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Additionally, Plymouth ordered the enslavement of 112 Wampanoags who surrendered at Dartmouth, 57 who surrendered in Sandwich, then sold another 178 they had kept in a pen for weeks, into slavery in Spain. “By the next year,” writes Silverman, “the colonies had enslaved upward of two thousand Native [men, women and children] and distributed them throughout the vast range of England’s dominions and its foreign markets, from Plymouth to the Portuguese Wine Islands and Taunton to even Tangier.” Public hangings of Natives were common in Plymouth, Boston and Newport.

William Bradford and Plymouth leadership downplayed slavery in the colony - with the assistance of bribes paid to English inspectors - and in some cases outright lied in correspondence about the prevalence of African slaves, in particular.

Weetamoo was found drowned in the Taunton River. Upon her discovery, the English “decapitated her and placed their trophy on a pike within sight of a holding pen full of injured, terrified Wampanoag prisoners of war.”[xxiii] Pumetacom was shot by a Christian Wampanoag, after which militia leader Thomas Church ordered him beheaded and quartered. His head was sent to Plymouth, where his father had, improbably, broken bread with the Pilgrims 54 years earlier. Pumetacom’s skull was left on display outside Plymouth for the next 20 years.[xxiv]

Around that time, the Massachusetts Bay Colony absorbed the Plymouth Colony, not the other way around. While it was likely a foregone conclusion considering the massive population discrepancy by then, some in Plymouth blamed its ministers for allowing the “Christian Indians” who had been such a deciding factor in King Philip’s War to be sold into slavery and disappeared to the West Indies.

Sachem in rebellion Weetamoo, as depicted by Tim O’Brien

“King Philip,” as the English derogatorily called Pumetacom, was a generation too late to rally his kin: too much was now at stake in terms of trade, numbers and firepower. Even still, he and a coalition of allies wreaked havoc on the colonies for about a year and half.

Formally, the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, New Haven and Connecticut colonies declared war on Native Americans on September 6, 1675. The Rhode Island colony and the Narragansetts formally remained neutral, but nobody paid attention. English forces assumed hostile intentions of countless tribes from Connecticut to Maine, often creating new enemies where none existed before. Between 600-1,000 members of the Nipmuc Nation were confined to a makeshift internment camp on Deer Island, despite having converted to Christianity, out of general distrust. Around half of those who were kept in the horrid conditions at Deer Island died by the end of the war.

On Nov. 2, Plymouth Gov. Josiah Winslow led Northeast forces through Rhode Island, burning Native towns along the way, until they located a Narragansett fort in South Kingstown. 1,000 English troops slaughtered about 600 Narragansetts, burned the fort and destroyed the tribe’s winter resources. Only 70 English troops were killed in what could hardly be called a battle against a neutral entity.[xxi]

The following spring, the Narragansetts responded, burning Providence to the ground, including Roger Williams’ home, and parts of Warwick, driving residents to Newport and Portsmouth. Pumetacom’s hopes of an uprising were finally dashed when the Mohawks turned against the Wampanoags.

In the end, more than 3,000 Native Americans died, along with hundreds of colonists. Massachusetts’ response to “Metacomet’s Revenge” was typically disproportional and cruel: They dispatched a rogue crew led by sociopathic “land pirate” Samuel Mosely to captain “an independent company made up of some of the most desperate elements of colonial society” to conduct broad sweeps in order to smoke out Pumetacom and a leading female rebel sachem, Weetamoo, from their hiding places. The land pirates’ pay came in the form of plunder and the sale of captives into slavery, and their dragnet predictably took in countless Christian Wampanoags and noncombatants with long relationships with the English.[xxii]

Ch. 4 SOURCES:

[xix] Sainsbury, J. A. (1975). Indian labor in early Rhode Island. New England Quarterly, 378-393.

[xx] Cogley, R. W. (1999). John Eliot’s mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War. Harvard University Press.

[xxi] Mather, I. (1862). The History of King Philip's War; Also, A History of the Same War. United States: editor.