Metacom, also known by his English name as “King Philip” (c. 1638-1676), was the younger son of the Pokanoket Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, who had negotiated peaceful relations with the English settlers at Plimoth Plantation during the 1620s. After Massasoit’s death in 1661, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Wamsutta, known to the English as Alexander. However, relations between English settlers and Indigenous peoples in New England began to deteriorate as land disputes increased and Native people resented being forced to live under colonial laws.
During a conference before the conflict, Metacom explained to English emissary John Easton the grievances that were likely to lead to war. Native people “had been the first in doing good to the English, and the English the first in doing wrong.” The English had taken far more land than was agreed to, damaged Native cornfields, “made them [Native traders] drunk and then cheated them in bargains,” and apparently poisoned Wamsutta when he was summoned to an English court. Metacom had no faith in English justice, given the greed of English kings and settlers.
The war began in June of 1675, with an inter-tribal attack on Swansea, Massachusetts, led by Metacom. Wamsutta’s widow, the Pocasset sunksqua Weetamoo, also commanded a Native strike force. Fighters from Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, and other Native communities wreaked havoc across New England, attacking and burning 52 English towns. King Philip’s War was, by proportion of the population, the bloodiest war in American history, killing an estimated 25% of New England’s Indigenous population (roughly 5,000 people) and 30% of the English population (roughly 2,500 people). During the war, many of the Nipmuc people who inhabited the “Praying Villages” in eastern Massachusetts were forced into an internment camp on Deer Island, where they succumbed to cold and starvation.
The southern New England fighting ended in August of 1676, when Metacom was killed at Mount Hope, Rhode Island. Conflicts sparked by King Philip’s War, however, continued in northern New England until the signing of the Treaty of Casco Bay, in present-day Maine, in 1678. In the end, these events locked into place the English control of southern New England and cleared the way for the further expansion of English settlements elsewhere.
After the war’s end, the surviving English reoccupied their abandoned villages to rebuild. Metacom’s wife and son, along with other Native captives, were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Some Native survivors were forced into service in English households. A number of Native people who escaped death and capture relocated to refugee villages among other tribal communities in the north and west, but many quietly returned to their traditional homelands, where their descendants still live today.
