King William’s War (1688 to 1697) was the first of four major colonial conflicts fought between England, France, and their respective Native American allies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Though the war had its own unique origins, it coincided with a larger European conflict – the Nine Years’ War – marking the first time that Colonial America was swept up in the imperial struggles of the Old World.

Though the war was named after King William III of England (reign 1689 to 1702), it had more to do with the political situation in North America than with the grand designs of European kings. Tensions between the New England colonies and the indigenous Wabanaki Confederacy remained high in the aftermath of King Philip’s War (1675 to 1678). Mistrustful of the intentions of the English, the Wabanaki aligned themselves with New France, the other major colonial power in the region. The French, in turn, were concerned with protecting their lucrative fur trade from the machinations of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, who were allied with the English in New York. Once word arrived from across the ocean that England and France were at war, the North American powder keg exploded; for the next several years, the French and Wabanaki launched several bloody raids against the English and Iroquois, who responded in kind. The backwoods bloodshed would continue until 1697, when the Treaty of Ryswick ended most of the fighting and restored the prewar borders. Tensions would continue to simmer until the outbreak of the next great colonial conflict, Queen Anne’s War (1702 to 1713).

In the decade that followed the devastation of King Philip’s War, an uneasy peace settled over New England. The peace, though fragile, was certainly welcome, since the war that preceded it had been bitter and hard-fought. The Wampanoag Confederacy, once the dominant power in the region, had attacked the New England colonies in a desperate bit to stop the white settlers from encroaching onto their lands. Thousands of men, women, and children had died in the struggle that followed, dozens of villages, both indigenous and English, razed to the ground. But now, Metacomet – the Wampanoag chieftain who had started the war, known to the English as ‘King Philip’ – was dead, felled by an assassin’s bullet, his severed head adorning a pike at the entrance to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where it would molder for the next two decades. His followers, those who had not already been killed, were either rounded up and executed or sold into slavery, while the other Wampanoags were forced onto reservations and made to watch as the triumphant New Englanders gobbled up their ancestral lands. The balance of power in the northeast had forever shifted; the strength of the Wampanoag Confederacy had been broken, the hegemony of the English ascendent.

But no sooner had the bloodshed of King Philip’s War given way to peace then Increase Mather, the preeminent minister in Boston, predicted the coming of another conflict: “There seems to be a dark cloud rising from the east in respect of Indians in those parts; yea, a cloud which streameth forth in blood” (quoted in Pulsipher, 588). Indeed, the Wampanoags had not been the only Native Americans contending with the English for control of the northeast. In the French colony of Acadia – roughly corresponding to the modern-day Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick – lived the Wabanaki people, or ‘people of the Dawnland’. During King Philip’s War, the Wabanakis had raided English settlements in New Hampshire and Maine, wreaking such havoc as to completely drive the terrified Englishmen away. In 1678, the war weary governments of New England signed a peace treaty with the Wabanakis. The Wabanakis would agree to let the English return to their abandoned settlements, and, in exchange, the English would recognize Wabanaki sovereignty and pay them an annual tribute in corn. For a while, this peace seemed to hold although the Wabanakis, cognizant of the way the English had treated the Wampanoags, remained wary.

To better prepare themselves for the eventuality of an English betrayal, the five Wabanaki nations (Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot) organized themselves into the Wabanaki Confederacy. They also pursued closer relations with New France, intermarrying with French settlers and allowing Jesuit missionaries into their midst. The French, of course, were the other dominant European presence in the region, vying with the English for control of the lucrative fur trade. Although the French were less permanently established in North America than their English rivals – in 1689, for instance, New France had a population of only 14,000, compared to the 154,000 people living in the English colonies – they were able to maintain their grip on the fur trade through a web of strong alliances with local Native American groups, like the Wabanaki. But in 1680, the string of alliances that upheld the French fur trade came under threat when the powerful Iroquois Confederacy attacked several of New France’s indigenous allies in the Great Lakes region. The Iroquois had recently formed an alliance with the English government of New York, called the Covenant Chain, leading the French to suspect that they had acted with the blessing – if not by the direct instigation – of the English. In retaliation, the French raided several Iroquois villages in New York, thereby challenging both the Iroquois and the English. The stage was set for another conflict; the clouds of war, as foreseen by Increase Mather, looked quite dark indeed.

In April 1688, amidst all this escalating violence, Sir Edmund Andros led an expedition to Saint-Castin’s Trading House in Maine. Andros was the unpopular governor of the Dominion of New England, a short-lived conglomeration of the New England colonies under a single, royally appointed government. An authoritative man, Andros sought to flex his powers by resolving a border dispute between Maine and Acadia. He led his soldiers to Penobscot Bay where they plundered both the home and trading post of Baron Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, a French military officer and trader who had set up shop on land claimed by Andros. Saint-Castin, who had married a Penobscot woman and had mixed-race sons by her, was well respected in the Wabanaki Confederacy; the attack on his property was viewed as an insult to the Wabanaki as a whole. Around the same time, 16 Wabanaki men were arrested in Maine on the orders of Governor Andros on the pretense that they had killed English cattle, and were sent to Boston for imprisonment. Wabanaki patience with their English neighbors had already been running thin – the New Englanders had slowly been violating the 1678 treaty by settling on Wabanaki lands and stopping payment of the corn tribute – but these two incidents were the final straw.

In August 1688, Saint-Castin led a party of Wabanaki warriors on raids against several English settlements in Maine. A few English settlers were killed in these scuffles, and several more were taken captive. When he learned of these raids, Governor Andros realized that he may have accidentally started a new Indian war and tried to deescalate, ordering the release of the 16 Wabanaki prisoners in Boston. But when Saint-Castin refused to release his own prisoners, Andros shifted tactics and led an army of 700 men into Maine in early November. By then, Saint-Castin and the Wabanakis had already withdrawn into Acadia, and the New Englanders accomplished little besides simply tramping around the wilderness. At the end of the year, Andros returned to Boston but left his troops behind in Maine to keep the peace, stationing them in several frontier posts. But, the following spring, news arrived from Europe that would change everything – the Glorious Revolution had broken out in England. King James II of England had been forced to abdicate, leading to the ascension of William of Orange and his wife Mary to the joint rule of the kingdom. The shockwaves of revolution reverberated throughout the colonies; Andros was overthrown by a mob in Boston, and the Dominion of New England dismantled. Because of the chaos, most of the English soldiers returned to Massachusetts, leaving Maine once again undefended.

In early 1689, monumental events in Europe would once again affect the destiny of the New World. The newly crowned William III of England joined together with Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, to form a ‘Grand Alliance’ against the expansionist ambitions of King Louis XIV of France. In May, William and Leopold officially declared war on France, beginning a conflict that would become known as the Nine Years’ War. Though the kings and generals of Europe hardly paid any thought to the backwoods of North America half a world away, this official declaration of war gave the colonies leave to attack one another with renewed vigor. News of the expanded European conflict had not yet reached the little settlement of Dover, New Hampshire, when, on the night of 27 June 1689, a pair of Wabanaki women arrived and asked for shelter. This was granted and, in the middle of the night, the women threw open the town gates to let in scores of Wabanaki warriors. 20 English settlers were massacred that night, including Major Richard Waldron, the town’s leading citizen. During King Philip’s War, Waldron had used trickery to capture hundreds of Wabanakis before selling them into slavery. Eager to repay this debt, the Wabanaki warriors now burst into his bedroom, clubbed him over the head, and dragged him into the next room where they tied him to a chair and tortured him to death. The Wabanakis then absconded from the ruined settlement with 29 English prisoners, who were sold into captivity in New France.

In August 1689, Saint-Castin once again invaded Maine at the head of a Wabanaki war party, this time sharing command with the French missionary Father Louis-Pierre Thury. They surrounded the English fort at Pemaquid, capturing or killing any English settlers who failed to make it to the safety of the fort’s palisades in time. The garrison held out for a day but, after sustaining heavy casualties, opted to surrender; Saint-Castin had both the fort and the nearby town burned to the ground. The raids on Dover and Pemaquid were a clear escalation of hostilities and, after the declaration of war in Europe became known, the English were eager to retaliate. A 1,500-man Iroquois war party was sent into New France to raid the settlement of Lachine, while Major Benjamin Church led 250 Massachusetts soldiers on an expedition to defend English settlers in Maine. Church held a fearsome reputation as an Indian fighter and, indeed, had led the party that had hunted down and killed Metacomet back in 1676. On 21 September 1689, Church would once again make a name for himself, when his men defended the English settlers at Falmouth (present-day Portland, Maine) against a larger Acadian and Wabanaki force. Church beat back the enemy at the cost of 21 casualties, saving the Falmouth settlers from likely slaughter.

In early 1690, the scale of the conflict expanded once again. The governor-general of New France, Louis de Baude, Comte de Frontenac, ordered several concurrent military expeditions against the English colonies. The first expedition, led by French officers and consisting of Wabanaki warriors, made its way to Schenectady, New York, on the night of 8 February 1690. Finding the town undefended, they attacked, massacring 60 residents (including 11 enslaved African Americans) and absconding with 27 captives. The second expedition, led by Saint-Castin, razed the town of Salmon Falls, on the border between New Hampshire and Maine, on 27 March, killing 34 English settlers. Saint-Castin’s expedition then wound its way into Maine, falling upon the Falmouth settlement that Church had defended the year before. This time, there was no one to protect the English settlers; Saint-Castin butchered the men, took the women and children prisoner, and burned the settlement to the ground. Church learned of the attack too late and arrived at Falmouth with little to do but bury the dead.

Frontenac’s attacks did not long go unanswered. On 23 April 1690, seven English warships sailed out of Boston carrying 736 provincial militiamen under Sir William Phips, a Maine-borne treasure hunter who now sought the glory of a military victory. On 9 May, the New Englanders arrived outside Port Royal, the capital of Acadia, taking the 90-man French garrison by surprise. Realizing they could not withstand a siege, the French surrendered. Phips imprisoned the French soldiers and Acadian townspeople in the church before turning a blind eye as his soldiers plundered the town, on the pretext that the French had somehow violated the terms of surrender. Phips left soon after, but additional English warships returned to Port Royal the following month, leading to another round of burning and looting. In September, Church led a second expedition of 300 men into Acadia. He travelled up the Androscoggin River, raiding Wabanaki villages and butchering several of their men. After freeing five English captives from a Wabanaki wigwam, Church claimed victory and returned to New Hampshire.

Emboldened by these successes, the English decided to launch full-scale invasions of New France. One expedition, under Fitz-John Winthrop, set out overland toward Montreal. However, disease, lack of provisions, and disagreements among officers forced this army to turn back before it reached its target. The second expedition, under Phips, targeted Quebec, capital of New France. In late August, Phips sailed out of Boston with 2,300 militiamen aboard 32 ships. But thanks to poor weather, he did not make it to Quebec until 16 October. Frontenac, appraised of Phips’s coming, had had ample time to prepare, and had gathered 3,000 soldiers for the town’s defense, including three battalions of colonial regulars. When Phips sent an emissary to demand Frontenac’s surrender, the French governor-general felt confident enough to say: “I have no reply to make to your general other than from the mouths of my cannons and muskets” (Canadian Biography). Phips was up to the challenge. On 18 October, he landed his men four miles below Quebec, but they had no sooner begun their march toward the town then they came under fire from French militia and their Wabanaki allies, sheltering in the dense forest. The next day, Phips’s warships opened a cannonade against the town but ran out of ammunition quicker than expected. The New England militiamen, already battered from their skirmishes in the woods, refused to assault Quebec without artillery support, forcing Phips to call off the attack. On 23 October, he negotiated a prisoner exchange with Frontenac before loading his men back on the ships and setting sail for Boston.

For the next several years, the cycle of retaliatory raids continued. In 1691, a Wabanaki war party raided the town of Wells in Maine, before travelling to the coastline, boarding an English vessel, and slaughtering its crew. On 24 January 1692, Father Louis-Pierre Thury and Penobscot Chief Madockawando led 300 Acadians and Wabanakis to the town of York – that night, they slaughtered over 100 English settlers and took 80 captives, in an event known as the Candlemas Massacre. Such surprise attacks caused a wave of fear to spread throughout the English colonies, as every frontier settlement wondered if it would be the next to suffer the French and Wabanaki wrath; some scholars speculate that this hysteria helped fuel the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 to 93. The English responded to these raids in kind. Church led a third expedition into Acadia in 1692, burning and pillaging as he went, and the following year, English frigates returned to Port Royal to burn it for a third time.

In 1693, tired of the fighting, English officials in Boston entered peace negotiations with the Abenaki, part of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Frontenac, wishing to disrupt such negotiations, sent one of his officers, Claude-Sébastian de Villieu, to stir up trouble. Villieu travelled from village to village, recruiting Abenakis that were against the peace treaty and, on 18 July 1694, led 250 of them in an attack on Durham, New Hampshire. In the ensuing slaughter – known afterward as the Oyster River massacre – 104 English settlers were killed, 27 taken captive. Villieu killed the livestock and burned the crops, manufacturing a famine for the survivors. The war then settled into a lull until 1696, when the French launched a largescale attack on Iroquois towns in New York and Saint-Castin led a raid on the rebuilt English fort of Pemaquid. After successfully taking the fort, Saint-Castin went on to raze nearly every English settlement in Newfoundland, resulting in over 100 deaths. Church once again retaliated by launching his fourth and final expedition into Acadia.

On 30 October 1697, the Treaty of Ryswick was signed in Europe, ending the Nine Years’ War and – by extension – ending King William’s War as well. Among other things, the treaty stipulated that New France, New England, and New York would all return to their prewar boundaries, thereby leaving several border disputes – like the one between Acadia and Maine – unresolved. Though England and France were now formally at peace, scattered fighting between the English and Wabanaki continued until January 1699, when the two parties signed a treaty in Casco Bay, Maine. The Iroquois, likewise, remained at war with the French. Frontenac, looking to get revenge on the Iroquois for their raids into New France, launched several devastating attacks on Iroquois villages in the late 1690s. The Iroquois appealed to their allies in New York for help but the English, tired of fighting, remained indifferent. It was not until 1701 that the Iroquois finally made peace with the French. The end of the war did nothing to resolve the high tensions in North America. Indeed, these tensions would soon spill over into the second great colonial conflict of the era, Queen Anne’s War.