Whoever asserted dominion over the Pequots, whose country lay precisely within the disputed territory, would have a strong legal claim to the region. Endecott, a soldier in service to Massachusetts Bay, was eager for a fight in order to dominate the Pequots and thereby beat out the Connecticut settlers. But the very competitiveness of the New England colonies made effective unified action against the Indians almost impossible, and it wasn’t until the spring of 1637 that the disorganized colonial forces were able to enlist the aid of the Narragansetts, Eastern Niantics, and Mohegans—all rivals of the Pequots—in order to mount a counteroffensive. Captain John Mason, in command of the colonial-Indian coalition, attacked a village at Mystic, Connecticut, where he killed 600-700 Pequots—mostly women, children, and old men—in the space of an hour.
Following the Mystic massacre, the Pequots were defeated at every turn. On September 21, 1638, the Treaty of Hartford divided the Pequot prisoners of war as slaves among the allied tribes—Mohegans, Narragansetts, and Niantics—and further stipulated that no Pequot could inhabit his former country again. Indeed, the treaty proclaimed, the very name “Pequot” would be forever expunged.
King Philip’s War
An even more destructive war broke out in New England less than 40 years later, again over a murder. On June 11, 1675, a farmer saw an Indian looting his cattle. He killed the Indian. The local Wampanoag chief, called Metacomet by the Indians and (with contempt) King Philip by the English, sought justice from the local garrison. Rebuffed, the Indians took justice into their own hands and killed the hot-tempered farmer, then killed his father and five other settlers.
But the war had actually been brewing for some time. King Philip was the son of Massasoit, the chief who had been so friendly to the New Englanders. Faced with the colonists’ insatiable land hunger, their rising population, and their highhanded, contemptuous treatment of himself, King Philip was not inclined toward friendship. Beginning about 1662, he stirred rebellion among the Narragansetts and the Nipmucks as well as his own Wampanoags. At first, the colonists were hobbled by the same problem they had during the Pequot War. Disorganized and apparently incapable of unified action, the New Englanders suffered very heavy losses during the first months of the war. It was only after they managed to join forces as the United Colonies that Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the more remote “Eastern Colonies”—Maine and New Hampshire—began to take the initiative.
King Philip’s War was an unmitigated catastrophe for colonists and Indians alike. During 1675-76, half the region’s towns were badly damaged and at least 12 utterly wiped out. The colonial economy was left in tatters because of the disruption of the fur trade, coastal fishing, and the West Indian trade. The Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Nipmucks lost a great many of their number. As for the colonists, proportional to the population at the time, King Philip’s War stands to this day as the costliest conflict in American history.
The French and Indian Wars
The Pequot War and King Philip’s War were strictly colonial tragedies. The series of wars that followed, however, were reflections of conflicts that had engulfed Europe.
King William’s War
King William III ascended the English throne in 1689, after James II had been ousted in a Protestant revolt. William almost immediately (May 12, 1689) committed his nation to the Grand Alliance, joining the League of Augsburg and the Netherlands to oppose French king Louis XIV’s invasion of the Rhenish Palatinate. In Europe, this resulted in an eight-year conflict known as the War of the League of Augsburg. In America, the struggle was called King William’s War and pitted the French and Abnaki Indians (of Maine) against the English and their allies among the Iroquois.
The New World theater of this war gave rise to a new kind of fighting. In 1689, Louis XIV dispatched Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac, to America as governor of New France. He had served in that capacity before—from 1672 to 1782—but was so dictatorial that he was recalled to France at the request of those he governed. Louis understood that what his colonies needed just now was precisely what this tough 70-year-old had to offer: a stomach for relentless aggression. Frontenac proposed not merely a defensive strategy against the British, but an invasion of New York. His only problem, he soon realized, was that he did not have the manpower to invade anybody. The solution, Frontenac decided, was to fight a “little war,” one that consisted not of grand strategies and the mass movement of great armies fighting European-style battles, but of ambushes, murders, and terror—mostly carried out by Indian allies. Properly coordinated, such action would demoralize the English settlers while simultaneously draining their military resources.
Frontenac’s “little war” was a dreary pattern of raid and counter-raid, without much decisive action, but with plenty of misery to go around from July 1689, when La Chine, Quebec, was ravaged by Iroquois, to September 1691, when Benjamin Church, aged hero of King Philip’s War, was called out of retirement to defend Saco, Maine. By the end of the month, the English struck a truce with Abnakis, which, however, was soon violated.
In September 1697, the Treaty of Ryswyck ended the War of the League of Augsburg in Europe and, therefore, officially ended King William’s War in America, but raids and counter-raids continued through the end of the 17th century.
Queen Anne’s War
Now it’s time to return to the cheerful precincts of “civilized” Europe. England, Holland, and Austria had the jitters over an alliance struck between France and Spain when King Charles II of Spain, a Hapsburg (that is, originally an Austrian), died in 1700, having named a Bourbon (that is, originally a Frenchman) as his successor. The French, naturally, backed Charles’s nominee, Philip of Anjou, the grandson of Louis XIV. England, Holland, and Austria threw their support behind the Bavarian Archduke Charles, second son of the Hapsburg emperor Leopold I. These three nations then formed a new Grand Alliance in 1701, and the War of the Spanish Succession was declared between the Grand Alliance and France and Spain on May 4, 1702. In America, the conflict was called Queen Anne’s War. The war began on September 10, 1702, when the South Carolina legislature authorized an expedition to seize the Spanish-held fort and town of Saint Augustine, Florida. When a combined force of 500 colonists and Chickasaw Indians failed to breach the fort, they settled for burning the town instead.
Not unexpectedly, this act brought a series of counter-raids from Spanish-allied Appalachee Indians, which prompted South Carolina governor James Moore to lead a force of militiamen and Chickasaws in a destructive sweep of western Florida during July 1704. The result: Seven villages and 13 Spanish missions (out of 14 in the area) were razed, and the Appalachee were effectively annihilated as a tribe. Strategically, Moore’s campaign opened a path into the heart of French Louisiana. Anticipating this, French colonial authorities heavily bribed the Choctaws into an alliance which blocked Moore’s advance into Louisiana.
In the meantime, up north, the French had managed to gather even more Indian allies, especially among the Abnakis, who ravaged English settlements in Maine (where Queen Anne’s War was called the Abnaki War). Farther north, in Nova Scotia, Benjamin Church, now so enfeebled by old age that he had to be carried into battle, terrorized the French Acadian settlements of Minas and Beaubassin during July 1704, while, in Newfoundland, French and Indian forces retaliated during August by destroying the English settlement at Bonavista. The war raged—from Saint Augustine, Florida, to St. Johns, Newfoundland (captured by the French just before Christmas 1708)—not in a series of great battles, but in a string of murders, raids, and counter-raids.
