THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA.
The man who finds an unknown country out,
By giving it a name, acquires, no doubt,
A gospel title, though the people there
The pious Christian thinks not worth his care.
Bar this pretence, and into air is hurled,
The claim of Europe to the _Western World_.
_Churchill._
We shall now have to deal entirely with our own nation, or with those
principally derived from it. We shall now have to observe the conduct
entirely of Protestants towards the aborigines of their settlements:
and the Catholic may ask with triumphant scorn, “Where is the mighty
difference between the ancient professors of our faith, and the
professors of that faith which you proudly style the reformed! You
accuse the papal church of having corrupted and debased national
morality in this respect,—in what does the morality of the Protestants
differ?” I am sorry to say in nothing. The Protestants have only too
well imitated the conduct and clung to the doctrine of the Catholics
as it regards the rights of humanity. It is to the disgrace of the
papal church that it did not inculcate a more Christian morality; it
is to the far deeper disgrace of Protestants, that, pretending to
abandon the corruptions and cruelties of the papists, they did not
abandon their wretched pretences for seizing upon the possessions of
the weak and the unsuspecting. So far, however, from the behaviour of,
the Protestants forming a palliation for that of the Catholics, it
becomes an aggravation of it; for it is but the ripened fruit of that
tree of false and mischievous doctrine which they had planted. They had
set the example, and boldly preached the right, and pleaded the divine
sanction for invasion, oppression, and extermination—such example and
exhortation are only too readily adopted—and the Protestant conduct
was but the continuation of papal heresy. The
New Presbyter was but old Priest writ large.
While we see, then, to the present hour the perpetuated consequences
of the long inculcation of papal delusions, we must, however, confess
that for the Protestants there was, and is, less excuse than for
the Catholic laity. They had given up the Bible into the hands of
their priests, and as a matter of propriety received the faith which
they held from their dictation: the Protestants professed that “the
Bible and the Bible alone, was the religion of the Protestants.” The
Catholics having once persuaded themselves that the Pope was the
infallible vicegerent of God on earth, might, in their blind zeal,
honestly take all that he proclaimed to them as gospel truth; but the
Protestants disavowed and renounced his authority and infallibility.
They declared him to be the very antiChrist, and his church the great
sorceress that made drunk the nations with the cup of her enchantments.
What business then had they with the papal doctrine, that the heathen
were given to the believers as a possession? The Pope declared that,
as the representative of the Deity on earth, he claimed the world, and
disposed of it as he pleased. But the Protestants protested against
any such assumption, and appealed to the Bible; and where did they
find any such doctrine in the Bible? Yet Elizabeth of England, granted
charters to her subjects to take possession of all countries not yet
seized on by Christian nations, with as much implicit authority as
the Pope himself. It is curious to hear her proclaiming her intimate
acquaintance with the Scripture, and yet so blindly and unceremoniously
setting at defiance all its most sacred precepts. “I am supposed,”
said she, in her speech on proroguing parliament in 1585, “to have
many studies, but most philosophical. I must yield this to be true,
that I suppose few that are not professors, have read more; and I need
not tell you that I am not so simple that I understand not, nor so
forgetful that I remember not; and yet, amidst my many volumes, I hope
God’s book hath not been my seldomest lectures, in which we find that
which by reason all ought to believe.”
It had been well if she had made good her boasting by proving
practically that she had understood, and had not forgotten the real
doctrines of the Christian code. But Elizabeth, as well as her father,
was, in every respect, except that of admitting the Pope’s supremacy,
as thorough a Catholic as the best of them; and we see her granting to
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, of Compton in Devonshire, in 1578, a charter as
ample in its endowments as that which the king of Spain himself gave to
Columbus, on the authority of the Pope’s bull, and securing to herself
exactly the same ratio of benefit: the Spanish commission was, in fact,
her model. She conferred on Sir Humphrey all lands and countries that
he might discover, that were not already taken possession of by some
Christian prince. He was to hold them of England, with full power of
willing them to his heirs for ever, or disposing of them in sale, on
the simple condition of reserving one-fifth of all the gold and silver
found to the crown. She afterwards gave a similar charter to Sir Walter
Raleigh: and her successor, James I., still further imitated the Pope
by dividing the continent of North America, under the name of North and
South Virginia, between two trading companies, as the Pope had divided
the world between Spain and Portugal.
It is really lamentable to see how utterly empty was the pretence of
reformation in the government of England at that time. How utterly
ignorant or regardless Protestant England was of the most sacred and
unmistakeable truths of the New Testament, while it professed to model
itself upon them. The worst principles of the papal church were clung
to, because they favoured the selfishness of despotism. The rights of
nations were as infamously and recklessly violated; and from that time
to this, Protestant England and Protestant America continue to spurn
every great principle of Christian justice in their treatment of native
tribes: they have substituted power for conscience, gunpowder and
brandy for truth and mercy, and expulsion from their lands and houses
for charity, “that suffereth long and is kind.”
The shameless impudence and hypocrisy by which nations calling
themselves Christians have ever persisted, and still persist, in
this sweeping and wholesale public robbery and violence, was happily
ridiculed by Churchill.
Cast by a tempest on a savage coast,
Some roving buccaneer set up a post;
A beam, in proper form, transversely laid,
Of his Redeemer’s cross the figure made,—
Of that Redeemer, with whose laws his life,
From first to last, had been one scene of strife;
His royal master’s name thereon engraved,
_Without more process the whole race enslaved_;
_Cut off that charter they from Nature drew_,
_And made them slaves to men they never knew_!
Search ancient histories, consult records,
Under this title the _most Christian Lords_,
Hold,—thanks to conscience—more than half the ball;—
O’erthrow this title, they have none at all.
But the national cupidity that was proof to the caustic ridicule of
Churchill, has been proof to the still more powerful assault of public
execration, under the growth of Christian knowledge. The Bible is now
in almost every man’s hand; its burning and shining light blazes full
on the grand precept, “Do as thou would’st be done by;” and are the
tribes of India, or Africa, or America, or Oceanica, the better for it?
Are they not still our slaves and our Gibeonites, and driven before our
arms like the wild beasts of the desert? We need not therefore stay to
express our abhorrence of Spanish cruelty, or describe at great length
the deeds of own countrymen in any quarter of the globe,—it is enough
to say that English and American treatment of the aborigines of their
colonies is but Spanish cruelty repeated. With one or two beautiful
exceptions, which we shall have the greatest pleasure in pointing out,
no more regard has been paid to the rights or the feelings of the North
American Indians by the English and their descendants, than was paid to
the South Americans by the Spanish and Portuguese.
Every reader of history is aware of the melancholy and disastrous
commencement of most of our American colonies. The great cause was that
they were founded in injustice. Adventurers, with charters from the
English monarch in their pockets, as the Spaniards and Portuguese had
the Pope’s bull in theirs, landed on the coast of America and claimed
it for their own, reckoning the native inhabitants of no more account
than the bears and fallow-deer of the woods. They had got a grant of
the country from their own king; but whence had he got _his_ grant?
That is not quite so clear. The Pope’s claim is intelligible enough: he
was, in his own opinion, God’s viceroy and steward, and disposed of his
world in that character; but the Bible was the English monarch’s law,
and where did the Bible appoint Elizabeth or James God’s steward? Where
did it appoint either of them “a judge and a ruler over” the Indians?
Truly Elizabeth, with all her vaunting, had read her Bible to little
purpose, as we fear most monarchs and their ministers to the present
hour have done. We must say of the greater part of North America, as
Erskine said of India—“it is a country which God never gave us, and
acquired by means that he will never justify.”
The misery attending the first planting of our colonies in America was
equal to the badness of our principles. The very first thing which the
colonists in the majority of cases seem to have done, was to insult
and maltreat the natives, thus making them their mortal enemies, and
thus cutting off all chance of the succours they needed from the
land, and the security essential to their very existence. For about a
century, nothing but wretchedness, failure, famine, massacres by the
Indians, were the news from the American colonies. The more northern
ones, as Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York, we took from the French and
the Dutch; the more southern, as Florida and Louisiana, were obtained
at a later day from the Spaniards. We shall here therefore confine our
brief notice chiefly to the manner of settling the central eastern
states, particularly Virginia, New England, and Pennsylvania.
For eighty-two years from the granting of the charter by Elizabeth to
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to the abandonment of the country by Sir Walter
Raleigh for his El Dorado visions, the colony of Virginia suffered
nothing but miseries, and was become, at that period, a total failure.
The first settlers were, like the Spaniards, all on fire in quest of
gold. They got into squabbles with the Indians, and the remnant of them
was only saved by Sir Francis Drake happening to touch there on his
way home from a cruise in the West Indies. A second set of adventurers
were massacred by the Indians, not without sufficient provocation;
and a third perished by the same means, or by famine induced by
their unprincipled and impolitic treatment of the natives. The first
successful settlement which was formed was that of James-Town, on James
River, in Chesapeak Bay, in 1607. But even here scarcely had they
located themselves, when their abuse of the Indians involved them in a
savage warfare with them. They took possession of their hunting-grounds
without ceremony; and they cheated them in every possible way in
their transactions with them, especially in the purchases of their
furs. That they might on the easiest terms have lived amicably with
the Indians, the history of the celebrated Captain John Smith of
that time sufficiently testifies. He had been put out of his rank,
and treated with every contumely by his fellow colonists, till they
found themselves on the verge of destruction from the enraged natives.
They then meanly implored him to save them, and he soon effected
their safety by that obvious policy which, if men were not blinded by
their own wickedness, would universally best answer their purpose. He
began to conciliate the offended tribes; to offer them presents and
promises of kindness; and the consequence was, they soon flocked into
the settlement again in the most friendly manner, and with plenty of
provisions. But even Smith was not sufficiently aware of the power of
friendship; he chose rather to attack some of the Indians than to treat
with them, and the consequence was that he fell into their hands, and
was condemned to die the death of torture.
But here again, the better nature of the Indians saved him: and that
incident occurred which is one of the most romantic in American
history. He was saved from execution at the last moment, by the Indian
beauty Pocahontas, the daughter of the great Sachem Powhatan. This
young Indian woman, who is celebrated by the colonists and writers of
the time, as of a remarkably fine person, afterwards married a Mr.
Rolfe, an English gentleman of the colony. She was brought over by
him to see England, and presented at court, where she was received
in a distinguished manner by James and his queen. This marriage,
which makes a great figure in the early history of the colony, was a
most auspicious event for it. It warmly disposed the Indians towards
the English. They were anxious that the colonists should make other
alliances with them of the same nature, and which might have been
attended with the happiest consequences to both nations; but though
some of the best families of Virginia now boast of their descent from
this connexion, the rest of the colonists of the period held aloof
from Indian marriages as beneath them. They looked on the Indians
rather as creatures to be driven to the woods—for, unlike the negroes,
they could not be compelled to become slaves—than to be raised and
civilized; and therefore, spite of the better principles which the
short government of that excellent man Lord Delaware had introduced,
they were soon again involved in hostilities with them. The Indians
felt deeply the insult of the refusal of alliance through marriage with
them; they felt the daily irritation of attempts to overreach them in
their bargains, and they saw the measures they were taking to seize on
their whole country. They saw that there was to be no common bond of
interest or sympathy between them; that there was to be a usurping and
a suffering party only; and they resolved to cut off the grasping and
haughty invaders at a blow. A wide conspiracy was set on foot; and had
it not been in this case, as in many others, that the compassionate
feelings of one of the Indians partially revealed the plot at the
very moment of its execution, not an Englishman would have been left
alive. As it was, a dreadful massacre ensued; and more than a fourth
of the colonists perished. The English, in their turn, fell on the
Indians, and a bloody war of extermination followed. When the colonists
could no longer reach them in the depths of their woods, they offered
them a deceitful peace. The Indians, accustomed in their own wars to
enter sincerely into their treaties of peace when inclined to bury the
tomahawk—were duped by the more artful Europeans. They came forth from
their woods, planted their corn, and resumed their peaceful hunting.
Just as the harvest was ripe, the English rushed suddenly upon them,
trampled down their crops, set fire to their wigwams, and chased them
again to the woods with such slaughter, that some of the tribes were
totally exterminated!
Such was the mode of settling Virginia. What trust or cordiality could
there afterwards be between such parties? Accordingly we find, from
time to time, in the history of this colony, fresh plots of the natives
to rid themselves of the whites, and fresh expeditions of the whites to
clear the country of what they termed the wily and perfidious Indians.
These dreadful transactions, which continued for the most part while
the English government continued in that country, gave occasion to that
memorable speech of Logan, the chief of the Shawanees, to Lord Dunmore
the governor: a speech which will remain while the English language
shall remain, to perpetuate the memory of English atrocity, and Indian
pathos.—“I now ask of every white man, whether he hath ever entered
the cottage of Logan when hungry, and been refused food? Whether
coming naked, and perishing with cold, and Logan has not clothed him?
During the last war, so long and so bloody, Logan has remained quietly
upon his mat, wishing to be the advocate of peace. Yes, such is my
attachment to white men, that even those of my nation, when they pass
by me, pointed at me, saying—‘_Logan is the friend of white men!_’ I
had even thought of living among you; but that was before the injury
I received from one of you. Last summer, Colonel Cressup massacred in
cold blood, and without any provocation, all the relations of Logan. He
spared neither his wife nor his children. _There is not now one drop of
my blood in the veins of any living creature!_ This is what has excited
my revenge. I have sought it. I have killed several of your people, and
my hatred is appeased. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace;
but imagine not that my joy is instigated by my fear. Logan knows not
what fear is. He will never turn his back in order to save his life.
_But alas! no one remains to mourn for Logan when he shall be no more!_”
The conduct of the English towards the natives in THE CAROLINAS may
be summed up in a single passage of the Abbé Raynal: “Two wars were
carried on against the natives of the most extravagant description.
All the wandering or fixed nations between the ocean and Appalachian
mountains, were attacked and massacred without any interest or motive.
Those who escaped being put to the sword, either submitted or were
dispersed.” The remnant of the tribe of the Tuscaroras fled into the
state of New York.
MARYLAND, in its early history, also exhibits its quota of Indian
bloodshed; but much of this is chargable to the account of the
colonists of Virginia. Lord Baltimore, who first colonised this
province in the reign of Charles I., was a Catholic, who sought an
asylum for his persecuted brethren of the same faith. Since the change
of religion in England, the Catholics had experienced the bitterness of
that persecution of which they, while in power, had been so liberal.
This seems to have had an excellent effect upon some of them. Lord
Baltimore and the colonists who went out with him, being most of them
of good Catholic families, determined to allow liberty of conscience,
and admitted people of all sorts. This gave great offence to their
royalist neighbours in Virginia, who, not permitting any liberty
of religious sentiment, found those whom they drove away by their
severities flocking into Maryland, and being there well received,
strengthening it at their expense. They therefore circulated all kinds
of calumnies amongst the Indians against the Maryland Catholics,
especially telling them that they were Spaniards—a name of horror to
Indian ears. Alarmed by this representation, they fell on the colonists
whom they had at first received with their usual kindness, laid waste
their fields, massacred without mercy all that they could meet; and
were not undeceived till after a long course of patient endurance and
friendly representation.
The settlement of NEW ENGLAND presents some new features. It was not
merely a settlement of English Protestants, but of the Protestants of
Protestants—the Puritans. A class of persons having thus made two
removes from Popery; having not only protested against the errors of
Rome, but against those of the very church which had seceded from Rome,
and professed to purify itself from its corruptions; having, moreover,
suffered severely for their religious faith, might be supposed to
have acquired far clearer views of the rights of humanity from their
better acquaintance with the Bible, and might be expected to respect
the persons and the property of the natives in whose lands they went
to settle, more than any that went before them. They went as men who
had been driven out of their own country, and from amongst their own
kindred, for the maintenance of the dearest privileges and the most
sacred claims of men; and they might be supposed to address the natives
as they reached their coast in terms like these: “Ancient possessors of
a free country, give us a place of refuge amongst you. You are termed
savages, but you cannot be more savage than the people of our own land,
who have inflicted dreadful cruelties and mutilations on us and our
friends for the faith we have in God. We fly from savages who pretend
to be civilized, but have learned no one principle of civilization, to
savages who pretend to no civilization, but yet have, on a thousand
occasions, received white men to their shores with benevolence and
tears of joy. What the savages of Europe are, a hundred regions
drenched in the blood of their native children can tell; that we deem
you less savage than them, the very act of our coming to you testifies.
Give us space amongst you, and let us live as brethren.”
For a time, indeed, they acted as men who might be supposed thus to
speak. The going out and landing in this new country of this band of
religious adventurers, have been and continue to be celebrated as the
setting forth and landing of “The Pilgrim Fathers.” It is in itself
an interesting event: the pilgrimage of a little host of voluntary
exiles, for the sake of their religion, from their native country, to
establish a new country in the wilderness of the New World. It is more
interesting from the fact, that their associates and descendants have
grown into one of the most intelligent and powerful portions of the
freest, and, perhaps, happiest nation on the globe. Their landing on
the coast of Massachusets was effected under circumstances of peculiar
hardship. It took place at a spot to which they gave the name of New
Plymouth, on the 11th of November, 1620. The weather was extremely
severe; and they were but badly prepared to contend with it. During the
winter one half of their number perished through famine, and diseases
brought on by their hardships. The natives, too, came down to oppose
their settlement,[31] and it is difficult now to imagine how such
religious people could reconcile to their consciences an entrance by
force on the territories of a race on whom they had no claim. They had,
indeed, purchased a tract of land of one of the chartered companies
in England; but one is at a loss to conceive how any English company
could sell a country in another hemisphere already inhabited, and to
which they had not the slightest title to show, except “the Bucanier’s
Post.” As well might a company of Indians sell some of their countrymen
a slice of territory on the coast of Kent; and just as good a title
would the Indians have to land, if they could, in spite of our Kentish
yeomen, and establish themselves on the spot. Moreover, these Pilgrim
Fathers had wandered from their original destination, and had not
purchased this land at all of anybody at that time. No doubt the
Fathers _thought_ that they had a right to settle in a wild country;
and simply fell in with the customs and doctrines of the times. We
might, however, have expected clearer notions of natural right from
their acquaintance with the Bible; for we shall presently see that
there were men of their own country, and in their own circumstances,
that would not have been easy to have taken such possession in such a
manner. We may safely believe that the Fathers did according to their
knowledge; but the precedent is dangerous, and could not in these times
be admitted: the Fathers did not, in fact, obtain any grant from the
English till four years afterwards (1624). When they had once got a
firm footing, Massasoit, the father of the famous Philip of Pokanoket,
whom these same settlers pursued to the death with all his tribe,
except such as they sold for slaves to Bermudas, granted them a certain
extent of lands. Subsequently purchases from the Indians began to be
considered more necessary to a good title.
Eight years afterwards another company of the same people, under
John Endicott, formed a settlement in Massachusets Bay, and founded
the town of Salem. In the following year a third company, of not
less than three hundred in number, joined them. These in the course
of time seeking fresh settlements, founded at different periods,
Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, Roxborough, and other towns; great
numbers now, allured by the flourishing state of the colony, flocked
over, and amongst them Harry Vane, the celebrated Sir Harry Vane
of the revolutionary parliament, and Hugh Peters, the chaplain of
Oliver Cromwell. Some difference of opinion amongst them occasioned a
considerable body of them to settle in Providence and Rhode Island.
These were under the guidance of their venerable pastor Roger Williams,
a man who deserves to be remembered while Christianity continues to
shed its blessings on mankind. Mr. Williams had penetrated through
the mists of his age, to the light of divine truth, and had risen
superior to the selfishness of his countrymen. He maintained the
freedom of conscience, the right of private judgment, the freedom of
religious opinion from the touch of the magistrate. The spirit of true
Christianity had imbued his own spirit with its love. Above all—for
it was the most novel doctrine, and as we have seen by the practice
of the whole Christian world, the hardest to adopt—he maintained the
sacred right of the natives to their own soil; and refused to settle
upon it without their consent. _He and his followers purchased of the
Indians the whole territory which they took possession of!_ This is
a fact which we cannot record without a feeling of intense delight,
for it is the first instance of such a triumph of Christian knowledge
and principle, over the corrupt morality of Europe. We nowhere read
till now, through all this bloody and revolting history of European
aggressions, of any single man treating with the savage natives
as with men who had the same inalienable rights as themselves.[32]
It is the first bright dawn of Christian day from the darkness of
ages; the first boundary mark put down between the possessions of
the unlettered savage, and the lawless desires of the schooled but
uncivilized European; the first recognition of that law of property
in the possessors of the soil of every country of the earth, until
the complete establishment of which, blood must flow, the weak must
be trodden down by the strong, and civilization and Christianity must
pause in their course. Honour to Roger Williams and his flock in
Narraganset Bay! The Puritan settlements still continued to spread.
Connecticut, and New Hampshire, and Maine were planted by different
bodies from Massachusets Bay; and the Indians, who found that the
whites diffused themselves farther and farther over their territories,
and soon ceased to purchase as Roger Williams had done, or even to
ask permission; began to remonstrate. Remonstrances however produced
little effect. The Indians saw that if they did not make a stand
against these encroachments they must soon be driven out of their
ancestral lands, and exterminated by those tribes on which they must be
forced. They resolved therefore to exterminate the invaders that would
hear no reason. The Pequods, who lay near the colony of Connecticut,
called upon the Narragansets in 1637, to join them in their scheme.
The Narragansets revealed it to the English, and both parties were
speedily in arms against each other. The different colonies of New
England had entered into an association for common defence. The people
of Connecticut called on those of Massachusets Bay for help, which
was accorded; but before its arrival the soldiers of Connecticut, who
seemed on all occasions eager to shed Indian blood, had attacked the
Pequods where they had posted themselves, in a sort of rude camp in
a swamp, defended with stakes and boughs of trees. The Pequods were
supposed to be a thousand strong, besides having all their women and
children with them; but their simple fortification was soon forced, and
set fire to; and men, women, children perished in the flames, or were
cut down on rushing out, or seized and bound. The Massachusets forces
soon after joined them, and then the Indians were hunted from place
to place with unrelenting fury. They determined to treat them, not as
brave men fighting for their invaded territories, for their families
and posterity, but as wild beasts. They massacred some in cold blood,
others they handed over to the Narragansets to be tortured to death;
and great numbers were sold into Bermudas as slaves. In less than
three months, the great and ancient tribe of the Pequods had ceased
to exist. What did Roger Williams say to this butchery by a Christian
people? But the spirit of resentment against the Indians grew to such a
pitch in those states that nothing but the language of Cotton Mather,
(the historian of New England,) can express it. He calls them devils
incarnate, and declares that unless he had “a pen made of a porcupine’s
quill and dipped in aquafortis he could not describe all their
cruelties.” Could they be possibly greater than those of the Puritan
settlers, who were at once the aggressors, and bore the name of
Christian? So deadly, indeed, became the vengeance of these colonists,
that they granted a public reward to any one who should kill an Indian.
The Assembly, says Douglass, in 1703, voted 40_l._ premium for each
Indian scalp or captive. In the former war the premium was 12_l._ In
1706, he says, “about this time premiums for Indian scalps and captives
were advanced by act of Assembly; viz.: per piece to impressed men
10_l._, to volunteers in pay 20_l._, to volunteers serving without pay
50_l._, with the benefit of the captives and plunder. Col. Hilton,
with 220 men, ranges the eastern frontiers, and kills many Indians.
In 1722 the premium for scalps was 100_l._ In 1744 it had risen to
400_l._ old tenor; for the years 1745, 6, and 7, it stood at the
enormous sum of 1000_l._ per head to volunteers, scalp or captive (!)
and 400_l._ per head to impressed men, wages and subsistence money
to be deducted.[33] In 1744 the Cape-Sables, and St. John’s Indians
being at war with the colonies, Massachusets-Bay declared them rebels;
forbad the Pasamaquody, Penobscot, Noridgwoag, Pigwocket, and all other
Indians west of St. John’s to hold any communication with them, and
offered for their scalps,—males 12 years old, and upwards, 100_l._ new
tenor; for such, as captives, 105_l._ For _women and children _50_l._,
scalps!—55_l._, captives! The Assembly soon after, hearing that the
Penobscot and Noridgwoag Indians had joined the French, extended
premiums for scalps and captives to all places west of Nova Scotia,
and advanced them to 250_l._ new tenor, to volunteers; and 100_l._ new
tenor to troops in pay.”[34]
In 1722, a Captain Harman, with 200 men, surprised the Indians at
Noridgwoag, and brought off twenty-six scalps, _and that of Father
Ralle_, a French Jesuit.[35] The savage atrocities here committed by
the New Englanders were frightful. They massacred men, women, and
children; pillaged the village, robbed and set fire to the church,
and mangled the corpse of Father Ralle most brutally.[36] For these
twenty-six scalps, at the then premium, the good people of Massachusets
paid 2600_l._ A Captain Lovel, also, seems to have been an active
scalper. “He collected,” says Raynal, “a band of settlers as ferocious
as himself, and set out to hunt savages. One day he discovered ten of
them quietly sleeping round a large fire. He murdered them, carried
their scalps to Boston, and secured the promised reward, of course
1000_l._! Who could suppose that the land of the Pilgrim Fathers, the
land of the noble Roger Williams, could have become polluted with
horrors like these!”
And why were the Indians now so sharply pursued—why such sums given
as tempted these Harmans and Lovels? Why the scalp of Father Ralle
to be stripped away from him?—Because Father Ralle had proclaimed a
very certain, but very disagreeable truth. He preached to the Indians,
“That their lands were given to them and their children unalienably
and for ever, according to the Christian sacred oracles.” What is
so inconvenient as to preach Bible truth in countries flagrant with
injustice? The Indians began to murmur; gave the English formal warning
to leave the lands within a set time, and as they did not move, began
to drive off their cattle. This was declared rebellion, the soldiery
were set on them, and 100_l._ a head proclaimed for their scalps.
This is called Governor Dummer’s war; but the most celebrated war was
that of Philip of Pokanoket, which occurred between this war and that
of the destruction of the Pequods. The cause of Philip’s war, which
broke out in 1675, and lasted upwards of a year, was exactly that of
this subsequent one, and indeed of every war of New England with the
Indians—the dissatisfaction of the Indians with the usurpation of the
whites. The New England people, religious people though they were,
seem to have been more irritable, more jealous, more regardless of the
rights of the Indians, and more quick and deadly in their vengeance
on any shew of spirit in the natives, than any other of the North
American colonies. The monstrous, and were it not for the testimony
of unimpeachable history, incredible sums offered for scalps by these
states, testify to the malignant spirit of revenge which animated
them. Even towards the Narragansets, their firmest and most constant
friends, who lived amongst them, they shewed an irritability and a
savage relentlessness that are to us amazing. On the faintest murmur of
any dissatisfaction of this tribe on account of their lands, or of any
other tribe making overtures of alliance to it, they were up in arms,
and ready to exterminate it. So early as 1642, they charged Miantinomo,
the great sachem of the Narragansets, with conspiring to raise the
Indians against them. The people of Connecticut immediately proposed,
without further proof or examination, to fall on the Indians and kill
them. This bloody haste was, however, withstood by Massachusets.[37]
They summoned Miantinomo before the court. He came, and it is
impossible not to admire his sedate and dignified bearing there. He
demanded that his accusers should be brought face to face, and that if
they could prove him guilty of conspiracy against the colony, he was
ready to suffer death; but if they could not, they should suffer the
same punishment. “His behaviour,” says Hutchinson, “was grave, and he
gave his answers with great deliberation and seeming ingenuity. _He
would never speak but in the presence_ of two of _his counsellors_,
that they might be witnesses of everything which passed. (No doubt he
had seen enough of ‘that pen and ink work,’ of which the Indians so
often complained). Two days were spent in treaty. He denied all that he
was charged with, and pretended that the reports to his disadvantage
were raised by Uncas, the sachem of the Mohegins, or some of his
people. He was willing to renew his former engagements; that if any of
the Indians, even the Niantics, who, he said, were as his own flesh and
blood, should do any wrong to the English, so as neither he nor they
could satisfy without blood, he would deliver them up, and leave them
to mercy. _The people of Connecticut put little confidence in him, and
could hardly be kept from falling upon him_, but were at last prevailed
upon by the Massachusets to desist for the present.”[38]
Poor Miantinomo did not long escape. Two years afterwards, in a war
with his enemy, Uncas, he was taken prisoner, and the colonists were
only too glad to have an opportunity of getting rid of a man of mind
and influence, who felt their aggressions and feared for his race—they
outdid the savage captor in their resentment against him. Instead
of interceding on his behalf and recommending mercy, by which they
might, at once, have set a Christian example, and have made a fast
friend, they procured his death. Uncas, with a generosity worthy of
the highest character, instead of killing his captive, as he was
entitled by the rules of Indian war, delivered him into the hands
of the New-Englanders, and the New-Englanders again returned him to
Uncas, desiring him to kill him, but without the usual tortures. It is
wonderful that they did not purchase his scalp, or that they excused
the torture; but a number of the English inhabitants went out and
gratified themselves with witnessing his death.[39]
It was not to be marvelled at that such general treatment, and such a
crowning deed exasperated the Narragansets to a dangerous degree. They
nourished a rooted revenge, which shewed itself on the breaking out
of Philip of Pokanoket’s war. They engaged to bring to his aid 4000
Indians.
Philip was one of the noblest specimens of the North American
Indian. He was of a fine and active person; accomplished in all
exercises of his nation, in war and hunting. He had that quick sense
of injuries, and that sense of the honour and rights of his people
which characterise the patriot; qualities which, though in the most
cultivated and enlightened mind they may hurry their possessor on
occasionally to sharp and vindictive acts, are the very essentials
of that lofty and noble disposition without which no great deed is
ever done. Had Philip contended for his country against its invaders
on anything like equal terms, he would have been its saviour,—the
naked Indians against the powers and resources of the English! It was
hopeless,—he could only become the Caractacus, or the Cassibelaunus of
his nation.
Philip has been painted by his enemies as a dreadful, perfidious, and
cruel wretch;—but had Philip been the survivor how would he have
painted them? With their shameless encroachments, their destruction of
Indians, their blood-money, and their scalps, purchased at 1000_l._
each! Philip had the deepest causes of resentment. His father,
Massasoit, had received the strangers and sold them land. They speedily
compelled him to sign a deed, in which by “that pen and ink work” which
the Indians did not understand, but which they soon learned to know
worked them the most cruel wrongs, they had made him to acknowledge
himself and his subjects the subjects of King James. Philip denied that
his father had any idea of the meaning of such a treaty,—any idea of
surrendering to the English more than the land he sold them; or if he
had done so, that he had any right to give away the liberties of his
nation and posterity; the government amongst the Indians not being
hereditary, but elective. Philip, however, was compelled to retract
and renounce such doctrines in another public document. But the moment
he became at liberty, he held himself, and very justly, free from the
stipulations of a compulsory deed.
But these were not all Philip’s grievances. His only and elder brother,
Wamsutta, or Alexander, for the entertainment of similar patriotic
sentiments, had been seized in his own house by ten armed men sent by
Governor Winslow, and carried before him as a caitiff, though he was at
that time the powerful sachem of the Narragansets, his father being
dead. The outrage and insult had such an effect upon the high-spirited
youth, that they threw him into a fever, which speedily proved
fatal.[40]
They were these and the like injuries that drove Philip to concert
that union of the Indians which, in 1675, alarmed New England. We need
not follow the particulars of the war. It was hastened by a premature
disclosure; and Philip has been always taxed as a murderer for putting
to death John Sausaman, a renegade Indian who betrayed the plot to the
English. The man was a confessed and undoubted traitor, and his death
was exactly what the English would have inflicted, and was justified,
not merely by the summary proceeding in such cases of the Indians,
but by the laws of _civilized war_, if such an odd contradiction of
terms may pass. Philip, after a stout resistance, and after performing
prodigies of valour, was chased from swamp to swamp, and at length shot
by another traitor Indian, who cut off his hand and head, and brought
them to the English. His head was exposed on a gibbet at Plymouth for
twenty years; his hand, known by a particular scar, was exhibited in
savage triumph, and his mangled body refused burial. His only son, a
mere boy, was sold into slavery.
It was during this war that the settlers lived in such a state of
continual alarm from the Indians, and such adventures and passages
of thrilling interest took place, as will for ever furnish topics of
conversation in that country. It was then that the congregation was
alarmed while in church at Hadley, in Massachusets, on a fast-day by
the Indians, and were compelled to leave their devotions to defend
themselves, when they were surprised by seeing a grave and commanding
personage, whom they had not before noticed, assume the command, lead
them to victory, and as suddenly again disappear. This person was
afterwards found to be Goffe, one of the English regicide judges, then
hiding in that neighbourhood. These facts Mr. Cooper has made good use
of in his story of “The Borderers.”
But the facts of more importance to our history are, that in this war
3000 Indians were said to be destroyed. The Narragansets alone, were
reduced from 2000 to about 100 men. After the peace was restored 400
Indians were ordered to assemble at Major Walker’s, at Catchecho, 200
of whom were culled as most notorious, some of them put to death, and
the rest sent abroad and sold as slaves. Yet all these severities and
disasters to the Indians did not extinguish their desire to resist
the aggressions of the whites. On all sides, the Tarrateens, the
Penobscots, the Five Nations, and various other tribes, continued to
harass them; filling them with perpetual fears, and inflicting awful
cruelties and devastations on the solitary borderers. These were the
necessary fruits of that rancorous spirit with which the harshness
and injustice of the settlers had inspired them. Randolph, writing to
William Penn from New England in 1688, says—“This barbarous people,
the Indians, were now evilly treated by this government, who made it
their business to encroach upon their lands, and by degrees to drive
them out of all. That was the grounds and the beginning of the last
war.” And that was the ground of all the wars waged in the country
against this unhappy people.