King Philip's War

King Philip's War, sometimes called the First Indian War, Metacom's War, Metacomet's War, or Metacom's Rebellion, was an armed conflict between Native American inhabitants of present-day New England and English colonists and their Native American allies in 1675–78. The war is named after the main leader of the Native American side, Metacomet, known to the English as "King Philip". Major Benjamin Church emerged as the Puritan hero of the war; it was his company of Puritan rangers and Native American allies that finally hunted down and killed King Philip on August 12, 1676. The war continued in northern New England (primarily in Maine at the New England and Acadia border) until a treaty was signed at Casco Bay in April 1678.

The war was the single greatest calamity to occur in seventeenth-century Puritan New England. In the space of little more than a year, twelve of the region's towns were destroyed and many more damaged, the colony's economy was all but ruined, and much of its population was killed, including one-tenth of all men available for military service. Proportionately, it was one of the bloodiest and costliest wars in the history of North America. More than half of New England's towns were attacked by Native American warriors.

Nearly all the English colonies in America were settled without any significant English government support, as they were used chiefly as a safety valve to minimize religious and other conflicts in England. King Philip's War was the beginning of the development of a greater American identity, for the colonists' trials, without significant British government support, gave them a group identity separate and distinct from subjects of the Parliament of England and the Crown in England.