Two wars broke Native political independence in southern New England. In May 1637 a Connecticut and Massachusetts force with Mohegan and Narragansett allies surrounded and burned the Pequot fort at Mystic, killing several hundred people, mostly non-combatants, in an attack that shocked even the colonists' Native allies; the survivors were hunted, enslaved and distributed, and the Treaty of Hartford of 1638 declared the Pequot nation dissolved. Forty years later Metacom, called King Philip by the English, led a broad alliance against colonial expansion; the war of 1675-76 destroyed or damaged dozens of towns on both sides and is among the deadliest per capita conflicts in the region's history. Colonial governments responded to victory by selling captives: Margaret Ellen Newell's research in the colonial court records shows that thousands of Native people were enslaved, including many who surrendered under promise of clemency, and that Indian slavery was an established institution in New England rather than an incident of war. Metacom was killed in August 1676 and his wife and son were among those sold overseas. The surviving Native population was left on small reserved tracts under colonial supervision.
New England colonial governments and their Native allies destroyed the Pequot and then the Wampanoag-led alliance, seizing their lands and selling captives into slavery in the Caribbean, Bermuda and beyond
Contemporary and modern reconstructions put the Native population of the war zone at roughly 10,000-15,000 by 1675 — about 4,000 Narragansett, 2,400 Nipmuc, 2,400 Massachusett and Pawtucket, and fewer than 1,000 Wampanoag and Pokanoket, plus Mohegan, Pequot and praying-town communities. This is already a post-epidemic figure: southern New England is thought to have held on the order of 100,000 people before the epidemics of 1616-19 and 1633.
The lower bound reflects conservative readings of the colonial records: several hundred Pequots killed at Mystic in 1637, and in King Philip's War roughly two to three thousand Native dead and perhaps eight hundred to a thousand colonists killed. The upper bound follows estimates that put Native wartime deaths in 1675-76 at five thousand or more, including deaths from exposure, starvation and disease among those driven from their villages during the winter, and colonist deaths at around two and a half thousand. There was no count of Native dead, and the colonial sources record their own losses far more carefully than those of their enemies.
The burning of the Mystic fort with its inhabitants inside, the destruction of villages and food stores on both sides, and the sale of captured Native adults and children into slavery in the Caribbean, Bermuda and the Atlantic islands are documented in the colonial court, treaty and shipping records examined by Newell.
United States of America, Bermuda, Barbados, Canada