Ethnic Cleansing in New England: King Philip's War and Aftermath, 1675-78

The highest casualty war per capita in American history

This is a great documentary on a war, and bona fide ethnic cleansing campaign, which forever changed the course of American history. It is the story of a coalition of American Indian nations fighting for survival against Puritan English settlement, and of a series of atrocities committed by those settlers that make the Salem Witch Trials of 15 or so years later look like entertainment for children.

This Lionsgate production, with a few re-enactors, is about 30 minutes long and chock full of facts like the high percentages of combatants on both sides who died fighting. It consists of mostly Wampanoag and other Native American historians giving their perspective on the war, and I must say that they treat the settlers fairly, but they left out a couple of things that determined the Puritans’ thinking at the time, which I will explore below.

As the documentary notes, up to 90% of the indigenous North American population was dead of European diseases before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth. The stage for what was to come was already set in steel-reinforced concrete.

Most of the Puritan population of what would become Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had fled England due to the Episcopalian, almost (gasp!) Roman Catholic policies of King Charles I in the 1630s, the English Civil War itself in the 1640s, and then again from King Charles II after the Restoration and the end of the puritanical regime of Oliver Cromwell in 1660.

By 1675, the English population of New England had grown considerably over several generations, was expanding onto neighboring Indian lands, and absolutely could not go home. There was no welcome for them in England, which at the time was involved in the Anglo-Dutch trade wars anyway, which the Puritans didn’t want to have anything to do with, and who can blame them for that?

The biggest cultural clash came over the concept of land ownership, of buying and selling land. The Indians of that time and place were semi-nomadic hunters and farmers. A tribe or clan would settle on one spot of good land with good water, farm it for a few years and use it as a base for hunting, and then move to another spot for another few years so the earth could recover.

Instead of crop rotation, the Indians used people rotation, and it worked quite well. So for them, if they “sold” a piece of land to the whites, they figured the whites would use the land as they did and then move on to another spot after a few years. The idea of permanent settlement, much less individual ownership of land, was alien to them.

Conversely, their idea of land use was every bit as confusing and alien to the English. The two groups never understood each other on that fundamental issue.

The Indians, specifically the Wampanoag and Narragansett, though there were other tribes involved, resisted English expansion with increasingly effective raids. Whole towns were burned to the ground. To the Puritan leadership, this represented not a sovereign people fighting to protect what they considered theirs, but a scourge sent by God to punish the English for their sins.

Yah, I know. Weird. Bloody weird.

The Puritans believed in predestination—that God had already determined their fate because He was all-knowing—and that he demonstrated his favor by bestowing worldly success on the faithful. This meant that whatever the faithful did to achieve that success was by definition God’s Will, and therefore morally justified. Anytime anything bad happened, it was because the faithful had sinned, or it was just God’s mysterious will.

Kind of took away any independent volition on the part of their enemies, didn’t it? It also helped to dehumanize them, and to justify whatever the Puritans saw as necessary at the time.

The Indians could not understand this and thought it was crazy, as I do today for that matter, but it was a very convenient religion for the emerging early capitalism and imperialism of the day, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, most Puritans accepted it as reality, and it helped to shape what followed.

Philip was the Christian name for a Wampanoag chief whose real name was something like Metacom, and was given the monarchical appellation because he did succeed in uniting several New England tribes against the common threat to their lands and way of life.

He was a good strategist and tactician. As the video discusses in detail, he orchestrated several well-planned ambushes of colonial militias sent to quell his people. It wasn’t until the English adopted Indian guerilla warfare tactics, and induced other Indians such as the Mohicans and Mohawks to fight with them, that they turned the tide.

Allow me to make a side note here. There were always Indian tribes who were recruited by the Europeans to fight for them against other tribes, from the time of Montezuma to that of Geronimo. It’s not something that modern Native American historians like to talk about very much, but it is an inescapable fact.

Fighting had started in the spring and lasted throughout the summer and fall. As a result, the Indians were unable to harvest their crops, hunger set in, their unity weakened, and the English attacked in December. The Great Swamp Fight, discussed in detail in the video, was a particularly bloody affair, and it was decisive.

King Philip was killed, his body drawn and quartered, and his head remained on a post until 1700. Once Indian resistance was crushed, the English launched a vicious ethnic cleansing campaign over the next couple of years.

Colonial militias swept through the countryside of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, killing all of the adult Indian men they could find, and transporting the women and children to Boston where they were sold into slavery to be worked to death on the English sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

It went on for two years. By 1678, very few Indians could be found anywhere near the settled portions of New England. Soon, the tribes of upstate New York and the Great Lakes would be caught between the English-speaking Europeans of New England and southern New York and the French-speaking ones spreading out from Quebec, but that is another story.

Today is both Martin Luther King Day and Inauguration Day for Trump II. It is also the day a ceasefire in another, far more industrialized and efficient ethnic cleansing taking place in Palestine is supposed to begin.

We must not forget King Philip, and his Wampanoag and their Narragansett and other allies who fought to survive once upon a time, just as we must never forget what either the Nazis or the Zionists did and to whom they did it. As the Puritans themselves might have said, there but by the grace of God go we.

Nor should we forget or ignore the rationalizations used to dehumanize and destroy entire peoples, for when we do, we don’t recognize them when they reappear, as they have done in our own time.

Remember King Philip, remember how the Puritans thought, and take a long, hard look at the Israelis and their rationalization of the worst crime one group of human beings can inflict upon another.

Thank you for reading, and hopefully viewing, good day or night, and good luck.

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