We have referred thus far only to such acts of warfare with the savages during our colonial period as were without concert between colonists in widely separated localities, each defending its own plantation with its own resources against its own assailants.
This statement, however, as to the separate conduct of hostilities in the early colonial period by each distinct plantation is subject to qualification in the case of the New England colonists. These came into a confederation in 1643, mainly with a view to mutual protection and defence against the savages. They were to be friends and allies in military operations, and to recognize their enemies as common. Though this confederation had not been formed at the time of the Pequot war, as the component parties to it were not all then in being, there was an anticipation of its objects so far as the case admitted. Soldiers from Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Rhode Island, with Narragansett and Mohican allies, composed the army of invasion and destruction. When the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut came into confederacy, a jealousy and dislike of some of the characteristic principles of Rhode Island led to its exclusion, though it had liberty to come in as if really a part of Plymouth colony. In King Philip's war the confederacy proved to be very effective, though there were jars and much friction in its elements and in its executive workings. So this great conspiracy of the natives was met, as were the oppressive measures of the mother country just a century afterwards, by the union of confederated colonial forces. Gradually, as the drama advanced over the stage of the continent, not only did all the colonial governments find themselves drawn into more or less of combined hostility against the natives, but England came into the strife with fleets and armies.
The rivalry between the English and the French colonists, which for nearly a century and a half had been fomenting here, — varied by broils, intrigues, local conflicts,
