For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  Rather than abide fickle friends, the colonists delivered a preemptive strike against the Narragansetts, resulting in the war’s most famous battle, the Great Swamp Fight of December 19, 1675. Many Narragansett families had taken up winter residence in a secret fortified village in Rhode Island’s Great Swamp. During the morning and early afternoon of the 19th, a day memorable for its bitter cold and the tremendous snowfall shrouding the land, an intercolonial army trudged the last few miles to the Indian fort. The governor of Plymouth Colony, Josiah Winslow, commanded the 1,100-man force, composed of soldiers from Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut and a substantial contingent of Indian allies, including a Narragansett defector who led the army to the concealed encampment. The Narragansetts resisted with valor, but the English gained the upper hand by resorting to fire, as they had previously done along the Mystic River. The immediate Indian losses numbered in the hundreds, but of equal importance was the destruction of the Indians’ clothing, housing, and winter food supply. Those Narragansetts fleeing into the swamp carried practically nothing with them and faced the grim prospect of freezing or starving to death.

  The Narragansetts had suffered a stunning defeat, but the colonial victory was not cause for unmitigated joy. Colonial casualties were about 20 percent of the army. Furthermore, the Narragansetts still had considerable fighting power, and the preemptive attack pushed the enraged tribe into the enemy camp. Still, though tainted by the casualty list and the prospect of additional enemies, the victory bolstered sagging morale. Until the Great Swamp Fight the colonial effort had been inept. One explanation for the initial blunders was the failure to use Indian allies. Despite many contemptible actions by whites toward even friendly Indians, approximately half the natives of New England refused to join the Wampanoags. However, when the war began, the settlers viewed practically all Indians with suspicion, fearing they might be plotting to repeat Good Friday of 1622 on a grander scale, and were reluctant to employ them. By the spring of 1676 necessity overrode prejudice and suspicion, and with Indian assistance the strategy of waging total war against Indian society became more successful.

  Two of New England’s most famous soldiers were William Turner and Benjamin Church. Leading 150 volunteers, in May 1676 Turner attacked a huge Indian base camp on the Connecticut River, killing hundreds of women and children and destroying a large cache of ammunition and two forges that the Indians used to repair firearms. Just as the colonists completed their destruction, Indian warriors counterattacked and inflicted severe losses on Turner’s command, but irreparable damage to the Indians’ cause had already been done. Church, who used Indian auxiliaries and imitated Indian methods, was New England’s foremost war hero. He had participated in the Great Swamp Fight and then retired from the war until the summer of 1676, when he offered to form a volunteer company of Indians and whites and fight Indians by fighting like Indians, emulating their stealthy guerrilla tactics. Church personally persuaded the small Sakonnet tribe to abandon Philip and then enlisted the Sakonnet warriors into his own company. His men captured Philip’s wife and nine-year-old son and, guided by one of Philip’s own men turned traitor, also killed the Wampanoag sachem on August 12, 1676. Church ordered Philip’s head and hands cut off and had the body quartered; then each quarter was hung from a separate tree.

  Although the roundup of stragglers went on for several months, Philip’s death marked the end of concerted Indian resistance. For the English the war’s cost was grievous: expenses of £100,000 and debts larger than the colony’s property value, three thousand fresh graves out of a white population of only 52,000, hundreds of homes burned, thousands of cattle killed. But white society recovered. The Indians did not. King Philip’s War was analogous to the Second Tidewater War, as it settled the question of whether Indians or whites would dominate the region. The conflict reduced the once-proud Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts to insignificance. Even tribes allied with the English suffered acute degradation as the natives rapidly declined in the war’s aftermath. A visitor to New England in 1687 noted: “There is Nothing to fear from the Savages, for they are few in Number. The last Wars they had with the English . . . have reduced them to a small number, and consequently they are incapable of defending themselves.”

  Simultaneously with this New England war, Virginia endured a curious affair known as Bacon’s Rebellion, which was part Indian war, part civil insurrection. The chain of events precipitating the rebellion would make good comic opera, had the results not been so lethal. In 1675 whites murdered some members of the friendly Susquehannock Indians, forcing the tribe onto the warpath. When the Susquehannocks retaliated, Virginians divided on how to respond. Governor William Berkeley represented one viewpoint. For reasons of humanity and policy, he believed colonists should differentiate between friendly and hostile Indians, protecting the former and waging war only against the latter. The governor knew of the recent upheaval in New England and wanted to preserve the loyalty of neighboring Indians, whose help would be essential if war broke out in Virginia too. To protect the frontier, Berkeley proposed a series of forts manned by militiamen; to reassure Virginians of the inability of subjugated Indians in their midst to do any harm, he disarmed the natives. Nathaniel Bacon, Berkeley’s cousin by marriage, symbolized the other perspective. Bacon believed all Indians were enemies and launched a crusade to kill them without distinguishing between hostile and loyal tribes. Bacon’s attitude represented the majority of frontiersmen who, resenting the expense of maintaining Berkeley’s forts, wanted to raise volunteer companies and slaughter Indians indiscriminately. When Berkeley opposed the formation of volunteer units, Bacon defied him, becoming an unofficial, uncommissioned “General of Volunteers.” Thus a dispute over Indian policy bred civil revolt.

  Under Bacon’s leadership the volunteer frontiersmen did not kill a single enemy Indian, contenting themselves with persecuting and slaughtering innocents. Meantime, Bacon also waged civil war against Governor Berkeley’s loyal forces. The whole sorry incident ended when Bacon died of the “Bloody Flux” (dysentery) in October 1676. The rebellion against constituted authority soon sputtered to a conclusion, and in the spring authorities reached a peace agreement with the terrified friendly tribes, whom Bacon’s volunteers had driven from their homes.

  In the hundred years prior to the American Revolution, colonists fought other wars strictly against Indians. For example, in 1711 the Tuscarora Indians in North Carolina launched a surprise attack that began the Tuscarora War (1711–1713). And in 1715 the Yamassee Indians staged an attack in South Carolina, beginning the Yamassee War, which intermittently sputtered on until 1728, with the Indians, as usual, being defeated. But purely Indian wars were relatively unimportant following King Philip’s War. After 1689 English colonists fought a series of wars against rival European colonies in which both sides made liberal use of Indian allies. By then the colonists had developed attitudes toward military institutions and war that set them apart from the European experience. First, unlike European nations, the colonies did not develop professional armies, instead relying on a militia system. During the Indian wars from 1622 to 1676, colonists gained confidence in this system and romanticized it, believing that citizen-soldiers defending their homes were far superior to an army of mercenaries. From their perspective they were at least partially correct. The militia had its deficiencies, but it proved adequate, since the Indians were the vanquished, not the whites. Second, the colonists did not enjoy an “Age of Limited Warfare” like that which prevailed in Europe from the midseventeenth to the mideighteenth century. To the colonists (and to the Indians), war was a matter of survival. Consequently, at the very time European nations strove to restrain war’s destructiveness, the colonists waged it with ruthless ferocity, purposefully striking at noncombatants and enemy property. The colonial wars fought between 1689 and 1763 perpetuated the attitudes fostered by the military experience between 1607 and 1676. Colonists remained disdainful, even fearful, of professional soldiers and augment
ed their quest for the Indians’ subjugation with an equally intense desire for the complete removal of French influence from North America.

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  TWO

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  The Colonial Wars, 1689–1763

  By the time Benjamin Church left King Philip’s butchered body hanging from four trees, North America had become a divided continent, as three imperial powers struggled for dominance. The English had established a thin band of civilization along the eastern seaboard and also claimed the shores of Hudson Bay. An even sparser line of French settlement thrust along the St. Lawrence River into the Great Lakes region. The Spanish claimed much of the Gulf coast, with its eastern anchor in Florida, where they founded St. Augustine in 1565. However, Spanish power was waning, leaving England and France as the primary competitors for an enormously rich prize, the interior of North America drained by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Geography favored the French, since the St. Lawrence gave them relatively easy access into the heart of the continent. By contrast, with the Appalachian Mountains blocking their westward advance, English colonists seemed doomed to occupy a coastal ribbon. Only two major gaps breached the northern half of the Appalachians: In central New York the Mohawk River pierced the mountains; farther north a corridor, consisting of the Hudson River, Lakes George and Champlain, and the Richelieu River, linked New France and the British colonies. Along with the St. Lawrence itself, these gaps were practically the only avenues over which the enemies could strike at each other.

  Although nature had blessed New France, the British had two compensating advantages, manpower and sea power. Throughout the colonial wars, British colonists outnumbered French colonists by about fifteen to one. Several factors somewhat reduced this disproportion in manpower. Only New York and New England, containing about half the English North American population, consistently fought in the wars, while France drew on all of Canada for support. The French colony also contained a higher proportion of males. One government capable of imposing unity of command ruled Canada, while the English, fighting under their individual colonial governments, lacked overall coordination. But would a single unified command be enough to overcome the British numerical advantage on both land and sea?

  Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the British navy increasingly controlled the Atlantic Ocean. Reinforcing the Royal Navy were privateers, which were merchant ships that their owners converted into warships for the express purpose of raiding the enemy’s seaborne commerce. Because a privateer’s owners and crew shared the proceeds from any captured ships (called prizes), the prospect of substantial prize money attracted thousands of colonial businessmen and mariners to the enterprise, especially from the port cities of Newport, New York, and Philadelphia. Since New France remained dependent on imports from the mother country, it could be likened to a sapling striving to reach maturity in a harsh environment. The sea lanes to France represented the roots, the St. Lawrence was analogous to the trunk, and the Great Lakes were the branches. Anything impeding the flow of supplies along the root system stunted the growth of the trunk and foliage. In wartime the Royal Navy, supplemented by numerous privateers, periodically severed these roots, allowing British land forces to attack a foe suffering from malnutrition.

  Euro-Indian Alliances and Early Conflicts

  The colonial wars cannot be understood without recognizing the complex relationship among Europeans, Indians, and the fur trade. Colonial competition for mastery of the continent inevitably affected the native tribes. Realizing that Indian alliances might ultimately determine which nation prevailed, perceptive white men sought Indian allies as warriors and as agents in the economically important fur trade. In the quest for Indian allies the French had two advantages, the British one. Less race-conscious than Englishmen, Frenchmen embraced Indian culture in ways alien to the British, and the natives recognized the difference. Nor were the French as greedy for Indian land as the British. Many French colonists were single males (fur traders, priests, and soldiers) and required only a few acres for their trading posts, missions, forts, and garden plots. But the rapidly multiplying English came primarily in family units to farm. Their thirst for land seemed unquenchable, and they frequently resorted to unscrupulous methods to obtain it.

  The British advantage was in the fur trade, which bound whites and Indians in an interdependent relationship and brought the European rivals into more direct competition. Colonists profited from the trade, while the Indians, who exchanged pelts for manufactured goods, gradually abandoned their self-sufficient existence as they became dependent on these wares. Since English manufactured goods were better and cheaper than French goods, Indians preferred to trade with the British. Under intense pressure to procure pelts, Indians killed off the nearby supply of fur-bearing animals and had to trap in more remote areas. White traders followed them, pushing the frontiers of New France and the English colonies closer together.

  The crucial European-Indian alliances in the northeast emerged early in the colonial era. Two major Indian cultures existed in the region, the Iroquoian and the Algonquin. Not only were these groups hostile to each other, but internal conflict among tribes belonging to the same group also occurred. Various Algonquin tribes—such as the Abnakis, Montagnais, and Ottawas—living in areas the French explored, welcomed the newcomers as allies against their traditional enemies, the Five Nations of the Iroquois confederacy (the Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Mohawk tribes). The Five Nations occupied the territory from the Hudson River and Lake Champlain westward to the Genesee River.2 Living in the Great Lakes region were the Hurons, Neutrals, and Eries, all akin to the Iroquois but, like the Algonquin tribes, periodically at war with the confederacy. South of the Five Nations were the Susquehannocks, an Iroquoian tribe also in conflict with the confederacy.

  When the French allied themselves with the Algonquins and Hurons to ensure the safety of their settlements and to gain access to rich fur sources, they automatically gained the enmity of the confederacy. Although the Five Nations could never count on more than three thousand warriors, they were aggressive fighters. The confederacy’s geographic position also allowed it to control the economic and military balance of power between Canada and the English colonies. Inhabiting the Mohawk and Hudson River gaps, it sat astride the northern frontier’s most vital crossroads of communications and trade. The Five Nations served like a belt of armor that the French had to penetrate before striking the English. The Iroquois were also in an ideal position to divert the flow of pelts from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson River.

  The Dutch settled the Hudson Valley, building Fort Orange (Albany) nine miles below the mouth of the Mohawk River. The Iroquois, anxious to acquire firearms to counter the French-Indian threat to their north, and the Dutch, eager to profit from the fur trade, established cordial relations. Seeking new access to furs, the Five Nations waged a series of expansionist wars during the midseventeenth century. They defeated the Hurons, Neutrals, and Eries and then turned against the Susquehannocks. The Iroquois intrusion into the Great Lakes region disrupted New France’s fur trade, threatening the colony with economic disaster. In 1664 the English conquered New Netherland, renaming it New York. Realizing that friendship with the Five Nations was important for their economic and military security, the conquerors preserved the Dutch relationship with the Iroquois. Thus when the colonial wars began, the battle lines were well formed. New France, the Algonquins, and remnants of the Iroquoian tribes that had recently been defeated by the Five Nations opposed the English colonists and the Iroquois. Although the northern frontier ultimately would be decisive during the colonial wars, the clashing interests of Spain, France, and England along the southern frontier helped mold the final outcome. After the founding of Charleston in 1670 and the subsequent growth of the Carolinas, a parallel search for Indian trade and alliances developed in the south, where the Appalachians tapered off in central Georgia. Settling in territory claimed by Spain, the Carolinians struggled with the Spanish a
nd their Indian supporters. Forming alliances with various Indian tribes, the English drove the Spanish frontier southward to the Florida peninsula. With the Spanish barrier eliminated, Carolina traders penetrated into the interior, where they established trading relations with the most important tribes of the old southwest. In eastern Tennessee and western Carolina they encountered the Cherokees. Further westward, in the Yazoo River valley and along the upper reaches of the Tombigbee River, were the Chickasaws. The Creeks inhabited western Georgia and eastern Alabama, and the Choctaws lived west of the Tombigbee. Like the northern tribes, these four powerful tribes frequently warred with each other.

  The Anglo-French frontiers collided in Louisiana, as they had already in the Great Lakes region. Both sides sought the allegiance of the four primary tribes living between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The French had the advantage of easy water routes, while the Carolinians had to rely on difficult overland trails. The French were also much less abusive toward the Indians and did not traffic in Indian slaves, a practice the English avidly pursued. However, the Carolina traders, like their northern counterparts, sold better-quality goods more cheaply. The Indian alliance system remained fluid during the early 1700s. The Choctaws were generally in the French camp, while the Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws favored the Carolinians. However, diplomatic maneuvering, trading opportunities, and strategic considerations made alliances undependable. The only certainty was that Indian assistance in the south, as in the north, would be vital in the wars for continental domination.