In 1675, war broke out in Rhode Island when Native people fired on a handful of colonists, killing a young English man. Or so goes the story.
If you're one of the relatively few people in the US who have heard of King Phillip's War, this is probably all you know. Or perhaps your Massachusetts town has a monument to what it calls heroic colonial captains. But what really took place in those bloody years, 1675-1678, across New England?
This vital presentation by historian Kevin March was the first in the Partnership of Historic Bostons 2026 spring lecture series, Metacom's Resistance. Kevin March offers the essential foundation you need for the rest of the series. Don't miss it!
King Philip’s War (1675-1678) has rightly been described as a watershed moment for the Native and Puritan inhabitants of New England. The history of this forgotten conflict is most often told through Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative and the victors' monuments scattered in towns throughout New England. However, these settler sources distort our historical memory of the complex tensions that led to war, the political and environmental factors that shaped its course, and its diverse outcomes for Native communities across the Northeast.
In this talk, Kevin March re-examines King Philip’s War, offering a more nuanced picture of the conflict that reshaped New England.
In June 1675, 50 years of Anglo-Indian tension erupted into conflict when the Wampanoag leader Metacom (King Philip) led a pan-Indian confederation against New England. In the summer and fall, Metacom’s coalition of Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Pocumtuck, Podunk, and Nashaway warriors raided English villages in southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and on the Connecticut River. A parallel war also erupted between the English settlers and Wabanaki Indians of Maine and New Hampshire.
In December, English soldiers and their Pequot and Mohegan allies launched a brutal campaign against the neutral Narragansetts, killing hundreds of men, women, and children in the Great Swamp Massacre. Bolstered by Narragansett survivors, Metacom launched a major raid on Plymouth in March 1676. But scarce provisions and infighting undermined his coalition, and the English slowly gained the initiative.
In August 1676, English and Mohegan rangers hunted down and killed Metacom at Mount Hope, Rhode Island, and his severed head was displayed at Plymouth. The English sold hundreds of Indian “traitors” into Atlantic slavery and dispossessed them of their lands. Yet Indian defeat was not universal. To the north, the Wabanakis were victorious, launching raids that “desettled” coastal Maine and allowed their leaders to dictate the terms of peace in April 1678.
This talk moves beyond narratives of “Indian rebellion” and Puritan conquest to offer a panoramic introduction to King Philip’s War. Following historian Lisa Brooks (Abenaki), this talk “unbinds” neat chronologies of the conflict, embracing its historical complexities and unevenness.
Kevin March begins by exploring the ongoing sources of conflict between Native and English communities, including disputes over property rights and political sovereignty. He will then examine the motives and decisions of Native peoples on both sides, including forgotten but crucial leaders like Weetamoo (Pocasset), Canonchet (Narragansett) Awashonks (Sakonnet), and Madockawando (Penobscot). He concludes by assessing the war’s diverse consequences for Native communities in the Northeast. Some groups suffered devastating losses, enslavement, and dispossession in the aftermath of King Philip’s War, but others retained their land rights and reasserted their political sovereignty for decades until the American Revolution.
On the 350th anniversary of King Philip’s War, its meanings and legacies are still deeply contested. This talk concludes with a brief examination of historical memories of the conflict. Puritan stalwarts like Cotton Mather labelled the war an “Indian rebellion,” but later historical reassessments have described the conflict as a “civil war,” and still others as a Native battle for survival and sovereignty. Popular narratives of this forgotten war still largely take the colonial perspective, but public history initiatives and collaborations between Native and settler scholars have begun to craft new histories of King Philip’s War. For them, King Philip's War is more accuately seen as a war of resistance.
Kevin March is a history PhD candidate (ABD) at Boston College. He is interested in empire, property, and environmental history in New England and vast early America. Kevin’s dissertation explores how the Wabanaki peoples (Abenaki, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Mi’kmaq) navigated the ecological, political, and cultural dimensions of contact with English and French settlers in the 17th century northeast. Trade records, property deeds, and wampum belts reveal complex connections between Wabanaki, English, and French actors. Kevin’s work has received generous support from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Society of the Cincinnati, and the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy at Boston College.
Image: The small piece of a 1675 map which appears on the video title page is the only surviving depiction of the fighting in King Philip's War, according to historian Jill Lepore. It is the first printed version of William Reed's original survey from 1665, but adds details from the war, including this snapshot of the warring parties as well as colonial towns destroyed in the early months of the war. John Seller, "A mapp of New England" (London: And are to bee sold at his shop at the Hermitage in Wapping and by Iohn Hills in Exchange Alley in Cornhill, [1675]). Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston