In order to get the Susquehannock's out of the Virginia wilderness, we must take a roundabout path back through New York and take notice of some of the other turmoils of that unquiet era. In doing so we shall have to study well a statesman damned by New England and praised by William Penn (who, of course, was also damned by New England). Late in 1674 the Duke of York commissioned Edmund Andros to govern the territories reconquered from the Dutch. Andros, as Penn later remarked with great judiciousness, "tho he was not without objection . . . certainly did great things."⁸³  

Andros took office in a New York where Englishmen were scarce and their scarcity was not regretted. To his north were the chronically hostile 'French whom he had to keep at bay without provocation. To his east were the Puritan colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts which, because of Andros' commission to govern lands claimed by them, were more acutely hostile than the French. To his south was Baltimore's Maryland with its dedication to the seizure of the Delaware Bay colonies.

Indian troubles revived everywhere. We have seen already the turmoil in the south. The Mohawk and Hudson valleys were tensely and uncertainly testing the viability of the enforced peace between Mohawk and Mahican. Perpetual skirmish and ambush remained the rule between the Iroquois and the Indians in alliance with the French. The Connecticut valley was soon to experience the most violent explosion of all; Andros had been in office less than eight months when King Philip's War turned New England's back settlements into shambles. The job that faced Andros was to bring peace to every point of the compass with the resources of a sparsely populated province in which he was a stranger who could not even speak the mother tongue of the majority of his own officials. He performed this Herculean task by a typically British, thoroughly pragmatic constitutional revolution. Working from the base already established by the Dutch, Andros took the materials he had at hand and created the "covenant chain" of subsequent fame in the history of the Indian peoples of the middle colonies. At the climactic moment of the process the Susquehannocks temporarily lost their legal identity as a nation.

Andros was a systematic man. On assuming office he began to confer separately with the more important chiefs of the Indian communities under his jurisdiction, starting with the nearest. By the end of April, 1675, he had concluded agreements of peace and protection with the tribes of the Hudson valley, Long Island, and northern New Jersey, and he was ready to manage the troubles on the Delaware.⁸⁴    Journeying to Delaware Bay, he gained a treaty with the Lenape and a special friend in Renowickam, their "Emperor." He took the occasion to dispatch a politely veiled warning to Lord Baltimore to refrain from further attacks on the Delaware colonists.⁸⁵    This was no sooner done than New England exploded, and Andros had to rush all about the Government to keep matters well and quiet. Then came the attack of Maryland and Virginia on the Susquehannock's, with its chain of calamities. Andros' great fear was that all the Indians from Canada to Virginia would unite in a showdown war with the English; and when he suddenly discovered that King Philip was wintering near Albany he knew that his moment of decision was at hand. If the Mohawks were to join Philip, as some of the Mahicans had done already, New England's prospects would worsen critically. If the Lenape in the south were to join their old allies, the Susquehannock's, for an assault on Maryland, the cost of suppressing them would be high indeed. In either case the damages to the fur tradethe sine qua non of New York's existencemight be irreparable. In this crisis the Mohawks and the Lenape remained constant, each nation in its own way. The Lenape simply kept the peace that Andros had negotiated with Renowickam. The Mohawks, armed and directed by Andros, suddenly attacked King Philip and drove him from his upper Hudson sanctuary among the Mahicans into the reach of New England's militia.⁸⁶ New England's historians fail to credit Andros for his help, following the lead of contemporary New Englanders who hated him for a variety of reasons, but the evidence is quite clear that the Mohawks acted on Andros' orders. It appears also that the Mohawks took the opportunity to pay off old scores against King Philip's Mahican hosts. Some of the Mahicans fled with Philip; others besought Andros' protection. In an apparently contradictory, but actually consistent, development of his strategy, Andros then offered refuge and sanctuary not only to the errant Mahicans but to all of New England's Indians who would come within his own jurisdiction; and he planted metaphorical "trees of welfare" at Scaticook and Albany to shelter them. Andros later told the Lords of Trade that he was unsure of the origins of King Philip's War, but certain that "the advantages thereby were none, the disadvantages very greate and like to be more, even in the loss of said Indians." Perhaps because there was no pressure of expanding white population in New York, Andros recognized a large Indian population, under control, as a commercial asset.⁸⁷