The winter of 1676 brought a lull in the fighting of King Philip's War in eastern Massachusetts, but come spring Native American forces resumed their raids on the area's Puritan towns.

The Native coalition attacked the strategically significant fort at Marlborough, Massachusetts on both March 16 and April 7, destroying most of the settlement and forcing a partial evacuation of its residents.

In response to these attacks, as well as the recent abandonment of Lancaster and Groton, the colonial Council of War dispatched Captain Samuel Wadsworth and fifty men to Marlborough to reinforce the frontier.

Native forces infiltrated Sudbury during the night[10] and attacked at dawn, burning houses and barns, as well as killing "several persons," according to Puritan historian William Hubbard.

[11] The Haynes garrison held throughout the battle, though authors George Ellis and John Morris have speculated that the siege was a feint meant to draw English reinforcements to the area.

Wadsworth's men had rested only briefly in Marlborough before their march back east to defend Sudbury; they were hungry, exhausted, and completely ignorant of their enemy's position.

[10] The Watertown militia and two companies of English cavalry repeatedly attempted to rescue Wadsworth, but ultimately failed to break the Native envelopment and were forced to retreat.

[10] According to Increase Mather, the Natives took "five or six of the English alive" and "stripped them naked, and caused them to run the gauntlet, whipping them after a cruel and bloody manner, and then threw hot ashes upon them; cut the flesh of their legs, and put fire into their wounds, delighting to see the miserable torments of wretched creatures.

On the morning of April 22, Native warriors taunted militiamen in Marlborough by shouting seventy-four times to indicate the number of their enemy they believed they had killed at Sudbury.

[3] In 1730, Samuel Wadsworth's son Benjamin (then president of Harvard College) dedicated a memorial stone over the mass grave where his father had been buried alongside his men.