Part 6 (1/2)

Things were becoming desperate. For ten weeks, from September 9 to November 19, the Federal Commissioners were in session daily in Boston.

The most eminent of their number, for ability and character, was the younger John Winthrop, who was still governor of Connecticut. Plymouth was represented by its governor, Josiah Winslow, with the younger William Bradford; Ma.s.sachusetts by William Stoughton, Simon Bradstreet, and Thomas Danforth. These strong men were confronted with a difficult problem. From Batten's journal, kept during that disastrous summer, we learn the state of feeling of excitement in Boston. The Puritans had by no means got rid of that sense of corporate responsibility which civilized man has inherited from prehistoric ages, and which has been one of the princ.i.p.al causes of religious persecution. This sombre feeling has prompted men to believe that to spare the heretic is to bring down the wrath of G.o.d upon the whole community; and now in Boston many people stoutly maintained that G.o.d had let loose the savages, with firebrand and tomahawk, to punish the people of New England for ceasing to persecute ”false wors.h.i.+ppers and especially idolatrous Quakers.”

Quaker meetings were accordingly forbidden under penalty of fine and imprisonment. Some harmless Indians were murdered. At Marblehead two were a.s.saulted and killed by a crowd of women. There was a bitter feeling toward the Christian Indians, many of whom had joined their heathen kinsmen in burning and slaying. Daniel Gookin, superintendent of the ”praying Indians,” a gentleman of the highest character, was told that it would not be safe to show himself in the streets of Boston.

Mrs. Mary Pray, of Providence, wrote a letter recommending the total extermination of the red men.

The measures adopted by the Commissioners certainly went far toward carrying out Mrs. Pray's suggestion. The demeanour of the Narragansetts had become very threatening, and their capacity for mischief exceeded that of all the other tribes together. In July the Commissioners had made a treaty with them, but in October it became known in Boston that they were harbouring some of Philip's hostile Indians. When the Commissioners sharply called them to account for this, their sachem Canonchet, son of Miantonomo, promised to surrender the fugitives within ten days. But the ten days pa.s.sed and nothing was heard from the Narragansetts. The victory of their brethren at b.l.o.o.d.y Brook had worked upon their minds, so that they no longer thought it worth while to keep faith with the white men. They had overcome their timidity and were now ready to take part in the work of ma.s.sacre. [33] The Commissioners soon learned of their warlike preparations and lost no time in forestalling them. The Narragansetts were fairly warned that if they did not at once fulfil their promises they must expect the utmost severities of war. A thousand men were enlisted for this service and put under command of Governor Winslow, and in December they marched against the enemy. The redoubtable fighter and lively chronicler Benjamin Church accompanied the expedition.

The Indians had fortified themselves on a piece of rising ground, six acres in extent, in the middle of a hideous swamp impa.s.sable at most seasons but now in some places frozen hard enough to afford a precarious footing. They were surrounded by rows of tall palisades which formed a wall twelve feet in thickness; and the only approach to the single door of this stronghold was over the trunk of a felled tree some two feet in diameter and slippery with snow and ice. A stout block-house filled with sharpshooters guarded this rude bridge, which was raised some five feet from the ground. Within the palisaded fortress perhaps not less than 2000 warriors, with many women and children, awaited the onset of the white men, for here had Canonchet gathered together nearly the whole of his available force. This was a military mistake. It was cooping up his men for slaughter. They would have been much safer if scattered about in the wilderness, and could have given the English much more trouble. But readily as they acknowledged the power of the white man, they did not yet understand it. One man's courage is not another's, and the Indian knew little or nothing of that Gothic fury of self-abandonment which rushes straight ahead and s.n.a.t.c.hes victory from the jaws of death. His fortress was a strong one, and it was no longer, as in the time of the Pequots, a strife in which firearms were pitted against bow and arrow.

Many of the Narragansetts were equipped with muskets and skilled in their use, and under such circ.u.mstances victory for the English was not to be lightly won. [Sidenote: Expedition against the Narragansetts]

On the night of December 18 their little army slept in an open field at Pettyquamscott without other blanket than a ”moist fleece of snow.”

Thence to the Indian fortress, situated in what is now South Kingston, the march was eighteen miles. The morrow was a Sunday, but Winslow deemed it imprudent to wait, as food had wellnigh given out. Getting up at five o'clock, they toiled through deep snow till they came within sight of the Narragansett stronghold early in the afternoon. First came the 527 men from Ma.s.sachusetts, led by Major Appleton, of Ipswich, and next the 158 from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; while Major Robert Treat, with the 300 from Connecticut, brought up the rear. There were 985 men in all. As the Ma.s.sachusetts men rushed upon the slippery bridge a deadly volley from the blockhouse slew six of their captains, while of the rank and file there were many killed or wounded. Nothing daunted they pressed on with great spirit till they forced their way into the enclosure, but then the head of their column, overcome by sheer weight of numbers in the hand-to-hand fight, was pushed and tumbled out into the swamp. Meanwhile some of the Connecticut men had discovered a path across the partly frozen swamp leading to a weak spot in the rear, where the palisades were thin and few, as undue reliance had been placed upon the steep bank crowned with a thick rampart of bushes that had been reinforced with clods of turf. In this direction Treat swept along with his men in a spirited charge. Before they had reached the spot a heavy fire began mowing them down, but with a furious rush they came up, and climbing on each other's shoulders, some fought their way over the rampart, while others hacked st.u.r.dily with axes till such a breach was made that all might enter. This was effected just as the Ma.s.sachusetts men had recovered themselves and crossed the treacherous log in a second charge that was successful and soon brought the entire English force within the enclosure. In the slaughter which filled the rest of that Sunday afternoon till the sun went down behind a dull gray cloud, the grim and wrathful Puritan, as he swung his heavy cutla.s.s, thought of Saul and Agag, and spared not. The Lord had delivered up to him the heathen as stubble to his sword. As usual the number of the slain is variously estimated. Of the Indians probably not less than 1000 perished. Some hundreds, however, with Canonchet their leader, saved themselves in flight, well screened by the blinding snow-flakes that began to fall just after sunset. Within the fortified area had been stored the greater part of the Indians' winter supply of corn, and the loss of this food was a further deadly blow. Captain Church advised sparing the wigwams and using them for shelter, but Winslow seems to have doubted the ability of his men to maintain themselves in a position so remote from all support. The wigwams with their tubs of corn were burned, and a retreat was ordered. Through snowdrifts that deepened every moment the weary soldiers dragged themselves along until two hours after midnight, when they reached the tiny village of Wickford. Nearly one-fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and many of the latter perished before shelter was reached. Forty of these were buried at Wickford in the course of the next three days. Of the Connecticut men eighty were left upon the swamp and in the breach at the rear of the stronghold. Among the spoils which the victors brought away were a number of good muskets that had been captured by the Nipmucks in their a.s.sault upon Deerfield. [Sidenote: Storming of the great swamp fortress, December 19]

This headlong overthrow of the Narragansett power completely changed the face of things. The question was no longer whether the red men could possibly succeed in making New England too hot for the white men, but simply how long it would take for the white men to exterminate the red men. The s.h.i.+ftless Indian was abandoning his squalid agriculture and subsisting on the pillage of English farms; but the resources of the colonies, though severely taxed, were by no means exhausted. The dusky warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced; but, as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand white men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he added, with a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send ten thousand more. For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a hope that his great influence with the savages might induce them to submit to terms of peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but they were now as little inclined to parley as tigers brought to bay, nor was the temper of the colonists a whit less deadly, though it did not vent itself in inflicting torture or in merely wanton orgies of cruelty.

[Sidenote: Effect of the blow]

To the modern these scenes of carnage are painful to contemplate. In the wholesale destruction of the Pequots, and to a less degree in that of the Narragansetts, the death-dealing power of the white man stands forth so terrible and relentless that our sympathy is for a moment called out for his victim. The feeling of tenderness toward the weak, almost unknown among savages, is one of the finest products of civilization.

Where murderous emotions are frequently excited, it cannot thrive. Such advance in humanity as we have made within recent times is chiefly due to the fact that the horrors of war are seldom brought home to everybody's door. Either war is conducted on some remote frontier, or if armies march through a densely peopled country the conditions of modern warfare have made it essential to their efficiency as military instruments that depredation and riot should be as far as possible checked. Murder and pillage are comparatively infrequent, ma.s.sacre is seldom heard of, and torture is almost or quite as extinct as cannibalism. The ma.s.s of citizens escape physical suffering, the angry emotions are so directed upon impersonal objects as to acquire a strong ethical value, and the intervals of strife may find individual soldiers of hostile armies exchanging kindly services. Members of a complex industrial society, without direct experience of warfare save in this mitigated form, have their characters wrought upon in a way that is distinctively modern, as they become more and more disinclined to violence and cruelty. European historians have noticed, with words of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which characterizes the American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked upon this humane temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful civilization, and which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its excellence and tends to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict due punishment upon the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the American of the nineteenth century has without doubt improved very considerably upon his forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of Cromwell and Milton was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as compared with their contemporaries. The long experience of internal peace since the War of the Roses had not been without its effect; and while the Tudor and Stuart periods had atrocities enough, we need only remember what was going on at the same time in France and Germany in order to realize how much worse it might have been. In England, as elsewhere, however, it was, when looked at with our eyes, a rough and brutal time. It was a day of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of court. The pioneers of New England had grown up familiar with such things; and among the townspeople of Boston and Hartford in 1675 were still many who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or turned pale over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the wrath of Heaven. [Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times]

When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent in them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself.

The feelings that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the smouldering embers of his homestead and gazes upon the mangled bodies of wife and children, are feelings that he shares with the most bloodthirsty savage, and the primary effect of his higher intelligence and greater sensitiveness is only to increase their bitterness. The neighbour who hears the dreadful story is quick to feel likewise, for the same thing may happen to him, and there is nothing so pitiless as fear. With the Puritan such gloomy and savage pa.s.sions seemed to find justification in the sacred text from which he drew his rules of life.

To suppose that one part of the Bible could be less authoritative than another would have been to him an incomprehensible heresy; and bound between the same covers that included the Sermon on the Mount were tales of wholesale ma.s.sacre perpetrated by G.o.d's command. Evidently the red men were not stray children of Israel, after all, but rather Philistines, Canaanites, heathen, sons of Belial, firebrands of h.e.l.l, demons whom it was no more than right to sweep from the face of the earth. Writing in this spirit, the chroniclers of the time were completely callous in their accounts of suffering and ruin inflicted upon Indians, and, as has elsewhere been known to happen, those who did not risk their own persons were more truculent in tone than the professional fighters. Of the narrators of the war, perhaps the fairest toward the Indian is the doughty Captain Church, while none is more bitter and cynical than the Ipswich pastor William Hubbard. [Sidenote: Warfare with savages likely to be truculent in character]

While the overthrow of the Narragansetts changed the face of things, it was far from putting an end to the war. It showed that when the white man could find his enemy he could deal crus.h.i.+ng blows, but the Indian was not always so easy to find. Before the end of January Winslow's little army was partially disbanded for want of food, and its three contingents fell back upon Stonington, Boston, and Plymouth. Early in February the Federal Commissioners called for a new levy of 600 men to a.s.semble at Brookfield, for the Nipmucks were beginning to renew their incursions, and after an interval of six months the figure of Philip again appears for a moment upon the scene. What he had been doing, or where he had been, since the Brookfield fight in August, was never known. When in February, 1676, he re-appeared it was still in company with his allies the Nipmucks, in their b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sault upon Lancaster.

On the 10th of that month at sunrise the Indians came swarming into the lovely village. Danger had already been apprehended, the pastor, Joseph Rowlandson, the only Harvard graduate of 1652, had gone to Boston to solicit aid, and Captain Wadsworth's company was slowly making its way over the difficult roads from Marlborough, but the Indians were beforehand. Several houses were at once surrounded and set on fire, and men, women, and children began falling under the tomahawk. The minister's house was large and strongly built, and more than forty people found shelter there until at length it took fire and they were driven out by the flames. Only one escaped, a dozen or more were slain, and the rest, chiefly women and children, taken captive. The Indians aimed at plunder as well as destruction; for they were in sore need of food and blankets, as well as of powder and ball. Presently, as they saw Wadsworth's armed men approaching, they took to flight and got away, with many prisoners and a goodly store of provisions. [Sidenote: Attack upon Lancaster, February 10, 1676]

Among the captives was Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who afterward wrote the story of her sad experiences. The treatment of the prisoners varied with the caprice or the cupidity of the captors. Those for whom a substantial ransom might be expected fared comparatively well; to others death came as a welcome relief. One poor woman with a child in her arms was too weak to endure the arduous tramp over the icy hillsides, and begged to be left behind, till presently the savages lost their patience. They built a fire, and after a kind of demon dance killed mother and child with a club and threw the bodies into the flames. Such treatment may seem exceptionally merciful, but those modern observers who best know the Indian's habits say that he seldom indulges in torture except when he has abundance of leisure and a mind quite undisturbed. He is an epicure in human agony and likes to enjoy it in long slow sips. It is for the end of the march that the acc.u.mulation of horrors is reserved; the victims by the way are usually despatched quickly; and in the case of Mrs. Rowlandson's captors their irregular and circuitous march indicates that they were on the alert. Their movements seem to have covered much of the ground between Wachusett mountain and the Connecticut river. They knew that the white squaw of the great medicine man of an English village was worth a heavy ransom, and so they treated Mrs. Rowlandson unusually well. She had been captured when escaping from the burning house, carrying in her arms her little six-year-old daughter. She was stopped by a bullet that grazed her side and struck the child. The Indian who seized them placed the little girl upon a horse, and as the dreary march began she kept moaning ”I shall die, mamma.” ”I went on foot after it,” says the mother, ”with sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and carried it in my arms till my strength failed me, and I fell down with it .... After this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they stopped. And now down I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a few boughs behind me, with my sick child in my lap, and calling much for water, being now, through the wound, fallen into a violent fever ....

Oh, may I see the wonderful power of G.o.d that my spirit did not utterly sink under my affliction; still the Lord upheld me with his gracious and merciful spirit.” The little girl soon died. For three months the weary and heartbroken mother was led about the country by these loathsome savages, of whose habits and manners she gives a vivid description. At first their omnivorousness astonished her. ”Skunks and rattlesnakes, yea the very bark of trees” they esteemed as delicacies. ”They would pick up old bones and cut them in pieces at the joints, ... then boil them and drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar and so eat them.” After some weeks of starvation Mrs. Rowlandson herself was fain to partake of such viands. One day, having made a cap for one of Philip's boys, she was invited to dine with the great sachem. ”I went,” she says, ”and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers.

It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease; but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life.” Early in May she was redeemed for 20 pounds, and went to find her husband in Boston, where the Old South Church society hired a house for them. [Sidenote: Mrs.

Rowlandson's narrative]

Such was the experience of a captive whose treatment was, according to Indian notions, hospitable. There were few who came off so well. Almost every week while she was led hither and thither by the savages. Mrs.

Rowlandson heard ghastly tales of fire and slaughter. It was a busy winter and spring for these Nipmucks. Before February was over, their exploit at Lancaster was followed by a shocking ma.s.sacre at Medfield.

They sacked and destroyed the towns of Worcester, Marlborough, Mendon, and Groton, and even burned some houses in Weymouth, within a dozen miles of Boston. Murderous attacks were made upon Sudbury, Chelmsford, Springfield, Hatfield, Hadley, Northampton, Wrentham, Andover, Bridgewater, Scituate, and Middleborough. On the 18th of April Captain Wadsworth, with 70 men, was drawn into an ambush near Sudbury, surrounded by 500 Nipmucks, and killed with 50 of his men; six unfortunate captives were burned alive over slow fires. But Wadsworth's party made the enemy pay dearly for his victory; that afternoon 120 Nipmucks bit the dust. In such wise, by killing two or three for one, did the English wear out and annihilate their adversaries. Just one month from that day Captain Turner surprised and slaughtered 300 of these warriors near the falls of the Connecticut river which have since borne his name, and this blow at last broke the strength of the Nipmucks. [Sidenote: Virtual exterminations of the Indians, February--August, 1676]

Meanwhile the Narragansetts and Wampanoags had burned the towns of Warwick and Providence. After the wholesale ruin of the great ”swamp fight,” Canonchet had still some 600 or 700 warriors left, and with these, on the 26th of March, in the neighbourhood of Pawtuxet, he surprised a company of 50 Plymouth men under Captain Pierce and slew them all, but not until he had lost 140 of his best warriors. Ten days later Captain Denison, with his Connecticut company, defeated and captured Canonchet, and the proud son of Miantonomo met the same fate as his father. He was handed over to the Mohegans and tomahawked. The Narragansett sachem had shown such bravery that it seemed, says the chronicler Hubbard, as if ”some old Roman ghost had possessed the body of this western pagan.” But next moment this pious clergyman, as if ashamed of the cla.s.sical eulogy just bestowed upon the hated redskin, alludes to him as a ”d.a.m.ned wretch.” [Sidenote: Death of Canonchet]

The fall of Canonchet marked the beginning of the end. In four sharp fights in the last week of June, Major Talcott, of Hartford, slew from 300 to 400 warriors, being nearly all that were left of the Narragansetts; and during the month of July Captain Church patrolled the country about Taunton, making prisoners of the Wampanoags. Once more King Philip, shorn of his prestige, comes upon the scene. We have seen that his agency in these cruel events had been at the outset a potent one. Whatever else it may have been, it was at least the agency of the match that explodes the powder-cask. Under the conditions of that savage society, organized leaders.h.i.+p was not to be looked for. In the irregular and disorderly series of murdering raids Philip may have been often present, but except for Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative we should have known nothing of him since the Brookfield fight.

At length in July, 1676, having seen the last of his Nipmuck friends overwhelmed, the tattered chieftain showed himself near Bridgewater, with a handful of followers. In these his own hunting-grounds some of his former friends had become disaffected. The daring and diplomatic Church had made his way into the wigwam of Ashawonks, the squaw sachem of Saconet, near Little Compton, and having first convinced her that a flask of brandy might be tasted without fatal results, followed up his advantage and persuaded her to make an alliance with the English. Many Indians came in and voluntarily surrendered themselves, in order to obtain favourable terms, and some lent their aid in destroying their old sachem. Defeated at Taunton, the son of Ma.s.sasoit was hunted by Church to his ancient lair at Bristol Neck and there besieged. His only escape was over the narrow isthmus of which the pursuers now took possession, and in this dire extremity one of Philip's men presumed to advise his chief that the hour for surrender had come. For his unwelcome counsel the sachem forthwith lifted his tomahawk and struck him dead at his feet. Then the brother of the slain man crept away through the bushes to Church's little camp, and offered to guide the white men to the mora.s.s where Philip lay concealed. At daybreak of August 12 the English stealthily advancing beat up their prey. The savages in sudden panic rushed from under cover, and as the sachem showed himself running at the top of his speed, a ball from an Indian musket pierced his heart, and ”he fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him.”

His severed head was sent to Plymouth, where it was mounted on a pole and exposed aloft upon the village green, while the meeting-house bell summoned the townspeople to a special service of thanksgiving.

[Sidenote: Death of Philip, August 12]

It may be supposed that in such services at this time a Christian feeling of charity and forgiveness was not uppermost. Among the captives was a son of Philip, the little swarthy lad of nine years for whom Mrs.

Rowlandson had made a cap, and the question as to what was to be done with him occasioned as much debate as if he had been a Jesse Pomeroy [34] or a Chicago anarchist. The opinions of the clergy were, of course, eagerly sought and freely vouchsafed. One minister somewhat doubtfully urged that ”although a precept in Deuteronomy explicitly forbids killing the child for the father's sin,” yet after all ”the children of Saul and Achan perished with their parents, though too young to have shared their guilt.” Thus curiously did this English reverence for precedent, with a sort of grim conscientiousness colouring its gloomy wrath, search for guidance among the ancient records of the children of Israel. Commenting upon the truculent suggestion, Increase Mather, soon to be president of Harvard, observed that, ”though David had spared the infant Hadad, yet it might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful.”