Metacom

His father Massasoit had kept a working peace with Plymouth for 40 years, and Metacom grew up inside it. In the spring of 1660 his older brother Wamsutta went before the Plymouth court and asked that the colonists give the two of them English names, in keeping with a Wampanoag practice of marking a turn in life with a new one. Wamsutta became Alexander. Metacom became Philip. Massasoit died the following year. In 1662 the court summoned Wamsutta over land he had sold without its permission, held him for questioning, and let him go a sick man. He died within days. Metacom, then about 24, took the sachemship believing his brother had been poisoned, and married Wootonekanuske, whose sister Weetamoo led the Pocasset.

In 1671 Plymouth extracted a settlement that stripped the Wampanoag of most of their guns and powder and declared them subject to English law. Four years later John Sassamon, a Harvard-educated interpreter who had told the governor that Metacom was gathering allies, was found dead under the ice of Assawompset Pond. A jury of 12 colonists and six Native elders convicted three Wampanoag men and hanged them on June 8, 1675. Fighting began 12 days later. Metacom assembled the widest Native alliance New England had seen, and the war consumed the region: 12 towns destroyed outright, more than half of all New England towns attacked, around 1,000 colonists and 3,000 Native people dead. Historians rate it the deadliest war of colonial America.

By early July 1676 more than 400 of his followers had surrendered. He went back to Mount Hope, and on August 12 a company under Captain Benjamin Church found him in the Miery Swamp. The man who shot him was not English. John Alderman was a Native man in Church's ranks whose brother Metacom had killed. The colonists beheaded the body, quartered it, and hung the pieces in trees. Alderman kept the right hand. The head went onto a pike at the entrance to Plymouth and stayed there more than 20 years. Wootonekanuske and their nine-year-old son were taken and sold into slavery, to Bermuda by one account and the West Indies by another. Several hundred to more than a thousand Native captives went the same way.

No portrait of him was made from life. The engraving people know is Paul Revere's, cut in 1772, nearly a century after the man was dead. Washington Irving gave him a romantic and sympathetic reading in 1820, and in 1829 John Augustus Stone's play Metamora made him a tragic hero for audiences who were at that moment applauding Indian Removal, complete with a dying speech he never delivered. William Apess claimed descent and preached a eulogy for him in 1836. His name is on a mountain ridge, three long-distance trails, two mill complexes, a Navy ship and a crane fly. Wampanoag memory holds that tribal members eventually took the skull off the pike and buried it in secret.

Metacom's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Agreement with Plymouth Colony other
  Signed on taking the sachemship, pledging not to make war without cause 1662
• The Taunton submission other
  Surrendered arms and accepted English law over the Wampanoag 1671
• The Native coalition of 1675 other
  Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Narragansett and Pocasset fighters under one strategy 1675

• 1660 aged ~22 Wamsutta asks the Plymouth court for English names for both brothers Wamsutta became Alexander. Metacom became Philip.
• 1661 aged ~23 Massasoit dies and Wamsutta becomes sachem
• 1662 aged ~24 Becomes sachem after Wamsutta dies following his detention at Plymouth The cause was never established. Metacom believed poison.
• 1671 aged ~33 Plymouth forces the surrender of Wampanoag arms at Taunton The agreement also placed the Wampanoag under English law.
• June 8, 1675 aged ~37 Plymouth hangs three Wampanoag men for the killing of John Sassamon The jury was 12 colonists and six Native elders.
• June 20, 1675 aged ~37 The war opens with the attack on Swansea
• March 29, 1676 aged ~38 Narragansett fighters under Canonchet burn Providence
• August 12, 1676 aged ~38 Shot at Mount Hope by John Alderman, then beheaded and quartered The head was set on a pike at Plymouth for more than 20 years.
• August 28, 1676 aged ~38 Church captures Annawan at Rehoboth, ending the war in the south

• Roger Williams 1603–1683
  Founder of Rhode Island and early advocate of religious liberty and separation of church and state. whose Providence burned in the war
• Washington Irving 1783–1859
  Early American storyteller whose Sketch Book gave the country Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow. romanticized him in 1820
• Tecumseh 1768–1813
  Shawnee leader who sought a broad Indigenous confederacy to resist U.S. territorial expansion. built the next great intertribal alliance
• Sitting Bull 1831–1890
  Hunkpapa Lakota leader and spiritual figure who resisted U.S. expansion and defended tribal sovereignty. fought the same war two centuries west
• Chief Joseph 1840–1904
  Nez Perce leader remembered for resistance to forced removal and eloquent advocacy for his people. later sachem of a surviving nation
• Vine Deloria Jr. 1933–2005
  Writer and legal scholar whose work transformed public understanding of Native sovereignty, treaty rights, and Indigenous religion. argued the sovereignty case in the 20th century