1676.]

KING PHILIP'S WAR.

275

year, between two and three thousand Indians were killed or submitted. Church, the most famous partisan commander, went out to hunt down parties of fugitives. Some of the tribes wandered away to the north, and were blended with the tribes of Canada. Philip himself, a man of no ordinary elevation of character, was chased from one hiding-place to another. He had vainly sought to engage the Mohawks in the contest; now that hope was at an end, he still refused to hear of peace, and struck dead the warrior who proposed it. At length, after the absence of a year, he resolved to return to the beautiful land where were the graves of his forefathers, the cradle of his infancy, and the nestling-place of his tribe. On the third day of August, he escaped narrowly, leaving his wife and only son as prisoners. "My heart breaks," cried the tattooed chieftain, in the agony of his grief; now I am ready to die." His own followers began to plot against him, to make better terms for themselves, and in a few days he was shot by a faithless Indian. The captive orphan was transported. So perished the princes of the Pokanokets. Sad to them had been their acquaintance with civilization. The first ship that came on their coast kidnapped men of their kindred; and now the harmless boy, that had been cherished as an only child, and the future sachem of their tribes, the last of the family of Massasoit, was sold into bondage, to toil as a slave under the suns of Bermuda. Of the once prosperous Narragansets, of old the chief tribe of New England, hardly one hundred men remained. The sword, fire, famine, and sickness, had swept them from the earth.

66

During the whole war, the Mohegans remained faithful to the English; and no blood was shed on the happy soil of Connecticut. So much the greater was the loss in the adjacent colonies. Twelve or thirteen towns were destroyed; the disbursements and losses equalled in value half a million of dollars an enormous sum for the few of that day. More than six hundred men, chiefly young men, the flower of the country, of whom any mother

276

THE INDIAN WAR IN MAINE.

[1676.

might have been proud, perished in the field. As many as six hundred houses were burned. Of the able-bodied men in the colony, one in twenty had fallen; and one family in twenty had been burnt out. The loss of lives and property was, in proportion to numbers, as distressing as in the revolutionary war. There was scarcely a family from which death had not selected a victim.

Let us not forget a good deed of the generous Irish ; they sent over a contribution, small, it is true, to relieve in part the distresses of Plymouth colony. Connecticut, which had contributed soldiers to the war, now furnished the houseless with more than a thousand bushels of corn. "God will remember and reward that pleasant fruit." Boston imitated the example; for "the grace of Christ," it was said, "always made Boston exemplary" in works of that nature.

The eastern hostilities with the Indians had a different origin, and were of longer continuance. The news of the rising of the Pokanokets was, indeed, the signal for the commencement of devastations; and, within a few weeks, the war extended over a space of nearly three hundred miles. But in Maine it was a border warfare, growing out of a consciousness of wrongs, and a thirst for revenge. Sailors had committed outrages, and the Indians avenged the crimes of a corrupt ship's crew on the villages. There was no general rising of the Abenakis, or eastern tribes, no gatherings of large bodies of men. Of the English settlements, nearly one half were destroyed in detail; the inhabitants were either driven away, killed, or carried into captivity; for covetousness sometimes provoked to mercy, by exciting the hope of a ransom.

The escape of ANNE BRACKETT, granddaughter of George Cleeves, the first settler of Portland, was the marvel of that day. Her family had, in August, 1676, been taken captives at the sack of Falmouth. When her captors hastened forward to further ravages on the Kennebec, she was able to loiter behind; the eye of the mother discerned the wreck of a birchen bark, which, with needle and thread from a deserted house, she patched

CONTROVERSY WITH CHARLES II. RENEWED. 277

and repaired; then, with her husband, a negro servant, and her infant child, she trusted herself to the sea in the tattered canoe, which had neither sail nor mast, and was like a feather on the waves. She crossed Casco Bay, and, arriving at Black Point, where she feared to find Indians, and at best could only have hoped to find a solitude, how great was her joy, as she discovered a vessel from Piscataqua, that had just sought an anchoring-place in the harbor!

The surrender of Acadia to the French had made the struggle more arduous; for the eastern Indians obtained supplies of arms from the French on the Penobscot. In 1677, the Mohawks were invited to engage in the war; a few of them took up the hatchet, but distance rendered coöperation impossible. After several fruitless attempts at treaties, in April, 1678, peace was established by Andros as governor of Pemaquid, but on terms which acknowledged the superiority of the Indians.

66

The defence of New England had been made by its own resources. Jealous of independence, it never applied to the parent country for assistance; and the earl of Anglesey reproached the people with their public spirit. "You are poor," said he, "and yet proud." The English ministry, contributing nothing to repair colonial losses, made no secret of its intention to reassume the government of Massachusetts into its own hands;" and, in 1676, while the Indian war-cry was yet ringing in the forests of Maine, Edward Randolph, at once the agent for Mason, and the emissary from the privy council, a hungry adventurer, whose zeal led him, in the course of nine years, to make eight voyages to America, arrived in New England, with a royal message, requiring submission. The colony, reluctantly yielding to the direct commands of Charles II., resolved to send William Stoughton and Peter Bulkley as envoys to England; grieving at the hardship of being required, at one and the same time, to maintain before courts of law a title to the provinces, and to dispute with a savage foe the possession of dismal deserts.

278 ORGANIZATION OF A GOVERNMENT IN MAINE.

Remonstrance was of no avail. In 1677, a committee of the privy council, which examined all the charters, denied to Massachusetts the right of jurisdiction over Maine and New Hampshire. The decision was so manifestly in conformity with English law, that the colonial agents attempted no serious defence.

The provinces being thus severed from the government of Massachusetts, King Charles was willing to secure them as an appanage for his reputed son, the kind-hearted, but worthless duke of Monmouth, the Absalom of that day, whom frivolous ambition at last conducted to the scaffold. But in May, 1677, before the monarch, whom extravagance had impoverished, could resolve on a negotiation, Massachusetts, through the agency of a Boston merchant, obtained possession of the claims of Gorges, by a purchase and regular assignment. The price paid was £1250-about six thousand dollars. But Massachusetts did not, at this time, come into possession of the whole territory which now constitutes the state of Maine. France, under the treaty of Breda, claimed and occupied the district from St. Croix to the Penobscot; the duke of York held the tract between the Penobscot and the Kennebec, claiming, indeed, to own the whole tract between the Kennebec and the St. Croix; while Massachusetts was proprietary only of the district between the Kennebec and the Piscataqua.

A novel form of political institution ensued. Massachusetts, in her corporate capacity, was become the lord proprietary of Maine; the little republic on the banks of the Charles was the feudal sovereign of this eastern lordship. Maine had thus far been represented in the Massachusetts house of representatives; henceforward she was to be governed as a province, according to the charter to Gorges.

The change of government in New Hampshire was less quietly effected. The patent of Mason was duly investigated in England; it was found that he had no right to jurisdiction; the unappropriated lands were allowed to belong to him; but the rights of the settlers

1679-1683.] NEW HAMPSHIRE A ROYAL PROVINCE. 279

to the soil which they actually occupied, were reserved for litigation in colonial courts.

In July, 1679, New Hampshire was separated from Massachusetts, and organized as a royal province. It was the first royal government ever established in New England. The king, reserving a negative voice to himself and his officers, engaged to continue the privilege of an assembly, unless he or his heirs should deem that privilege "an inconvenience."

In March, 1680, a general assembly was convened at Portsmouth, and the colony asserted its rights in the first decree of their new code. "No act, imposition, law, or ordinance, shall be valid, unless made by the assembly and approved by the people." Thus did New Hampshire seize the earliest moment of its separate existence, to express the great principle of self-government, and take her place by the side of Massachusetts and Virginia. Nor was Mason successful in establishing his claims to the soil. The colonial government protected the colonists, and restrained his exactions.

Hastening to England, Mason was authorized to select the person to be appointed governor. He found a fit agent in Edward Cranfield, a man who had no object in banishing himself to the wilds of America, but to wrest a fortune from the sawyers and lumber-dealers of New Hampshire.

But the first assembly which Cranfield convened, in November, 1682, dispelled all his golden visions of an easy acquisition of fortune. The "rugged" legislators would not yield their liberties; and, in January, 1683, the governor in anger dissolved the assembly.

The dissolution of an assembly - a novel procedure in New England-was followed by popular discontent, and a cry for "liberty and reformation."

The lawsuits

about land were multiplied. Packed juries and partial judges settled questions rapidly; but Mason derived no benefit from a decision in his favor; for he could neither get possession of the estates, nor find a purchaser.

Cranfield still sighed for money; and now, stooping to