King Philip's War
Order to the Major of Suffolk to send troops to help protect Concord and Medfield
22 April 1676
22 April 1676
King Philip’s War was one of the deadliest calamities to befall early New England. Breaking out in June 1675 with the murder of a Christian Indigenous person and the subsequent execution by an English court of the three Indigenous men it had convicted of the crime, the fighting took place between the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, New Haven and Connecticut and their Indigenous allies and a confederation of usually warring local peoples led by Metacomet, sachem (paramount chief) of the Wampanoag community and known to the English as King Philip. Modern historians regard the 14 months of hostilities as proportionately the deadliest in American history and instrumental in forging a sense of identity amongst the colonists separate to that of the English of England.
The order illustrated here was sent from the council of Massachusetts Bay to the Major of the Suffolk County militia in Dorchester (now a suburb of Boston) on 22 April 1676, a few days after an Indigenous attack on nearby Sudbury. He is instructed by the council to collect 40 troopers (or, failing that, as many as he can gather) and proceed to Sudbury, where they are to learn ‘what they may of the enemy’s motion and where they may be’. The Indigenous Peoples are presumably suspected of heading for Concord or Medfield, since the men are subsequently to make their way there and gather information about the towns’ condition.
By the time of the attack on Sudbury New England had been suffering the ravages of war for the best part of a year. Half of its towns had been destroyed and the frontier of English settlement in the region pushed back east towards the Atlantic coast. The colonists had received scant help either from England, whose Anglican monarchy, recently restored, had little love for Puritans, or from the colonies of Virginia and New York further south, whose governments were respectively embroiled in a rebellion of frontier farmers and trying to establish their authority in an area still largely inhabited by the Dutch. As the fighting wore on both sides became more brutal in their methods, as evinced by the reports of what would now be prosecuted as war crimes that have come down to us through the colonists’ written accounts. By the time Metacomet was cornered and killed in a swamp in August 1676 – his head later to be exhibited on a spike at the gates of Plymouth, where it sat for several decades – the war had claimed the lives of one in ten adult male colonists. The toll on the Indigenous Peoples was higher: the proportion of the local population accounted for by the various communities is estimated to have fallen from 30% before the war to just 15% by 1680, even accounting for English deaths.
It is interesting to observe as a footnote that, though he was anathematized for a hundred years as a bloodthirsty savage, Metacomet was the subject of a curious cultural reassessment in the nineteenth century. In 1814 Washington Irving painted a sympathetic portrait of him in a popular essay, and John Augustus Stone’s "Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags", which portrayed Metacomet as an American hero fighting foreign tyranny, was performed for forty years throughout America as one of the most popular plays of the age.
The order illustrated here was sent from the council of Massachusetts Bay to the Major of the Suffolk County militia in Dorchester (now a suburb of Boston) on 22 April 1676, a few days after an Indigenous attack on nearby Sudbury. He is instructed by the council to collect 40 troopers (or, failing that, as many as he can gather) and proceed to Sudbury, where they are to learn ‘what they may of the enemy’s motion and where they may be’. The Indigenous Peoples are presumably suspected of heading for Concord or Medfield, since the men are subsequently to make their way there and gather information about the towns’ condition.
By the time of the attack on Sudbury New England had been suffering the ravages of war for the best part of a year. Half of its towns had been destroyed and the frontier of English settlement in the region pushed back east towards the Atlantic coast. The colonists had received scant help either from England, whose Anglican monarchy, recently restored, had little love for Puritans, or from the colonies of Virginia and New York further south, whose governments were respectively embroiled in a rebellion of frontier farmers and trying to establish their authority in an area still largely inhabited by the Dutch. As the fighting wore on both sides became more brutal in their methods, as evinced by the reports of what would now be prosecuted as war crimes that have come down to us through the colonists’ written accounts. By the time Metacomet was cornered and killed in a swamp in August 1676 – his head later to be exhibited on a spike at the gates of Plymouth, where it sat for several decades – the war had claimed the lives of one in ten adult male colonists. The toll on the Indigenous Peoples was higher: the proportion of the local population accounted for by the various communities is estimated to have fallen from 30% before the war to just 15% by 1680, even accounting for English deaths.
It is interesting to observe as a footnote that, though he was anathematized for a hundred years as a bloodthirsty savage, Metacomet was the subject of a curious cultural reassessment in the nineteenth century. In 1814 Washington Irving painted a sympathetic portrait of him in a popular essay, and John Augustus Stone’s "Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags", which portrayed Metacomet as an American hero fighting foreign tyranny, was performed for forty years throughout America as one of the most popular plays of the age.