USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 33
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" 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 quo 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 pleas- ure, as intimated in the said declaration now read, the question was resolved in the negative, nemine contradicente." 6
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 country, 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
1 Second Report of the Record Commissioners, 4 Ibid. p. 120.
1. 158. { See further on this town-house in Mr. Bynner's chapter in this volume. - En. j
2 Aass. Col. Records, vol. iv. pt. i. p. 444.
3 Second Report of the Record Commissioners, p. 113.
5 lbid. pp. 132, 133.
6 MS. Records of the Town of Boston, ii. 155.
" [This struggle for the maintenance of the charler is fully described in another chapter of this volume. - ED.Į
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BOSTON AND THE COLONY.
spare the inhabitants of Boston; and it is significant of the changed con- dition 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 be- fore for regulating the manner in which gunpowder should be kept.1 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 illus- trate 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 truc, 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 pro- visions 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 recog . nized no appeal to the mother country. Thus, by slow degrees, the colony became
" A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent."
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
1 MIS. Records of the Town of Boston, ii. 176, 177. Other orders were confirmed at the same time.
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
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.1 This fact shows how close were the pohtical 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 ques- tions which most largely influenced the course of colonial polities were pri- marily 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 magis- trates 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.2 Wilson and Cotton were acknowledged forces in shaping the colonial polity ; at a later period the Mathers showed that the Boston ministers had lost nonc 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 affairs. 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.
Chi. b. Smith
1 ĮCf. Snow's Boston, p. 56, and the facsimile Winthrop's Life of John Winthrop, 1630-49, ch. xviii, and in his chapter in this volume.
of the page in another chapter. - ED.]
2 }See the curious story recounted in R. C. - ED.J
CHAPTER VI.
THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
BY GEORGE EDWARD ELLIS. Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
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 suc- cessive 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 reduc- ing 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 to- wards 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 fol- lowed. There has been no sharing of the heritage with the original oc- cupants ; they have had to move out and to move on. With consummate assurance the abler racc 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.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
of the urst 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 experi- ment in continued conflict.
Amid all the sharp and bitter variances between the ereeds of the Roman- ist 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 con- vert the savage, but was too dilatory or too inefficient 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 slaugh- ter than a subject of salvation by the method of the Gospel. Modern readers of our early local literature sometimes find it difficult 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 dis- possess 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 l'uritan captain, John Mason, had burned up some seven hundred 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
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
was God seen in the Mount, crushing his proud enemies." The enemies of the Puritans were the enemies of God.
But even while the Puritan was finding a full justification of his exter- minating work against the Indians as doomed and uncovenanted 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 justi- fication for the same course against the savage tribes as his border set- tlements advance towards them. The different mode of life, and the dif- ferent 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 im- possible for them to live even within miles of intervening space in the same territory. The savage necds that Nature should be and should forever remain in its wild, primeval condition. The native 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 by- paths. The winds and breezes must not be tainted by the effluvia of hu- manity ; they must be silent, except only from their own murmurs or the gusts of storms. The waters must be left 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. But 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 mcat of the ox, the sheep, and the swine is far morc congenial to his palate and physical system than that of the native wilder- ness. 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 sum- mer 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 per- manently to one spot. As now, in our most secure and crowded rural com- munities, 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 the 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
277
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
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 con- secrating aim of the enterprise in the Colony, to civilize and Christianize the barbarous heathen inhabiting here. But, again, we meet with frequent ref- erences 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 over our own people so that they may be just and courteous to the In- dians, 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 re- iteration, 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 gen- erally 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 authen- tic information of the condition of the natives before the settlement at Ply- mouth and that at Salem, we have very imperfect. knowledge about the des- olating 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-
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
minding himself of the stress which he had previously laid upon their pur- pose 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 Ply- mouth, in ten years, not one of them had been converted. He accounts this to the difficulty presented by the Indian language, in which, he naïvely 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." The good minister made these somewhat fallacious state- ments in perfectly good faith, seeming not to have recognized the peculiar- ities 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 rav- ages 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 un- buried 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 are more than four millions of population, at about thirty thousand. This estimate is now believed to be an excessive one.1
1 [The principal contemporary authorities on the condition of the New England Indians at the time of the settlement are as follows : Smith, Desc. of New England and Generall Historie ; Bradford, Plymouth Plantation, edited by C. Deane ; Mourt, Relation, &c., recently edited by Dr. H. M. Dexter; Winslow, Good Newes, re- printed in the appendix of the Congregational Board's edition of Morton's Memorial ; the Re- lation, 1622, by the President and Council of New England ; Gorges, Briefe Narration ; Win- throp, New England ; Higginson, New England Plantation : Dudley, Letter to the Countess of Lincoln, given in Voung's Chron. of Mass., &c .; Johnson, Wonder-working Providence, reprinted in 2 Mass. Hist. Coll., ii., and recently edited by Poole ; Wood, New England's Prospect ; Mor-
ton, New English Canaan ; Lechford, Plaine Dealing, reprinted in 3 Mass. Ilist. Coll., iii., and recently edited by Dr. Trumbull ; a tract, New England's First Fruits, 1643, reprinted in Mass. Hist. Coll., i., and by Sabin, New York, 1865 (and the series of tracts on the conversion of the Indians referred to in a later note); the " Briefe Observations of the Customes," ap- pended to Roger Williams's Aty, reprinted in the R. I. Hist. Coll., 1827, and by the Narra- gansett Club, 1866. Palfrey says "the only au- thentic portrait of an historical Indian " is one painted for Governor Winthrop, of Connecticut, of Ninigret, a Niantic sachem, which has been engraved in Drake's Boston and elsewhere. A story, ascribed to one of the Mathers, that three hundred skulls, supposed to be Indian, had been
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Under this somewhat hazy and confused state of mind as to the numbers, disposition, and probable attitude of the Indians towards them, with the 15 I venerate the folgumes cause. " et for the red man dare to plead - He how to Heaven's recorded laws. avowed intent of treating them kindly and of civilizing and Christianizing them, while still with the hope that there were He turned to nature for a creed; Beneath the pillared downs . He sock our God in prayer : Through boundlefs words he loved to roam . And the Great Spirit worshipfred there. But one , one fellow etrol with us he felt . To one devenity with us he knelt : Freedom , the self same freedom we adore, Bade him defend hus violated phone . but few of them, the colonists planted themselves on this soil, and prepared, as the stronger party, for the encoun- ter. And now, on the other side, we have to inform our- selves, as satisfactorily as our means will admit, about the ideas and feelings of the In- He saw the cloud, ordained to grow. And burst when has hills in He saw his people withering by . Beneath the invader's evil eye; ( hange fest were trampling on his fathers homes. At midnight how he woke to gase . Upon his happy cabin's blaze , and placein this children's dying groans. He faw- and maddening at the sight. Gave his bold bosom to the fight : Is tagen raga has soul was driven . Mary was not - non sought , non given ; The pale man from his lands must fly. dians towards the white com- ers on their first acquaintance. We have on this point (on this, as on every other occa- sion when it comes before us) to 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, He would be fine . on he would die . however, to recognize the fact that the Indians from the first FROM CHARLES SPRAGUE'S ODE, 1830.1 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
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