King Philip’s War: “The Bloodiest War in American History”

“Always brutal and everywhere fierce, King Philip’s War, as it came to be called, proved to be not only the most fatal war in all of American history but also one of the most merciless,” Jill Lepore wrote in her award-winning book The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998).

The back cover summary of Lepore’s book reads: “In 1675 Algonquian Indians all over southern New England rose up against the Puritan colonists with whom they had lived peacefully for several decades. The result was the bloodiest war in American history, a terrifying conflict in which the Puritans found themselves fighting with a cruelty they had thought only the natives capable of.  By August 1676, when the severed head of the Wampanoag leader, King Philip, was displayed in Plymouth, thousands of Indians and English men, women, and children were dead. More than half of the new towns in New England had been wiped out, and the settlers’ sense of themselves as civilized people of God had been deeply shaken.”

One of the earliest printed accounts of King Philip’s War (that Lepore cited in several instances and even pictured in her book) appeared in the August 16 to 19, 1675 issue of the London Gazette.

As the lead report, spanning two-thirds of the London Gazette‘s front page (the first time the Gazette had dedicated so much space to the American colonies, which alone underscored the severity and importance of the news), is a letter from Benjamin Batten, the son of Sir William Batten.

Benjamin Batten “happened to be in Boston when that fateful Indian uprising began, and my attention was drawn to him by a letter he wrote to Sir Thomas Allin, Comptroller of the Navy, relating in considerable detail the daily news of the trouble in Plymouth Colony down to the sixth of July, 1675.” (Benjamin Batten and the London Gazette by Douglas Leach, printed in the New England Quarterly 1963.)

The carnage is not diluted for the London Gazette readers:

• “In their journey they had seen lying the bodies of several English without heads, who had been murthered by the Indians…”
• “We had advice, that 16 English were killed in skirmishing and 7 Indians…”
• “And that 14 houses belonging to the English near Swansey, had been burnt…”
• “An Indian Spy had been executed at Plymouth…”
• “Having only seen ten Indians together, of whom they killed four; they found 6 English heads, and twice as many hands, being of those the Indians had murthered…”

Below is the famed issue of the London Gazette containing Batten’s letter about the first days of King Philip’s War. Click to enlarge.