Belly Button Lint: Rick Ramsey's Weblog

Excerpts from Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick, published by Viking Press (c) 2006...

"But no matter how desperately our nation's mythologizers might wish it had never happened, King Philip's War will not go away. The fourteen bloody months between June 1675 and August 1676 had a vast, disturbing impact on the development of New England and, with it, all of America.

page 357

"By the end of the war, Mount Hope, once the crowded Native heart of the colony, was virtually empty of inhabitants. Fifty-six years after the sailing of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims' children had not only defeated the Pokanokets in a devastating war, they had taken conscious, methodical measures to purge the land of its people..."

"The war that was to have removed forever the threat of Indian attack had achieved exactly the opposite of its original intention....Without "friend Indians" to buffer them from their enemies, those living on the frontier were left open to attack. Over the course of the following century, New England was ravaged by a series of Indian wars. Unable to defend themselves, the colonies that had once operated as an autonomous enclave of Puritanism were forced to look to the British Crown for assistance. Within a decade of King Philip's War, James II had appointed a royal governor to rule over New England, and in 1692 Plymouth became part of Massachusetts."

pages 346-347

"In terms of the percentage of population killed, the English had suffered casualties that are difficult for us to comprehend today. During the forty-five months of World war II, the United States lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population; during the Civil War the casualty rate was somewhere between 4 and 5 percent. During the fourteen months of King Philip's War, Plymouth Colony lost close to 8 percent of its men.

"But the English losses appear almost inconsequential when compared to those of the Indians. ... Overall, the Native American population of southern New England had sustained a loss of somewhere between 60 and 80 percent."

page 332

"It is easy to mock past attempts to venerate and sanctify the Pilgrims, especially given what their sons and grandsons did to the Native Americans. And yet we must look with something more than cynicism at a people who maintained more than half a century of peace with their Native neighbors. The great mystery of this story is how America emerged from the terrible darkness of King Philip's War to become the United States."

page 357