The Pokanoket sachem spoke to Winslow through an interpreter, John sassamon’s brother Rowland, and as the conversation became more heated, the major insisted that they move outside. Alexander was outraged that Plymouth officials had chosen to treat him in such a rude manner. If there had been any truth to the rumor of a conspiracy with the Narragansetts would he be here, casually fishing at Monponsett Pond?
Winslow reminded the sachem that he had neglected to appear, as promised, before the Plymouth court. Alexander explained that he had been waiting for his friend Thomas Willett, a Plymouth resident with close ties to the Indians, to return from Manhattan so that he could speak to him about the matter.
By this point, Alexander had worked himself into a raging fury. Winslow took out his pistol, held the weapon to the sachem’s chest, and said, “I have been ordered to bring you to Plymouth, and by the help of God I will do it.”
Understandably stunned, Alexander was on the verge of exploding, when sassamon asked that he be given the chance to speak to his sachem alone. After a few minutes of tense conversation, it was announced that Alexander had agreed to go with Winslow, but only as long as “he might go like a sachem”—in the company of his attendants.
It was a hot summer day, and Winslow offered Alexander the use of one of their horses. since his wife and the others had to walk, the sachem said that “he could go on foot as well as they,” provided that the English kept a reasonable pace. In the meantime, Winslow sent a messenger ahead to organize a hasty meeting of the magistrates in Duxbury.
The meeting seems to have done much to calm tempers on both sides. What happened next is somewhat unclear, but soon after the conference, Alexander and his entourage spent a night at Winslow’s house in Marshfield, where the sachem suddenly fell ill. The sachem’s attendants asked that they be allowed to take him back to Mount Hope. Permission was granted, and Alexander’s men carried him on their shoulders till they reached the Taunton River in Middleborough. From there he was taken by canoe back to Mount Hope, where he died a few days later.
It was an astonishing and disturbing sequence of events that showed just where matters stood between the English and Indians in Plymouth Colony. In 1623, Edward Winslow had earned Massasoit’s undying love by doing everything in his power—even scraping the sachem’s tongue—to save his life. Thirty-nine years later, Winslow’s son had burst into Alexander’s wigwam, waving a pistol. Within a week, the Pokanoket leader was dead.
In years to come, the rumors would grow: that Alexander had been marched unmercifully under the burning summer sun until he had sickened and died; that he had been thrown in jail and starved to death.
In an effort to stop the rumors, one of the men who’d accompanied Winslow—William Bradford’s son William Jr.—provided an account of the incident in which he insisted that Alexander had accompanied Winslow “freely and readily.” But Alexander’s younger brother Philip became convinced that Winslow had poisoned the sachem. Intentionally or not, Winslow had lit the slow-burning fuse that would one day ignite New England.
◆◆◆ For days, hundreds, perhaps thousands of Indians gathered at Mount Hope to mourn the passing of Alexander. Then the despair turned to joy as the crowds celebrated his brother Philip’s rise to supreme sachem of the Pokanokets.
◆ The “Seat of Philip” at the eastern shore of Mount Hope.
On the eastern shore of Mount Hope is the huge rock from which the peninsula gets its name. More than three hundred feet high, Mount Hope provides panoramic views of Narragansett and Mount Hope bays. There is a legend that Philip once stood upon the top of Mount Hope and, turning west, hurled a stone all the way across the peninsula to Poppasquash Neck, more than two miles away. It is a tradition that reflects the sense of power and strength that many Pokanokets may have projected upon their new leader, who was just twenty-four years old in August 1662. That summer, the “flocking multitudes” at Mount Hope caused the Plymouth magistrates to fear that Philip had gathered a council of war. Only a few weeks after hauling his brother into court, Governor Prence made the same demand of Philip.
The young sachem who appeared at Plymouth on August 6, 1662, was not about to bow before the English. As Philip made clear in the years ahead, he considered himself on equal terms with none other than King Charles II. All others—including Governor Prence and the lying Major Josiah Winslow—were “but subjects” of the king of England and unfit to tell a fellow monarch what to do. Philip’s “ambitious and haughty” attitude at the Plymouth court that day moved one observer to refer to him mockingly as “King Philip”—a nickname he never claimed for himself but that followed the sachem into history.
No matter how confident Philip appeared that day in court, he knew that now was not the time to accuse the English of murdering his brother. so instead of accusing Winslow of the deed—something he did not say openly to an Englishman until near the outbreak of war thirteen years later—Philip told the members of the court exactly what they wanted to hear. He promised that the “ancient covenant” that had existed between his father and Plymouth remained unchanged. He even offered his younger brother as a hostage if it might ease the magistrates’ concerns, but it was decided that this was not necessary. As far as Governor Prence was concerned, relations with the Indians were once again back to normal.
◆◆◆ Over the next few years, as Philip settled into his new role as leader of the Pokanokets, New England grew more and more crowded. Both the English and the Indians depended on agriculture, and only about 20 percent of the land was suitable for farming. Adding to the pressure for land was the rapid rise of the English population. The first generation of settlers had averaged seven to eight children per family, and by the 1660s, those children wanted farms of their own.
The English were not the only ones whose world was changing. The Indians of Philip’s generation had grown up amid the boom times of the fur trade and had come to regard expensive Western goods as an essential part of their lives. But now, with the virtual extinction of the beaver and the loss of so much land, this new generation of Native Americans was beginning to face a future with fewer opportunities.
The pressure was particularly intense in Plymouth. Unlike Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut, which had large tracts of land to the west that could still be settled, the Indians and English in Plymouth had almost nowhere left to go. Pushed south to the neck of Mount Hope, Philip and his people were hemmed in from nearly every side.
As Philip knew, losing land had a direct impact on his people. If the Pokanokets were to survive as an independent tribe, they must hold on to what land his father and brother had not yet sold. soon after becoming sachem, he and Governor Prence agreed to a seven-year halt on the sale of Indian land. It was an extraordinary agreement that marked a dramatic change from the past, and Philip instructed John sassamon to write the governor a letter. “Last summer [Philip] made that promise with you,” sassamon wrote, “that he would not sell no land in seven years time.... [H]e would have no English trouble him before that time.”
◆ Paul Revere’s engraving of King Philip.
But Philip soon changed his mind. The following year, in April 1664, Philip agreed to sell a piece of land bordering the towns of Bridgewater, Taunton, and Rehoboth for a record £66 (roughly $12,000 today)—almost twice the amount his father had received for the Pokanoket homeland of sowams. Philip had at least succeeded in getting the English to pay a decent price for his land. In a way, he was doing just what his father had done forty years before—adapting to the inevitable forces of change.
◆◆◆ By 1667, Philip was five years into his reign as sachem of Mount Hope. Almost thirty years old, he and his wife, Wootonekanuske, had just had a son, and the birth of the boy appears to have caused Philip to draft a will. When Philip’s interpreter, John sassamon, read the will back to him, all seemed as the sachem had intended. But, as it turned out, sassamon had written something else entirely.
Instead of leaving his lands to his intended heirs, Phili
p had, according to the will written by sassamon, left his lands to his interpreter, a trick like squanto’s almost forty years earlier. When Philip discovered what his trusted interpreter had done, sassamon, it was reported, “ran away from him.” soon sassamon was back with his former mentor, John Eliot, working as a teacher and minister to the Praying Indians.
sassamon’s betrayal was just one setback in what proved to be a difficult year for the Pokanoket sachem. That spring, Plymouth governor Prence heard a disturbing rumor. spies from Rehoboth, partway between Plymouth and Mount Hope, reported that Philip had been talking about joining forces with the French and Dutch against the English. Not only would this allow the Indians to get back their lands, Philip had claimed, but it would enable them to “enrich themselves with [English] goods.” Once again, it was time to send Major Josiah Winslow to Mount Hope.
Once at Mount Hope, Winslow took away the Pokanokets’ guns, then found an Indian who told him that Philip had indeed been talking about a possible conspiracy against the English. Described as “one of Philip’s sachem’s men,” the witness told of Philip’s plan with so many specific details that Winslow felt the accusation was “very probably true.” Philip must once again appear before the Plymouth court.
From the outset, Philip claimed that he had been set up, “pleading how irrational a thing it was that he should desert his long experienced friends, the English, and comply with the French and Dutch.” should the English decide to withdraw “their wonted favor,” he said, it would be “little less than a death to him, gladding his enemies, grieving and weakening his friends.”
In the end, the Plymouth magistrates decided that even if Philip’s “tongue had been running out,” he was not about to attack anybody. Instead, they were now concerned that this accusation had so weakened Philip that he was in danger of being rejected by his own people. From the colony’s point of view, it was better to have a weak leader in place among the Pokanokets than a sachem who might rally his people against them. “[N]ot willing to desert [Philip] and let him sink,” the court decided to continue its official backing of Philip and return the confiscated weapons. But this did not stop the magistrates from charging the sachem £40 ($8,000 today) to help pay for Winslow’s fact-gathering mission. As the magistrates knew all too well, the only way the sachem was going to pay the fine was to sell the English some more of his peoples’ land.
Philip had begun with the best of intentions, but by the end of the 1660s, he was on his way to a huge sell-off of Native land, aided by his brother’s former friend Thomas Willett. From 1650 to 1659, there had been a total of fourteen Indian land deeds registered in Plymouth court; between 1665 and 1675, there would be seventy-six deeds.
Governor Prence and Major Winslow were proud of the strategy they had developed to deal with the Indians in the colony. With the help of Willett, the governor served as Philip’s main contact, while Winslow built a relationship with the sachem of the Massachusetts to the north. It was a division of alliances that the two officials modeled on how Governor Bradford and Captain standish had handled squanto and Hobbamock in 1622.
But while Bradford and standish’s strategy appears to have worked reasonably well, Prence and Winslow’s approach proved far less effective when Prence died in 1673 and Winslow became governor. With Prence gone, Philip was now forced to deal with the one official he absolutely hated above all others. Not only was Winslow linked to his brother’s death, he had proven himself to be one of Plymouth’s most aggressive purchasers of Indian real estate. By the time he became governor in 1673, Winslow had come to embody Plymouth’s policy of increasing antagonism toward the colony’s Native Americans.
It may have been true that from a strictly legal standpoint there was nothing wrong with how Winslow and the other Plymouth officials acquired large amounts of Pokanoket land. And yet, the process removed the Indians from their territory as effectively—and as cheaply—as driving them off at gunpoint. Philip had to do something to stop the long series of losses that had come to be identified with his leadership.
◆◆◆ In March 1671, Hugh Cole of swansea reported that Indians from all over the region were meeting at Mount Hope. At one point, Philip led a group of sixty armed warriors on a march up the peninsula to the edge of the English settlement. Josiah Winslow reported the rumor that in addition to winning the support of the Narragansetts, Philip had hatched a plot to kidnap the Plymouth governor. Though not a shot had yet been fired, many in Plymouth believed that after years of rumors, war had finally come to the colony.
some New Englanders dared to suggest that the Indians were not entirely to blame for the threatened revolt and that Plymouth was guilty of treating the Pokanokets badly. In an attempt to prove otherwise, Plymouth magistrates invited a group from Massachusetts Bay to attend a meeting with Philip at the town of Taunton on April 10, 1671.
Philip and a large group of warriors—all of them armed and with their faces painted—cautiously approached the Taunton town green, where an equal number of Plymouth militiamen, armed with muskets and swords, marched back and forth. Fearful that he was leading his men into a trap, Philip insisted that they be given several English hostages before he entered the town. Tensions were so high that many of the colony’s soldiers shouted out that it was time for them to attack. Only at the angry insistence of Massachusetts Bay officials were the Plymouth men made to stop. Finally, after the exchange of several more messages, Philip and his warriors agreed to meet inside the Taunton meetinghouse—the Indians on one side of the aisle, the colonists on the other.
◆ Solid maple war club, inlaid with white and purple wampum, reputed to have been King Philip’s.
It did not go well for Philip. Once again, the Plymouth magistrates bullied him into submission, insisting that he sign a document in which he acknowledged the “naughtiness of my heart.” He also agreed to surrender all his warriors’ weapons to the English. According to the Puritan historian William Hubbard, one of Philip’s own men was so ashamed by the outcome that he flung down his musket, accused his sachem of being “a white-livered cur,” and vowed that “he would never [follow Philip] again or fight under him.” Yet another warrior who was the son of a Nipmuck sachem left Taunton in such a rage that he was moved to kill an Englishman on his way back to his home in central Massachusetts. He was eventually tried and hanged on Boston Common, where his severed head was placed upon the gallows.
In the months that followed, the colony required that the Indians from Cape Cod to Nemasket sign documents restating their loyalty to Plymouth. The magistrates also insisted that Philip and his warriors turn over all their remaining weapons. When Philip refused, it seemed once again as if war might break out. Fearful that Plymouth was about to drive the Pokanokets and, with them, all of New England into war, the missionary John Eliot suggested that Philip come to Boston to speak directly with Massachusetts Bay officials.
As the missionary had said might happen, the sachem received a much more sympathetic welcome in Boston than he had ever been given in Plymouth. Philip then agreed to meet with Plymouth officials again on september 24, 1671, as long as a delegation from Massachusetts Bay was also in attendance.
But by the time Philip appeared in Plymouth, the officials from Massachusetts Bay had changed their position: Plymouth was right, and the Pokanokets were wrong. The treaty Philip was subsequently forced to sign was a total and embarrassing surrender. He was required once again to turn over all his weapons, and pay a fine of £100. Even worse, he was now a subject of Plymouth and had to pay the colony an annual tribute of five wolves’ heads. Plymouth had given Philip no options: If he was to survive as sachem of the Pokanokets, he must now go to war.
◆◆◆ Philip was disarmed but hardly defeated. He immediately began to make plans for obtaining more muskets. But to pay for the new weapons, he was going to need money—and lots of it.
In August of 1672, Philip took out a mortgage on some land along the Taunton River to pay off a debt of £83; soon after, he s
old a four-mile-square piece of land in the same area for £143 (approximately $32,000 today)—the largest price ever paid for a piece of Indian real estate in Plymouth. Philip, it appears, had launched into a strategy of selling land for weapons. It didn’t matter to him that he was about to sell almost every parcel of land he owned, because it was all to fund a war to win those lands back. By 1673, Philip had sold every last scrap of land surrounding his territory.
Playing into Philip’s strategy was English greed. Rather than wonder how he and his people could possibly survive once they’d been confined to a reservation at Mount Hope, or question where all this money was going, the English went ahead and bought more land—even agreeing to pay for the rights to fish in the waters surrounding Mount Hope when it meant that the Pokanokets might no longer be able to feed themselves.
◆◆◆ The Pokanokets represented just 5 percent of the total Indian population of New England. If Philip was to have any hope of winning a war, he needed a significant number of the other tribes to join him. He knew he could probably count on the Pocassets and the Nemaskets, who were both led by his relatives, but it was questionable whether the Indians on Cape Cod and the islands, where Christianity had made large inroads, would follow him into war. Closer to home, the Massachusetts, who were so cozy with Winslow, would never join him. Uncas and the Mohegans, along with the remnants of the Pequots, also had strong ties to the English. The Nipmucks, on the other hand, were the Pokanokets’ ancient and trustworthy friends, a relationship strengthened by Massasoit’s final years with the Quabaugs.
There were two important unknowns. To the south of Pocasset were the sakonnets, led by the female sachem Awashonks. The sakonnets’ loyalties were difficult to determine, as were the Narragansetts’, the traditional foes of the Pokanokets. some progress had been made in establishing a common ground between the two tribes, but the Narragansetts were too large to speak with a single voice. Their young warriors were anxious to fight, but the tribe’s older, more cautious sachems were reluctant to go to war.