THE WAR: The Great Swamp Massacre occurred six months into Metacomet’s War—the most devastating conflict in colonial New England’s history. By the time it ended in August 1676, the war had killed roughly 5% of New England’s colonial population and between 40-60% of the Indigenous population in southern New England. Proportionally, it remains the deadliest war in American history.

The assault on December 19, 1675 was unusual: coordinated military action across four colonies—Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, and Rhode Island—against a people who had signed a neutrality treaty eight weeks earlier. The colonial justification hinged entirely on the Narragansett sheltering refugees.

WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARD: The survivors fled into the winter. Many froze or starved. Others joined Metacomet’s alliance, which continued fighting through the spring and summer of 1676. Metacomet was killed in August 1676 near Mount Hope, Rhode Island—shot by a Wampanoag man allied with the English. The colonists beheaded and quartered his body. His head remained on a pike in Plymouth for over two decades. His wife and nine-year-old son were sold into slavery in the Caribbean.

Captured Narragansett and Wampanoag—including children—were enslaved and shipped to Bermuda, the Caribbean, and Mediterranean ports. Margaret Ellen Newell’s Brethren by Nature (2015) documents how King Philip’s War accelerated the development of Indigenous slavery in New England.

THE 1906 MONUMENT: The Rhode Island Society of Colonial Wars erected the monument during a period of intense Anglo-Saxon nationalism in American culture. The same decades produced Confederate monuments across the South, celebrations of “Pilgrim heritage” throughout New England, and the Immigration Restriction League’s campaigns against Southern and Eastern European immigrants. The monument’s language—”rugged and unadorned Pilgrim and Puritan”—reflects a deliberate construction of white Protestant identity as the authentic American inheritance.

READING THE PRIMARY SOURCES: Benjamin Church’s Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War (1716) is the most detailed English account of the massacre, but it was written forty years after the fact. Church was a military pragmatist who later became famous for his “ranger” tactics—learned partly from Indigenous warfare. His objection to burning the village was logistical, not moral. His memoir served his reputation.

Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) framed the war as providential—God clearing the land for his chosen people. Mather never witnessed the events he described. His account tells us more about Puritan ideology than about what happened.

The colonial declaration of war (1675) is the most revealing document. Its explicit justification—”relieving Wampanoag women and children and wounded men”—states plainly that the Narragansett’s crime was providing refuge. The logic is clarifying.

INDIGENOUS SCHOLARSHIP: Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) wrote Our Beloved Kin (2018) partly to recover what colonial sources deliberately obscured: the kinship networks, diplomatic relationships, and Indigenous decision-making that shaped the war. Brooks reconstructs the Narragansett not as passive victims but as political actors navigating impossible circumstances. The book won the Bancroft Prize.

Christine DeLucia’s Memory Lands (2018) examines how the landscapes of King Philip’s War carry contested memories—English commemorations layered over Indigenous presence, monuments that celebrate what should be mourned.

THE SITE TODAY: The Great Swamp Fight Monument stands in a small park off Route 2 in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. The swamp itself—now the Great Swamp Management Area—is a 3,800-acre wildlife preserve. The exact location of the Narragansett fort remains disputed. You can walk the land. There is no memorial to the dead.

THE NARRAGANSETT: The Narragansett Indian Tribe is a federally recognized sovereign nation headquartered in Charlestown, Rhode Island. They have maintained continuous presence in their homeland for thousands of years—before the massacre, through it, and after.

Narrangansett Indian Tribe

SOURCES:

Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998)

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (2018)

Christine DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (2018)

Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (2015)

James D. Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 (1999)

The Great Swamp Massacre at 350: A Resistance History Moment