USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 35
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
the English from Cambridge, Dorchester, and other places. Jolin 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.1 All through the winter of 1637 the Pequots continued to pick off the whites in their territory, and they John Major 1. Afrach Stoughton./ Sion Gardner mutilated, tortured, roasted, and mur- dered 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 has been said, about a thousand Pequot "braves." The authorities in Connecticut reso- lutely started a military organization, giving the command to the redoubtable John Mason, a Low-Country soldier, AUTOGRAPHS OF LEADERS IN THE WAR.2 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 effec- tive. Of the hundred and sixty men raised by Massachusetts, only about
1 [This was in October, 1636. The famed Miantonomoh was the chief who came to Boston. Savage's edition of Winthrop's New England, i. 236. A view of the monument erected to Miantonomoh's memory is given in Bryant and
1637
the maske Mountsnow also a Dorchester man, and commanded
Gay's United States, ii. 95. As to the form of Miantonomoh's name, see Dr. Trumbull in the Hist. Mag. ii. 205. Letters of Roger Williams at this time are given in the " Winthrop Papers "
in 4 Mass. Hist. Coll. vi. Cf. Arnold's Rhode Island, i. ch. iii. - ED.]
2 [Mason's life has been written by Dr. Ellis in Sparks's series of biographies. He had lived in Dorchester from 1630 to 1635. The lines of his descendants are traced in the N'. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1861, and in the Memoir of Mrs. Mary Anna Board- man, New Haven, 1849. Stoughton was the expedition that sailed from Boston in June, 1637, to follow up the successes of Mason. Gardiner was now a Connecticut man, but he had arrived in Boston and had been em- ployed as an engineer in planning the works on Fort Hill in 1632. There is an account of him
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THIE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
twenty, under Captain Underhill, - a good fighter, but a sorry scamp, - reached the scene in season to join with Mason in surprising the unsus- pecting 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. Ilundreds 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, how- ever, they soon abandoned, taking refuge, with their old people and chil- dren, 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.1
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
furnished by Massachusetts, Boston supplied ants are given in Thompson's Hist. of Long Island, ii. 378, and in the Heraldic Journal, iii. 82. Of the one hundred and sixty men
in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., x. Notes of his descend-
twenty-six. - En.] 1 [Chapter on " Philip's War," by the Rev. E. E. Hale. - ED.]
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
infuriate warfare of our soldiers, but equally our legislative acts and meas- ures, 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 the vindictiveness with which the last-named writers, for instance, have recorded our carly Indian wars, certainly bring the frame of their spirits, if not their sense of humanity, under question.1 They and the English soldiers and magistrates whose deeds they record are entitled, however, to such palliating or explan- atory 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 - than 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
1 [The principal carly writers on the Pequot war are these : Mason wrote an account, which was given in good part by Increase Mather in his Relation of the Troubles in New England, 1677, as being the work of John Allyn, Secre- tary of the Colony of Connecticut, but was printed from the original manuscript by Prince in 1736, and again, following Prince's edition, in 2 .Mass. Hist. Coll. viii. 120-153, and once more reprinted by Sabin in 1869. Captain John Under- hill, 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 eye- witness, published True Relation of the late Battell fought in New England, London, 1637 (second edition, 1638, in Harvard College Library, and in the Prince Library), which is reprinted in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll., 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 re- spects, of all the early accounts. It is reprinted in the appendix of some copies of the edition of Penhallow's Indian Wars, edited by Dodge, Cin- cinnatı, 1859. There are other contemporary accounts in Winthrop's New 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, 1860.
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 Ma- ther 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 Sta'e of New England, being a Narrative, &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 edi- tions 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 fol- lowed the inaccurate 1775 edition. Hubbard also gives a chapter to the Pequot war in his His- tory 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. Niles, " History of the French and Indian Wars," in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. vi. and 4 ibid. v., is held by Palfrey to be not very accurate. The more ac- cessible modern writers are these : Drake, Book of the Indians, bk. ii. ch. vi., and "Notes" in N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., January, 1858, &c .; Barry, Ilist. of Mass. i. ch. viii .; Palfrey, New England, i. 456; Bryant and Gay, United States, ii. ch. i .; Trumbull, History of Connec- ticut, iii. ch. v. ; G. E. Ellis, Life of John Mason, &c .- ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
frontiers of civilization have steadily become more and more ruthless un- der 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 rela- tion 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 was 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 sur- prise, 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 in- mates of a rude cabin in the woods, the braining of infants, the agonies of
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
the gauntlet, the scornful mockings, aggravating death by slow fires, and all the cunning mutilations by which the savages surpassed the skill of the an- atomist and the vivisector 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 trecs, and that Captain John Tilley, while fowling in a canoc, was scized 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 ven- omous class of the vermin and serpents and wild-cats of the woods. 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 Stod- dard, of Northampton, who, after the horrors which Deerfield had twice suf- fered 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 ye way to hunt ye Indians with dogs as they doe bears," as is done in Virginia. He adds: " If ye Indians were as other people are, and did manage their war fairly after ye 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 doc acts of hostility without proclaiming war; they don't appear openly in ye feeld to bid us battle; they usc those cruelly that fall into their hands; they act like wolves and are to be dealt withall as wolves." 1 It is to be noticed also that, just pre- vious to our Pequot war, the colonists of Virginia had been nearly exter- minated 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 duc to them for labor spent or for
1 4 Mass. Hist. Coll. ii. 235-237.
VOL. I .- 33.
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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 unre- warding 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 zcal 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 Vine- yard, 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 Languages of America, written by Roger Williams on his voyage to England, in the spring
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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 casie 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 com- mandments, to allow their children 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 blas- phemy, 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 men- tioned 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?
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Eliot, born in 1604,1 came to New England in 1631, and was settled as pastor in Roxbury the next year, having declined the office in the Boston Church. Ile 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 oppo- sition 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 sym- pathy ; 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.
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