convince them to provide a place of refuge for the warring Indians, women and children, and potentially their men as well. The warring Indians got their weaponry, their guns, powder and shot from Dutch colonists living in Albany, which was under English jurisdiction but made up primarily of Dutch people left over from New Netherland. The Mohawks controlled access to that gun entrepot. And so when Philip is reaching out to the Mohawks, trying to draw them into the war and to convince them to provide refuge to the warring Indians, non combatants. The Mohawks then reach out to the governor of New York. It's a young English colony, it had just taken over from New Netherland. And what the governor of New York, Edmund Andrews, says to the Mohawks is, I tell you what, if you take up arms against Philip and his coalition, I will make it worth Your while I will shower you with guns, powder and shot and political favor. And the Mohawks say we're in. They attack Philip's winter camp outside of Albany, drive him away from the gun dealers and force his. His fighters back into the teeth of the English and their native allies. And that, in effect, is the turning point in the war.
- [45:33]
C
And then in the spring of 1676, the Narragansetts lose their leader, Chief Cano Chet. He was captured, handed over to the Mohegans, shot, beheaded and quartered.
- [45:44]
E
Yes.
- [45:44]
C
And then in May, the militia attack and kill up to 200 Narragansett at the Battle of Turner Falls at Pesky Omsquit, near the Connecticut River. I should have practiced pronouncing that word before.
- [45:55]
E
You know, these terms can be very difficult for people who are unfamiliar with them. Well, this is exactly right.
- [46:01]
C
And so the tide is turning.
- [46:03]
E
The tide is turning. So, you know, you have the English. You have a growing coalition of native people allied with the English, fighting against Philip and his men. The resistance fighters are short of gunpowder. Their arms are in poor repair. They're starving. Eating on the run is a very difficult thing to do. And yet they're being forced to do that. Disease is running through their ranks. And what's more, the English offer quarter to any native warriors who switch sides, and growing numbers of them take up the offer.
- [46:36]
C
And we're about a year in here, so a whole year of warfare that is very difficult to sustain. I should say I don't know that much about King Philip's decision making, other than what you've shared here with me today. To what extent did he think about, you know, this may be a long, drawn out campaign that we just simply can't sustain.
- [46:54]
E
It's pretty clear that he had been conducting diplomacy with Native people for the better part of 15 years in the lead up to this war, trying to rally them to a resistance. It had created regular problems with. With the English. You know, again, I told you about the fines and confiscating of land over, over and over again. And he appears to have hoped that that coalition he was cultivating would spring to action on his behalf when the war began. He was partly right and partly wrong. The linchpin really does appear to be the Mohawks. If the Mohawks had rallied to the side of Philip, he might very well have achieved his ends, but they didn't. In this, there's a really critical lesson about how colonialism worked, not only in New England, but throughout the Americas and indeed throughout the world. The Way colonialism works is by pitting indigenous people against one another.
- [47:50]
C
Yes.
- [47:51]
E
By exploiting their rivalries, by exploiting how decentralized their societies are. And so you play divide and conquer.
- [48:00]
C
The English Indian soldier John Alderman shot and kill King Philip August 20, 1676, at Mount Hope. He was hung, beheaded, drawn and quartered, King Philip's head placed on a spike and displayed at Plymouth Court Colony for two decades. This effectively ends the war, although some fighting did continue until a treaty was signed in 1678. But a year of this horrible bloodshed, as I mentioned, raids, counter raids, ambushes, massacres, torture, enslavement. Lepore says by the time of Philip's death, August 1676, 25 English towns, more than half of all the colonist settlements in New England, had been ruined, and the line of English habitation had been pushed back almost to the coast. The struggling colonists had nearly been forced to abandon New England entirely, she says, and their losses left them desperately dependent on England for support. Yet Indian losses were far, far greater. She says Colonial armies, with their Pequot and Mohegan allies, pursued enemy Indians from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley, killing warriors in the field and families in their homes. Those Algonquins who fought the English saw their communities decimated, thousands killed in the fighting. Thousands more died of disease or starvation or shipped out of the colonies as slaves. So what's the landscape like when the. When the fighting is over?
- [49:24]
E
Everything's scorched, empty frames of homes, unburied bodies, slaughtered livestock. Everything was a wreck. Everything was a wreck.
- [49:33]
C
And the onions are basically shattered.
- [49:35]
E
Yes. Native people will never be able to put up a resistance in southern New England again. Let me be clear, however. The resistance will continue in May, and it will continue for another 75 years, partly as an extension of this war. And some native survivors of this war are going to flee to Jesuit missions in New France in the St. Lawrence River Valley, and they and their descendants are going to continue to plague the English settlements of northern New England and the Connecticut River Valley well into the 18th century. So for them, you know, this war is not over. But effectively, power of native people in southern New England is shattered. Now, that doesn't mean there are no native people left. Let's be clear. All the native people who sided with the English, Christian Wampanoags on Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and Cape Cod, Wampanoags who switched sides late in the war. You mentioned aldermen who killed Philip. He's one of those. Those types, the Mohegans the Pequots. There's a small band of Narragansetts known as not the Niantics who side with the English in this war. Their experience after the war illustrates why Philip went to war in the first place. Because what the English do is effectively treat them as Philip projected his own people being treated by, by the English in the event that he didn't go to war. They reduced them to near landlessness. These groups survive on postage stamp sized reserves of their previous vast domains. The English drive them into desperate debt to creditor merchants and the like. The courts slapped them with fines over trivial one trivial matter after another with the express purpose of selling them as servants to English farmers, to English whaling merchants and other other English fishermen. We get to the point that by the early 18th century, not only most native adults in southern New England, most native children are servants of the English. And these are the allies. These are the allies of the English and these are Christian Indians. They've adopted the religion of the colonists and still the colonists treat them this.
- [51:49]
C
Way because of the racial attitudes that Laport poor and I guess your new book get into as well, a hardening or a crystallizing of racial attitudes that sees Indians as not quite fully human, not deserving of the same rights that Englishmen.
- [52:06]
E
Yeah, I mean I would say that the racial attitudes help justify this behavior. But let's be clear, what's driving it? What's driving it is lust for native land and labor. And so the racial ideology serves as a cover. Right. An ideological justification for that crass exploitation.
- [52:27]
C
And this is a century before the Declaration of Independence. To return to a point I made at the beginning of our conversation, this is part of the origin story of the United States. You can't get to 1776 without this. No.
- [52:41]
E
You know, the entire continent was Indian country. Yeah, it's Indian country with native people on it. Let's be clear. It's not an empty land, it's not a wilderness. To take possession of the continent required horrific violence of the very sort that we've been discussing. King Phillips war is not an isolated case. King Philip's war is representative of colonial American history. It happens over and over and over again in one place after another.
- [53:08]
C
So by the time the Revolutionary War starts, Native Americans are what, a fraction of their older population numbers? They do play a role in the Revolutionary War. This is touched on in the Ken Burns documentary. But they're not nearly as powerful as they used to be.
- [53:24]
E
Not on the coastal plain. So, you know, if you're talking, you know, between southern Maine and Georgia, 100 miles inland from the coast. Right. Native people have been thoroughly reduced in population, utterly denuded in terms of their military power. They have no political independence anymore. That is not true. When you get to the mountains, when you get to the mountains and the lands beyond, you still have groups like the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Shawnees, the Haudenosaunees or Iroquois who are still powers with which to be reckoned.
- [54:00]
C
Absolutely. And the British seek them out to try to put down the revolutionaries.
- [54:04]
E
That's precisely right. And, you know, Native people will continue to dominate most of the continent well into the 19th century. And, you know, then there's going to be a massive sweep of the white population over the entirety of the continent. But they are still forces with which to be reckoned.
- [54:24]
C
On the next episode of History as it Happens, we'll be joined by David Schmidt and Jeffrey Ward, two of the filmmakers for Ken Burns new documents documentary the American Revolution. That is next, as we report History as it Happens. And remember, you can sign up for my newsletter free. Just go to Substack and search for History as it Happens.