Surviving Slavery: The Sale of Indigenous People in King Philip's War

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One of the lesser-known aspects of the War for New England (King Philip’s War) was the intentional campaign to enslave Native peoples. The war unleashed multiple attempts to capture and force into servitude Indigenous men, women, and children alike. This included Native men who armed themselves to defend their homelands, but it also included non-combatants, women, youth, and children, who were often just going about their business or trying to stay out of the war. Even worse, colonial governments offered clemency for Natives who surrendered, but instead of providing protection either shipped them out of the region as slaves or parceled them off into English households for a set period of servitude, sometimes until the age of 25 or 30.

This presentation by historian Linford Fisher explores the lived realities of Native families and communities through the horrors of family separation, enslavement, and being trafficked out of the region. Individuals - fathers, mothers, sons, daughters - were shipped overseas to destinations such as Barbados, Jamaica, the Azores, and even Tangier in North Africa.

Some enslaved people attempted to return home, and in rare cases colonial leaders were able to facilitate the return of those who had been sold into foreign slavery. But in most cases families and communities felt the loss of these individuals for generations, even as colonial governments used their reduced numbers as an excuse to take over even more land.

These same Native communities continued to press for their sovereignty. They remain here today, although the shadow of these events continue to loom large.

Enslavement of Indigenous people during and after King Philp’s War was only one episode in a longer intertwined process of land theft and enslavement, as Linford Fisher shows in his forthcoming book, Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Enslavement in US History (Liveright, 2026). Copies will be available for purchase. You can pay by cash, via Venmo, or on PayPal at the Partnership of Historic Bostons website, here.

Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (2012), the co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island’s Founding Father (2014), and the co-editor of Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America – A Documentary History (2024), as well as more than a dozen articles and chapters. Fisher is the principal investigator of a digital project entitled Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas (www.stolenrelations.org), a community-centered, tribal-collaborative project that seeks to broaden our understanding of Indigenous experiences of settler colonialism and its legacies through the lens of slavery and servitude. He has just finished a book called Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in American History (which will be out with Liveright/Norton in April 2026) on Native American enslavement in English colonies in North America and the Caribbean and, later, in the United States, between Columbus and early 20th century.

FIND OUT MORE

Stolen Relations project www.stolenrelations.org

Stealing America Amazon https://a.co/d/cVUNPpo

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Image: A close-up of a certificate from Plymouth colony governor Josiah Winslow granting Captain Thomas Smith of the Seaflower the right to transport 110 Native men, women, and children out of Plymouth and to sell them into "perpetuall servitude & slavery." Dated August 9, 1676. Certificate to Thomas Smith, 9 August 1676, Josiah Winslow, 1676. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston