King Philip's War

By the 1670s the Native peoples of southern New England—the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuck, and others—had watched two generations of English settlers crowd onto their lands, undermine their leaders, and subject them to colonial courts and missionaries. Metacom, the Wampanoag sachem the English called King Philip, forged a broad alliance to resist this encroachment. In 1675 the war erupted, and for more than a year combined Native forces attacked and burned colonial towns across the region, pushing the New England colonies to the brink of collapse.

Proportionally, King Philip's War was among the deadliest conflicts in American history. Dozens of English towns were destroyed and thousands of colonists killed, but the toll on the Native peoples was catastrophic: their food supplies were burned, their numbers gutted by combat, famine, and disease, and the survivors were killed, driven into exile, or sold into slavery. Metacom was hunted down and killed in August 1676. The war broke the power of the independent Native nations of southern New England for good and opened their lands to unchecked English settlement.