King Philip's War

King Philip's War

The central issue leading up to King Philip's War between the New England colonists and the region's Algonquian nations was land, with the growing English population demanding more and more of it. Native Americans saw their homelands shrinking as the stream of settlers fanned out from the Atlantic.

King Philip's War began in the context of struggles over trade, land, and sovereignty that turned violent as a result of the John Sassamon case. Sassamon was a Wampanoag Christian convert and interpreter, a schoolteacher in missionary John Eliot's praying towns communities of Indian converts and subsequently secretary to Philip ...