Note 2 — Chapter I · NATIONAL TRAITS OF CHARACTER.

Massasoit, the father of Philip, was the true friend to the English, and when he was about to die, took his two sons Alexander and Philip, and fondly commended them to the kindness of the new settlers, praying that the same peace and good will might be between them, that had existed between him and his white friends. Upon mere suspicion, only a little while afterwards, the elder, who succeeded his father as ruler among his people, was hunted in his forest home, and dragged before a court, the nature and object of which he could not understand; but the indignity which was offered him and the treachery of those who thus insulted him, so chafed his proud spirit, that a fever was the consequence, of which he died. And this is not all. The son and wife of Philip were sold into slavery, as were also many others of the Indians taken captive during the colonial wars. “Yes,” says a distinguished orator,2 “they were sold into slavery,—West Indian slavery! an Indian princess and her child sold from the cool breezes of Mount Hope, from the wild freedom of a New England forest, to gasp under the lash, beneath the blazing sun of the tropics! ‘Bitter as death,’ aye, bitter as hell! Is there any thing, I do not say in the range of humanity,—is there any thing animated, that would not struggle against this?”