Cape & Islands News

Cape Cod's religious warefare circa 1675

War against Wampanoags was one of the deadliest wars in American history
A holy war waged with staggering brutality - memories of Iraq & Viet Nam

In order for the non-native Americans around here to understand the Mashpee Indian angst over the last one-third of a millennium since the Wampanoag survivors of the King Philip war were sold into slavery by our Pilgrim forefathers, The New Yorker review of Martha's Vineyard author Nathaniel Philbrick's new book, “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War”, should help.

Jill Lapore's long and very readable review in the April 24 issue  doesn't get to our local tribe until her eighth paragraph where she writes;

In 1675, Massasoit’s son Metacom, called King Philip by the English, launched a war against Plymouth and, eventually, against Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Connecticut, too. The bloody carnage known as King Philip’s War nearly put an end to the Puritan experiment...

Not long after (William) Bradford’s death, Massasoit died, too, and with them ended an era of uneasy peace. Inheriting his father’s position in 1662, Philip tried to halt English encroachment. When that failed, he began preparing for war. In January of 1675, a Christian Indian named John Sassamon warned Plymouth’s governor, Josiah Winslow, of Philip’s plans. Sassamon was soon found dead. In June, Plymouth executed three of Philip’s men for Sassamon’s murder. Within days, Wampanoags had begun attacking English towns.

In proportion to population, King Philip’s War was one of the deadliest wars in American history. More than half of all English settlements in New England were either destroyed or abandoned. Hundreds of colonists were killed. Thousands of Indians died; those who survived, including Philip’s nine-year-old son, Massasoit’s grandson, were loaded on ships and sold into slavery. Because the conflict was, for both sides, a holy war, it was waged with staggering brutality.

The description of the carnage and inhuman conduct of both sides during the war can not help but bring up images of the worst reports about Viet Nam and Iraq. Describing the “Great Swamp Fight” where Benjamin Church's Pilgrim forces killed thousands of Native American  women, children, and old men hiding in a makeshift fort constructed for their protection in the middle of a Rhode Island swamp is one example.

King Philip's head stuck atop a stake for decades 

Most died after the English set the fort on fire roasting them alive. A  Boston poet wrote according to the author, “Here might be heard an hideous Indian cry, / Of wounded ones who in the wigwams fry.”

The war ended when Philip (on right) was shot. Pilgrim commander "Church ordered his body drawn, quartered, and decapitated... and his head placed on top of a stake in the middle of town where it remained, rotting, for decades. "

This compelling five page article should be read by every Mashpee resident in preparation for the next few years as their Wampanoag neighbors ask for major portions of the Massachusetts Military Reservation now that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has granted them official tribal status.

The New Yorker review ends on this cautionary note,

In 1716, Benjamin Church, or at least his son Thomas, looked back at King Philip’s War and decided that it was possible to be both victorious and virtuous in the kind of war the colonists had fought against the Indians—a people at a vast technological disadvantage, fighting a holy war, with almost nothing left to lose. But it wasn’t possible. At least, nothing in the evidence from 1675 and 1676 suggests that it was. And pretending that Benjamin Church found “Conscience” in the woods of Plymouth in that winter of war, rather than understanding why, forty years later, he came to wish he had, doesn’t make it any more possible today. The ways of the Puritans are not our ways, their faith is not our faith. And their wars are not our wars.

Learn more about King Philip and his war here.
Lean more about the Mashpee Tribe here.
Learn more about the Wampanoags here.
Read a review of this book in today's Newsweek here.