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Updated: June 9, 2025
By the year 1675, four thousand Indians had been converted to Christianity. But the missionaries were not successful with Philip and the Wampanoags at Mount Hope. They utterly refused to listen to the preachers. They preferred their former mode of life, and there were several good reasons for this preference, as they thought.
We have already seen how greatly interested he was in his boyhood days at the coming of the white men and how friendly he felt toward them at that time. He, his father, and the other Wampanoags continued to remain on friendly terms with the English, although several other Indian tribes did not.
He called the sachems of the Wampanoags together, and talked the matter over with them. Several meetings were held, and every member expressed himself on the subject very freely. The question then arose, what should they do? It very soon became evident that two opposite opinions were held. It was not the custom of the Indians to vote on any questions that were discussed at their meetings.
The Wampanoags were talking about surrendering. Philip knew that surrender meant death for him. He refused even to think of it. When one of his warriors suggested it to him he killed him on the spot. The English soon learned that Philip had returned to his old home. They surrounded him.
He was offered life upon condition that he would submit to the English, and deliver up to them all the Wampanoags in his territory. "Let me hear no more of this," he replied, nobly. "I will not surrender a Wampanoag, nor the paring of a Wampanoag's nail." He was taken to Stonington, where he was sentenced to be shot. When informed of his doom, he replied, in the spirit of an old Roman,
Thus there seem to have been, in the days of the Pilgrims, three dominant nations, with their illustrious chieftains, who held sway over all the petty tribes in the south and easterly portions of New England. The Wampanoags, under Massasoit, held Massachusetts generally. The Narragansets, under Canonicus, occupied Rhode Island. The Pequots, under Sassacus, reigned over Connecticut.
The whole army then advanced to the spot where the sovereign of the Wampanoags lay gory in death. They had but little reverence for an Indian, and, seizing the body, they dragged it, as if it had been the carcass of a wild beast, through the mud to an upland slope, where the ground was dry.
"His refusal," writes Francis Baylies, "to betray the Wampanoags who had sought his protection is another evidence of his lofty and generous spirit, and his whole conduct after his capture was such that surely, at this period, we may be allowed to lament the unhappy fate of this noble Indian without incurring any imputation for want of patriotism."
He died in 1661, at the advanced age of eighty or ninety years, leaving two sons whom the English named respectively Alexander and Philip. Alexander, the eldest son and hereditary sachem, died soon after his father, when Philip became chief sachem and warrior of the Wampanoags, with his royal residence on Mount Hope, not far from Bristol, Rhode Island. He was called King Philip.
A strict hand was held by Massachusetts over the Narragansetts and other subject tribes, contracting their limits by repeated cessions, not always entirely voluntary. The Wampanoags, within the jurisdiction of Plymouth, experienced similar treatment.
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