Note 277 — APPENDIX A. TO CHAPTER X.

The treatment of the Indians by the early New England Puritans is one of the darkest pages in English colonial history. I have slightly alluded to it in the preceding pages of this volume. Many passages might be selected from the early divines of New England, referring to the Indians as the heathen whom they were to drive out of the land which God had given to this Israel. I will confine myself to the quotation of a few words from the late Rev. J.B. Marsden, A.M., noted for his Puritan partialities, in the two volumes of his History of the Early and Later Puritans. But his sense of Christian justice, tolerance, and humanity revolted at the New England Puritans' intolerance to each other, and their cruel treatment of the Indians. Mr. Marsden says:

"The New England Puritans were revered beyond the Atlantic as the Pilgrim Fathers, the founders of great cities, and of States renowned through the wide world for wealth, intelligence, and liberty. Their memory is cherished in England with feelings of silent respect rather than of unmixed admiration; for their inconsistencies were almost equal to their virtues; and here, while we respect their integrity, we are not blinded to their faults. A persecuted band themselves, they soon learned to persecute each other. The disciples of liberty, they confined its blessings to themselves. The loud champions of the freedom of conscience, they allowed no freedom which interfered with their narrow views. Professing a mission of Gospel holiness, they fulfilled it but in part. When opposed, they were revengeful; when irritated, fanatical and cruel. In them a great experiment was to be tried, under conditions the most favourable to its success; and it failed in its most important point. The question to be solved was this: How would the Puritans, the hunted, persecuted Puritans behave, were they but once free, once at liberty to carry their principles into full effect? The answer was returned from the shores of another world. It was distinct and unequivocal. And it was this: they were prepared to copy the worst vices of their English persecutors, and, untaught by experience, to imitate their worst mistakes. The severities of Whitgift seemed to be justified when it was made apparent on the plains of North America, that they had been inflicted upon men who wanted only the opportunity to inflict them again, and inflict them on one another." (Marsden's History of the Early Puritans, Chap, xi., pp. 305, 306.)

After referring to early conflicts between the Puritans and Indians, Mr. Marsden remarks as follows in regard to the manner in which the Puritans destroyed the Pequod nation:

"If there be a justifiable cause of war, it surely must be this, when our territory is invaded and our means of existence threatened. That the Indians fell upon their enemies by the most nefarious stratagems, or exposed them, when taken in war, to cruel torments (though such ferocity is not alleged in this instance), does not much affect the question. They were savages, and fought white men as they and their fathers had always fought each other. How then should a community of Christian men have dealt with them? Were they to contend as savages or civilized men? As civilized men, or rather as men who had forsaken a land of civilization for purer abodes of piety and peace? The Pequod war shows how little their piety could be trusted when their passions were aroused."

"After a week's marching, they came at day-break on the Indian wigwams and immediately assaulted them. The 'massacre' (so their own chronicler, Mr. Bancroft, has termed it) spread from one hut to another; for the Indians were asleep and unarmed. But the work of slaughter was too slow. 'We must burn them,' exclaimed the fanatic chieftain of the Puritans; and he cast the first firebrand to windward among their wigwams. In an instant the encampment was in a blaze. Not a soul escaped. Six hundred Indians, men, women, and children, perished by the steady hand of the marksman, by the unresisted broadsword, and by the hideous conflagration.

"The work of revenge was not yet accomplished. In a few days a fresh body of troops arrived from Massachusetts, accompanied by their minister, Wilson. The remnants of the proscribed race were now hunted down in their hiding places; every wigwam was burned; every settlement broken up; every cornfield laid waste. There remained, says their exulting historian, not a man or a woman, not a warrior or child of the Pequod name. A nation had disappeared from the family of men." "History records many deeds of blood equal in ferocity to this; but we shall seek in vain for a parallel to the massacre of the Pequod Indians. It brought out the worst points in the Puritan character, and displayed it in the strongest light. When their passions were once inflamed, their religion itself was cruelty. A dark, fanatical spirit of revenge took possession, not, as in other men, by first expelling every religious and every human consideration, but, what was infinitely more terrible, by calling to its aid every stimulant, every motive that religion, jaundiced and perverted, could supply. It is terrible to read, when cities are stormed, of children thrown into the flames, and shrieking women butchered by infuriated men who have burst the restraints of discipline. It is a dreadful licence; and true and gallant soldiers, occur when it may, feel that their profession is disgraced. But this was worse. Here all was deliberately calm; all was sanctioned by religion. It was no outbreak of mere brutality. The fast was kept; the Sabbath was observed; the staff of office, as a sacred ensign, was consecrated by one Christian minister, while another attended upon the marching of soldiery, and cheered them in the murderous design with his presence and his prayers. Piety was supposed not to abhor, but to exult in the exploit. This was true fanaticism. God's word and ordinances were made subservient to the greatest crimes. They were rudely forced and violated, and made the ministers of sin. When the assailants, reeking from the slaughter and blackened with the smoke, returned home, they were everywhere received with a pious ovation. God was devoutly praised, because the first principles of justice, nay, the stinted humanities of war, had been outraged, and unresisting savages, with their wives and children, had been ferociously destroyed." (Marsden's History of the Early Puritans, Chap, xi., pp. 305-311.)

Such was the early Puritan method of fulfilling the Royal Charter to the Massachusetts Company of "Christianizing and civilizing the idolatrous Indians;" and such is a practical comment upon Colonel Barré's statement as to Indian cruelties.

But the intolerance of the Puritans to each other was as conspicuous as their cruel treatment of the Indians. On this point Mr. Marsden adds:

"The intolerance with which the Puritans had been treated at home might at least have taught them a lesson of forbearance to each other. But it had no such effect. It would almost seem as if, true disciples in the school of the High Commission and Star Chamber, their ambition was to excel their former tyrants in the art of persecution. They imitated, with a pertinacious accuracy, the bad examples of their worst oppressors; and with far less to excuse them, repeated in America the self-same crimes from which they and their fathers had suffered so much in England. No political considerations of real importance, no ancient prejudices interwoven with the framework of society, could be pleaded here. Their institutions were new, their course was hampered by no precedents. Imagination cannot suggest a state of things more favourable to the easy, safe, and sure development of their views. Had they cherished a catholic spirit, there was nothing to prevent the exercise of the most enlarged beneficence. Their choice was made freely, and they decided in favour of intolerance; and their fault was aggravated by the consideration that the experiment had been tried, and that they themselves were the living witnesses of its folly." (Marsden's History of the Early Puritans, p. 311.)