History

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God   Mary Rowlandson   Context   After the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, relations between the newly arrived British settlers and long-established native peoples were uneasy at best. A major source of tension between the two groups was their differing approaches to the land. The Native Americans who lived in what is now New England hunted and gathered nuts to eat, but they also farmed, with corn as their principal crop. When the settlers arrived, the Native Americans focused on the land's resources, assuming the resources would still be at their disposal even if the new settlers used the land as well. The colonists, in contrast, came from Britain, where plots of land separate from common land were individually fenced off as areas for livestock to graze. Livestock suddenly appeared on land the Native Americans had planned to use for resources, a conflict that became one of the causes of King Philip's War (also called Metacom's War), named for the leader of the Wampanoag Indians.   {draw:frame} The Native Americans and the colonists had lived peacefully together for nearly fifty years before the war broke out in 1675, but their calm coexistence ended as the colonists demanded more land from the Native Americans, who felt their culture was being threatened. Deep-seated resentment bubbled to the surface, and neighbors became enemies. The war, marked by Native American raids on the colonists' settlements and the colonists' retaliation, didn't end until Philip's death in 1676. Chaos and violence characterized the raids on British towns: in Lancaster, for example, a number of Native Americans arrived at sunrise and opened fire on the town, using guns they had acquired in trade or in warfare with other settlers.   In addition to killing some colonists, the attackers took captives, not only in Lancaster but elsewhere. By taking settlers captive, King Philip (also known as Metacom, though not mentioned by that name in The Sovereignty and...