Jekyll website for the King Phillip's War Project @ Boston College
By Kevin March
“Breaking Dawn:” King Philip’s War and the Rise of the Wabanaki Confederacy, 1675-1715
King Philip’s War (1675-78) was the most brutal and politically consequential war in seventeenth-century New England and perhaps all of North America. Almost all histories of King Philip’s War depict the conflict as an archetypal “Indian War” that inevitably ended in a costly but unequivocal victory for the English colonists. Historian Colin Calloway views as King Philip’s War “the great watershed” that triggered the sharp decline of indigenous political, economic, and military power in New England.1 Archetypical Indian Wars, after all, are ultimately Indian defeats.
But colonial archetypes conceal indigenous realities. By interpreting King Philip’s War as a classic Indian War, historians have overlooked the diverse consequences it had for Indians across New England. Although the English defeated the Indians in Southern New England in August 1676, the five tribes of the Wabanaki Confederacy—who called themselves “the People of the Dawnland”—continued to wage war from their homelands in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. When they agreed to peace in April 1678, the Wabanakis had done what no historian has acknowledged: they had won King Philip’s War.
My project is to reexamine the Wabanaki Confederacy from its ascent in King Philip’s War to its loss of influence under the Treaty of Utrecht. In doing so, I propose to liberate the great watershed from the restraints of archetypal narrative by reinterpreting it as a victory for the Wabanaki Confederacy. Such an argument would have profound implications for the field of Early American history. Beginning in the 1980s, the rise of ethnohistorical methods and the “cultural turn” in the humanities caused historians to recognize that Indians had significant roles and heterogenous experiences in Early America. Indians are now considered historical actors, but most studies only explore their agency in the context of resistance to colonialism, often through a combination of creative cultural adaptation and warfare.1
Resistance to colonialism was undeniably a major facet of the Indian experience in Early America, but it was not the sole arena for their agency. Many Indians lived in loose but sophisticated polities that exercised regional hegemony, compelled less powerful Indian nations and colonial settlements to become tributaries, and frequently subjugated their would-be colonizers. Kathleen DuVal and Pekka Hamalainen have done pioneering work that demonstrates how Indian societies dominated in the Arkansas Valley and the Great Plains. DuVal argues that the “Indians of the Arkansas Valley held sovereignty according to both their own and European definitions. They exercised property rights over most of the region’s land and resources and…wielded authority over the small amounts of land that Europeans held…”3 Hamalainen argues that from 1700 to 1860, the Comanche Nation constituted an indigenous empire that reduced “Euro-American colonial regimes to building blocks of their own dominant position” The Comanches used their political power and military dominance to build “an imperial organization that subdued, exploited, marginalized, co-opted, and profoundly transformed near and distant colonial outposts.” Much like the Comanche Empire reversed “the conventional imperial trajectory in vast segments of North and Central America,” the Wabanaki Confederacy acted as a sovereign polity that not only fought against colonization, but reversed the exploitative process against New England.4
Historians have long debated whether the war was fought over racial identity and whether the appellation “King Philip’s War” is even appropriate. But from Douglas Leach to Jill Lepore, scholars who have studied the conflict implicitly agree on two things—that King Philip’s death in August 1676 ended meaningful Indian resistance and that this outcome was a devastating defeat for Indians throughout New England. While there is ample evidence for these assertions in southern New England, the documentary record shows the war’s course and outcome were different in Northern New England. This region encompassed the homeland of the Wabanaki tribes, including the Penobscots, the Norridgewocks, the Maliseets, the Passamaquoddies, and the Mi’kmaqs. Though the Wabanaki Confederacy quickly sided with Metacom in King Philip’s War, its objectives were different from those of the Wampanoags. The Wabanakis used the conflict to use military force to halt English colonization efforts in Maine and expand their sphere of influence by reducing English frontier towns to submission. The war’s northern theater mirrored the southern theater in its brutality, but fighting continued for another twenty months after Metacom’s death.5 The sachem had brought the Wabanakis into his alliance against New England, but their fates were not intertwined.
The Wabanaki Confederacy realized its political goals under the peace treaty of April 1678. Under the terms of the treaty, the English abandoned frontier towns that intruded on Wabanaki lands, and colonists in Maine and New Hampshire agreed to pay annual tribute to the Penobscots.6 The 1680s, a rare period of peace in the northeast, allowed Wabanaki leaders to capitalize on their victory and spread their political and economic control by making tributaries out of the colonial frontier towns on the borders of Wabanakia. The Wabanaki Confederacy’s ascent as a regional power was evident in King William’s War (1688-99) and Queen Anne’s War (1702-13), in which it forged a political, military, and economic alliance with the colonies of New France and Acadia. Wabanaki warriors and sailors conducted dynamic military expeditions against New England that both reasserted their territorial sovereignty and expanded their maritime power.
The Wabanaki Confederacy’s influence began to unravel with the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended Queen Anne’s War in 1713. French imperial ministers in Versailles conveniently forgot about the Wabanaki Confederacy, ceding Wabanakia to the English.7 With the arbitrary stroke of a pen, the treaty negotiations undermined the Wabanaki Confederacy’s political ascendance and the imperial power it had gained since King Philip’s War. Emboldened by their empire’s diplomatic victory, English colonists ignored the Wabanaki hegemony they had been forced to acknowledge before the treaty and settled en masse in Maine and New Hampshire. Though the Wabanaki Confederacy continued to vigorously defend its homelands through the American Revolution (1775-1783), it never again exercised the political, military, or economic power it held from 1678 to 1713.
- Colin G. Calloway, “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1997), 4.
- Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: University Press, 1988), especially 533-573.
- Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 7.
- Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 3.
- Christopher J. Bilodeau, “Creating an Indian Enemy in the Borderlands: King Philip’s War in Maine, 1675-1678,” Maine History 47 no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 11-40.
- Treaty of Casco,” 12 April 1678, in Jeremy Belknap, The History of New Hampshire Vol. 1 (Carlisle: Applewood Books, 1784), 158-160.
- Kenneth M. Morrison, The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 159-168.
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