For a time, indeed, they acted as men who might be supposed thus to speak. The going out and landing in this new country of this band of religious adventurers, have been and continue to be celebrated as the setting forth and landing of “The Pilgrim Fathers.” It is in itself an interesting event: the pilgrimage of a little host of voluntary exiles, for the sake of their religion, from their native country, to establish a new country in the wilderness of the New World. It is more interesting from the fact, that their associates and descendants have grown into one of the most intelligent and powerful portions of the freest, and, perhaps, happiest nation on the globe. Their landing on the coast of Massachusets was effected under circumstances of peculiar hardship. It took place at a spot to which they gave the name of New Plymouth, on the 11th of November, 1620. The weather was extremely severe; and they were but badly prepared to contend with it. During the winter one half of their number perished through famine, and diseases brought on by their hardships. The natives, too, came down to oppose their settlement,[31] and it is difficult now to imagine how such religious people could reconcile to their consciences an entrance by force on the territories of a race on whom they had no claim. They had, indeed, purchased a tract of land of one of the chartered companies in England; but one is at a loss to conceive how any English company could sell a country in another hemisphere already inhabited, and to which they had not the slightest title to show, except “the Bucanier’s Post.” As well might a company of Indians sell some of their countrymen a slice of territory on the coast of Kent; and just as good a title would the Indians have to land, if they could, in spite of our Kentish yeomen, and establish themselves on the spot. Moreover, these Pilgrim Fathers had wandered from their original destination, and had not purchased this land at all of anybody at that time. No doubt the Fathers thought that they had a right to settle in a wild country; and simply fell in with the customs and doctrines of the times. We might, however, have expected clearer notions of natural right from their acquaintance with the Bible; for we shall presently see that there were men of their own country, and in their own circumstances, that would not have been easy to have taken such possession in such a manner. We may safely believe that the Fathers did according to their knowledge; but the precedent is dangerous, and could not in these times be admitted: the Fathers did not, in fact, obtain any grant from the English till four years afterwards (1624). When they had once got a firm footing, Massasoit, the father of the famous Philip of Pokanoket, whom these same settlers pursued to the death with all his tribe, except such as they sold for slaves to Bermudas, granted them a certain extent of lands. Subsequently purchases from the Indians began to be considered more necessary to a good title.
Eight years afterwards another company of the same people, under John Endicott, formed a settlement in Massachusets Bay, and founded the town of Salem. In the following year a third company, of not less than three hundred in number, joined them. These in the course of time seeking fresh settlements, founded at different periods, Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, Roxborough, and other towns; great numbers now, allured by the flourishing state of the colony, flocked over, and amongst them Harry Vane, the celebrated Sir Harry Vane of the revolutionary parliament, and Hugh Peters, the chaplain of Oliver Cromwell. Some difference of opinion amongst them occasioned a considerable body of them to settle in Providence and Rhode Island. These were under the guidance of their venerable pastor Roger Williams, a man who deserves to be remembered while Christianity continues to shed its blessings on mankind. Mr. Williams had penetrated through the mists of his age, to the light of divine truth, and had risen superior to the selfishness of his countrymen. He maintained the freedom of conscience, the right of private judgment, the freedom of religious opinion from the touch of the magistrate. The spirit of true Christianity had imbued his own spirit with its love. Above all—for it was the most novel doctrine, and as we have seen by the practice of the whole Christian world, the hardest to adopt—he maintained the sacred right of the natives to their own soil; and refused to settle upon it without their consent. He and his followers purchased of the Indians the whole territory which they took possession of! This is a fact which we cannot record without a feeling of intense delight, for it is the first instance of such a triumph of Christian knowledge and principle, over the corrupt morality of Europe. We nowhere read till now, through all this bloody and revolting history of European aggressions, of any single man treating with the savage natives as with men who had the same inalienable rights as themselves.[32] It is the first bright dawn of Christian day from the darkness of ages; the first boundary mark put down between the possessions of the unlettered savage, and the lawless desires of the schooled but uncivilized European; the first recognition of that law of property in the possessors of the soil of every country of the earth, until the complete establishment of which, blood must flow, the weak must be trodden down by the strong, and civilization and Christianity must pause in their course. Honour to Roger Williams and his flock in Narraganset Bay! The Puritan settlements still continued to spread. Connecticut, and New Hampshire, and Maine were planted by different bodies from Massachusets Bay; and the Indians, who found that the whites diffused themselves farther and farther over their territories, and soon ceased to purchase as Roger Williams had done, or even to ask permission; began to remonstrate. Remonstrances however produced little effect. The Indians saw that if they did not make a stand against these encroachments they must soon be driven out of their ancestral lands, and exterminated by those tribes on which they must be forced. They resolved therefore to exterminate the invaders that would hear no reason. The Pequods, who lay near the colony of Connecticut, called upon the Narragansets in 1637, to join them in their scheme. The Narragansets revealed it to the English, and both parties were speedily in arms against each other. The different colonies of New England had entered into an association for common defence. The people of Connecticut called on those of Massachusets Bay for help, which was accorded; but before its arrival the soldiers of Connecticut, who seemed on all occasions eager to shed Indian blood, had attacked the Pequods where they had posted themselves, in a sort of rude camp in a swamp, defended with stakes and boughs of trees. The Pequods were supposed to be a thousand strong, besides having all their women and children with them; but their simple fortification was soon forced, and set fire to; and men, women, children perished in the flames, or were cut down on rushing out, or seized and bound. The Massachusets forces soon after joined them, and then the Indians were hunted from place to place with unrelenting fury. They determined to treat them, not as brave men fighting for their invaded territories, for their families and posterity, but as wild beasts. They massacred some in cold blood, others they handed over to the Narragansets to be tortured to death; and great numbers were sold into Bermudas as slaves. In less than three months, the great and ancient tribe of the Pequods had ceased to exist. What did Roger Williams say to this butchery by a Christian people? But the spirit of resentment against the Indians grew to such a pitch in those states that nothing but the language of Cotton Mather, (the historian of New England,) can express it. He calls them devils incarnate, and declares that unless he had “a pen made of a porcupine’s quill and dipped in aquafortis he could not describe all their cruelties.” Could they be possibly greater than those of the Puritan settlers, who were at once the aggressors, and bore the name of Christian? So deadly, indeed, became the vengeance of these colonists, that they granted a public reward to any one who should kill an Indian. The Assembly, says Douglass, in 1703, voted 40l. premium for each Indian scalp or captive. In the former war the premium was 12l. In 1706, he says, “about this time premiums for Indian scalps and captives were advanced by act of Assembly; viz.: per piece to impressed men 10l., to volunteers in pay 20l., to volunteers serving without pay 50l., with the benefit of the captives and plunder. Col. Hilton, with 220 men, ranges the eastern frontiers, and kills many Indians. In 1722 the premium for scalps was 100l. In 1744 it had risen to 400l. old tenor; for the years 1745, 6, and 7, it stood at the enormous sum of 1000l. per head to volunteers, scalp or captive (!) and 400l. per head to impressed men, wages and subsistence money to be deducted.[33] In 1744 the Cape-Sables, and St. John’s Indians being at war with the colonies, Massachusets-Bay declared them rebels; forbad the Pasamaquody, Penobscot, Noridgwoag, Pigwocket, and all other Indians west of St. John’s to hold any communication with them, and offered for their scalps,—males 12 years old, and upwards, 100l. new tenor; for such, as captives, 105l. For women and children 50l., scalps!—55l., captives! The Assembly soon after, hearing that the Penobscot and Noridgwoag Indians had joined the French, extended premiums for scalps and captives to all places west of Nova Scotia, and advanced them to 250l. new tenor, to volunteers; and 100l. new tenor to troops in pay.”[34]
In 1722, a Captain Harman, with 200 men, surprised the Indians at Noridgwoag, and brought off twenty-six scalps, and that of Father Ralle, a French Jesuit.[35] The savage atrocities here committed by the New Englanders were frightful. They massacred men, women, and children; pillaged the village, robbed and set fire to the church, and mangled the corpse of Father Ralle most brutally.[36] For these twenty-six scalps, at the then premium, the good people of Massachusets paid 2600l. A Captain Lovel, also, seems to have been an active scalper. “He collected,” says Raynal, “a band of settlers as ferocious as himself, and set out to hunt savages. One day he discovered ten of them quietly sleeping round a large fire. He murdered them, carried their scalps to Boston, and secured the promised reward, of course 1000l.! Who could suppose that the land of the Pilgrim Fathers, the land of the noble Roger Williams, could have become polluted with horrors like these!”
And why were the Indians now so sharply pursued—why such sums given as tempted these Harmans and Lovels? Why the scalp of Father Ralle to be stripped away from him?—Because Father Ralle had proclaimed a very certain, but very disagreeable truth. He preached to the Indians, “That their lands were given to them and their children unalienably and for ever, according to the Christian sacred oracles.” What is so inconvenient as to preach Bible truth in countries flagrant with injustice? The Indians began to murmur; gave the English formal warning to leave the lands within a set time, and as they did not move, began to drive off their cattle. This was declared rebellion, the soldiery were set on them, and 100l. a head proclaimed for their scalps.
This is called Governor Dummer’s war; but the most celebrated war was that of Philip of Pokanoket, which occurred between this war and that of the destruction of the Pequods. The cause of Philip’s war, which broke out in 1675, and lasted upwards of a year, was exactly that of this subsequent one, and indeed of every war of New England with the Indians—the dissatisfaction of the Indians with the usurpation of the whites. The New England people, religious people though they were, seem to have been more irritable, more jealous, more regardless of the rights of the Indians, and more quick and deadly in their vengeance on any shew of spirit in the natives, than any other of the North American colonies. The monstrous, and were it not for the testimony of unimpeachable history, incredible sums offered for scalps by these states, testify to the malignant spirit of revenge which animated them. Even towards the Narragansets, their firmest and most constant friends, who lived amongst them, they shewed an irritability and a savage relentlessness that are to us amazing. On the faintest murmur of any dissatisfaction of this tribe on account of their lands, or of any other tribe making overtures of alliance to it, they were up in arms, and ready to exterminate it. So early as 1642, they charged Miantinomo, the great sachem of the Narragansets, with conspiring to raise the Indians against them. The people of Connecticut immediately proposed, without further proof or examination, to fall on the Indians and kill them. This bloody haste was, however, withstood by Massachusets.[37] They summoned Miantinomo before the court. He came, and it is impossible not to admire his sedate and dignified bearing there. He demanded that his accusers should be brought face to face, and that if they could prove him guilty of conspiracy against the colony, he was ready to suffer death; but if they could not, they should suffer the same punishment. “His behaviour,” says Hutchinson, “was grave, and he gave his answers with great deliberation and seeming ingenuity. He would never speak but in the presence of two of his counsellors, that they might be witnesses of everything which passed. (No doubt he had seen enough of ‘that pen and ink work,’ of which the Indians so often complained). Two days were spent in treaty. He denied all that he was charged with, and pretended that the reports to his disadvantage were raised by Uncas, the sachem of the Mohegins, or some of his people. He was willing to renew his former engagements; that if any of the Indians, even the Niantics, who, he said, were as his own flesh and blood, should do any wrong to the English, so as neither he nor they could satisfy without blood, he would deliver them up, and leave them to mercy. The people of Connecticut put little confidence in him, and could hardly be kept from falling upon him, but were at last prevailed upon by the Massachusets to desist for the present.”[38]
Poor Miantinomo did not long escape. Two years afterwards, in a war with his enemy, Uncas, he was taken prisoner, and the colonists were only too glad to have an opportunity of getting rid of a man of mind and influence, who felt their aggressions and feared for his race—they outdid the savage captor in their resentment against him. Instead of interceding on his behalf and recommending mercy, by which they might, at once, have set a Christian example, and have made a fast friend, they procured his death. Uncas, with a generosity worthy of the highest character, instead of killing his captive, as he was entitled by the rules of Indian war, delivered him into the hands of the New-Englanders, and the New-Englanders again returned him to Uncas, desiring him to kill him, but without the usual tortures. It is wonderful that they did not purchase his scalp, or that they excused the torture; but a number of the English inhabitants went out and gratified themselves with witnessing his death.[39]
It was not to be marvelled at that such general treatment, and such a crowning deed exasperated the Narragansets to a dangerous degree. They nourished a rooted revenge, which shewed itself on the breaking out of Philip of Pokanoket’s war. They engaged to bring to his aid 4000 Indians.
Philip was one of the noblest specimens of the North American Indian. He was of a fine and active person; accomplished in all exercises of his nation, in war and hunting. He had that quick sense of injuries, and that sense of the honour and rights of his people which characterise the patriot; qualities which, though in the most cultivated and enlightened mind they may hurry their possessor on occasionally to sharp and vindictive acts, are the very essentials of that lofty and noble disposition without which no great deed is ever done. Had Philip contended for his country against its invaders on anything like equal terms, he would have been its saviour,—the naked Indians against the powers and resources of the English! It was hopeless,—he could only become the Caractacus, or the Cassibelaunus of his nation.
Philip has been painted by his enemies as a dreadful, perfidious, and cruel wretch;—but had Philip been the survivor how would he have painted them? With their shameless encroachments, their destruction of Indians, their blood-money, and their scalps, purchased at 1000l. each! Philip had the deepest causes of resentment. His father, Massasoit, had received the strangers and sold them land. They speedily compelled him to sign a deed, in which by “that pen and ink work” which the Indians did not understand, but which they soon learned to know worked them the most cruel wrongs, they had made him to acknowledge himself and his subjects the subjects of King James. Philip denied that his father had any idea of the meaning of such a treaty,—any idea of surrendering to the English more than the land he sold them; or if he had done so, that he had any right to give away the liberties of his nation and posterity; the government amongst the Indians not being hereditary, but elective. Philip, however, was compelled to retract and renounce such doctrines in another public document. But the moment he became at liberty, he held himself, and very justly, free from the stipulations of a compulsory deed.