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land." Charles himself commended this affair more expressly, because" the colony was rich and strong, able to contest with all other plantations about them;" "there is fear," said the monarch, in May, 1671," of their breaking from all dependence on this nation." "Some of the council proposed a menacing letter, which those who better understood the peevish and touchy humor of that colonie were utterly against." After many days, it was concluded “that, if any, it should be only a conciliating paper at first, or civil letter; for it was understood they were a people almost upon the very brink of renouncing any dependence upon the crown." "Information of the present face of things was desired," and Cartwright, one of the commissioners, was summoned before the council to give “a relation of that country;" but, such was the picture that he drew, the council were more intimidated than ever, so that nothing was recommended beyond "a letter of amnesty." By degrees, it was proposed to send a deputy to New England, under the pretext of adjusting boundaries, but "with secret instructions to inform the council of the condition of New England; and whether they were of such power as to be able to resist his majesty and declare for themselves, as independent of the crown." Their strength was reported to be the cause "which of late years made them refractory." But the king was taken up by "the childish, simple, and baby face" of a new favorite and his traffic of the honor and independence of England to the king of France. The duke of Buckingham, now in mighty favor, was revelling with a luxurious and abandoned rout; and, for the moment, the discussions at the council about New England were fruitless.

CHAPTER V.

NEW ENGLAND AND ITS RED MEN.

COLONIES were valued in proportion as their products differed from those of the parent country. "Massachusetts," said Sir Joshua Child, in his discourse on trade, “is the most prejudicial plantation of Great Britain; the frugality, industry, and temperance of its people, and the happiness of their laws and institutions, promise them long life, and a wonderful increase of people, riches, and power." It paid no regard to the acts of navigation. With a jurisdiction stretching to the Kennebec, it possessed a widely extended trade; acting as a carrier for other English colonies, and sending ships into the most various climes. Boston harbor was open to vessels from Spain and Italy, from France and Holland. Commerce brought wealth to the colonists, and they employed it liberally; after the great fire in London, they sent large contributions to the sufferers.

Beggary was unknown; theft was rare. If "strange new fashions" prevailed among "the younger sort of women," if "superfluous ribbons" decorated their apparel, at least "musicians by trade and dancing-schools" were not fostered. In spite of the increasing spirit of inquiry and toleration, the Congregational churches were upheld "in their purest and most athletick constitution." Affluence was uninterrupted.

This increase of the English alarmed the red men, who could not change their habits, and who saw themselves deprived of their ancient resources. It is difficult to form exact opinions on the population of the several colonies in this early period; the colonial accounts are incomplete ; those which were furnished by emissaries from England are

and

extravagantly false. No great error will be committed if we suppose the white population of New England, in 1675, to have been fifty-five thousand souls. Of these, Plymouth may have contained not many less than seven thousand; Connecticut, nearly fourteen thousand; Massachusetts proper, more than twenty-two thousand; and Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, each perhaps four thousand. The settlements near the sea-side reached from New Haven to Pemaquid. The beaver trade, even more than traffic in lumber and fish, created the villages beyond the Piscataqua; yet in Maine, as in New Hampshire, there was "a great trade in deal-boards;" and the rivers were made to drive "the saw-mills," then described as a "late invention." Haverhill, on the Merrimack, was a frontier town; from Connecticut, emigrants had ascended as far as the rich meadows of Deerfield and Northfield; but Berkshire was a wilderness; Westfield was the remotest plantation. Between the towns on Connecticut river and the compact towns near Massachusetts bay, Lancaster and Brookfield were the solitary abodes of Christians in the desert. The confederacy of the colonies had been renewed, in anticipation of dangers.

The number of the red men of that day hardly amounted to thirty thousand in all New England west of the St. Croix. Of these, perhaps about five thousand dwelt in the territory of Maine; New Hampshire may have hardly contained three thousand; and Massachusetts, with Plymouth, never from the first peopled by many of them, seems to have had less than eight thousand. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, never depopulated by wasting sickness, the Mohegans, the Narragansetts, the Pokanokets, and kindred tribes, had multiplied their villages along the sea, the inlets, and the larger ponds, which added fish to their scanty supplies. Yet the exaggerated estimates of their numbers melt away when subjected to criticism. In Connecticut, there may have been two thousand able-bodied red men; the Narragansetts, like so many other tribes, boasted of their former grandeur, but they could not bring into action a thousand bowmen. West of the Piscataqua there were probably about fifty thousand whites and hardly twenty-five thousand Indians; while, east of it, there

were about four thousand whites, and perhaps more than that number of red men.

The ministers of the early emigration were fired with zeal to redeem these "wrecks of humanity," and gather them into civilized villages.

No pains were spared to teach them to read and write; and, in a short time, a larger proportion of the Massachusetts Indians could do so than recently of the inhabitants of Russia. Some of them spoke and wrote English quite well. The morning star of missionary enterprise was John Eliot, whose character shone with the purest lustre of disinterested love. An Indian grammar was a pledge of his earnestness; the pledge was redeemed by his preparing and publishing a translation of the whole Bible into the Massachusetts dialect.

He lived with the red men; spoke to them of God and of the soul, and explained the virtues of self-denial. He became their law-giver. He taught the women to spin, the men to dig the ground; he established for them simple forms of government; and, in spite of menaces from their priests and chieftains, he instructed them in his own religious faith, and not without success. Groups of them used to gather round him as round a father, and often perplexed him with their doubts. "What is a spirit?" asked the Indians of Massachusetts of their apostle. "Can the soul be enclosed in iron so that it cannot escape?" "When Christ arose, whence came his soul?" Every clan had some vague conceptions of immortality of its own. "Shall I know you in heaven?" inquired a red man. "Our little children have not sinned; when they die, whither do they go?" "When such die as never heard of Christ, where do they go?" "Do they in heaven dwell in houses, and what do they do?" "Do they know things done here on earth?" The origin of moral evil has engaged the minds of the most subtle. "Why," demanded the natives on the banks of the Charles, "why did not God give all men good hearts?" "Since God is all-powerful, why did not God kill the devil, that made men so bad?" Of themselves they fell into the mazes of fixed decrees and free-will. "Doth God know who shall repent and believe, and who not?" The ballot-box was to them a mystery. "When you

choose magistrates, how do you know who are good men, whom you dare trust?" And again: "If a man be wise, and his sachem weak, must he yet obey him?" Eliot preached against polygamy. "Suppose a man, before he knew God," inquired a convert, "hath had two wives, the first childless, the second bearing him many sweet children, whom he exceedingly loves, which of these two wives is he to put away?" And the case was put to the pure-minded Eliot, among the wigwams of Nonantum: "Suppose a squaw desert and flee from her husband, and live with another distant Indian, till, hearing the word, she repents, and desires to come again to her husband, who remains still unmarried: shall the husband, upon her repentance, receive her again?" The poet of civilization tells us that happiness is the end of our being. "How shall I find happiness?" demanded the savage. And Eliot was never tired by this importunity or by the hereditary idleness of the race; and his simplicity of life and manners won for him all hearts, whether in the villages of the emigrants or "the smoaky cells" of the natives.

In the islands round Massachusetts, and within the limits. of the Plymouth patent, "that young New England scholar," the gentle Mayhew, forgetting the pride of learning, endeavored to convert the natives. At a later day, he took passage for England to awaken interest in his mission, and the ship in which he sailed was never more heard of. But, such had been the force of his example, that his father, though bowed down by the weight of seventy years, assumed toward the red men the office of the son whom he had lost, and, though he declined to become the pastor of their regularly organized church, he continued his zeal for them till beyond the age of fourscore years and twelve, and with the happiest results. The Indians of the Elizabeth isles, though twenty times more numerous than the whites in their immediate neighborhood, preserved an immutable friendship with Massachusetts.

Churches of "praying Indians" were gathered; at Cambridge, an Indian became a bachelor of arts. Yet Christianity hardly spread beyond the Indians on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket, and the seven feeble villages round Boston. The Narragansetts, hemmed in between Connecticut

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