or safety to those who dwelt within their bounds. They were mere spectators of the Pequot war-could not punish the murderers of Oldham or avenge the death of their own Sachem, Miantonomo. A few years later, they desired that they might not be "forced from their religion." They never intimated to Massachusetts that any oppression or outrage towards Williams's colony would be a casus belli, or deemed an injury to themselves. The only protector of Rhode Island was the English government.

After the failure at Warwick, Massachusetts made one more attempt to secure the Rhode Island territory for herself, -this time at Providence. In 1649, some of the purchasers of the Pawtuxet lands subjected themselves and their possessions to the jurisdiction of Massachusetts.' She readily accepted them, although they were beyond the boundaries of her patent. Among the Pawtuxet grantees were William and Benedict Arnold. There was probably some truth in what William Arnold had written to Massachusetts-that in Pawtuxet and Warwick the settlers were too few to over-awe the Indians, or to establish an efficient magistracy, and that the fugitives of the rest of the country come thither to be free from all restraint. Among the settlers of Pawtuxet was whatever could be found in Rhode Island of sympathy with the ideas of Massachusetts. But in their first purchasing of Williams his best lands, and then endeavouring to subvert the colony which had granted them, we find only a bad faith as discreditable as the conduct of the refugees whom they condemn. Massachusetts showed her usual zeal in enlarging her territory, and sent citations from Boston to Rhode Island, directed to some of the neighbours of William Arnold and William Carpenter, the seceders of Pawtuxet, requiring them to answer their complaints in the courts of Massachusetts. Illegal as these proceedings were, they were eagerly adopted as the first steps toward the acquisi

(1) Mass. Col. Records, III. 196-97.

(2) June 20, 1650.

tion of Narragansett Bay. The story may be read at large in Arnold and in the Colonial Records. They were like, in purpose, to the attack upon Gorton nearly ten years before. So grave was the situation that a special convention of delegates from all the Rhode Island towns was called by the President of the colony, to consider the invasion of its territory. This second attack of Massachusetts was also unsuccessful. But the attempt (continued during several years) was highly injurious to the weaker colony. It tended to the subversion of all legal authority and social order. The Indians were no indifferent spectators of the proceedings. They hoped for a protectorate from the Bay which would shield them from the consequences of their depredations upon Rhode Island property. The weakness of the smaller colony was now fully understood, and disorders by the Narragansetts continued long after the original cause of them had gone by. A feeling of insecurity everywhere prevailed, and found expression both in private correspondence and in public acts. A few extracts from these may show the dangers and the spirit of those days. In May (23d) 1650, supplies of power and magazines of arms proportioned to the population of the place were to be established in every town. At the Town Meeting, November 3, 1655, "ordered that the matter of fortification against the barbarians be farther debated the next fourth day." They did debate it, but the poverty of the first generation precluded any effectual measures of public defence. Jan. 28, 1655–6, “Ordered that liberty be

(1) See Arnold's Hist. R. I., I. 230, 231, 232.

(2) The government of "the Bay" sent peremptory orders to Rhode Island not to prosecute any suits against the Pawtuxet men who had renounced her jurisdiction, May 30, 1650, and threatened intervention if taxes were levied upon them.

(3) Providence Town Records, June 27, 1650, p. 142.

(4)R. I. Col. Records p. 223.

The town of Providence was a partaker in the general apprehensions. Town Records September 8, 1654. ** "Ordered that those farms which are one mile off the Towne shall have liberty to leave one man at home on training days."

given to so many as please to erect a fortification upon the Stamper's Hill or about their own houses." It was wise to make some provision for the safety of the Town Mill, where were at times considerable stores of grain. The founders thus foresaw the catastrophe of the town, twenty years before it came. This alarm was premature. The people were safer while their villages were mere trading posts, than they were after they had grown into communities large enough to excite the apprehensions of the Indians, but not large enough for their own defences.

It had been well if after seventeen years of service, in behalf of the peace of New England, Williams had not been forced to address the General Court of Massachusetts, in words like these:

"The Indians which pretend your name at Warwick and Pawtuxet, (and yet live as barbarously if not more than any in the country) please you to know their insolencies upon ourselves and cattle (unto £20 damages per annum) are insufferable by English spirits,"--"please you to give credence that to all these, they pretend your name, and affirm that they dare not, (for offending you) agree with us, nor come to rules of righteous neighborhood, only they know you favor us not, and therefore sent us for redress unto you.' The Indians "evade both" laws (i. e., that of Rhode Island, and that of Massachusetts), "under cover of your authority." "Whereas, I humbly conceive, with the people of this colony your commerce is as great as any in the country, and our dangers (being a frontier people to the barbarians) are greater than those of other colonies, and the ill consequences to yourselves would be not a few nor small, and to the whole land, were we first massacred or mastered by them. I pray your equal and favorable reflection upon that, your law, which prohibits us to buy of you all means of our necessary defence of our lives and families, (yea in this most bloody and massacreing time)."""

Williams had not found it impossible to live at peace among the Indians, and he strove in vain to induce the Government of the Bay, to refrain from stirring up their barbaric passions, and from refusing the means of defence against the evils

(1) Compare Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 3d series, I. 11.

(2) Williams's letter, Nov. 15, 1655. Narr. Club Pub., VI. 293, 294, 296.

of which they had been themselves the authors. Gov. Winthrop had thought it an error to refuse the sale of a few barrels of powder yearly, to the outlawed colony. The narrow-minded men who succeeded him persevered in this thankless policy, long after his decease. The evil was remedied through the London agent of the colony, John Clarke.' Warwick was still the chief sufferer by Indian disorders, which went on unchecked.2 Daily contact with barbarians did not tend to the improvement of either race. The morals of the Narragansetts reacted in some degree, upon their English neighbours.

The Plantations of Providence during these years, were more fortunate than those of Warwick. The English settlers were more numerous, and they attempted some measures of relief and self defence. The Indian disturbances were but

(1)R. I. Col. Records, Oct. 11, 1656. John Clarke, "procured and sent fower barrels of powder and eight barrels of shott and bullets for the use of the colony, and hath consigned them to our honoured President Mr. Roger Williams."

(2) Williams to Gen. Court, May, 12, 1656. Narr. Club. Pub., VI. 300, 301. "They have not been sparing of your name as the patron of all their wickedness against our Englishmen, women and children and cattle to the yearly damage of sixty, eighty and one hundred pounds." * "Please you not to be insensible of the slippery and dangerous condition of this their intermingled cohabitation. I am humbly confident that all the English towns and plantations in New England, put together, suffer not such molestation from the natives as this one town and people. It is so great and so oppressive that I have daily feared the tidings of some public fire and mischief."

(3) Ibid, p. 300, 301.

"Our first request" "is for your favorable consideration of the long and lamentable condition of the Town of Warwick," * * "they are so dangerously and so vexatiously intermingled with the barbarians, that I have long admired the wonderful power of God, in restraining and preventing very great fires of mutual slaughter breaking forth between them.” This is a view of Warwick Neck, in the summer of 1656. [Ibid, p. 301].“ This small neck (wherein they keep and mingle fields with the English) is a very den of wickedness, wherein they not only practice the horrid barbarisms of all kinds of whoredoms, idolatries, conjurations, but living without all exercise of actual authority, and getting store of liquors (to our grief), there is a confluence and rendezvous of all the wildest and most licentious natives and practices of the whole country."

trivial. In the northern part of the colony, the natives were few and widely separated. Their controversies arose chiefly from their cheating, drunkenness, and theft. There was no petty Sachem in the neighbourhood to embroil them with Massachusetts, and after the attempt upon Pawtuxet was at an end, the "Bay people "made no farther endeavours to gain possession of the territory. Yet there was reason to apprehend danger, in the vicinity of the Indians and the townsmen were careful to avoid giving them offence. The necessity of leaving one of the household at home on training days, (Town records, Nov.8,1654), must have been a severe privation when those were almost the only holidays of the year. At this time, a half hour's walk would carry any of the townsmen into the midst of scenes such as must recently have been sought on the western borders of Colorado. To avoid the perils of the neighborhood as well as the losses by their thefts, it was "ordered" by the Town of Providence, (January 27, 1657), "that no Indians sit down to inhabit in this Neck." The communistic ideas of the Indians were as vigorously asserted as in Warwick. Wherever one of them found an uncultivated field, he built a wigwam, without asking permission of the owner of the freehold, and whatever he lacked for a livelihood he eked out from the gardens, barns and hencoops of his white neighbours. The prohibition was futile, for there was no civil force to give effect to it. At the same time, the townsmen were anxious that the Indians should have no reason to believe that justice was denied them, in the courts of the Englishmen. The Plantations were not as yet, strong enough to treat the natives as their subjects, and their habits of private revenge made it dangerous to punish them even for their crimes. The colony established only a court of appeals,―leaving it to the towns to set up and regulate their own local tribunals. In the same Town Meeting, which endeavoured to exclude the Indians from "the Neck," (January 27, (1) Before the division of Providence, that part of it lying between the Seekonk and the Mooshassuc, was styled in deeds and public documents "Providence Neck,"