The Great Swamp Fight in King Philip's War

·       The Great Swamp Fight was the first example of a large-scale victory of the English colonists over the Indians of southeastern New England. It was a test of the New England confederation or commission of the three United Colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut. Rhode Island, founded by dissidents and at this time largely inhabited by Quakers, was not an official member of the confederation, although many Rhode Islanders fought valiantly against the Indians.
  
King Philip's War had begun in the summer of 1675 when the Wampanoags, inspired by Metacom (better known to the English by his baptismal name, Philip), son of the chief Massasoit who had welcomed the Pilgrims, opened hostilities against Plymouth colony settlements that were hemming them in at Mount Hope at the northeast end of Narragansett Bay. The Wampanoags caused much damage and misery, but the greater potential danger was from the Narragansetts of western Rhode Island, a large tribe that threatened the colonists in the settlements to the west on the Connecticut River and to the north in central Massachusetts. The English, fearful that they would join the fray, decided to force the issue of Narragansett loyalty and, if necessary, attack them in their winter quarters. When the Narragansetts refused to comply with the colonists' demands, the Commissioners of the United Colonies ordered the attack.
  
On 19 December 1675 the total force of 1,100 men, including Indian auxiliaries, under the command of Josiah Winslow, the governor of Plymouth colony, was led by an Indian defector named Peter through the frozen swamp to the secret palisaded village which sheltered at least 1,000 Indians. The Indians had built individual wigwams for each family group within the fort and filled them with food supplies for the entire winter, but they had not quite completed their defenses. Peter led the colonial forces to the one spot where the defenses were incomplete. The troops poured in only to be driven back by direct fire and cross fire from the small blockhouses. Again they advanced. This time they gained ground inside the walls, and commenced hand-to-hand combat among the wigwams. With great difficulty, the colonists prevailed, the wigwams with their terrified inhabitants and all the food supplies were put to the torch. The official estimate was that three hundred warriors and over three hundred noncombatants died in the fort. The colonists lost twenty dead and two hundred wounded in the assault. The threat of the Narragansetts had been removed.

In Captain Benjamin Church of the Plymouth colony, the English found their greatest leader, one who understood that the way to defeat the Indians was to wear them down. The greatest blow to the Narragansetts at the Great Swamp Fight was not so much the loss of life as the loss of food. From then on, the English strategy became to keep the Indians moving until they surrendered because their women and children were starving. The militia system was too cumbersome to provide the guerrillas that Church needed; he relied on a mobile group of volunteers, chosen from colonials and Christian Indians, who scoured the swamps of Plymouth colony looking for King Philip. On 12 August 1676 Church caught up with him in the swamps of Mount Hope, near Swansea, Massachusetts. Philip was killed by one of the Indians. Church described the corpse as that of a "doleful, great, naked, dirty beast." He had Philip's head cut off and sent back to Plymouth for public display. In September Church accepted the surrender of Annawan, Philip's war leader, who gave him the chief's regalia. That was the end of King Philip's War.

It was also the end of the Indian threat to any part of southern New England. The Indians who surrendered were sold as slaves to the West Indies, others either moved west or became Christianized and marginalized within the English society. The Indian threat had been real. In proportion to population, King Philip's War inflicted greater casualties upon the white settlers than any other war in American history. The line of American settlement had actually been pushed back more than twenty miles. Thirteen towns in Mas­ sachusetts and Rhode Island had been almost completely destroyed; six, including Springfield and Providence, were partially burned. The economic cost was tremendous: the United Colonies claimed that their war expenses reached the staggering £100,000 sterling. Internal strains among the colonies, squabbling over former Indian lands, broke out. It should also be noted that the Narragansetts were betrayed by an Indian, and that Benjamin Church's forces were mixed white and Indian. Some Indians, whether because of ancient tribal animosities or for personal reasons, such as conversion to Christianity, always served with the colonial forces.

THE MILITIA SYSTEM

·       As the British settlements moved slowly westward, the militia became differentiated into two types. The first, on the frontier, remained the primitive type, entirely defensive. Throughout the colonial period and beyond, the settlers on the frontier and the Indians who impeded their movement westward, fought each other with ferocity, scalped, raided, and burned, yet in a sense understood each other and crossed the lines into each others cultures with some frequency. These men, except for a few who joined ranger companies in the 1750s (Robert Rogers and his second in command John Stark were the most famous) did not serve directly under the British. They were too busy defending their own families and moving the line of settlement westward.
  
The second form of militia, which evolved in the settled areas behind the frontier, became more important politically than militarily. The militia companies were mustered once a year in the spring for Training Day. There they showed off their military expertise, elected their new officers, drank a good deal of punch in the local tavern, and generally enjoyed their time of patriotic male solidarity. These companies provided the young volunteers who served in the provincial forces for pay, young men in their early twenties, unmarried and landless, and in need of cash money to buy the land that was the only recognized form of wealth. The New England volunteers were literate and respected young men who served with their cousins and neighbors for money and adventure. They were very conscious of the contractual, covenantal nature of their service. They, as devoutly bigoted Protestants, extended the covenantal theory to their service as battle as against the anti­christian Indians and papist French. The Virginia volunteers for provincial service were drawn from same age group as the New Englanders, but were more likely to have been born in Britain and had no local ties. They had nothing of the New England village consensus that service was desirable, were far more cynical, and deserted at an appalling rate unless they were paid large bonuses.

The British army, which had not existed in Elizabethan times, gradually took shape during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - an entirely different shape from the American pattern. By the eighteenth century, all British battles, except the Stuart attempts to regain the throne, were fought on foreign soil with professional soldiers.

The officers bought their commissions and were of the landowning classes. The men, as the Duke of Wellington was to say early in the next century, were the scum of the earth. Not many were hardened criminals, but they were from the property-less, disaffected classes, without education or hope. They enlisted for thirty years or for life, never married, and knew no life but the army. As the eighteenth century progressed, more Highland Scots and Irish, who were not native English-speakers, enlisted, and the British made use of German mercenaries as well. They were exhaustively drilled and brutally treated; the shocked Americans recorded that some soldiers were sentenced to 1,000 lashes for misdemeanors. The officers, accustomed to perfect obedience and to an unbridgeable gulf between officers and men, could not understand the provincial mentality and saw the colonials simply as bad soldiers.