son, Gallop, Siely, Marshall, led their companions through the narrow entrance in the face of death, and left their lives as a testimony to their patriotism and courage. But the palisades, strong as they were, could not check the determined valor of the assailing party. Within the enclosure the battle raged hand to hand, till seventy of the New Englanders were killed and twice that number wounded; nor was it decided till the group of Indian cabins was set on fire.

Then were

swept away the winter's stores of the tribe; their curiously wrought baskets, full of corn; their famous strings of wampum; their wigwams nicely lined with mats-all the little comforts of savage life. Old men, women, and babes, perished in the flames. How many of their warriors fell was never known. The English troops, after the engagement, bearing with them their wounded, retraced their steps, by night, through a snow-storm, to Wickford.

"We will fight," said the Indian warriors, "these twenty years; you have houses, barns, and corn; we have now nothing to lose ;" and towns in Massachusetts, one after another— Lancaster, Medfield, Weymouth, Groton, Marlborough—were laid in ashes.

Early in the morning of the tenth of February, 1676, Philip of Pokanoket, with warriors of the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck tribes, burst upon Lancaster in five several assaults. Forty-two persons had sought shelter under the roof of Mary Rowlandson; and, after a hot assault, the Indians succeeded in setting the house on fire. "Quickly," she writes, "it was the dolefulest day that ever mine eyes Now the dreadful hour is come. Some in our house were fighting for their lives; others wallowing in blood; the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out. I took my children to go forth; but the Indians shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house as if one had thrown a handful of stones. We had six stout dogs, but none of them would stir.

saw.

The bullets flying thick, one went through my side, and through my poor child in my arms." The brutalities of an Indian massacre followed; "there remained nothing to me," she continues, now in captivity, "but one poor wounded babe.

Down I must sit in the snow, with my sick child, the picture of death, in my lap. Not the least crumb of refreshing came within either of our mouths from Wednesday night to Saturday night, except only a little cold water. One Indian, and then a second, and then a third, would come and tell me, 'Your master will quickly knock your child on the head.' This was the comfort I had from them: miserable comforters were they all."

Nor were such scenes of ruin confined to Massachusetts. At the south, the Narragansett country was deserted by the English; Warwick was burnt; Providence was attacked and set on fire. "We will fight to the last man," said the gallant chieftain Canonchet," rather than become servants to the English." In April, 1676, taken prisoner near the Blackstone, a young man began to question him. "Child," replied he, "you do not understand war; I will answer your chief." The offer of his life, if he would procure a treaty of peace, he refused with disdain. "I know," added he, "the Indians will not yield.” Condemned to death, he only answered: "I like it well; I shall die before I speak anything unworthy of myself."

There was no security but to seek out the hiding-places of the natives. On the banks of the Connecticut, just above the falls that take their name from the gallant Turner, was an encampment of large bodies of hostile Indians; a band of one hundred and fifty volunteers, from among the yeomanry of Springfield, Hadley, Hatfield, and Northampton, led by Turner and Holyoke, making a silent march in the dead of night, came at daybreak of the nineteenth of May upon the wigwams. The Indians are taken by surprise; some are shot down in their cabins; others rush to the river, and are drowned; others push from shore in their birchen canoes, and are hurried down the cataract.

As the season advanced, the Indians abandoned every hope. Their forces were wasted; they had no fields that they could plant. Continued warfare without a respite was against their usages. They began, as the unsuccessful and unhappy so often do, to quarrel among themselves; recriminations ensued; those of Connecticut charged their sufferings upon Philip; and his allies became suppliants for peace. Some

surrendered to escape starvation. In the progress of the year, between two and three thousand Indians submitted or were killed. Church, the most famous partisan warrior, went out to hunt down parties of fugitives. Some of the tribes wandered away to the north, and were blended with tribes of Canada. Philip himself 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 a year's absence, he resolved, as it were, to meet his destiny, and returned to the beautiful land which held the graves of his forefathers, and had been his home. On the third of August, 1676, 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. His captive child was sold as a slave in Bermuda. Of the Narragansetts, once the chief tribe of New England, hardly one hundred men survived.

During the war, the Mohegans remained faithful to the English, and not a drop of 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, perished in the field. As many as six hundred houses were burnt. Of the able-bodied men in the colony, one in twenty had fallen; and one family in twenty had been burnt out.

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, furnished the houseless with more than a thousand bushels of corn. "God will remember and reward that pleasant fruit." Boston did the like, for "the grace of Christ always made Boston exemplary" in works of that nature.

VOL. 1.-27

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, a border warfare extended over nearly three hundred miles. 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, as the eastern tribes were called, 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 the hope of a ransom sometimes counselled mercy.

The escape of Anne Brackett, granddaughter of George Cleeves, the first settler of Portland, was the marvel of that day. In August her family were taken captive at the sack of Falmouth. When her captors hastened forward to further ravages on the Kennebec, she was able to loiter behind; with needle and thread from a deserted house, she repaired the wreck of a birchen bark; then, with her husband, a negro servant, and her infant child, she trusted herself to the sea in the patched 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 encounter savages, 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 anchorage in the harbor!

The surrender of Acadia to the French had rendered the struggle more arduous, for the eastern Indians obtained arms from the French on the Penobscot. A few of the Mohawks took up the hatchet; but distance rendered co-operation impossible. After several fruitless attempts at treaties, on the twelfth of April, 1678, peace was finally established by Edmund Andros, as governor of the duke of York's province beyond the Kennebec. The red men promised the release of prisoners and the security of English towns; in return, the English were to pay annually, as a quit-rent, a peck of corn for every English family.

CHAPTER VI.

THE OVERTHROW OF THE CHARTER OF MASSACHUSETTS.

To protect the Catholic religion and establish the absolute power of the crown were the constant desires of Charles II. The movements against the liberties of the colonies were marked by the same occasional hesitation and the same underlying persistency as those against the rights of English corporations and the English parliament. For fifteen or sixteen years after the restoration, there was no officer of the customs in Massachusetts, except the governor, annually elected by the people; and he had never taken the oath which the navigation act of 1660 required. During the disastrous Indian war, New England, jealous of independence, never applied to the parent country for assistance. "You are poor," said the earl of Anglesey, "and yet proud." The English ministry, contributing nothing to repair colonial losses, made no secret of its intention to "reassume the government of Massachusetts," and while the ground was still wet with the blood of her yeomanry, the ruins of her villages were still smoking, and the Indian war-cry was yet ringing in the forests of Maine, the committee of the privy council for plantations "did agree that this was the conjuncture to do something effectual for the better regulation of that government, or else all hopes of it might be hereafter lost." The choice of its agent fell upon Edward Randolph, who at the same time was intrusted by Robert Mason with the care of his claims to New Hampshire; so that he menaced at once the extent, the trade, and the charter of Massachusetts.

Arriving in June, 1676, the emissary immediately demanded of Leverett the governor, that the letter which he