has told the story of these proceedings against the Narragansetts and Gorton's company; but without adding to our knowledge of the facts, obtained from sources more satisfactory.

1 Gorton and his party were severely dealt with. It is no part of the historian's office to frame justifications for acts which he records. But he should endeavor to produce the true explanations of whatever is perplexing. And it is a mistake to suppose that the suggestion of culpable motives for a course of action is the suggestion the most likely to elucidate it. The contrary is true, when the characters involved are on the whole such as have affinity with worthy motives.

The Magistrates of Massachusetts had perhaps never heard the name of Gorton before Roger Williams wrote to Winthrop that he was afraid the restless demagogue would drive him away from Providence. (See above, p. 120, note 2; 118, note 5.) Eight months more had passed, when the original planters in the outskirts of that feebly organized settlement complained at Boston, that Gorton had obtained land 66 over their heads," and raised a riot which had led to blows. At the same time the Magistrates learned that he was associated in his machinations with persons whom they had lately had to deal with for misbehavior within their own confines; and further inquiry must have brought them the information, that most of his company had been disturbers, of whom they had

formerly had to rid themselves, and that he himself had been banished from Plymouth for "seditious carriage,” punished by whipping on Rhode Island for riot and mutiny, and refused" inhabitation and town privileges" by Williams and his friends at Providence for "his uncivil and inhuman practices; " in short, that wherever he had been, he had been an intolerable pest.

The complainants received for answer, that they were no subjects of Massachusetts, and that the way for them to seek their right to live quietly, was to attach themselves to some orderly government. Having borne their discomforts through the greater part of another year, they resolved at length to place themselves under her protection; and Massachusetts, unwilling to have an anarchy grow up upon her borders, as well for more general reasons, as because it would leave unrestrained such treatment of the Indians as would be at once unjust and dangerous, took the same course as had been before taken with the detached settlements in New Hampshire and Maine, and received the petitioners under her government.

The other party, under furious exasperation, which they first expressed in a letter, conceived in abusive and threatening terms which showed them prepared to do their utmost possible of harm, removed towards the Narragansett country, where they pretended to have bought lands of its chief. Meantime other circumstances lent a much

higher importance to the affair. The settlements had been distressed by intelligence of a scheme on foot for a general rising of the Indians, under the lead of the Narragansetts, the most powerful Indian tribe, and of their able and restless chief, from whom Gorton and his company pretended to have made their purchase. The excitement was at its height at the time when these dangerous persons had become the savage's fast friends, had dealt with him for lands, and established themselves near him at the most important point of passage and communication between the different English settlements. No good offices could be expected from them. The worst might reasonably be feared. At all events, the place was one too favorable for hostilities, to be left in the occupation of bitter and capable enemies. And the emergency became pressing, when Miantonomo, in violation of a treaty, made war upon Indian allies of the English, and when, on his being taken prisoner, Gorton established a further interest with his tribe by writing a threatening letter to his captor to procure his release. "Many reasons concerning our safety," wrote Winthrop to the Providence men who had proposed themselves as mediators, "have necessarily put us upon this course;" and he explained himself by adding, "the bottom of it [that is, of the action of Gorton's party] is easily sounded; which is, to win time to discourage the Indians under our subjection, and to give them time and opportunity to stir up, as much as in them lieth, the other Indians against us." (R. I. Hist. Col., II. 110.)

The means of redress and of security were furnished when the Indian chiefs of Shawomet, having satisfied the Massachusetts Court that the land said to have been sold by Miantonomo to Gorton was not his to sell, but theirs, yielded it and themselves to her government. It was thought that the land might lie within the Plymouth patent; but the Federal Commissioners, with the consent of those who represented Plymouth, requested Massachusetts to assume jurisdiction. She proceeded to do so; and was defied. While her blood was up against King Charles, with whom her friends were now fighting a critical battle for all that is dearest to good men, the opposition she was aiming to put down was made more alarming and offensive by the threat of bringing in his authority to overbear her own; and at length she undertook to subdue with the vigor of military action the pertinacious disturbers whom the Colonies previously infested by them had dealt with in vain.

Their persons being seized, they were arraigned both as blasphemers and as "enemies of all civil authority." If, for good and sufficient reasons concerning the public weal, it was right that they should be disabled, the charge of blasphemy was, in the circumstances, no unfit or dishonest expedient for the purpose. Undoubtedly the rulers in Massachusetts believed that their prisoners had been guilty of it, and that it was an offence properly punishable by human tribunals. The people's horror of blasphemy was on their side. The people familiarly recognized it as a great crime. It stood as such on the statute-book in England, as well as in

Mas

1638.

almost all the English settlements in this country. And by their own law under which, however, no execution ever took place it was a capital offence. The author of their Body of Liberties had, to their satisfaction, quoted Scripture (Lev. xxiv. 15, 16) as authority for so regarding it.

The final form of the arraignment and conviction in this case has given color to a charge, which the sufferers, resorting to an obvious topic of crimination, afterwards busied themselves to enforce,—that there was an invasion of the rights of conscience. But it is an easy faith that can admit that it was in pursuit of a knot of misbelievers or blasphemers, that a little army was sent to a distance of sixty miles; or that it was an offence of this nature, that agitated so long the deliberations of the General Court of Massachusetts and of the Federal Council of the Four Colonies. It is more natural to suppose that, so long as no other harm was done, blasphemies might have been uttered without interruption, stint, or end, in the Narragansett woods, where there were no devout ears to be pained with them; while, on the other hand, it appears too much to expect that sensible men, like the Massachusetts rulers, would permit wild Indians to be set upon them, and hold the instigators harmless merely for their abundant speaking and writing of gibberish in

terlarded with Scripture. Nor will it escape the reader's attention, that, through the relenting inconsistency which usually finds place when a theory of law is too rigorous to command the sympathy of the people's moral sense, Gorton and his companions, though pronounced guilty of what was unquestionably, by the law, a capital crime, escaped, by a small majority, a sentence of death. It may even be reasonably presumed, that the minority gave their voice for that penalty through a reluctant theoretical devotion to the letter of the code; and that the minority would not have been composed of so many persons, had they thought there was a chance of their proving to be the larger number.

1 At the opening of the second annual meeting of the Commissioners, Massachusetts claimed precedence; and the body, while they denied it as a matter of right, "yet, out of their respects to the government of the Massachusetts, they did willingly grant that their Commissioners should first subscribe after the President in this and all future meetings." (Records, &c., in Hazard, II. 14.) At the sixth annual meeting, it was further determined that, in the arrangement of seats at meetings, "the Commissioners of the Massachusetts should have the first place." (Ibid., 99.)

See Vol. I. 600, 624.