King Philip / Makers of History

by John S. C. Abbott

With peace came abundant prosperity. Emigrants flocked over to the New World. In ten years after the Pequot war the colonists had settled fifty towns and villages, had reared forty churches, several forts and prisons, and the Massachusetts colony, decidedly pre-eminent, had established Harvard College. The wilderness indeed began to blossom, and gardens, orchards, rich pastures, fields of grain, and verdant meadows cheered the eye and filled the dwellings with abundance.

Acts of violence.
Death of Miantunnomah.

There were now four English colonies, Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven. There were also the germs of two more, one at Providence and the other on Rhode Island. The Indians, with the exception of illustrious individuals, were a vagabond set of perfidious and ferocious savages. They were incessantly fighting with each other, and it required all the efforts of the English to keep them under any degree of restraint. The utter extirpation of the Pequots so appalled them, that for forty years no tribe ventured to wage war against the English. Yet during this time individual Indians committed many enormous outrages of robbery and murder, for which the sachems of the tribes were not responsible. The Mohegans, under Uncas, had become very powerful. They had a fierce fight with the Narragansets. Miantunnomah was taken captive. Uncas put him to death upon Norwich plain by splitting his head open with a hatchet. The Mohegan sachem tore a large piece of flesh from the shoulder of his victim, and ate it greedily, exclaiming, "It is the sweetest meal I ever tasted; it makes my heart strong."

Marauding bands of Indians often committed murders. The efforts of the English to punish the culprits would exasperate others, and provoke new violence. Indications of combinations among the savages were frequently developed, and the colonists were often thrown into a general state of alarm, in anticipation of the horrors of another Indian war.

The war-whoop resumed.

In the year 1644, a Massachusetts colonist visiting Connecticut was murdered on the way by an Indian. The English demanded the murderer. The Indians, under various subterfuges, refused to give him up. The English, in retaliation, seized upon eight or ten Indians, and threw them into prison. This so exasperated the savages that they raised the war-whoop, grasped their arms, and threatened dire revenge. By boldness and moderation the English accomplished their ends, and the murderer was surrendered to justice. A few weeks after this an Indian entered a house in Stamford. He found a woman there alone with her infant child. With three blows of the tomahawk he cut her down, and, plundering the house, left her, as he supposed, dead. She, however, so far recovered as to describe the Indian and his dress. With great difficulty, the English succeeded in obtaining the murderer. The savages threw every possible impediment in the way of justice, and assumed such a threatening attitude as to put the colonists to great trouble and expense in preparing for war.

The United Colonies of New England.
A confederacy.

In view of such perils, in the year 1645, the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed a confederacy, under the name of the United Colonies of New England. They thus entered into an alliance offensive and defensive. Each colony retained, in its domestic concerns, its own government and jurisdiction. Two commissioners from each colony formed a board for managing the common affairs of the Confederacy. This was the germ of the present Congress of the United States.

Indian conspiracy.

In the year 1646 a large number of Indians formed a conspiracy to set fire to Hartford and murder the inhabitants. An Indian who was engaged to assassinate the governor, terrified, as he remembered that every one who had thus far murdered an Englishman had been arrested and executed, revealed the plot. The Indians generally, at this time, manifested a very hostile spirit, and many outrages were perpetrated. The English did not deem it prudent to pursue and punish the conspirators, but overlooked the offense.