Chapter 10

were made by splits from congregations, or by withdrawals because of religious differences. So each little town had its own peculiar views, which were not always the same as those held in other towns; but as time went on, people began to yield a little in their opinions. They saw, too, that the colonies of New England were threatened by foes without, whose pressure urged a closer union between the friends and foes within. Across the Connecticut, the Dutchmen of New York were crowding the Englishmen of New England; in the north, the Frenchmen of Canada were ever full of a desire to conquer their English neighbors in the south; while within their own limits, and alike on their western and northern borders, the New England colonists ever had before their eyes the threatening horrors of Indian war.

Then, too, the men of New England were prospering in trade and barter, and saw the need of a business union. So fear and self-interest alike combined to urge the New Englanders into friendlier and closer union. This came about at last, when, in 1643, the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven joined themselves into a confederacy for mutual benefit, protection, and defense, under the name of the "United Colonies of New England."

Thirty-nine towns, with a population in all of twenty four thousand inhabitants, made up this league and confederacy. Of these Massachusetts Bay counted fifteen thousand within her own borders, and was compelled, therefore, to pay the most toward expenses and contribute the largest number of men as soldiers for defense, Naturally the Bay colony wished to have

the most to say; so, while by the terms of the confederation she had really no more authority than the smallest of the four, the Bay colony tried to lead, and often got into dispute with the other three.

But each of the four colonies saw that it was unwise to let these disputes run into real quarrels. Each was necessary to the other, and "United we stand, divided we fall" was an easily understood motto. How much that union of the four New England colonies led to the later plan of American union and independence it is not easy to say. It undoubtedly set men to thinking, especially when, after a while, a tyrannical king broke up and absorbed the confederacy into his own royal provinces; but in those mid-years of the century it was a wise and proper thing to have achieved, as the men of New England speedily discovered when there broke upon them, in 1675, the open menace of a determined Indian war. Then Massachusetts took the lead.

England, indeed, was too busy to bother with its colonies, and so the go-ahead, assertive Massachusetts colonists were left to take care of themselves. The war which now threatened the peace of the colonies is known as King Philip’s War, although Philip of Pokanoket was no king. He was simply the chief of the once powerful tribe of the Wampanoags. He was the younger son of that Massasoit with whom

the Pilgrims of the Plymouth colony, in the days of Captain Standish, had wisely made a treaty, and kept it unbroken for over forty years.

But Massasoit was dead; Captain Miles Standish was dead; Governor William Bradford and Governor John Winthrop were dead. The old friendships weakened, and Philip, or Metacomet, as his Indian name runs, was sagamore and leader in the lodges of the Wampanoags.

Philip was a fiery and spirited red man. He chafed under the lordship of the white "intruders;" he saw the lands of the red men gradually passing into the hands of their white neighbors. They had been honestly bought and paid for, but real estate dealings were something which the communistic Indians never could really understand. Philip knew the menace of the increasing numbers of the English colonists; he misunderstood the design of that good John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, in converting and civilizing the Indians, and saw in all this housing of Eliot’s christianized red men, who were called the "praying Indians," only a design to weaken the red man and increase the strength of the white man.

"That good John Eliot" is one of the historic figures of Massachusetts. A graduate of Cambridge University in England, he came to Massachusetts in 1631, and became the minister of the church in Roxbury, where he lived near the Eliot Square of to-day. There he became filled with the desire to convert to Christianity the Indians of New England; and from there he went on his pilgrimage as "apostle to the Indians from Cape Cod to the Merrimac." For them he lived and labored, learning their language, civilizing and Chris-

tianizing them, until in Massachusetts alone there were nearly four thousand of Eliot’s "praying Indians," as they were called. A saintly, prayerful, pure, and well-meaning reformer was this noble-souled John Eliot. His efforts were distrusted by his own brethren and misjudged by the Indians, and all that we have now to remember the good apostle by, besides his sainted memory, are the most costly and rarest of old books,

Eliot’s Indian Bible," and his word for "chief" or "leader" in the Indian tongue, which has now become a familiar word in American politics, ‘ mugwump."

But his influence was wider than this, for it is now a well-recognized fact that but for the loyalty and devotion of Eliot’s praying Indians the league of Philip of Pokanoket would have been a successful combination, and the colony of Massachusetts Bay would have been either exterminated or weakened beyond rescue.

It was the conversion, and, as Philip considered it, the weakening of these praying Indians that especially inflamed that fiery son of Massasoit, and urged him into vengeance upon the white man.

For thirteen years the red leader bided his time, sowing the seeds of discontent and distrust among the neighboring tribes, until finally, in 1675, all the horror of Indian war broke upon the colonies of Massachusetts and Plymouth.

Villages were sacked and burned; soldiers were ambushed and killed; women and children were massacred or dragged into captivity. The security of forty years of peace was broken. War was in the land.

Swanzy and Dartmouth, Middleboro and Taunton

and Brookfield, tasted all the savage horrors of Indian attack and massacre, and so, gradually, the trouble set westward, until it came with tomahawk and torch into the fair valley of the Connecticut, where Springfield, Northampton, and Hadley lay along the beautiful river.

Hadley, by its position, had been made a point of rendezvous and departure for operations offensive and defensive; it became, therefore, a mark for Indian raid and assault, when Philip the sagamore came to rouse the tribes of the Connecticut valley to war upon the white men.

It was on the first day of September, in the battle year of 1675, that the people of Hadley, assembled in their meetinghouse to keep a day of fasting and of prayer, were suddenly startled by the horrible Indian yell.

"The Indians are upon us!" they cried; and forthwith the armed men rushed to the palisades.

But they were too late. All that previous night their red foemen had been making ready. To the south of the town a careful ambush had been laid, and from the north, against the slender defense of palisades, seven hundred Indians swooped down upon the devoted town to force the fortifications and drive the I startled inhabitants of Hadley into the dreadful southern ambuscade.

The palisades at the north, though valiantly defended, were speedily forced. A mob of screeching Indians swarmed into the little hamlet; the defenders met them bravely, and forced them off; but, reinforced, they came crowding back, and the men of

Hadley, driven before the savage onrush, fell back for a last desperate stand upon the village green.

Then it was that a strange thing came to pass; for, as the men of Hadley quailed before their savage foe-men, suddenly a stranger stood among them.

No one knew him. But when, with rapid movements and commanding voice, he formed the fighting men into a well-ordered array, they knew that a leader in battle had come to help them, and they unquestioningly obeyed him. Swiftly the line was formed; swiftly it was strengthened; as swiftly it charged upon the red invaders, the white-haired, military-looking leader urging the defenders forward in their sortie. A word here, a gesture there, a massing at one point, a flanking at another, and speedily the tide of war was turned. The men of Hadley with a resistless charge drove back

Indian mass, and, forcing it through the ruined palisades, sent it flying to the north, routed, scattered, overthrown.

But when, the danger over, the retreat recalled, the village saved, the men of Hadley once more gathered on their village green, the mysterious stranger had disappeared.

No one saw him come; no one saw him go. Do you remember the heaven-sent messengers of whom the Roman legends tell us, who, at the battle of the Lake Regillus, appeared just in the nick of time to save the day for Rome? In much the same way this gray-haired stranger came and fought for the people of Hadley until the foe was routed. Macaulay’s stirring ballad tells the Roman story:

"‘Rome to the charge!’ cried Aulus;

‘The foe begins to yield!

Charge for the hearth of Vesta!

Charge for the Golden Shield!

Let no man-stop to plunder,

But slay and slay and slay;

The gods who live forever

Are on our side to-day.’"

And then, the battle over, the heaven-sent allies disappeared. For, says the ballad:

"Straight again they mounted,

And rode to Vesta’s door;

Then, like a blast, away they passed,

And no man saw them more."

Just so vanished the man who turned the battle and won the day at Hadley. Silently he came; silently he

left. And the people, quick to believe in miracles, could come to but one conclusion.

"It was an angel," they declared, "sent of God upon this special occasion for our deliverance."

And so they maintained for years. But time at last unraveled the mystery, and now we know that the man who had appeared so suddenly, commanded so well, fought so valiantly, and disappeared so mysteriously, was none other than the fugitive English republican Major General William Goffe, the friend of Cromwell, the bravest of the parliamentary generals, the commander at Dunbar and at Worcester, the man who would have been the general in chief of the army of the Commonwealth and the successor of Cromwell as Lord Protector of England, had not the generals of Cromwell themselves brought back the Stuarts to power. But, more than all this, he was one of the judges who presided at the trial which condemned Charles I. to death, and was therefore known for all time as" Goffe the regicide." A fugitive from his home, a price upon his head, he and his companion, General Whalley, had found their way to Massachusetts and been secretly harbored and helped by a few faithful friends. From the windows of the house of his friend Mr. Russell at Hadley he had seen the Indian onslaught. His habits of command and leadership awoke in him and urged him to the aid of the villagers. Putting himself at their head, he had routed the savage foe as he had routed the king’s men at Dunbar, and then, his work accomplished, he had slipped into hiding again, and lived thus until his death, four years later.

It is one of the romances of Massachusetts history, and

lights up that especially dark and gloomy time known as King Philip’s War, so crowded with stories of sack and slaughter, of hairbreadth escape and furious battle, ended only by the treacherous slaughter of the brave but unskilled sagamore Philip, and the utter destruction of the Indians of New England as a foe to be feared.

Twelve out of ninety New England towns had been destroyed; forty more had known massacre, sack, and slaughter; a thousand fighting men had fallen before the Indians’ fury; as many helpless women and children had perished, too; the war debts exceeded the colony’s personal property, and for years were a burden on the people. But they paid the debt.

Upon the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies the war had fallen with especial force. But they won. The Indians were simply obliterated as a factor longer to be dreaded or feared in the colony life, and as the men of Hadley saw, in the sudden appearance of the angel who was no angel, the helping hand of God, so they called the whole bitter war an act of Providence sent for their own "chastening."

It did more than chasten; it educated. For Massachusetts learned, from this Indian war, habits of wariness, watchfulness, energy, determination, and self-help. They grew to see and to know their own power; and when the need came to face men even more crafty and determined than the crafty Philip, they were able to meet the crisis with a calm front and a determined mind, the first fruitage of that "eternal vigilance" which to them, as to other patriots, has ever proved itself the "price of liberty."