New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America

Chapters 4-6 explore new worlds in religion, war, and diplomacy. King Philip’s War of 1675-76 in New England, which Calloway mentions throughout the book, serves as an example of dramatic changes in all three areas.

In the mid-17th century, Puritan minister John Eliot set out to convert local Indigenous Americans to Christianity. Unlike Catholics in New Spain and New France, Puritans were unlikely missionaries, for Puritanism taught that salvation was reserved for an “elect” few. Nonetheless, Eliot established a total of 14 so-called “praying towns,” where Indigenous Americans lived together as part of a Christian community. It appears that these communities, including the “showpiece praying town” of Natick, attracted converts from smaller and more vulnerable tribes (77). Leaders and warriors from larger tribes, including the Wampanoag, resented the praying towns and regarded their inhabitants as cultural traitors. In 1675, the English executed three Wampanoags for murdering a praying-town convert. Metacomet, the Wampanoag chief known as “King Philip” to the English, forged an alliance with several smaller tribes and went to war against Puritan New England.

In the summer and fall of 1675, Metacomet’s forces launched surprise attacks on more than a dozen Massachusetts towns, many of them on the colony’s western frontier. Early victories drove fleeing colonists eastward. As the war spread, the powerful Narragansetts of Rhode Island entered the conflict, bolstering Metacomet’s numbers. With the help of Mohegan, Pequot, and other praying-town allies, New England’s militia repelled several attacks, but Metacomet’s “anti-English confederation” had the advantage (100). The tide turned in the winter of 1675-76, when Mohawks from New York entered the war on the English side. Metacomet’s forces suffered a series of defeats and spent the summer of 1676 on the defensive. On August 12, a praying-town Wampanoag shot and killed Metacomet himself. Thereafter, Metacomet’s confederation disintegrated.

On the surface, King Philip’s War might appear to refute rather than support Calloway’s larger argument. It was a brutal and catastrophic conflict in which thousands lost their lives on both sides. Plymouth colonists dismembered Metacomet’s corpse and displayed his head on a pike. Vanquished Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and others were enslaved in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Per capita, King Philip’s War remains the most destructive war in American history.

On the other hand, King Philip’s War illustrates exactly the sort of “new world” Europeans and Indigenous Americans created throughout North America. Christian missionaries won converts whose mere existence caused tension in Native communities. These converts, along with other friendly tribes, helped European settlements survive. As they grew stronger, European colonies engaged in diplomacy and formed alliances with larger Indigenous confederacies such as the Iroquois. When Europeans and Indigenous Americans fought, either with or against one another, the battles often assumed a mixed character: Indigenous-inspired raids and ambushes combined with European-style sieges. King Philip’s War had all of these features.