In the early 1700s, as Connecticut and the other private colonies were combating the Board of Trade's attempts to revoke their charters, a long-running dispute between the colony and the Mohegans, a once-powerful Native American tribe, came to the attention of royal officials. The dispute centered on a large tract of land (approximately 20,000 acres) in southeastern Connecticut, which, the Mohegans claimed, the colony had reserved for them in the late seventeenth century. Concerned that the colony had violated its agreements, the Mohegans, aided by powerful colonists with a pecuniary interest in this tract of land, appealed to the Privy Council. As a result of this appeal, what had been a narrow dispute over land became part of a larger conflict between the Crown, the colony, and the tribe over property and autonomy in the empire.

The origins of the conflict between the Mohegans and Connecticut lie in the complicated aftermath of the Pequot War in the late 1630s. Uncas, sachem of the Mohegans, used the warfare between the English and the Pequots to undermine the powerful Pequot sachem, Sassacus. According to Michael Oberg, “With the Pequots under attack by the Narragansetts and the Dutch, and ensnared in an increasingly tangled web of controversy with the English, Uncas saw alliance with the newcomers as a means to increase his power and that of the Mohegans.”