But despite the war dance Awashonks was not immediately persuaded by Philip’s braves. She asked Church if it was true that Plymouth was building an army to attack Philip. Church responded, probably truthfully, that he would not have settled so near Mount Hope if the government was planning a war. She told him she had been threatened by Philip that if she did not become part of his confederacy he would kill English cattle and burn houses on her side of the river. The English would think she was responsible and attack her. Church called Philip’s men bloody ungrateful wretches, for the English had been nothing but good to them. He advised Awashonks to seek sanctuary with the English. She promised to remain neutral in the event of a war. Church was escorted home by two of her men. He decided not to move his goods in case that looked provocative. He asked the Sakonnets to bury them in the woods if war really did break out.
Church’s confidence that the war could be contained was dealt a blow at nearby Pocasset, where he met Weetamoo. Her new husband, Peter Nunuit, was just arriving by canoe from Mount Hope. He told Church there would certainly be a war as Philip had just held a dance for several weeks, attended by young men from all over the area. Weetamoo’s men had gone to Philip’s dance though she had tried to stop them. Church advised her to seek shelter with the English at Aquidneck.
Peter Nunuit had been with Philip on Mount Hope when a peacemaking letter arrived from Josiah saying the English had nothing against him and had no intention of attacking him. The braves had wanted to kill the English messengers, but Philip stopped them, saying his friend James Brown must not be harmed, ‘telling them his father had charged him to show kindness to Mr Brown’. Local histories note there were a number of English people Philip gave special instructions not to kill. But Josiah was not among them.
No warnings were sent round the Plymouth townships to prepare for war. Perhaps Josiah still thought it could all be settled, or perhaps he simply dreaded the onset of the fighting. He wrote to Weetamoo repeating Church’s suggestion she hide herself at Aquidneck with the Rhode Islanders away from Philip’s wrath. Perhaps Weetamoo had beauty and charisma that temporarily broke through Josiah’s hostility. Perhaps chivalry had something to do with it. Benjamin Church described the two as friendly. Easton believed that Weetamoo had done much by back channels to try to avoid war. He may have been naïve. Locals had suspicions of the Indian queen. They would not take her in and burned her canoes. In fact, Weetamoo was probably always bent on joining Philip to make war. Not only did she desire vengeance for the death of Wamsutta, she was also a great princess who did not want her powers circumscribed by the English.
As midsummer approached, Josiah in Marshfield continued to hope for peace. But the settlers nearest Mount Hope in south Swansea started leaving their homes. On 20 June Philip’s warriors began laying siege to Swansea. The inhabitants cooped themselves up in garrison houses. The long-predicted war had begun.
At break of day the next morning Josiah and Penelope were woken at Careswell by a messenger from Swansea. He had galloped all the way to let them know Philip was in action. Josiah sent messengers to call up seventy-five men from Taunton and Bridgewater to go to Swansea’s assistance. He hoped to have another 150 in the field by the next day. Meanwhile he sent a note to the Massachusetts governor, John Leverett. In his usual courtly language Josiah entreated him to ‘excuse the rudeness of my lines and to grant a word of answer by the post’. The situation was desperate. He feared that Swansea ‘may be sorely distressed before they can have relief’, though the messenger said the men were very cheerful. ‘Our great request to your honour’, he said, was that they used their influence ‘to secure us from trouble’ from the Narragansetts and Nipmucks, who were under Massachusetts protection. Josiah was confident that this would be a fight that could be contained: ‘If we can have fair play with our own we hope with the help of God we shall give a good account of it in a few days.’ And he continued to believe as he wrote that ‘There hath been no occasion given by us, no threat, nor unkindness, but their own pride and insolency alone hath moved them to give us this trouble’. Boston replied they would send a mission with great speed to the Nipmucks and Narragansetts and to Philip. They said: ‘pray let us have advice from time to time of what happens. We shall not fail to give you all needful assistance’.
The storm clouds that had been threatening for almost forty years had finally broken. The population of the English settlements trembled at what appeared to be the withdrawal of God’s favour, on which they had presumed for so long.
CHAPTER XVII
King Philip’s War
The revolt of the Indians was so dramatic that they drove the English towards the sea. Over half of the ninety New England towns were attacked. Seventeen were razed to the ground, their fine frame buildings, barns and fences reduced to heaps of ashes. Another twenty-five towns were badly wrecked.
By April 1676, ten months after the war began, it was not safe for the English to live beyond a certain point in the American wilderness. A third of all frontier towns in Massachusetts were abandoned. The colony begun by the Mayflower settlers was in danger of vanishing, as if the previous fifty years had never been.
When the Indian attacks had begun in late June 1675, no one could have predicted they would develop into what one historian has called ‘the bloodiest war in American history in terms of its proportionate effect on a region’. It was assumed that the fighting would soon be over, and limited to Plymouth Colony, never that it could lead to the tribes of southern New England rising together against the English, the stuff of colonists’ nightmares. The New England clergyman Increase Mather has left us a contemporary account of the war. He described how ‘this fire which in June was but a little spark, in three months time is become a great flame, that from East to West the whole Country is involved in great trouble’.
* * *
On 22 June 1675, hoping to keep the mass of Indians away from the lure of Philip’s warlike preparations, the governments of Rhode Island and Massachusetts went into action. But when the three captains entrusted with negotiating with Philip found mutilated English corpses on the way to Swansea, the peace mission was aborted. On 26 June Massachusetts soldiers were sent to Mount Hope.
The expedition started inauspiciously with an eclipse of the moon. The troops halted in total darkness, until the moon began to shine again and lit up the trail. To some, a black spot in the middle of the moon resembled an Indian scalp. To others, it looked like an Indian bow drawn against the English.
After a brisk rendezvous with the Plymouth troops at the minister’s house at Swansea, which was within a quarter of a mile of Mount Hope, some Massachusetts troopers were so keen to get to the Indians that they impetuously ran over the bridge. It was a foolish action. Indians lurking in undergrowth attacked and Philip and his men seized the opportunity, leapt into canoes and escaped from Mount Hope across Narragansett Bay to the country of the Pocassets.
Once the massed ranks of English soldiers were ready to march across the Mount Hope bridge in formation, they found no Indians left. There was just a torn-up Bible, a very frequent occurrence in the war showing how much the Indians hated this symbol of English power.
A couple of miles on they came upon the hideous sight of heads, scalps and hands cut off the corpses of English people. These body parts had been stuck on poles. The commander insisted on cutting them down.*
Eventually the search was called off. The peninsula was empty. The soldiers came upon Philip’s large wigwam which was deserted. Retreating back over the bridge to Swansea they were encircled by thirty or forty Indian dogs. So swift had Philip’s flight been, the dogs had lost their masters.
Philip’s dramatic escape had been masterminded by Weetamoo, who had finally shown her hand. Abandoning all pretence of supporting the English, she now threw her weight behind Philip. It was she who sent the canoes in which Philip fled, and it was she who enabled him to go to ground in her territories opposite Mount Hope. She sheltered him for a month. A crucia
l number of the warriors defending Philip in his hideaway turned out to be from Weetamoo’s own tribe, the Pocassets. At last, Weetamoo was taking revenge against the settlers for what she regarded as the murder of her husband.
The colonists were hampered by lack of ammunition and food. They knew that Philip was holed up in the Pocasset Swamp on Weetamoo’s land and they tried to make a firm treaty with the Narragansetts, to prevent him escaping to Narragansett territories nearby. Soldiers who were all novices in war imagined that the unknown woods were full of hundreds of Indian warriors.
If failing to contain Philip on Mount Hope had been a great mistake, the Plymouth troops’ inability to capture him in the Pocasset Swamp was catastrophic. The colonists should have had men at the swamp’s northern end to catch him as he came out. But the Plymouth men were not professional soldiers. Ever since the New England Confederation was formed in the 1640s, militias had become more systematised, and each town had a trained band with two or three officers who drilled them in the use of weapons, but this took place just four or five times a year. Most of these officers did not have a grasp of military strategy.
Philip’s warriors made deliberate diversionary attacks on the towns of Middleborough and Dartmouth, and on the night of 29 July, a hundred English troops were forced to go to the assistance of Dartmouth. Only twenty-five men were left guarding the swamp. Philip seized the opportunity to escape. He and his braves made their way north-west over the Taunton River on rafts and were now free in the Nipmuck country. The Nipmucks had given assurances of neutrality, but the promises were meaningless. They joined Philip, launching small-scale but alarming attacks on the Massachusetts towns of Mendon, Brookfield and Lancaster. And from then on the war spread across the whole of New England. Philip’s breakout from the swamp was the beginning of a tremendous journey through New England rallying the tribes, largely on foot or by canoe. Philip was not to be seen in his home territories again for another year.
In the past the pragmatic Canonicus and Passaconaway had urged peace and accommodation; they recognised that in the long term the Indians could not defeat the English. But Miantonomo had warned it must be war if the Indians wanted to preserve their autonomous civilisation. The charismatic Philip had been preparing the ground with the war dances and conferences he had at Mount Hope over the past few years. Now his message of insurrection was out in the open. It spread amongst mutinous tribes like a hissing charge of dynamite. The nightmare had come to pass. Philip had united the tribes against the English.
* * *
Two weeks after the war began Josiah made his will. He had serious fears Careswell would be Philip’s next port of call. He wrote to Governor Leverett at the end of July that he had heard ‘my person … has been much threatened’. The Winslows had to decide what to do with Penelope and their two children. Elizabeth was eleven but Isaac was only four. The murder of Rachel Mann, ‘a serious, modest, well-disposed woman’, and the baby she was breastfeeding when Rehoboth was attacked was particularly horrifying. It seemed sensible to send the whole household north to Salem, outside the war zone, to the Curwens, who could look after them in their large house. Nowhere in Plymouth Colony felt safe.
At least Josiah did not have to worry about his mother. At some point before that summer, Susanna had died. In the autumn of 1673 her old friend Mistress Elizabeth Warren also passed away. They had known each other since Leiden, over half a century before. The Plymouth Colony records relate that Mistress Warren was ‘honourably buried’. Having lived a godly life, she ‘came to her grave as a shock of corn fully ripe’.
Meanwhile Susanna’s grandchildren and daughter-in-law were clambering into canoes to go across the Marshfield creek to reach the sea. From the coast they could get a ketch to the safety of Boston. The household included a young female cousin, Elizabeth Gray. The Winslows seem to have brought her up perhaps as a companion for their daughter. Josiah’s nephew William White was also living at Careswell to get an agricultural education, as was the custom, helping Josiah farm his considerable acreage. He was probably asked to protect the family on their journey north; he could return later to fight.
It was a frantic departure, but their journey was relatively well managed in comparison to the chaos as the war continued, when carts of desperate people evacuated burning towns all over New England. The practical Penelope managed to hand over a copy of Josiah’s will to her brother-in-law.
Josiah would now be ‘less encumbered’. He had twenty men with him at Careswell. He had resolved to stand and fight for as long as he could – ‘as long as a man will stand by me’, in a garrison where all were taking watches night and day. Josiah had built protective extensions onto the house. At an angle to the fence round the property there was a well and beyond it a pond and a cedar tree. Legend has it that from a window of the house one of the garrison spotted an Indian sniper hiding in the tree and shot him. The pond became known as Long Tom Pond. Some say there was a tunnel from the house which came up outside the stockade onto the marsh.
The countryside was so dangerous that Josiah could not return to Plymouth town. As governor he had to conduct the war temporarily from Careswell. Fortunately he had been Plymouth’s military leader for almost twenty years. He was increasingly gloomy. It had become clear that the war was going to need to be a joint enterprise involving the United Colonies. Josiah asked that Boston organise support for a defensive war, because it was not safe to send a messenger cross-country to Connecticut. He told Captain Cudworth, commander of Plymouth Colony’s small army, that the ablest men, with the Massachusetts soldiers ‘and our Indian allies’, should be made into ‘as many small parties as you shall judge convenient and so to range down this way or where your best intelligence may guide you to speak with the enemy’. The rest should go home to protect their towns and families.
Though Josiah spoke of ‘Indian allies’, he believed most of the Indians in the Plymouth Colony would eventually join Philip. Even Indians who were their friends would be too frightened of Philip to oppose him. The arrival of an Indian named Vickus and his son and a party of men offering to help put him into a dilemma: ‘I am not well assured of their fidelity, yet in as much as they are come down to tender their service, we are not willing to put such a discouragement upon them to refuse them least it should cause them to take part with the Enemy.’
The Narragansetts swore they would not join Philip. Yet while Philip was still on Mount Hope locals had seen their canoes passing across Narragansett Bay with emissaries to Philip. A hundred Narragansett warriors had marched to Warwick, but they retreated. As usual Uncas stirred the pot in Boston: he lost no opportunity to tell the government that the Narragansetts were treacherous. But in this case he had some reason. After Philip escaped from the Pocasset Swamp, English colonists saw Weetamoo and her Pocassets heading down to the Narragansett main camp thirty miles to the south-west.
By August the impenetrable Narragansett country was hiding Weetamoo and several hundred Pocasset warriors. As always in such moments of crisis Massachusetts called in Roger Williams as interpreter and ambassador. But his influence was no longer what it had been. Miantonomo’s son Canonchet had grown up in the shadow of his father’s death. Canonchet was as stoical and fierce as Philip. The history of being menaced by the English meant he had abjured the desire for peace the Narragansetts had once been known for.
Ninigret held himself aloof. He had intimidated the English colonies for twenty years with his war threats. But his actions at this time reveal that he had been a clever diplomat, exploiting whatever powers he could against the English to attempt to keep hold of Narragansett territory. Ninigret had no intention of going to war. He began to distance himself from the Narragansett leadership, and offered to broker a peace, suggesting he went with an English envoy to the Mohawks to stop them joining in on Philip’s side. When this offer was not taken up, Ninigret removed his people from their home territories. For the rest of the war they largely secluded themselves in unknown country. The Penn
acook tribe similarly believed that no good could come from joining either side. They too vanished.
* * *
The war coincided with a widespread belief that God was not pleased with New Englanders, who would have to pay for deserting their promises by becoming so worldly. For some time there had been great anxiety amongst New England clergy about their covenant with God. Increase Mather’s sermon of February 1674 had warned ‘The Day of Trouble is near’ when a sinning people would be punished. He had not known when. It was clearly now. The warnings about what would happen to a backsliding people were about to be verified. In his account of the war he observed that ‘great and public Calamities seldom come upon any place without Prodigious Warnings to forerun and signify what is to be expected’. There had been various portents: the noise of a ‘great piece of Ordnance’ at Hadley and other towns; in Malden people talked of the sound of drums passing.
From August 1675 onwards, when it became clear how many Indians were responding to Philip’s call, the mood of the English colonists became more desperate. God’s will was urgently sought. What did it mean? Reverend Thomas Walley on Cape Cod struggled to interpret the divine significance of the war. A Quaker had told him it was punishment for persecuting them. But some thought it was because the colony allowed them ‘public exercise of their false worship’. Like so many, Josiah interpreted it as God using the Indians to punish the colonists, to ‘scourge and chasten us’, as he told John Winthrop junior soon after the war began. The terrible destruction was for the population’s own good. Throughout New England the churches advised people to beg God for forgiveness, through days of humiliation and fasting.
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