Maps of New England during King Philip’s War

At the end of July 1675 two important things were happening at once. King Philip, known as Metacom to his people, and the sunksqua Weetamoo, were in flight along with at least 250 of their people.  Reports coming into the colonial militias in the Fall River area suggested that Philip and Weetamoo intended to cross the Providence River and head for Nipmuc country.

Farther north, at almost exactly the same time, Massachusetts Bay Colony had heard rumors that the Nipmucs had joined, or were soon to join, King Philip’s Wampanoags. The Nipmucs occupied the strategically important territory between the settled towns of Massachusetts Bay near Boston and places like Springfield on the Connecticut River.  From the Bay’s point of view, it was important to determine whether the Nipmucs were in the war or would remain neutral. Since Edward Hutchinson had succeeded in extracting a purported treaty from the Narragansetts, Massachusetts dispatched him into Nipmuc country with Thomas Wheeler and twenty horsemen to do the same.

Sadly for all the people of New England, Hutchinson and Wheeler would set in motion a chain of events that would cause this awful war to spread everywhere in the region east of the Connecticut River. The New English would find themselves waging a brutal counterinsurgency, with all the tactical problems of irregular war in our own time.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

This is the second of two “Sidebar” episodes in honor of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s famous ride, which we will celebrate on the night of April 18 by putting two lights in a window of our house. 

Last time we explored the prelude to the ride in the months before the final crisis that triggered the march of the British “Regulars” on Lexington and Concord. This episode is the story of Paul Revere’s “midnight” ride on the night of April 18-19, 1775, including the famous lanterns of Old North Church, the fraught trip across the Charles River under the guns of HMS Somerset, his spectacular horse Brown Beauty (one of the great equine heroes of American history), the “waking up the institutions of New England” that night in raising the alarm not just on the road to Lexington and Concord but throughout eastern New England, and his astonishing capture and release. And, sure, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott.

Maps of Paul Revere’s Ride

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride

John Hancock’s Trunk o’ Papers

April 18, 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s “Midnight Ride” to alarm the towns around Boston that the “Regulars” were marching out to capture artillery and ammunition at Concord, or perhaps to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock. This was but the last of a series of crises that rocked New England in the months before the midnight ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord the next day. This episode explores those crises, known as the “Powder Alarms,” and Paul Revere’s central role in the resistance movement among Boston Whigs – including the famous Sons of Liberty – during those fraught years before the shooting began.

[Errata: I implied that Dr. Benjamin Church’s betrayal of the Patriot cause wouldn’t be understood “for years,” but in fact it was uncovered during the summer of 1775, after the shooting had begun, when one of his letters to the British was intercepted. He was permitted to leave the country in lieu of imprisonment, and sailed for the West Indies. His ship disappeared at sea and Church was never seen again.]

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride

Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”

Intolerable Acts

Thomas Gage

It is July 1675 in New England. On June 23, fighting men of the Wampanoag nation and of Plymouth Colony had begun killing each other and enemy civilians in earnest. The question was whether this still small conflict would remain a local and short dust-up within Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag lands encompassed by the colony’s borders as defined by the New Englanders, or would it spread more widely? That question was very quickly answered – the wildfire of King Philip’s War would spread to encompass virtually all of New England east of the Connecticut River and up the coast of Maine. This episode explains how it happened.

The image for this episode on the website is a drawing of King Philip – Metacom – by Paul Revere, who 250 years ago today (April 8, 1775), was riding to Concord to warn the locals, not yet on the famous Midnight Ride but on a false alarm that turned out to be an unplanned dress rehearsal.

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War

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Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

After Massasoit’s death in 1660 or 1661, his son Wamsutta became sachem of the Pokonoket community and the leading sachem of the Wampanoag confederation, and early on he followed Algonquian custom and changed his name.  He asked the men of Plymouth Colony, longstanding allies of his nation, to give him an English name, and they proposed Alexander.  His brother Metacom also took an English name, Philip. Alexander would soon die under circumstances that deeply concerned the Wampanoags, and his brother Metacom, now known to the English as King Philip, assumed the paramount sachemship.

During the 1660s and 1670s, a series of crises would degrade the now fifty year alliance between Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag confederation, with war narrowly averted in 1671. Then, in early 1675, the Harvard-educated Christian Indian John Sassamon would be found dead, murdered by someone. Plymouth prosecuted and executed three Wampanoag men on scanty evidence, a violation of Philip’s sovereignty. Misunderstandings piled on top of outrage, and pressure built on both Philip and the Plymouth authorities to mobilize. The deputy governor of Rhode Island tried to broker peace, but events moved too fast. On June 23, 1673, the war began.

Errata: (1)Toward the end of the episode, I said that the town of Mattapoisett was “just east of New Bedford.” Oops. There is a town with that name there today, per Google maps, but in 1675 the place with that name was on the water near Swansea, where the Taunton River flows into Mt. Hope Bay. (2) At another point, I said there had been “almost forty” narratives written about the war. Since there were at least 29, I should have said “almost thirty.”

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

Jill LePore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity

Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People

John Easton, A Relation of the Indian War (pdf)

Philip Ranlet, “Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War,” The New England Quarterly, March 1988.

This episode looks at the background causes of the brutal war between the New English colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut and their indigenous allies against a tribal alliance including both the Wampanoags and the Narragansetts between 1675 and 1678.

King Philip’s War is the most widely used name of that bloody and arguably existential war. In surveys of American history, it is often the only event between the founding of Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay and the end of the 17th century that rates more than a sentence or two. This is for good reason, insofar as King Philip’s War changed the trajectory of New England’s history. It is thought to be the bloodiest war in American history as a proportion of the affected population. As many as 1000 colonists died, including perhaps 10 percent of the English men of military age. Three thousand Indians were killed, and as many as a thousand were sold into slavery abroad. The war altered the relationship between the European colonists and the Indians of the region to a far greater degree than the Pequot War or any of the other conflicts that had preceded it, shattered the military and cultural power of New England’s most powerful indigenous nations, and so devastated the English that by some estimates per capita wealth in the region did not return to the level of 1675 until the eve of the American Revolution a century later.  The New England frontier, for better or worse, did not advance for forty years after King Philip’s War.

Suffice it to say, we should understand the issues that broke the long peace in the summer of 1675, almost exactly 350 years ago.

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

Jill LePore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity

Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People

Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

Philip Ranlet, “Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War,” The New England Quarterly, March 1988.

This episode ties up the loose ends that remained at the end of the expedition of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in 1673. Among other things, we explore the ultimate fate of Jolliet’s optimistic vision that a canal could bridge the continental divide in Illinois, allowing sailing ships to travel from Lake Erie all the way to the Gulf. Along the way we learn all sorts of factoids, including the fate of the Carolina Parakeet, snippits from the earliest history of Chicago, including the origin of the name of that city, its first non-indigenous resident, and the resolution of Marquette’s pervasive gastrointestinal issues.

[Errata: About five minutes along I saw that Jolliet arrived at Quebec about July 29, 1673. Should have been1674. Oops.]

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Mark Walczynski, Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition

John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent 

Francis Borgia Steck, The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (pdf)

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable

In the summer of 1673, two now famous Frenchmen and five others who are all but nameless traveled by canoe from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac to central Arkansas on the western bank of the Mississippi River, and then back again. Louis Jolliet was a new sort of Frenchman, a natural born North American, having come into this world in Quebec in 1645, now a fur trader and voyageur. Jacques Marquette was the more usual sort, having been born in France in 1637.  By the time of the expedition Marquette was a Jesuit priest, long known to the nations of North America as a “Black Robe.”

The episode begins with an overview of New France in the years between Samuel de Champlain’s death in 1635 and 1661, when it languished because the Five Nations of the Iroquois had it entirely bottled up. The expedition was a marker of New France’s rapid expansion after King Louis XIV began to rule in his own right that year.

Along the way, our heroes become the first Europeans to visit Iowa (Go Hawks!), see some extraordinary painted monsters, learn the importance of the calumet, and find a short portage in the eastern continental divide at a place soon to be called Chicago.

Map of the route (visible in the shownotes for the episode on the website), credit Illinois State Museum

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Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Mark Walczynski, Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition

Francis Borgia Steck, The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (pdf)

Piasa “monsters” (Wikipedia)

Carignan-Salières Regiment (Wikipedia)

Beaver Wars (Wikipedia)

This is the last of a three-episode series on the Dutch “raid on America” in 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest of the Admiralty of the Dutch province of Zeeland – “Kees the Devil” – and a privateer named Jacob Benckes had pillaged English possessions in the Indies. By late June 1673 their fleet of at least 12 ships was sailing to the Chesapeake Bay, where the year’s crop of tobacco from Virginia and Maryland had been loaded on merchant ships to sail by convoy to England. Arriving there on July 10, Evertsen and Benckes fought two English warships in the second Battle of the James River, and captured or destroyed thousands of hogsheads of tobacco. As they left with their haul, they grabbed a ketch with, among other people, a couple of the New Jersey rebels on board. They gave Evertsen important intelligence about the shoddy defenses of New York. By the end of July, only three weeks after arriving at the Chesapeake, Kees the Devil would reconquer New Netherland.

But not before a brave English soldier got decapitated by a cannon ball.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672-1674

John E. Pomfret, Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary

Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664-1691

Battle of the James River (1667) (Wikipedia)

This is the second of three episodes about a daring Dutch raid on the West Indies and the English colonies of North America during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The extended raid, led by Commander Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest of the Admiralty of the Dutch province of Zeeland and a privateer named Jacob Benckes, was a sideshow in that war, yet its consequences were far-reaching.  Among other accomplishments, Evertsen, known to his fans as Kees the Devil, and Benckes, “subdued three English colonies, depopulated a fourth, captured or destroyed nearly 200 enemy vessels, inflicted a serious injury upon the Virginia tobacco trade, wiped out the English Newfoundland fisheries, and caused unending panic in the New England colonies.”

This episode covers the first phase of the “raid on America,” in which Evertsen’s squadron sails from Zeeland for the South Atlantic, aiming to capture the English East India fleet at St. Helena. Failing that, the squadron sailed for South America and the Indies, eventually meeting up with Benckes at Martinique. After capturing prizes and burning down St. Eustatius, the episode ends with Evertsen and Benckes headed toward the rich tobacco fleet then gathering in the Chesapeake.

X/Twitter – @TheHistoryOfTh2 – https://x.com/TheHistoryOfTh2

Facebook – The History of the Americans Podcast – https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfTheAmericans

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Donald G. Shomette and Robert D. Haslach, Raid on America: The Dutch Naval Campaign of 1672-1674

Map of the land campaign against the United Provinces in the Third Anglo Dutch War:

Third Anglo-Dutch War (Wikipedia)

Cornelis Evertsen The Youngest (Wikipedia)

The Fifth Column Podcast