Boston City (part 31 of 67)

" At a meeting of the freemen of this town upon full warning, - upon reading and publishing his Majesty's declaration, dated 26th of July, 1683, relating to the (^no warranto issued out against the charter and privileges claimed by the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, it being put to the vote whether the freemen were minded that the General Court should make a full submission and entire resignation of our charter and privileges therein granted to his Majesty's pleasure, as intimated in the said declaration now read, the question was resolved in the negative, nemine contradicaite*' -

During all the anxious period when the charter was in danger, the town constantly instructed her deputies to the General Court to do nothing to abridge the liberties of the countr>^ and to give their consent to no laws repugnant to the charter.^

In the period of misgovernment after the first charter was vacated, and before the second charter was granted, the hand of arbitrary power did not spare the inhabitants of Boston ; and it is significant of the changed condition of things to read in the town records a formal confirmation, by the President and Council, of rates voted by the town for finishing the alms house and for maintaining the poor, and of an order made many years before for regulating the manner in which gunpowder should be kept.* It is no matter for surprise, but it is one for deep satisfaction, that Boston was foremost in the resistance to Andros, and that the New England Revolution of 1689 was the result of a great popular uprising in Boston. With the loss of the colony charter one period in the history of Boston, as well as of Massachusetts, closed : with the grant of the province charter a new era opened.

In reviewing the details which have been brought together here to illustrate the relations of the town to the colony down to the end of the colonial period, no one can fail to be impressed, above all else, by the slow and steady growth of the institutions with whose later developments we are familiar. The founders of the colony and of the town brought with them no elaborate plan of colonial or town government; and the institutions which they established here were the natural growth of the circumstances in which they were placed. It is needless now to discuss the question whether the colony charter merely created a trading corporation to reside in England and transact all its business there, or whether it conferred on the company the power necessary to establish a colonial government here and to make all necessary laws under it not repugnant to the laws of England. The deliberation with which the transfer of the charter to New England was ordered shows that Winthrop and his associates accepted the latter view ; and they and their successors acted on it until the charter was vacated. The charter was, it is true, only a clumsy and ill-contrived foundation on which to erect such a superstructure as was built up here in half a century ; but as each necessity arose for the exercise of new powers the magistrates and the people deduced the requisite authority from the acknowledged provisions of the charter. This development went forward in two directions, - one toward local self-government in the management of town affairs, and the other toward the establishment of a strong central authority which recognized no appeal to the mother country. Thus, by slow degrees, the colony became

In this gradual development of free institutions during the colonial period Boston had a conspicuous part As the most important town in the colony, in respect both to wealth and population, she could not fail to exert a large influence in colonial politics. There are no records now extant to show when the first board of selectmen was established in Boston ; but such a body was in existence in September, 1634, when the town records begin, and Winthrop, who had been Governor in the preceding year and was now one of the Assistants, was a member.^ This fact shows how close were the political relations of the colony and the town. It was only a single step from the office of governor to that of selectman. Not a few of the questions which most largely influenced the course of colonial politics were primarily Boston questions. The disarmament of the followers of Wheelright, in 1637, was the result of the controversy in the Boston church over the theological speculations of Mrs. Hutchinson. The separation of the magistrates and deputies into two bodies, in 1643-44, was finally brought about by the strong feeling which had been aroused by a series of lawsuits in Boston over a stray pig.^ Wilson and Cotton were acknowledged forces in shaping the colonial polity ; at a later period the Mathers showed that the Boston ministers had lost none of their interest in politics; and, it may be added, the first governor under the province charter owed his appointment to the good offices of Increase Mather, the minister of a Boston church.

So close, indeed, were the relations of the colony and the town, and so nearly identical were their interests during the earlier part of the colonial period, that it is not easy to write the history of Boston without writing also the history of Massachusetts. But as the number of towns multiplied, and the aggregate population and wealth increased and became more widely distributed, the limits of the central power and of the local power were more exactly defined. The General Court confined itself more and more to matters of general importance; and the town was left more and more to regulate her own afTairs. The relations of the town and the colony changed somewhat in character. There was little of direct interference on either side ; but neither the colony nor the province ever relinquished the authority which might be claimed under the respective charters, and the town never ceased to take the liveliest interest in all matters which concerned the other towns as well as herself. A reciprocal influence took the place of the more direct and positive relations which had existed at first; and from the time when the extent of the powers which the town might rightfully exercise was defined with some approach to accuracy, the separate history of the town and of the colony or province may be traced along parallel lines, with little fear of confusion of statement.

* [Cf. Snow's Boston, p. 56, and the facsimile Winthrop's Lift of ydhn Winthrop, 1630-49^ of the page in another chapter. - Ed.] ch. xviii., and in his chapter in this volume,

By George Edward Ellis

IT seems to have been allotted to the first colonists in the settlement of Boston to establish the precedent which has ever since, in the successive advances of our race over the continent, been adopted as an example, or regarded as certified by experience, - that civilized men and barbarians cannot live peacefully as neighbors. Whether this issue was prejudiced at the start by ill advice or wrong action, and whether a different principle or method in the treatment of the Indians, by those whose ruthless dealing with them justified itself by the assumed necessity of their extinction or removal from proximity to a white settlement, would have in any way modified the subsequent relations between the aboriginal and the intruding races on this continent, it might be profitless now to inquire. Certain it is that two facts of a most decisive significance are certified to us by full historical testimony of the past, and by the course of things which has been followed up to this current year of time. The first is, that when the magistrates and fighting men of Boston came into actual warfare with Indian tribes, even at a considerable distance from their own original plantations, they acted as if under the stress of a necessity to secure a complete riddance of their red foes, putting as many of them as possible to death, and reducing the remnant to abject and humiliating slavery, - a few being scattered among the settlements, while the greater number were transported to be sold in foreign plantations. The second fact is, that as the white men, .steadily advancing their borders across the vast expanses of continent towards the further ocean, over each mountain range and valley, have come in contact with survivors of tribes previously driven to refuges in the West, or with new hordes of wild roamers, the precedent has been invariably followed. There has been no sharing of the heritage with the original occupants ; they have had to move out and to move on. With consummate assurance the abler race has spoken its command to the savage in the tone and language of the old Prophet, - " The place is too strait for me ; give room that I may dwell."

This assurance of the right, as well as of the ability, of the civilized man to dispossess the red man of his territory has rested itself, from the time VOL. I. - 31.

of the first foreign discovery of this continent down to recent years, upon two grounds of justification, quite different in their character, but each of them, under the circumstances of the times and the views of those who adopted it, believed to be of axiomatic truth. One of these was simply a matter of opinion, firmly and devoutly held, indeed, but still only a way of thinking which took for granted its own rightfulness. The other ground of the white man's justification - that which came in season to serve when the former might be questioned or discredited, and which abundantly supplied its place - may be regarded as certifying itself by actual and decisive experiment in continued conflict.

Amid all the sharp and bitter variances between the creeds of the Romanist and the Puritan, there was one point of pious belief held in common between the sanguinary Spanish invaders of the more tropical realms of this continent and the stern Protestant heretics who planted their colonies on the rough borders of the Bay of Massachusetts. Equally, and, so to speak,, honestly, were they assured that as Christians they had by the law of Nature and of " Grace " dominant rights over heathen, not only to the soil but to everything beside, including even existence. The Spaniard said to the wild native, " Be converted or die;" without, however, allowing time or mercy for the saving process. The Puritan avowed it to be his main intent to convert the savage, but was too dilatory or too incflicient in the attempt for its success. But from the moment when the Puritan had experience of Indian warfare, the savage became to him rather a heathen to be put to the slaughter than a subject of salvation by the method of the Gospel. Modern readers of our early local literature sometimes find it diflicult to relieve the writers of it from the imputation of the grossest bigotry and hypocrisy, when, without misgiving, regret, or one breathing of tender human yearning for their wretched victims, they speak of themselves as merely fulfilling the will and purpose of heaven against heathen outcasts, children of the Devil. But we cannot question the thorough sincerity of the belief which found expression in these dismal and to us often revolting declarations. It was of the very fibre and texture, of the very vigor and essence of the faith of the Puritan exiles, that, in coming to occupy these wild realms where the imbruted savages roamed, they were fortified by the same Divine rights and held to the same solemn obligations as were the chosen people of old, of whom they read so trustfully in their Bibles. It was one of the profoundest and most vital sources -of their courage, heroism, and constancy in their enterprise, their refuge and solace in all their straits and hazards, that God was leading them and using them for his own purposes to reclaim a blasted region of the earth and to set up his kingdom there. They, too, were to dispossess and drive out the heathen, and to put them to the sword, to form no truce with them, and to exterminate even their offspring. When that stanch old Puritan captain. John Mason, had burned up some seven himdrcd of the Pequots in their own fort and wigwams, and the wretched victims were writhing impaled upon their own palisades, he wrote of the scene, " Thus

The Indians Of Eastern Massachusetts

But even while the Puritan was finding a full justification of his exterminating work against the Indians as doomed and uncovcnanted heathen, another conviction grew strong in his mind, which has ever since, and never more effectually than to-day, furnished to the civilized man a justification for the same course against the savage tribes as his border settlements advance towards them. The different mode of life, and the different uses which the land and the water-courses of the earth are made to serve for the white and the red man, make it impracticable and indeed impossible for them to live even within miles of intervening space in the same territory. The savage needs that Nature should be and should forever remain in its wild, primeval condition. The n^itive forests must stand in their dark and tangled luxuriance, sheltering the game and bearing fruit and berry. They must be unopened by highways ; coursed only by leafy and mossy bypaths. The winds and breezes must not be tainted by the efHuvia of humanity ; they must be silent, except only from their own murmurs or the gusts of storms. The waters must be lefl to flow freely, that the fish may visit them for spawning. The dam or mill which obstructs their course, and defiles or clogs them with rubbish or saw-dust, at once destroys their value to the savage. 13ut the white man's first necessity is a clearing. His axe breaks the solitude. The wild creatures in the forest are to him not only game for his partial subsistence, but vermin destructive of his flocks and poultry. The white man never by preference would live wholly on the food of the woods. The meat of the ox, the sheep, and the swine is far more congenial to his palate and physical system than that of the native wilderness. He must fence and plant grounds, raise cereal crops, textile fibres and domesticated animals, and open highways over his scattered settlements. He must put the watercourses to use, must dam the streams, and raise the clatter of the mill. The white man, in the regions where the heats of summer and the frosts and snows of winter divide the year, must be thoughtful and provident. He must fill his barn and cellar, and attach himself permanently to one spot. As now, in our most secure and crowded rural communities, a strolling tramp is an object of suspicion and fear, so on all early and recent border settlements the known proximity of few or many vagrant savages, prowling in tlie shadows of the forest and bent on ventures for stealing the live-stock, or firing the corn-rick, or frightening the inmates of the cabin, was an experience to which the white man never could reconcile himself. So the condition was very soon certified, and has never since been qualified, that if the white man resolves to occupy any region of territory, the red man, if in transient possession, must move wide- away. From this anticipation of what proved to be the experience of the first colonists, we start for the beginning of their story.

We are naturally prompted to ask, with what expectations and intentions as regards their relations with the natives whom they might find here the first colonists to the Bay prepared to meet them? On this matter there is to be noted some confusion of statement. Over and over again, in very positive and earnest terms, the purpose is avowed, as indeed the prompting and consecrating aim of the enterprise in the Colony, to civilize and Christianize the barbarous heathen inhabiting here. But, again, we meet with frequent references to the fact that before the planters left England they had learned that the natives in these parts had been almost exterminated by some desolating plague or disease, so that they were not likely to meet with any embarrassment from such a remnant of them as they might encounter.

Governor Cradock, in his letter to Endicott, March, 1629, bids him to " be not unmindful of the main end of our Plantation, by endeavoring to bring the Indians to the knowledge of the Gospel," and to keep a watchful eye ov^r our own people so that they may be just and courteous to the Indians, winning their love and respect and getting some of their children to be trained in learning and religion. The Charter emphatically recognizes this obligation towards the natives ; and those who availed themselves of the privileges which it bestowed professed with seeming sincerity, and with reiteration, that they expected to be missionaries of the Christian religion, and heralds of civilization to the heathen.

It is observable also, that, up to the early period of fierce hostilities between the Massachusetts colonists and the natives, the former, when brought under question in England for their proceedings here, were generally glad to lay the utmost stress possible upon their missionary errand and purposes. None the less, however, is it true that the colonists in this immediate neighborhood expected to find but very few, and those a feeble remnant, in possession here, and were persuaded that the fewer of them there were, the better for both parties. In the lack of particular and authentic information of the condition of the natives before the settlement at Plymouth and that at Salem, we have very imperfect knowledge about the desolating plague which is said to have well nigh extirpated the natives just previously. Increase Mather distinguishes between a plague in Plymouth Colony and the small-pox in this region. Bradford says that the Pilgrims, before leaving Leyden, expected to find but a scanty number of natives on their arrival. The patriarch White, in the Planter's Plea, says : " The land affords void ground " for more people than England can spare, " on account of a desolation from a three years' plague, twelve or sixteen years past, which swept away most of the inhabitants all along the sea-coast, and in some places utterly consumed man, woman, and child, so that there is no person left to lay claim to the soyle which they possessed." In other places, twenty or thirty miles up into the land, he says, not one in a hundred is left. Those of them who are left, he promises, we will teach providence and industry, which in their wastefulness and idleness they much need. Also, we shall defend them from the ** Tarantines " savages, who have been wont to destroy and desolate them, '* and have wonderfully weakened and kept them low in times past." But yet this stanch friend of the colonists, re- minding himself of the stress which he had previously laid upon their purpose to convert the Indians, feels bound to meet the supposed objection as to how this is to be done, if they have been so nearly killed off. He therefore pleads that it is easier to begin the work with a few, and then to spread it to places better peopled. Besides, he suggests, there are enough of them near by in the Narragansett country. He grants that no progress had been made in converting the Indians in Virginia; and that in New Plymouth, in ten years, not one of them had been converted. He accounts this to the difficulty presented by the Indian language, in which, he naively suggests, the whites easily acquire enough facility for purposes of trade and for temporal matters, but not for making themselves understood about " things spiritual." Mr. Higginson, after his arrival in Salem, wrote in 1629, " The Indians are not able to make use of the one fourth part of the land ; neither have they any settled places, as towns, to dwell in, nor any grounds, as they challenge for their own possession, but change their habitation from place to place." Thfe good minister made these somewhat fallacious statements in perfectly good faith, seeming not to have recognized the peculiarities in the habits of the savages just noted, as to their not confining themselves to any fixed residences, and their need of vast spaces of territory for their wild roaming life.

We have no means of any trustworthy information as to the extent and effects inland from the coast border of the desolation made by the pestilence just previous to the coming of the colonists. The small-pox renewed its ravages in the immediate neighborhood very soon after their arrival. It is on record that many of the whites pitifully befriended the red sufferers in their bewilderment under loathsome disease when their own kith and kin deserted them in dismay. It is said that in some spots the ground was strewn with unburied human bones. The most careful computation and inference from facts that afterwards came to the knowledge of the whites put the estimate of the number of the savages then within the present bounds of New England, where now ar^ more than four millions of population, at about thirty thousand. This estimate is now believed to be an excessive one.* printed in the appendix of the Congregational ** Briefe Observations of the Customes," apl>oard*s edition of Morton's Mentorial ; the Pe- pended to Roger Williams's A'ey, reprinted in

New England; Qor^ts, Briefe Narration ; Win- gansett Club, 1866. Palfrey says "the only a athrop, N'ew England ; I (igginson. New England thentic |)ortrait of an historical Indian " is one

Under this somewhat hazy and confused state of mind as to the numbers, disposition, and probable attitude of the Indians towards them, with the kindly and of civilizing and Christianizing them, while still with the hope that there were but few of them, the colonists planted themselves on this soil, and prepared, as the stronger party, for the encounter. And now, on the other side, we have to inform ourselves, as satisfactorily as our means will admit, about the ideas and feelings of the Indians towards the white comers on their first acquaintance. We have on this point (on this, as on every other occasion when it comes before us) remind ourselves that the Indians have no historian of their own race, no one to state their cause, to stand for their side, or to represent their view on a single controversy or struggle between them and the whites. It is pleasant, however, to recognize the fact that the Indians from the first have never lacked friends, pleaders, or champions among the race which has spoiled them. By such men, just, candid, and prompted by considerate and merciful sentiments, facts have been left on record for us, and avowals and admissions of oppressive dealings by the whites have been made, from which we are able to gather as fair a statement of the Indian side in every quarrel and conflict as might have been looked for from the pen of an Indian advocate and historian. Our own historians, indeed, have not in all cases so guarded and qualified their relations of dug up on Cotton (Pemberton) Hill, has been taken to show that the peninsula was at one time well populated ; but few or no evidences of that kind have been disclosed in the general excavation of the land which has from time to time been made all over the territory of original Boston. - Ed.]

1 [This, one of the most fervent appeals for the Indian, is taken from the original manuscript of the centennial ode delivered by Charles Spraguc at the celebration in 1830 ; and for the privilege of making the fac-simile we are indebted to the courtesy of the son of the |>oet, Charles J. Sprague, Esq., of Boston. - Ed.]

The Indians Of Eastern Massachusetts

the causes and the conduct of the English wars with the natives as to conceal from us the evidence that the civilized man was generally the aggressor, and that though he expressed horror and disgust at the barbarous and revolting atrocities of savage warfare, his own skill and cruelty in wreaking vengeance hardly vindicated his milder humanity.

The testimony on record in every case is complete, and without exception, to two facts, the significance of which, as setting forth the relations between the two races on this continent, can hardly be exaggerated. First, it is in evidence from the writings of all the voyagers, explorers, Jind colonists coming hither from Europe, beginning with those of the Spanish discoverers, that at every point along our whole coast, and on the shore of every inhabited island, the new-comers met a kindly reception from the natives. The sea-worn, feeble, and hungry adventurers, weakened by confinement and illness, craving fresh water, meat, and green vegetables, were made free partakers of the rude hospitality of the red man. In many instances, well authenticated, they would have perished from starvation without such succor. Second, it is also in evidence that in every case, with very rare exceptions, the kindness and hospitality of the savages were ill requited. Oppressive or cruel treatment was the base return. Nor do the exceptions which are to be allowed for present themselves in the journals of the early visits made to the New England coasts by English adventurers. On the contrary, the wrong was committed here by them with all its aggravations. Natives enticed on board English fishing or trading vessels here were in three instances kidnapped, carried off, and sold into slavery. This was the method of the introduction of the white man to the red man.

There are frequent and positive affirmations scattered over the writings of the first colonists of Massachusetts, that in no single instance did they assume the possession or occupancy of any parcel of land without the free consent and the fair compensation of the natives. The claim thus asserted, as if for the quieting of conscience, occasionally has the. tone of a boast, as if indicating a supererogatory merit. At any rate the new-comers do not appear to have felt any reproaches at having displaced the original occupants. Among the grievances which the magistrates had against Roger Williams, in the first issue of contention opened by him, was his disputing the right of the English monarch to grant a patent to lands here without a recognition of the prior claims of the natives. It is observable, also, that, when under the so-called usurpation of Andros and the overthrow of the colony charter all the titles to land held by it were put in peril, the magistrates of Boston made haste to secure a confirmation of the deed of the peninsula from the grandson of the old Sachem.

If we examine closely the matter and contents of the contracts by which these purchases of land from the Indians were secured, and the consideration paid for them, we must keep in view the relations of the respective parties, the value of wild land to each of them, and the uses to which it had been and was to be put. It is evident that the whites regarded the territorial rights of the Indians, in their mode of occupancy for the time being of any particular region, as at best but vague and slender, while the way in which they scoured over it without in any way improving it, except by an occasional cornfield, did not insure ownership according to any test recognized by the law of nations. Our romantic notions of the aborigines assign to them in their tribes the long possession for generations of ancestral hunting-grounds and burial-places. Well-certified facts that have been accumulating from all our knowledge of the relations of the Indian tribes on this continent before and since the coming hither of Europeans assure us that there is very much of mere fancy in those notions. In very rare cases, if, indeed, in any, - except as regards the Five Nations or Iroquois, of central New York, who had themselves farther back been intruders and conquerors, displacing previous occupants, - is there evidence of any long and quiet tenure of the same regions by the same tribe of savages. There was among them an endless and hardly intermittent internecine warfare. The tribes were constantly displacing each other. At the time of the colonization of New England, the Indians on its soil had been and were at feud ; some of them had conquered, snbjugated, and brought under tribute their weaker neighbors ; and of once powerful tribes there remained but feeble remnants. As the whites came to the knowledge of these facts, they of course naturally drew the inference that any particular clan or tribe who happened to be here or there were transient roamers rather than old-time inheritors. In 1633 the Court ordered " that the Indians had a just right to such lands as they possessed and improved by subduing the same. Gen. i. 28, ix. i." The condition demanded was actual occupation by tillage. The accepted rule was vacuum domicilium cedit occupanti, Plymouth devoted several necks of land to the Indians, and pronounced them inalienable.

The whites regarded land strictly for its uses, and in a wilderness these were substitutes for title-deeds. They recognized the right of the old Patriarch, returning with his family from a sojourn in Egypt during a famine, to repossess himself of Canaan and to drive out the heathen, because of a title to it assured by the three ancient tokens of ownership in the altar of Bethel, the well of Jacob, and the tomb at Macphelah. The Indians raised and left no such token, no land-mark, structure, or betterment. Occupancy, improvements, and an added value to field and stream were the white man's tests of rightful tenure. They saw no evidences of these in the vast forests and reedy meadows where the Indians lurked. The Indians simply wasted everything within their reach. They skimmed what was on the earth's surface. They required enormous spaces of wilderness for their mode of existence, - depths in which the game for their subsistence, and the creatures and the food on which that game might subsist, roamed free for natural propagation.

Under these circumstances, while wc smile as in ridicule or contempt at the trifling compensation paid to the Indians in a purchase covenant for their lands, we must remember that the standard of values was quite unlike our modern estimates. The deeds which are preserved, and the transactions on record from the earliest days, tell us of thousands and tens of thousands of acres being transferred for the consideration of a few utensils ; tools, gewgaws, yards of cloth, blankets, or coats. But an implement of iron or steel, a pot, kettle, spade, axe, or hatchet, was to an Indian the representative of an untold value. It extended and intensified his own natural resources, as steam and labor-saving machines reinforce the abilities of civilized man. Probably, too, the whites, in many cases, regarded the title-deeds of lands thus transferred to them as of very dubious authenticity and validity. It was really questionable if the chief or sachem of a tribe had such a vested right in any particular portion of territory as to have authority, on the consideration of a few perishable articles, to alienate it for all time from his temporary subjects and their posterity. If the Indians really owned it in any way equivalent to our own tenure of possession, it is evident that, if not a permanent annuity of perpetual benefit with a share to all, at least some better mode of compensation than that of a trifling gift so soon to perish in the using should have balanced the transfer.

It soon appeared, however, in many cases, that the Indians supposed that these deeds of theirs to the whites merely conferred upon the latter a right of joint occupancy with themselves. They seem to have had no idea that they had shut themselves out for all time from the liberty of roaming over their lands. King Philip, though he had been lavishly free in his gifts of large areas of land to the men of Plymouth, soon came to make bitter complaints against the white man's clearings and fences, as disabling the red man from using the regions in common.

There is no early contemporary notice of any claim set up by Indians on the score of their territorial rights on the peninsula of Boston, nor of any negotiations for a purchase or payment by the whites. It was only after more than a half century had elapsed since its settlement, when, in 1684, such claim was asserted and satisfied, that we learn that it had been advanced some time previously. Finding the spot desolate, except as Mr. Blackstone had a lonely residence here, the whites inferred that its former occupants had perished by the plague, or had deserted it, so that they themselves were free to take possession. Nor do we know of the occasion which prompted the demand for remuneration when it was subsequently made. There is in the Suffolk Registry a copy of an Indian deed of Boston, recorded in 1708. It appears that at a town-meeting on June 18, 1685, a citizen of Boston, who was joined by some associates, was charged with the office of purchasing any claim, *' legal or pretended," which the Indians might advance to '* Deare Island, the Necke of Boston, or any parte thereof." The Indian chief in the negotiation was Wampatuck, by the English called Charles Josias, grandson of Chickataubut, who, the deed recites, "upon the first coming of the English, for encouragement thereof, did grant, sell, alienate, and confirm unto them and their assigns forever all that Neck of land, in order to their settling and building a Town there, now known by the name of Boston, as it is environed by the Sea, and by the line of Roxbury, and the island called Deer Island, about two leagues easterly from Boston, &c., - which have been quietly possessed by the said English for the space of about five-and-fifty years last past." This deed - on the consideration of " a valuable sum of money," the amount not being stated - was signed by the marks of the chief and some of his Indian " counsellors," witnessed and acknowledged before magistrates.^ It is singular that neither the Court Records, Winthrop, nor any other writer at the time make any reference to the earlier transaction with Chickataubut, of whom, however, Winthrop has frequent mention during the three years in which he lived after the arrival of the English. Intimations have been dropped that this deferred record of a bargain with the Indians for the absolute ownership of the peninsula was shrewdly contrived by the astute authorities of the town, as they were trembling over the royal challenging of their Colony Charter, the fall of which might render worthless all grants of parcels of territory that depended upon legislation under it. Chickataubut resided at Neponset. As there is no evidence that he ever bestowed the land on the English by formal transfer, so it is certain that he never made objection to its occupancy by them, and that he never molested them. On the contrary, he seemed to welcome their presence, and put himself under their patronage. Such is the tenure of the white man's home on this ancient soil.

There was never any serious collision on the spot between the natives and the occupants of Boston and its immediate neighborhood. The whites had to seek and destroy their enemies in places distant from these scenes when hostilities raged between them. There were occasional alarms in the early years, and measures of protection - like a night-watch, and orders requiring the colonists to have their arms in readiness - showed that the people were at times anxious and always on their guard. Very soon, however, the whites came to understand the relations between themselves and the remnant of the natives scattered in the neighborhood, and felt that they were reasonably secure from harm. The apprehension was rather from the mischief that might be done by strolling and pilfering individuals or small parties in the night or in the woods, the firing of scattered dwellings, or the murder of a traveller, than from any assault in force. Before Winthrop's party had occupied the peninsula, it had been visited, and the immediate surroundings by land and water had been explored, by a boat-load of men from Plymouth.^ There was not a single Indian found at the time on this

> [This original deed is now in the possession v. 516, that, May 20, 16S6, a committee (Samuel of General Charles G. Loring of Boston, and by Nowcll, John Safiin, Timothy Prout) was aphis ]>ermission is here* given in heliotype, much pointed to receive from Rawson, the secretary, reduced. It is printed verbatim in the Muss, all such pai)ers as referred to the negotiations ///>/. Soc. Proc.^ March, 1879, having been less to preserve the charter and to the Indian titles accurately printed before by Snow in his Hist, of the land, and to preserve them, - the "Maaof Boston, Cf. Drake's Boston^ p. 456. Mr. sachusetis books and papers "being about this Charles Deanc has examined the (|ucstion of the time transferred to the custody of Andros and comparative validity of the Indian and patent his secretaries. SnioaU Papirs/\, 168. - Ed.] titles to land, in the Mass, Hist. Soc, Feb- « [This visit is recounted in Mr. Adams's ruawyt 1873. It appears by the Mass, Rtcords^ chapter of the present volume. - Ed] peninsula. Some deserted wigwams were seen in various places. Weak and sparse groups of natives were met, or traces of their lingering presence were observed, up the banks of the Mystic and the Charles. The first sight of white men seemed always to alarm an Indian, and he was inclined to run away and hide himself But the natives were generally reassured by a sign of amity. We read of some friendly manifestations, such as the exchange of a bass for ah English biscuit, and of communications in answer to questions so far as the parties could make themselves understood. Occasionally some native would appear wearing some article of European apparel, or having a foreign implement or tool, showing that the random intercourse of previous years, between foreign adventurers and fishermen, had already heralded the time for deliberate colonization. The people of Boston were soon well assured of the security of their own position. The easily-guarded peninsula hanging by the slender stem of a narrow neck of land to Roxbury, with tide-waters and flats nearly surrounding it, was safe against the artifices of Indian warfare. When settlements were made in the interior, the trees which were felled for a clearing were used for a stockade, - as, for instance, the present College Yard and Common at Cambridge were originally enclosed and fortified by palisades, the trees being driven closely into the ground, and their tops united by birch withes. Within this enclosure the people, when alarmed, took refuge, and the cattle, which browsed outside by day, were driven at night.^

Some months 'elapsed after the settlement before the whites had any intercourse with others of the natives than those who harbored north of Charles River. At the end of March, 163 1, Winthrop mentions that " Chicatabot came from Neponset on the south, with his sannops and squaws," and presented him with a hogshead of Indian corn. The Governor gave the party a dinner, with a cup of sack and beer, and to the men some tobacco. Three of the party remained over night. " Chickatabot being in English clothes, the Governour set him at his own table, where he behaved himself as soberly as an Englishman. The next day, after dinner, he returned home, the Governour giving him cheese and pease, and a mug and some other small things." The sachem repeated his visit in less than a month, wishing to trade with the Governor for an English suit. But Winthrop, reminding him that it was not seemly " for sagamores to truck," gave orders to his tailor, and had the chief " put into a very good new suit from head to foot." Food being put upon the table, the chief refused to eat till the Governor had said grace ; and after meat he was desired by the chief to return thanks. Winthrop received, as a return present, " two large skins of coat beaver." The Governor and the Court evidently tried to maintain relations of amity and equity with the natives near them. If a white man wronged an Indian he was duly punished, and required to make restitution. If the Indian was the trespasser, he in his turn suffered ; and if chastisement was the penalty decreed, another Indian was made to inflict it.

And here, with whatever of relief the fact may afford us in a review of the fierce conflict with the natives, at a distance in which soldiers sent from Boston had a full share, it is to be frankly stated that the feuds and quarrels of contending Indian tribes furnished the occasion of the first, and one of the most ruthless, of our wars with the natives. Only because Indians were set against Indians, giving opportunity to the whites to find most effective allies in their forest warfare, could the early colonists from Spain, France, or England have been so uniformly the conquerors. It may safely be affirmed that if the natives of this continent had been at peace among themselves, and had offered a united resistance to the first feeble bands of European intruders, its occupation would have been long deferred.

The region extending from the bounds of Rhode Island to the banks of the Hudson was at the time of the colonization held in strips of territory mainly by three tribes of the natives, who had long had feuds among themselves and with other tribes. They were the Narragansetts, the Mohegans, and the Pequots. The Mohegans were then tributaries of the Pequots, and were restive under subjection to their fierce and warlike conquerors, who were estimated to number at the time a thousand fighting men. Fair and fertile meadows, ponds, fresh and salt streams, and virgin forests made the region rich and attractive. To the mind and eye of the Puritan it would present itself as a portion of the heritage which God had given to his children, especially to his elect, which in this fulness of time was no longer to be scoured over by scant hordes of heathen barbarians, but to be turned to the uses of a thriftful civilization under the Gospel. The way in which this end was to be brought about would depend entirely upon the relation and attitude in which the savages should put themselves to the whites ; whether a friendly and docile one, - which would make them partners in a profitable trade, and easy subjects of conversion, - or one of hostility and resistance, using their own resources and modes of defensive and offensive warfare. The policy of the whites was to aggravate the dissensions of the tribes, and to make alliance with one or more of them. Winthrop records in March, 163 1, the visit to Boston of a Connecticut Indian, probably a Mphegan, who invited the English to come and plant near the river, and who oflfered presents, with the promise of a profitable trade. His object proved to be to engage the interest of the whites against the Pequots. His errand was for the time unsuccessful. Further advances of a similar character were made afterwards, the result being to persuade the English that, sooner or later, they would need to interfere as umpires, and must use discretion in a wise regard to what would prove to be for their own interest. In 1633 the Pequots had savagely mutilated and murdered a party of English traders, who, under Captain Stone, of Virginia, had gone up the Connecticut. The Boston magistrates had instituted measures to call the Pequots to account, but nothing effectual was done. The Dutch had a fort on the river near Hartford, and the English had built one at its mouth. In 1636 several settlements had been made in Connecticut by the English from Cambridge, Dorchester, and other places. John Oldham, of Watertown, had in that year been murdered, while on a trading voyage, by some Indians belonging on Block Island. To avenge this act our magistrates sent Endicott, as general, with a body of ninety men, with orders to kill all the male Indians on that island, sparing only the women and little children. He accomplished his bloody work only in part; but after destroying all the corn-fields and wigwams, he turned to hunt the Pequots on the main. After this expedition, which simply exasperated the Pequots, they made a desperate effort to induce the Narragansetts to come into a league with them against the English. It seemed for a while as if they would succeed in this, and the consequences would doubtless have been most disastrous to the whites. The scheme was thwarted largely through the wise and friendly intervention of Roger Williams, whose diplomacy was made effective by the confidence which his red neighbors had in him. The Narragansett messengers then entered into a friendly league with the English in Boston.^ All through the winter of 1637 the Pequots continued to pick off the whites in their territory, and they mutilated, tortured, roasted, and murdered at least thirty victims, becoming more and more vindictive and cruel in their doings. There were then in Connecticut some two hundred and fifty Englishmen, and, as hUs been said, about a thousand Pequot ** braves." The authorities in Connecticut resolutely started a military organization, giving the command to the redoubtable John Mason, a Low-Country soldier, who had recently gone from Dorchester. Massachusetts and Plymouth contributed their quotas, having as allies the Mohegans, of whose fidelity they had fearful misgivings, but who proved constant though not very effective. Of the hundred and sixty men raised by Massachusetts, only about

> [This was in October, 1636. The famed in 4 Mass. Hist. CoU. vi. Cf. Arnold's Khode Miantonomoh was the chief who came to Boston. Island^ i. ch. iii. - En.| i. 236. A view of the monument erected to in Sparks's series of biographies. He had lived Miantonomoh's memory is given in Bryant and in Dorchester from 1630 to 1635. The lines of ^ his descendants are traced in the N. E.

* in the Afemoir o/Afrs. Mary Anna Boardman^ New Haven, 1849. Stonghton was also a Dorchester man, and commanded the expedition that sailed from Boston in June, 1637, to follow up the successes of Gay's United States^ ii. 95. As to the form of Mason. Gardiner was now a Connecticut man, M iantonomoh's name, see Dr. Trumbull in the but he had arrived in Boston and had been em- ///>/. Mag. ii. 205. letters of Roger Williams ployed as an engineer in planning the works on at this time are given in the "Winthrop Papers" Fort Hill in 1632. There is an account of him twenty, under Captain Underbill, - a good fighter, but a sorry scamp, - reacbed the scene in season to join with Mason in surprising the unsuspecting and sleeping Pequots in one of their forts near the Mystic. Fire, lead, and steel, with the infuriated vengeance of Puritan soldiers against murderous and fiendish heathen, did effectively the exterminating work. Hundreds of the savages, in their maddened frenzy of fear and dismay, were shot or run through as they were impaled on their own palisades in their efforts to rush from their blazing wigwams, crowded within their frail enclosures. The English showed no mercy, for they felt none. The language and tone in which three of the leaders in the daring and desperate massacre have, as writers of little tracts, described the scene, indicate that they regarded themselves as engaged in a meritorious work, - in fact, as the willing agents of the Almighty, whose special providences were evidently engaged for their help. A very few of the wretched savages escaped to another fort, to which the victorious English followed them. This, however, they soon abandoned, taking refuge, with their old people and children, in the protection of swamps and thickets. Here, too, the English, who had lost but two men killed, though they had many wounded, and who were now reinforced, pursued and surrounded them, allowing the aged and the children, by a parley, to come out. The men, however, were mostly slain, and the feeble remnant of them which sought protection among the so-called river Indians, higher up the Connecticut, and among the Mohawks, were but scornfully received, - the Pequot sachem, Sassacus, being beheaded by the latter. A few of the prisoners were sold in the West Indies as slaves, others were reduced to the same humiliation among the Mohegans, or as farm and house servants to the English, - a wretched fate for once free roamers of the wild woods. But the alliances into which the whites had entered in order to divide their savage foes were the occasions of future entanglements in a tortuous policy, and of later bloody struggles of an appalling character. Thus, in its origin, causes, and results, we read of the first fierce struggle of our ancestral stock with the aborigines on the soil which the new comers believed, or taught themselves to believe, belonged by the ordinance of Heaven to them. It is for later pages in this volume to follow their chronicles in a yet more desperate crisis, which brought extreme peril nearer to the homes and hearts of the people of Boston.^

In all candor the admission must be made, that Christian white men, - Puritans, - with all the humanity which they practised towards their own brethren, and all the piety which they professed towards God, allowed themselves to be trained by the experience of Indian warfare into a savage cruelty and a desperate vengefulness, hardly distinguishing themselves at any point from the victims of their rage. This assertion covers not only the inruriate warfare of our soldiers, but equally our legislative acts and measures, and the temper and language of contemporary writers and historians, especially the foremost ones, who were clergymen, like Increase Mather and William Hubbard. The heat, the passion, the scorn, and tlie vindictiveness with which the last-named writers, for instance, have recorded our early Indian wars, certainly bring the frame of their spirits, if not their sense of humanity, under question.^ They and the English soldiers and magistrates whose deeds they record are entitled, however, to such palliating or explanatory pleading in their behalf as their own circumstances and experiences, and the extremities of the situation in the times of which they wrote may fairly demand or allow. Our soldiers, magistrates, and early historians, if thus challenged, would have justified themselves, in the main, by referring to their own experience of Indian warfare, the atrocities and barbarities of which drove them to the desperate conviction that they were dealing rather with the fiends of hell - as indeed they said they were - tlian with creatures like themselves, however low in the scale of humanity. A review of our colonial and national history, reaching down to that of the years last passed, would present a mass of evidence to prove that white men on the border

* [The principal early writers on the Pcquot war are these : Mason wrote an account, which was given in good part by Increase Mather in his Relation of (he Troubles in New En^and^ 1677, as being the work of John Allyn, Secretary of the Colony of Connecticut, but was printed from the original manuscript by Prince in 1736, and again, following Prince's edition, in 2 Mtus, Hist. Coll. viii. 120-153, and once more reprinted by Sabin in 1869. Captain John Underbill, of Boston, who had taken part in it, published News from America^ London, 1638 (in Harvard College Library), which is reprinted in 3 Mass, Hist Coll. vi. Rev. Philip Vincent, also an eyewitness, published Trtie Relation of the late Battell fought in New England^ I^ndon, 1637 (second edition, i63<S in Harvard College Library, and in the Prince Library), which is reprinted in 3 Mass, Hist. ColLf vi. 29-43. Captain Lion Gardiner's Relation of the Pequot Wars was drawn up partly from old papers about twenty-three years after the war, and remained in manuscript till 1833, when it was printed in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll.^ iii. 131-160. Drake thinks it the most valuable, in some respects, of all the early accounts. It is reprinted in the appendix of some copies of the edition of Penhallow*s Indian IVars^ edited by Dodge, Cincinnati, 1859. There are other contemporary accounts in Winthrop's Nno England; and in Winthrop's letters given in Bradford's Plymouth Plantation, in R. C. Winthrop's Life and Letters of Winthrop, ii., and one of them in Morton's Memorial. Johnson, Wonder-working Providence, gives some account; and a letter of Jonathan Brewster, describing its outbreak, is given in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., May, 186a

Of the later narratives are Increase Mather's Relation, above mentioned, covering the Indian troubles, 1614-75, which has been of late years edited by S. G. Drake (in 1864). Cotton Mather gives another account in his Magnalia, bk. vii. ch. vi. Hubbard's account covers 1607-77. The Boston edition, 1677, is called Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England, while there was an edition issued the same year in London under the title of The Present Stae of New England, being a Narrairt)e, &c Field, Indian Bibliography^ p. 179, says there were two issues, if not two separate editions, in Boston in 1677, and he thinks the Boston and London editions were in part printed simultaneously from copies of the same manuscript. S. G. Drake has edited it of late years, with a preface ; and he says the best text is that of the second, 1677, edition, and that later editions have usually followed the inaccurate 1775 edition. Hubbard also gives a chapter to the Pequot war in his History of New England. Hist. Mag., August and November, 1857 ; Sibley, Harvard Graduates, p. 60. M. C. Tyler, American Literature, ii. 135, characterizes these early chroniclers. Nlles, " History of the French and Indian Wars," in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. vi. and 4 ibid, v., is held by Palfrey to l)e not very accurate. The more accessible modem writers are these : Drake, Book of the Indians, bk. ii. ch. vi., and " Notes " in N. E. Hist, and Ceneal. Reg., January, 1858, &c.; Barry, Hist, of Mass. i. ch. viii.; Palfrey, Ne^o England, i. 456; Bryant and Gay, United States, ii. ch. i. ; Trumbull, History of Connecticut, iii. ch. V. ; G. E. Ellis, Life of John Masouy Ac - Ed.1 frontiers of civilization have steadily become more and more ruthless under these experiences of savage warfare. The complete extinction of the red race is the sole solution of the problem accepted by the vast majority of those soldiers or border settlers who have had to deal with savages. The Massachusetts Puritans may not have avowed this conviction so frankly as have many who have succeeded to them on this soil. But they seem to have acted in the full belief of it. It is observable in our early chronicles that the feelings with which our colonists regarded the natives, and the relation in which they put themselves towards them, underwent a rapid change as the parties came into fuller acquaintance. At first the whites felt a vague sense of obligation to the savages on whose possessions they were entering, deeming themselves held, as superiors and as Christians, to offices of pity, help, and mercy to such forlorn heathen. Very soon, however, indifference, neglect, contempt, arbitrary assumption, and severe repression manifested themselves in all the white man's dealings with the Indians. Cotton Mather wrote of them : ** These doleful creatures are the veriest ruins of mankind. One might see among them what a hard master the Devil is to the most devoted of his vassals." It was at once taken for granted by the colonists that the natives were natural subjects of the English monarch, bound to allegiance and obedience. So far as the savages comprehended the meaning of this assumption, they were at a loss to apprehend the grounds of it; and though they were ingeniously induced to assent, it w^s evident that they were never really reconciled to it. The perplexity and the antagonism thus stirred in the breasts of the freemen of Nature were greatly strengthened when they came to learn that the English among them regarded them not only as fellow-subjects of the monarch across the sea, but as really their subjects, held to obedience and tribute to them, as their masters. The Indian was slow in coming to realize that the first appearance of a few not formidable parties of white men left here by vessels that at once sailed away, were but little ripples of one wave of the rolling tide which was soon to cover these shores and to surge on till it reached the further ocean. As soon as the ominous signs of the fate which awaited themselves were realized for what they foreboded, the savages were roused to a desperate but futile resistance. It was too late for them. The whites could not complain if, against their implements of steel and their skill and firearms, the Indians made use of all the guile and strategy of their wilderness tactics, - the subtilty and secrecy of ambush, the midnight surprise, the arrow tipped with flaming tow to fire the thatched roof of the cabin, the skulking shot from behind a tree, and the arts learned from the couching and springing of the wild beasts of the forest. But the maxim that all tricks and frauds are fair in open war would not cover the revolting and torturous ingenuities of malice, rage, and fiendish cruelty by which the savages deferred the death and prolonged the exquisite torments of their victims. The midnight yells and shrieks which palsied with horror the inmates of a rude cabin in the woods, the braining of infants, the agonies of the gauntlet, the scornful mockings, aggravating death by slow fires, and all the cunning mutilations by which the savages surpassed the skill of the anatomist and the viviscctor in approaching but still avoiding the centres of vitality, naturally induced in the whites a belief that they were dealing with imps from Pandemonium. When report was made by two of the English, in a boat on the Connecticut, that they had seen the quartered bodies of two whites hanging on trees, and that Captain John Tilley, while fowling in a canoe, was seized by ambushed Pequots, who cut off his hands and feet, and praised him for his ** stoutness '* under the torture in which he lingered for three days, white men, and white women too, were assured that humanity was left wholly out of the account, with every alleviating mercy of quick and painless death, in savage warfare. Instances are on record in our later annals of frontiersmen, who, having seen their wives and little ones subjected to all the barbarous outrages of Indian malignity, registered vows of vengeance, devoting the remainder of their lives to tramping and ambushing for the sole errand of destroying a holocaust of the red race. Our own colonists very soon came to regard the savages as simply the most noxious and venomous class of the vermin and serpents and wild-cats of thewoods. Happily it is not in our English, but in the Frenchman's chronicles of his retaliatory imitation of savage barbarities, that we read of the infliction by white men of the death by fire and torture of perfidious red men. But the records of the General Court of Massachusetts contain the tariff* of premiums offered and paid for the scalps taken by our enlisted soldiers, or by our volunteers, from Indian men and women, boys and girls. It was the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, who, after the horrors which Dcerfield had twice suffered from Indian massacre, wrote to Governor Dudley, in 1703, a letter, from which the following is an extract, proposing that the English near him ** may be put into y* way to hunt y* Indians with dogs as they doe bears," as is done in Virginia. He adds : ** If y* Indians were as other people are, and did manage their war fairly after y* manner of other nations, it might be looked upon as inhumane to pursue them in such a manner. But they are to be looked upon as thieves and murderers; they doe acts of hostihty without proclaiming war; they don't appear openly in y* feeld to bid us battle; they use those cruelly that fall into their hands ; they act like wolves and are to be dealt withall as wolves." ^ It is to be noticed also that, just previous to our Pequot war, the colonists of Virginia had been nearly exterminated by an Indian massacre, secretly and artfully planned, and awful in its havoc.

We must turn now to another part of our theme concerning the relations between the colonists and the natives. Hardly more cheering is it in the review than that we have just rehearsed. Considering the emphasis laid upon the duty and purpose of efforts for the conversion of the natives in the charter of the colony, and by those who brought it with them, it must be admitted that little, if any, credit is due to them for labor spent or for success attained in that work. One signal achievement, a monument of holy zeal and pious toil, invested now with a pathetic interest, remains to us in Eliot's translation of the Bible into the Indian tongue, to testify to the consecrated labor of an individual to discharge a Christian obligation to the dark and doomed savage. A very few other names there are - like those of the Mayhews, Gookin, Cotton, Shepard, and Bourne - which deserve to be mentioned with respect and homage for their patient service in that unrewarding field. But neither the records of the Court, nor the attitude in which the large majority of the colonists put themselves toward the sacred task, or even towards those who assumed its heaviest responsibility, testify to any enthusiasm about it. It must be confessed, likewise, that the first general sense of obligation toward the savages was stirred by questionings and censures of the colonists from their friends in England, while, as may be considered pardonable on account of the poverty of our early days, the funds spent in the work came very largely from abroad. The colonists well knew how zealously, and with what in the view of the missionaries was regarded as rewarding success, the Franciscan and Jesuit priests in the French settlements had given themselves to the work of bringing savages within the fold of the Church. But neither the methods nor the fruits of this priestly zeal commended themselves to the Puritans. As we shall have occasion to notice, the Puritans thought an alleged convert made by the priests as hardly a whit better than a heathen.

When John Eliot, of Roxbury, and Thomas Mayhew, of Martha's Vineyard, almost simultaneously gave themselves to the work of converting the natives, some of the most inquisitive of the latter put to them the natural but embarrassing question, why the English should have allowed nearly thirty years, the period of a generation, to pass, since their first occupancy of the soil of Massachusetts, before beginning that work? The colonists had learned enough' of the Indian tongue for the purposes of trade and barter. They had made the natives feel the power and superiority of the white man, who kept them at a distance as barbarians and pagans, holding them subject to his own laws for theft, polygamy, and murder, and waging dire war against them for acts which the Indians regarded as only a defence of their natural rights. Incidentally, indeed, the natives who had come into contact with the whites had received from them help, tools, appliances, and many comforts relieving the desolateness of their lot and life. But only after this long delay had the white man proposed to make the savages full sharers in his blessings of civilization and religion. The childlike sincerity of Eliot furnished him with a reply which best apologized for the neglect of the past by regret, and by the earnestness of his purpose for the future. The Presbyterian Baylie, in his invective against the New England " Church- Way," had charged upon its supporters that, ** of all that ever crossed the America seas, they were the most neglectful of the work of conversion." He rests his charge upon quotations from the Key into the Language of America, written by Roger Williams on his voyage to England, in the spring of 1643, which was published in London in the summer of that year. From another little essay of Williams's Baylie quotes the following sentences : " For our New England parts, I can speak it confidently, I know it to have been easie for myself long ere this to have brought many thousands of these natives, yea the whole community, to a far greater anti-Christian conversion than was ever heard of in America. I could have brought the whole countrey to have observed one day in seven, - I adde, to have received Baptisme ; to have come to a stated Church meeting; to have maintained Priests and Forms of Prayer, and a whole form of anti-Christian worship in life and death. Wo be to me if I call that conversion to God, which is indeed the' subversion of the souls of millions in Christendom from one false worship to another. God was pleased to give me a patient, painful spirit to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes, to gain their tongue."

By these censures the Court of Massachusetts may have been prompted to its action in March, 1644. Some of the sachems, with their subjects, were induced to come under a covenant of voluntary subjection to the Government, and into an agreement to worship the God of the English, to observe the commandments, to allow their diildren to be taught to read the Bible, &c. The county courts were ordered in the same year to take care for the civilization of the Indians, and for their instruction in the knowledge and worship of God. In the next year - 1645 - the Court desired that " the reverend Elders propose means to bring the natives to the knowledge of God and his wayes, and to civilize them as speedily as may be.'* President Dunster seems to have been regarded as eccentric in urging that the Indians were to be instructed through their own language rather than through the English. In November, 1646, the Court, admitting that the Indians were not to be compelled to accept Christianity, decreed that they were to be held amenable to what it regarded as simple natural religion, and so should be punished, for blasphemy, should be forbidden to worship false gods, and that all pow-wowing should at once be prohibited. " Necessary and wholesome laws for the reducing them to the civility of life " should be made, and read to them once in a year by some able interpreter.

The ever-honored representative of Puritan zeal and piety in the service of the natives, who, with his co-workers, Mayhew and Gookin, can alone ** match the Jesuit " in this work, was the famous John Eliot. Yet even he and his foremost assistants fell short of the extreme devotedness of the Jesuit, in lonely, isolated labor and peril, as in the depths of the wilderness he identified himself in manner of life with the savage. The modest Eliot, who had been called " the Indian Evangelist " in a tract by Edward Winslow, objected to bearing the title, as in use " for that extraordinary office mentioned in the New Testament," and asked that the sacred word should " be obliterated in any copies of the books that remain unsold." What would Eliot have said to the title of " Apostle," which he has long borne, and will ever bear unchallenged ; or even to that of " the Augustine of New England," which M. Du Ponceau attached to his name?

Eliot, born in 1604,^ came to New England in 163 1, and was settled as pastor in Roxbury the next year, having declined the office in the Boston Church. He served in his pastorate till his death in 1690, at the age of 86; his faithful partner, who had come over from England to be married to him, dying shortly before him, in her 84th year. From his first settlement, Eliot had given thought and heart to the welfare of the natives. As soon as his efforts seemed hopeful to himself, he met with incredulity and even opposition from many around him. It must be confessed that only from a very few, and those most earnest in their own piety, did he ever receive full sympathy ; and this in but rare cases reached to enthusiasm. Winslow, the agent of the Colony in England, won friends for Eliot's object there, and brought about the incorporation of a society, in 1649, which furnished funds for its encouragement. To that same society Harvard College, in its early* poverty and struggles, was more largely indebted than has been generally recognized. The Massachusetts Court, in 1647, voted Eliot a gratuity of ten pounds for his work.

Eliot says that an Indian taken in the Pequot wars, and who lived in Dorchester, was the first native ** whom he used to teach him words, and to be his interpreter.'' He took the most unwearied pains in his strange lessons from this uncouth teacher, finding progress very slow and baffling, receiving no aid from the other tongues which he had learned and taught in England and which were so differently constituted, inflected, and augmented. Though he is regarded as having gained an amazing mastery of the Indian language, he frequently, even at the close of a half century in his work, avows and laments his lack of skill in it. He secured from time to time what he calls the more ** nimble-witted " natives, young or grown, to live with him in Roxbury, and to accompany him on his visits, to interchange with him words and ideas. A beautiful tribute was borne to him by Shepard, of Cambridge, who said that while some of the English exceeded Eliot in converse with the Indians about common matters, trade, &c., " in sacred language, about the holy things of God, Mr. Eliot excels any other of the English." Differences of judgment have been expressed as to the capacity

He has also traced the family in the N. E. Hist. Register is reprinted in Beach's Indian Misa9id Getieal. Reg., July, 1869. The earliest life cellany. Cf. Biglow's Hist, of Natick, and the and adaptability of the Indian tongue for converse on themes of dignity* in abstract discourse. Mr. Leverich, of Sandwich, a successful Indian preacher, highly commended the language for such uses. Eliot thought Mr. Cotton, of Plymouth, his own superior in the mastery of it. Only after two years study did he venture to preach in it, but even then he would not offer prayer in it. On the 28th of October, 1646, on a hill in Nonantum, Eliot first preached to the chief Waban and some of his subjects in their own tongue a discourse from Ezekiel, xxxviii. 9, of an hour and a quarter in length.

* [This cut is made, by permission, from a photograph of a portrait owned by Mrs. William Whiting, of Roxbury, which bears the following inscription in the upper left-hand corner : "John Elliot, the Apostle of the Indians. Nascit. 1604. Obit, 1690," - which constitutes the only direct evidence of its authenticity. If authentic, it must have been painted in this country, for Eliot never returned to England. It would have been natural for Boyle to have employed some one to portray the missionary in whose labors he had taken so much interest In 1851 the late Hon. William Whiting, M.C., found the painting in the shop of a dealer in Lx)ndon, who seemed to have a notion that the " Indians ** were East Indians. He could give no account of the source from which the picture came, having purchased it with others. - Ed.]

His prayer was in English, as he scrupled lest he might use some unfit or unworthy terms in the solemn office. This prompted an inquiry from his interested but bewildered listeners, whether God would understand prayer offered to him in the Indian tongue? His method in subsequent visits, when he gained more confidence, was to offer a short prayer in Indian, to recite and explain the Ten Commandments, to describe the character, work, and offices of Christ as Saviour and Judge, to tell his hearers about the creation, fall, and redemption of man, and to persuade them to repentance. He then encouraged them to put any questions that rose to their minds, promising them answers and explanations. Some of their queries were so apt and pertinent, indicating much acumen, that their good friend was often puzzled to satisfy them. Cotton Mather, in commending Eliot's style in sermonizing, said : *' Lambs might wade into his discourses on those texts and themes wherein elephants might swim." Such a style must have been equally suited to his white and red auditors. Some of the leading men of the colony, magistrates and ministers, occasionally accompanied Eliot on his preaching visits, and however they may have fallen short of his enthusiasm and hopefulness, they gratefully appreciated his devotion and zeal.

From the very entrance upon his work, Eliot set before himself an aim and plan, as the prime conditions of any successful effort for the sure and permanent benefit of the natives, which put him and other Puritan, and indeed all Protestant, missionaries to the Indians into the broadest possible divergence from the methods of the Jesuits. These latter sought to interfere as slightly as possible with the native habits, the wild ways, the freedom and impulses of the savages. As a general thing all the French colonists, lay and clerical, associating with the Indians, compromised themselves and their own civilization by meeting the Indians more than halfway, by living with them on easy if not equal terms, adopting their free habits, indulging their humors, and scrupulously avoiding all crossing their inclinations or shocking their prejudices. The Frenchmen did not bind the savages to fixed residences, nor compel them to live in houses, to wear white men's clothing, to be scrupulous about cleanliness, or dainty in their food. They shared the natives* wigwams, their loathsome cookery, not troubled much by contact with their filth, vermin, and immodesty. A few simply ritual ceremonies, a repetition of prayer or chant, and the baptismal rite turned the doomed heathen into a lovely Christian, and set him in equality with the Frenchman. All didactic, moral, intellectual training was regarded as needless or unessential. The simplest assent to the chief and to a few subordinate doctrines or dogmas of the Church was all sufficient. A savage might, under the stress of circumstancesi pass thrpugh the saving, and, so to speak, the converting and Christianizing, process within ten minutes, or even in one. Quite otherwise did Eliot apprehend the conditions of his exacting work, if it was to have any measure of assurance for success. He aimed to establish communities of the Indians in fixed settlements, exclusively their own, with entirely changed habits of life, dependent no longer upon hunting and roaming, but pursuing industrious occupations, with lands cleared and fencedi modestly clothed, living in houses, regarding propriety and decency. Ultimately they were to have local magistrates, mechanics, teachers, and preachers of their own race, with all the comforts and securities of the towns of the white men, and organized and covenanted churches. He wrote, " I find it absolutely necessary to carry on civility with religion." After deliberate examination of several localities, Itliot made choice of a region which still bears its original name, Natick, for his fond exi>eriment for the subjects of his care, who came to be known as " the praying Indians." A considerable company of the natives was gathered here in 165 1. Eliot kept the General Court informed of all his proceedings, and sought its sympathy and aid. It is curious to read on the Records enactments by which portions of our wilderness territory, the whole of which had so recently been regarded by the savages as in their unchallenged ownership, were bounded off, as henceforward to be their own for improvement. There does not seem to have been much heartiness in this legislation, the kind purpose of which alternated with measures of apprehension, caution, and restraint There was always a party in the colony, not wholly composed of the " ungodly," or the unfeeling and self-seeking classes, who looked with distrust, indifference, or avowed hostility upon the work of Eliot and his supporters. Such persons thought they had come fully to understand what an Indian was in blood and fibre, in native proclivity and irreclaimable savagery. Indeed, some of them saw in specimens of the first alleged converts to the white man's faith and ways satisfactory evidence either that the Indian could not really be transformed and renewed, or that he was not worth the labor spent on his conversion.

The experiment at Natick, the first of a series of a dozen others made with degrees of completeness in plan in several places, was, like most of them, under the special care of Eliot. He was modest, unassuming, deferential, ready to yield his own preferen- . ^- v. v^, ^ ,il ful to all the exacting routine of duty in his Roxbury parish, his rule was to visit Natick once a fortnight, visiting in the alternate week the wigwam of Cutshamakin, in Dorchester, in all weathers ; riding on his horse eighteen miles by a way through woods, over hills and swamps and streams, which his journeys opened into a road. He carried with him heavy and miscellaneous burdens. Though his own beverage was water, his diet the simplest, and he abhorred tobacco, he was willing that the Indians should in some cases have wine, while he himself replenished their pipes. He always had apples, nuts, and other little gifts for the pappooses. He had acquired that fine

1 fHie letter to which this is the subscription inet, ** Miscellaneous," 1632-1795, p. 9^ and it is is in the Massachusetts Historical Society's cab> printed in Mass, Hist CM vi. aoi. ~ Ed.]

accomplbhment of being a graceful beggar of something from everybody, - his own comfort and needs dropping out of thought in his care for others. The cast-off clothing, and even much that had not come to that indignity, of his own parishioners and friends and the widest compass of neighbors, was solicited, and generally was borne on his horse's shoulders or crupper, to eke out the civilized array of his red pupils. Without overwrought enthusiasm, and with meek patience and slow, steady advances, Eliot met all the obstacles which he looked for in dealing with an intractable race. With the same mild virtues he parried the distrust and opposition of many around him. Even some sincere but misgiving lookers-on thought he was anticipating a work which should be deferred till the time was providentially reached " for the coming in of y* fulness of y Gentiles." The worldling complained of him for injuring the trade in peltry with the Indians. The magistrates were by no means always faithful in keeping even the letter of their covenants, and were cool as to the spirit of them. Meanwhile the Indian pow-wows, magicians, sorcerers, medicine-men, were secretly jealous, sometimes actively hostile. The sachems were deprived of tribute from their subjects. King Philip, hearing of the work across his borders, positively refused to entertain the missionaries, to listen to their teaching, or to allow his subjects to be approached by it. And he spoke in bitter contempt of the English creed and religion. Roger Williams wrote, in 1654, that in his recent visit to England he had been charged by the Narragansett sachems to petition Cromwell and the council in their behalf, that they should not be compelled to change their religion. King Philip, taking hold of one of Eliot's coat-buttons, told him he cared no more for his religion than for that. This desperate hard-heartedness in Philip prompted Cotton Mather to speak of him as *' a blasphemous Leviathan." Uncas, sachem of the Mohegans, forbade any proselyting work among his Indians.

The bounds for the Indian town of Natick - **the place of hills" - were drawn by the Court in 1652. Over Charles River, which ran through it, sometimes fordable, sometimes swollen, the natives built a strong arched foot-bridge, eighty feet long, and eight feet high, its piles laden with stone. The rude builders were especially proud of their work, which stood firm, while in the next freshet an English bridge near by, in Medficid, was carried down the stream. Three wide parallel streets, two on one side and one on the other of the river, ran through the town. The territory was portioned into lots for houses, tillage, and pasturage. Fruit-trees were planted, with walls and fences. A palisadoed fort enclosed a meeting-house fifty feet long, twentyfive wide, and twelve high, built of squared timber, in English fashion, by the natives, with two days' aid from an English carpenter. The space within was to be used for a school, and for preaching and worship, while the attic, besides a store-room, contained a bed-room for Eliot; for, unlike the Jesuit missionary, he insisted on his own privacy, and brought with him food prepared by his wife, as his English stomach would not bear the diet and culinary work and apparatus of the natives. His average Indian auditory was about an hundred, a few whites being generally present. The place soon began to wear the air of industry and thrift, with a show of comfort. The Indians were indulged in their antipathy to the English styje of houses and lodgings, but cleanliness and decency, for which the natives were utterly and unblushingly wanting all sense, were rigidly insisted upon. Eliot established over them a theocratic and Jewish form of municipal government, by rulers of tens, fifties, and an hundred. They came to have magistrates and school teachers, of both sexes, of their own race. They entered into a solemn religious covenant, Sept. 24, 165 1 , " with God and each other, to be governed by the Word of the Lord in all things." The most earnest efforts were made for the primer and catechetical teaching of the children in English, and also in preparing youth, by a dame and a grammar-school at Cambridge, for entering Harvard College, so that there might be well-instructed Indian and English preachers in both tongues.

Eliot, by letter and report,^ steadily kept the society and its officers in England informed of the progress of his holy work. His letters, hopeful and genial, are also frank, candid, and not greatly over-colored. A series of now very rare tracts and essays were printed at the time, which modestly take their titles from the stages of advance, - as " The Day Breaks," " The Dawn Advances," " The Clear Orb appears and mounts to the Meridian." - The crowning aim for which the devout and single-hearted Indian Apostle was laboring - with no undue expectancy, well knowing that it must be delayed and toiled for tilt it came with its own assurance of ripeness and joy t - was that he might live to find alt the needful sacred conditions fulfilled in which he might gather " a Church of Christ " after the Puritan fashion, composed of regenerated and covenanted Indian men and women, with the seals of the sacraments, and a baptized flock. This required "a company of saints by profession and in the judgement of charity." The strict observance of the Sabbath, family prayer, grace at meals, Biblc-re.iding, a conviction of their sinful and lost state, spiritual experience of renewal, and a sincere purpose to lead a godly, consistent life were the means and stages of the culminating result. The Indian pastor must rival in ability, attainment, zeal, and piety the English minister, and, putting himself in communion with sister churches, his own flock must be equal to them in all gospel relations. The brethren and sisters, when thus covenanted, would have a strict watch and ward over

* [Varioiw letters of Eliot to the corporation them, and several are reprinted in 3 Mass, I/ist, are printed in Afass. /list, Soc, Proc , Noveml)er, Coii, iv.

* [The bibliography of this series of tracts reprinted in 1874 from the Amer, Antif, Soc. Proc. can l)e followed in Dr. TIenry M. Dexter's ex- Single tracts have been printed or reprinted in haustive " Bibliography of Congregationalism," different places, as Eliot's " Dying Speeches o£ appended to his Congregationalism as seen in its several Indians,** in the Sabbath at Home^ 1868, p. Literature^ 1880. A very valuable series of copies 333, and in the Prince Society*s edition of Dunis recorded, with notes by Dr. Trumbull, in the ton*s Letters ; the " Clear Sunshine," in Thomas Brinley Catalogue^ p. 52, &c Cf. also Field*s Shepard's WVZ-jr.ii.; andEllot*s^r/yA'}irr/i/rtv, Indian Bibliography, 1670, by Marvin of Boston, &c. Sec Dr. Trum- each other, jealously guarding themselves against reproach or scandal, keeping ail wrong-doers in awe, attracting the well-disposed, and proving themselves a body of the elect

The wisest and most sincerely earnest and good among men, in all their private aims and public plans, have always found their accomplished results to fall widely short of their purposes; and in such disappointments of experience, all the noble and earnest effort that has been spent must be regarded as a moral equivalent to what was looked for as success. It cannot be claimed that on any large public scale, cither of expense or interest, Massachusetts tried to fulfil its pledges or its obligations of humane, Christian duty to the Indians. Indeed, some of the sharpest rebukes for its neglect and failure in this matter came from the more conscientious and scrupulous of its own people. Stoddard, of Northampton, wrote a lugubrious tract to prove that many of the severest calamities visited on the colony might be referred to the displeasure of Providence because so little had been done for the conversion of the savages. Notwithstanding all the justice of the admission thus made to the discredit of our fathers, it must still be affirmed that in full view of the difficulties of their position and of all the facts of the case, as we look back upon them, the efforts and toils of Eliot and his co-laborers, within the scale and with the means which limited their undertaking, were on the whole the most creditable, well-devised, and hopeful enterprise of the kind ever put on trial on this continent. The labors of the Jesuit priests among the savages, heroic, self-sacrificing, and constant to death, were, in the view of the missionaries themselves, fully rewarded in their results. Rut religious Protestants at the time regarded the boa.stcd triumphs of the Church and the Cross among the sa\^es, and all the fond complacency of the priests, with simple disgust and contempt. Not the first step had in their opinion been taken, or even attempted, to secure what they believed to be the true process of saving conversion in the heart and conscience of the savage. He had been taught a few ** mummeries," had been sprinkled with water in the outward form of baptism, and then had been left, in habit and way of life, as much of a savage as before. The task to which the Puritan missionary set himself, as conditioning his success, was a far more exacting and complicated one. Full civilization, if it did not with him take precedence of Christian conversion, was the essential accompaniment of it. Cleanliness, decency, a humanized heart, monogamy, chastity, daily labor in some industrious calling, ability to read, and a quickened intellectual activity, could alone serve as a basis for the hopeful material out of which to make Christians. The Puritan was also vastly embarrassed and put at extreme disadvantage by his own creed, and by the requisitions which he felt obliged to make of converts through a training in doctrinal divinity and experimental religion. Calvinism has always proved hard teaching to heathens of any type, and the Calvinism of the Puritans was, as we shall soon see, offered to especially difficult pupils of it. The proffer to the savages was a gospel of " Good-News," of joy and blessing. Its first message to them was that they were all under the curse of the Englishman's God, and doomed to a fearful hell forever. They had not been aware of their dreadful condition in these respects; and between the difficulty of making them understand and realize this their desperate state, and of bringing them to avail themselves of the method which alone promised deliverance from it, the Puritan set himself to a very hard task. Considering these facts in connection with the well-devised purposes of Eliot, the patient, persistent, and tentative plans which he pursued for realizing them must be held worthy of the distinctive commendation just assigned to them. Nor can the disastrous failure of any long result from his labors, - attributable largely to the calamity of King Philip's war, - be regarded as essentially derogating from this commendation. It might be claimed that the Moravians among the Indians of Pennsylvania had been more wise and successful in their work than was the Puritan Eliot. The Moravians have often been presented as models for Protestant missionaries among the savages. But it is to be remembered that their efforts were made later, with the help of much hard-earned experience ; that the subjects of their noble labors were mainly remnants of tribes of humbled, subject savages, - " women," as their proud barbarian conquerors called them, - and that, if the Moravians proffered the same essential creed for converts, they used it a little more manageably. But the Moravians gained much by making a common home with their wild pupils, as the Puritans did not.

Though the culmination of his labors in a Christian church, in membership, pastor, and officers composed wholly of Indians, was an object so dear to the heart of Eliot, and many of his converts were importunately impatient to realize the promised boon, his own good sense and wellpoised discretion deferred the result for four full years. These years he had improved by secluding his converts from the white settlements, and by keeping them to hard labor, while they were diligently instructed. They showed considerable skill in handicrafts and also in municipal administration. In 1656 the Court had commissioned Major Daniel Gookin, a man of noble and lovable character, and Eliot's most attached co-worker, as the general magistrate of all the Indian towns. The income of the English society for converting and civilizing the Indians, - amounting to the then large sum of about seven hundred pounds, - was freely spent in the salaries of missionaries and teachers, in printing, and in furnishing goods, tools, clothing, &c., for those under training. The first brick edifice in the college yard at Cambridge was built by the funds of this society, and was called " the Indian College," being designed to accommodate twenty native pupils. There the Indian Bible was afterwards printed, with primers, tracts, &c. A vessel laden with utensils and tools for Natick, sent over by this society, was wrecked on Cohasset rocks, but some of the freight was saved. Eliot told his bewildered converts that Satan, in his spite, wrecked the vessel, while God in mercy saved some of the cargo. Eliot's salary from the society rose from twenty to forty, and finally to fifty pounds.

On the very eve of the occasion for instituting the church at Natick, " three Indians of y* unsound sort, had got several quarts of strong water." The natural consequences followed. Of this Eliot says, *' There fell out a very great discouragement, which might have been a scandal to them, and I doubt not but Satan intended it so. But the Lord improved it to stir up faith and prayer, and so turned it another way I " Serene and mighty is that assuring trust which can thus allot tlie bane and blessing of human life to two agents, a lesser and a Mightier!

A suggestive scene is offered to an artist who would find a subject for his pencil in early New England History, in a visit received by Eliot at Roxbury, in 1650, from a most unwonted guest. In that year Governor D'Aillebout sent to the governors of this and of Plymouth Colony Father Druillettes, a Jesuit missionary among the Indians in Canada, to engage the English settlers in commercial relations, with a view also to secure them in alliance against the Mohawk Indians, the enemies of the French. There was then a law of our General Court that a Jesuit presuming to enter this jurisdiction should at once be banished, on pain of death if he ventured to return. Druillcttes's diplomatic character was his security, lie has left a charming letter in French describing his visit. Though he was unsuccessful in the object of his errand, he met with kind treatment and generous hospitality. Doubtless the Mass was for the first time celebrated in Boston by himself in a private room, with " a key *' furnished him by his courteous host. Major Gibbons. Governor Endicott in Salem treated him in a friendly way, and talked French with him. Governor Bradford, of Plymouth, invited him to dinner, and, **it being Friday, entertained him with fish." The Father describes his visit to "Mr. Heliot" at Roxbury, who, it being November, invited him to stay with him, and thus defer his journey back to Canada through the wintry wilderness ; but the priest could not remain.^