Benjamin Church

Benjamin Church was a New England military officer who became prominent during King Philip’s War. He organised mixed companies of English colonists and Indigenous allies and used mobile tactics against Wampanoag and allied forces.

Church later took part in expeditions against French and Abenaki settlements during the colonial wars. His memoirs influenced later American ideas about frontier warfare, although his campaigns also formed part of a violent history of dispossession and colonial expansion.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower then carries the story into the next generation, when population growth, land pressure and mutual distrust destroy the earlier accommodation. Massasoit’s son Metacom leads a coalition against the English in King Philip’s War, while Benjamin Church develops tactics that help break Indigenous resistance. Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Mayflower Papers includes selections from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation; Bradford and Edward Winslow’s Mourt’s Relation; Winslow’s Good News from New England; Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan; Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative; and Benjamin Church’s account of King Philip’s War.