What Happened After Thanksgiving?
The Bloodiest War in American History
Thanksgiving has now concluded, and so the turkey decorations and family squabbles with the liberal niece or wine-addicted, cat-owning aunt can be put away for another year…or at least until Christmas. But have you, dear reader, as you fix another plate of leftovers and ask who ate the last slice of pie you were hoping to eat, ever wondered what happened after the First Thanksgiving?
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Though there were similar celebrations in Virginia well before the Pilgrims and Indians had their harvest celebration that later became a national tradition, what’s now remembered and celebrated as the Thanksgiving occurred in 1621, a year after the landing at Plymouth. As the National Archives describes it: “During the autumn of 1621, at least 90 Wampanoag joined 52 English people at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, to mark a successful harvest. It is remembered today as the ‘First Thanksgiving,’ although no one back then used that term.”1 It further notes that the celebration occurred because “Tribal leaders were wary of the English but nevertheless formed an alliance with the colonists for strategic purposes. They also shared knowledge about hunting and planting that saved the Pilgrims from starvation and made the 1621 harvest celebration possible.”
So, today, it’s marked as a kumbaya moment for the settlers and the friendly Indians who surrounded the fledgling English settlement in Plymouth. To a limited extent that was true, but the term “Indian Giver” didn’t come about out of nothing, and the typical turn of semi-friendly relations turned into one of the colonial era’s most sickening, slaughterous conflicts within a generation.
Namely, the once friendly Wampanoag people had, by the late 1660s and early 1670s, turned decidedly non-friendly in King Phillip’s War, a war led by the son of the Wampanoag chief who aided the Pilgrims and one of the bloodiest colonial wars between the English and Indians.
As with most American-Indian Wars, King Phillip’s War began over a land dispute. Particularly, the settlers of the Plymouth Colony, who were soon founding other small towns across New England, namely Salem and Boston, thought they had established rights to settle across all of Wampanoag country through their early alliances with Squanto and Massasoit, the father of King Phillip. To some extent, that was accurate, as those leaders had granted access and Ousamequin was seen as the “king” of the natives, as his son later was. But, others in native leadership, some of whom had territorial claims and hadn’t granted that territory to the English, thought their rights ignored by greedy settlers. So, as the settlers gradually built towns, chopped down woods to establish farms, and otherwise expanded throughout the territory and up the Connecticut River valley, tensions expanded.
Particularly, tensions built after the death of Ousamequin, as the leaders who replaced him disputed territorial claims the English thought they had rightly been granted by him. Namely, they claimed some of the lands to have been freely given to them by Ousamequin, and in other cases, they thought that his eldest son, Wamsutta had granted them territory. Both men did grant the territory to the English in exchange for an alliance and protection, as the settlers claimed, but other Indian leaders though the grants illegitimate and void, which, of course, infuriated the settlers, who saw their role as the protectors of the Wampanoag as being in exchange for the land the natives were now demanding back.
Tensions ratcheted up yet more by the time King Phillip succeeded his father, Ousamequin, and brother Wamsutta in the early 1660s. By then, settler expansion and attempts to convert the Wampanoag to Christianity were causing conflict. Additionally, other disputes about land, with numerous Indians selling land that their tribes then didn’t want to part with, such as when Mammanuah, the son of a neighboring tribe’s ruler, sold some of his land and his tribesmen then refused to honor the transaction when the settlers began planting on the land.
Things then came to a head when the Indians under King Phillip murdered John Sassamon, an Indian convert to Christianity and early graduate of Harvard who served as an intermediary between the natives and settlers, after he warned the English that King Phillip was planning to attack their dispersed settlements. His murder was connected to yet another disputed land deal, along with the aforementioned plot. So, the English quickly tried, found guilty, and hanged his murderers while demanding the natives surrender their muskets, which began what became known as King Phillip’s War.
The first rumble of musketry came when a band of Indians attacked isolated homesteads in the area of a small settlement called Swansea, burning homes and killing several settlers. The colonists responded by sending a punitive expedition. It demolished a Wampanoag town and the war then became a general one, encompassing all of the native tribes in the New England area and the settlers against which they were arranged.
An essentially racial war between Indians and English sparked by decades of resentment, King Phillip’s War was noted even at the time for its gruesome brutality and the intentional infliction of atrocities on both sides. Anthony Brandt, in “Blood Betrayal: King Phillip’s War,” describing how the nature of the conflict turned it into such an atrocity-filled one, noted:2
Nor did the war proceed in any organized way. The colonists fought by erecting garrisons in the towns and sending armed columns down forest trails after the Indians. The militias acted as though the laws of civilized warfare were in effect, as if the Indians would dutifully face them on a battlefield or retreat to strongholds that could then be properly besieged. The Indians did build palisaded forts, but they were just as apt to slip away when enemies approached.
The most effective tactic the colonists used was to burn Indian crops in the fields, but this was a two-way street. The Indians burned many barns packed with colonial harvests and killed or stole farm animals. The retaliatory raids persisted through 1675 and into the following year. The colonists pursued the raiders, but it took several costly ambushes for them to learn that a military column in thick woods was an extremely vulnerable target. The Indians were at home in the forests and repeatedly lured the colonists into traps. Only when Mohegan scouts led them through the woods did the settlers stand much of a chance.
Describing what that conflict turned into, the description for Jill Lepore’s book on the conflict, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, provides:3
King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war--colonists against Indians--that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."
It all began when Philip (called Metacom by his own people), the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. The war spread quickly, pitting a loose confederation of southeastern Algonquians against a coalition of English colonists. While it raged, colonial armies pursued enemy Indians through the swamps and woods of New England, and Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley. Both sides, in fact, had pursued the war seemingly without restraint, killing women and children, torturing captives, and mutilating the dead. The fighting ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in August 1676.
So, it was a horrific conflict in which towns, villages, and isolated homesteads and settlements were raided by both sides, with civilians butchered, crops burned, and torture common. The cost of the war, for Indians and English alike, was immense. In fact, King Phillip’s War remains the bloodiest war of all time for America as a percentage of the population, with somewhere from 5-30% of the English population being killed and a majority of settlements attacked and destroyed. The Harvard Veterans Alumni Organization, describing the immense human cost of the conflict, notes:4
Most historians agree King Philip’s War resulted in the highest loss of life per capita of any war in colonial or U.S. history. Philip’s forces attacked at least 52 of 90 colonial settlements, destroying a dozen and burning over 1,200 homes. The precise numbers of lives lost is hard to pinpoint. Some historians claim the death toll was “perhaps 30% of the English population of New England… [and] estimate that the combined effects of war, disease, and starvation killed half the Native population of the region.” Most historians, however, place the death toll at about 5% of New England’s white settler population (including 10% of fighting age men), compared to 2.5% of the population in America’s Civil War. Either way, the war ruined the colony’s economy for years to come, leaving widows and maimed veterans to carry on.
While the cost of war was horrific for the colonial population, it was catastrophic for the native population. Colonial soldiers killed around 2,000 Native Americans, while another 3,000 died because of sickness and starvation. Colonial leaders sold at least 1,000 as slaves, with thousands more fleeing to join Native American people to the north and west. The English colonists had overwhelmed the Wampanoag people, just as some the lessor Wampanoag chiefs had originally predicted to Massasoit. In 1970, nearly 300 years after the King Philip’s War, Wampanoag Leader Frank James summed up the Wampanoags experience. “We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.”
Anthony Brandt, in “Blood Betrayal: King Phillip’s War”, in addition to describing the immense human cost of the war, notes that New England society was permanently scarred by the conflict, with the English needing a century to return to pre-war levels of prosperity and the Indians being permanently crushed. He noted:5
By the time the fighting finally ended, the costs proved crippling for both sides. Hundreds of Algonquian-speaking Indians had been sold into slavery at an average price of three English pounds, and thousands more had been killed. Algonquian society as a whole would never recover. Colonial New England would recover, but at a snail’s pace—it took 100 years for the region’s economy to reach the prosperity levels of the prewar period.
So, by 1676, just a generation after the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags feasted side by side to celebrate the harvest, both sides were exhausted and bloodied by a furious conflict that ripped their world apart and set them back by at least a century, if not forever. Such can be the high cost of good intentions and is worth remembering after Thanksgiving when considering the potential disaster that can come from misunderstandings with “newcomers.”