George William Ellis - King Philips War

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King Philip's War

Based On The Archives And Records Of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island And Connecticut, And Contemporary Letters And Accounts

GEORGE WILLIAM ELLIS

JOHN EMERY MORRIS

King Philip's War, Ellis/Morris

Jazzybee Verlag Jrgen Beck

86450 Altenmnster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849652494

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

admin@jazzybee-verlag.de

CONTENTS:

PREFACE

THE period marked by the Indian wars of 1675 and 1676, known as King Philip's War, is one of the most interesting and epochal in the early history of the New England colonies.

It was the first great test to which the New England Commonwealths were subjected, and it enforced upon them in blood and fire the necessity of a mutual policy and active co-operation. The lesson that union is strength was learned at that time and was never forgotten. New England after the war, free from fear of any Indian attacks, was able to turn her attention to her own peaceful industrial and political development undisturbed.

However much we must condemn the arbitrary aggressions which drove the Indian tribes into revolt, the historic fact must be accepted that between peoples the fittest only survive, and that as between races ethics rarely exist.

The importance of this conflict in the minds of the early New England people is attested by the great attention paid to it by contemporary New England historians like Mather and Hubbard, and by the voluminous correspondence of the chief men in the colonies.

The correspondence between the Governors and Councils and the commanders in the field in the records and archives of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, serve as a vast mine for careful exploration of the conflict in almost all its details.

We do not claim for this work that it is an absolutely true history; no absolutely true history is possible on any subject. All the authors claim is that it is the result of a wide and discriminative study of the published and unpublished archives of the New England colonies, and of the contemporary letters found in the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Historical Society collections.

Among other works consulted have been the contemporary accounts of Hubbard, Mather, and the Old Indian Chronicle, Captain Church's Narrative, the Journals of Mrs. Rowlandson and John Easton, Major Gookin's Christian Indians, Wheeler's True Narrative of the Lord's Providence, etc. Liberty has been taken occasionally to abridge involved and verbose quotations.

The authors wish to acknowledge their great indebtedness to the work of Rev. George Bodge, the late Samuel Drake, Sydney S. Rider, and the constant courtesy and help of Mr. Albert C. Bates, librarian of the Connecticut Historical Society, and to the authors of many of the valuable town histories.

The narrative and references are the work of Mr. George W. Ellis, while the biographical and local notes have been supplied by Mr. John E. Morris. Acknowledgment is herewith made to many local antiquarians for their co-operation and courtesy.

CHAPTER I

IN the opening years of the seventeenth century, Verrazano and Champlain in their explorations along the New England coast, found the land inhabited by a numerous and warlike population. Many a wigwam village with its waving fields of ripening maize and garden patches of beans and squash, lay stretched along the sheltered coves, and the frail barks of the Indian fishermen thronged the inlets of the shore.

Scarcely a generation later Pilgrim and Puritan searching for a habitable site found the coast almost a solitude. A pestilence more fatal to the Indian tribes than their internecine wars had swept over the land. Wigwams had disappeared. Brush and the encroaching forest were fast blotting out the once cultivated fields and the remnants of the tribes had either retired into the forests or remained too broken in power to offer resistance.

In 1675 a traveler following the course of English settlements found no English habitations upon the coast of Maine east of the Penobscot and the gloom of mighty forests reigned undisturbed. The straggling cabins of Pemaquid amidst the stumps of half-cleared pastures along the shore marked the northern limit of English civilization in the New World.

No road as yet traversed the wild hills and forests that intervened between the Connecticut and the Hudson. South and east, save where Long Island gave to the Connecticut shore a narrow strait of quiet water, spread the Atlantic, while north of the Merrimac lay a vast solitude of rugged mountains and slumbering forest reaching to the St. Lawrence. New England was isolated; and was to remain isolated for many a year to come, a fact of tremendous importance in the molding of New England character.

The political and social center of New England life was Boston, where, beyond the shore edged with docks and wharfs, winding streets and crooked alleys, followed the base of the hills with many a turn, or climbed the slope at the easiest angle. The narrow streets near the wharves were paved with cobblestones, and the shops of one or two stories, and dwellings, mostly of wood, with peaked or gambrelled roofs, presented a medley of shapes and colors.

Homespun garments and cloaks of sober hue, set off with white collars, steeple-shaped hats, loose breeches tied at the knee, everywhere met the eye, the gold laced coats of the brighter colors worn by certain individuals, bespeaking a higher station or a taste for finery that the spirit of Puritanism and the statutes had not entirely eliminated.

Sailors with skirts hanging to the knees, farm laborers in leather or deerskins, Indian converts in English dress from the nearby Christian villages, merchants and magistrates, crowded the narrow streets, and if it was training day the cobblestones awoke to the tread of marching companies of foot equipped with muskets and bandoliers, or rang under the hoofs of troops of horse armed with carbines, pistols, swords, helmets and cuirasses over buff coats.'

No card playing or drinking of healths disturbed the decorum of the taverns, arbitrary regulations which made no distinctions between self-regarded sins and crimes against society, were enforced, and liar and idler were terms sufficiently defined for legal regulation.

A democratic theocracy was here building up on its own interpretations of scriptural precedents, a Biblical commonwealth, "a moral oasis in the midst of a world abandoned to sin," the Canaan of a new Israel, where personal calamities were interpreted as the direct judgment of God.

With the theocracy there was no question of non-conformity. It was their purpose, thoroughly carried out, that New England should be made altogether impossible for those who wished the privilege of thinking or acting contrary to the principles and regulations they themselves laid down as necessary for righteousness and social order. "Better tolerate hypocrites and tares than thorns and briars," affirmed Cotton.

It was not religious considerations alone, however, that had caused the people of the old land to seek homes in New England. The profits of the seacoast fisheries arid the lumber trade, the opportunity for securing large tracts of fertile land, and the inducement of copartnership in the great joint-stock trading corporations, seemingly enriched by royal charters and monopolies, encouraged many to venture their fortunes in the colonies of New England, while the ambitious saw in the new and undeveloped land that opportunity of bettering their condition denied them by the civil and ecclesiastical aristocracy of England.

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