being whipped or "laide necke and heels," were not more efficacious.1 His thirst, once excited, was not easily allayed. Under the Earl of Warwick's charter, the Town Meetings supplemented the colonial statutes, by enactments of their own. Providence Town Meeting, June 24, 1655, Mr. R. Williams, moderator. It was "ordered that if any sell to any Indian, a gallon of wine or liquors either directly or indirectly, he shall forfeit six pounds, one half to the informer, the constable, and his aid, and the other half to the Town Treasury." The Narragansett of those days was subjected to a rule which might well have perplexed profounder students of constitutional law. He was required to obey two sovereignties at once-that of his own sachem, and also that of the intruding Englishmen, who first sold him their liquors, and then whipped him for drinking them. The "Indian drunkennesse" had already become a public danger. The teachings of Williams and his example, were wasted both upon colonists and Indians. The moral elevation of the Narragansetts became hopeless and nothing was clearer to the most ordinary foresight, than the approaching destruction of the tribe.

To conclude this mention of the obstacles to the civilization of the Narragansetts, some account must be taken, of the "murtherous English" "the desperate English," as Williams styles the early "border ruffians" of New England. These lawless outcasts, were equally a danger to the Indian and to the Englishman. In the midst of an old society, and with exaggerated notions of the morals of those early days we find it difficult to believe that there were then in New England, outlaws hanging upon the outskirts of civilization, holding their possessions by what Sir William Blackstone calls "the robust title by occupancy," subsisting by theft and by illicit trade with both Indians and English, and proving that they were no respecters of persons by the impartial robbery of

(1)A. D. 1655.

(2) See Williams's letters, Narr. Club Pub., VI. 111. Key, p. 110. Gookin, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1st series, I. 210.

both. The early records of these colonies preserve instances of their outrages and murders among the Indians—the crimes then perpetrated being equal in atrocity to any of the present day. Sometimes these fugitives joined the Indians, and adopted their barbarous manners.1 After a crime perpetrated by some of these, Williams writes to Gov. Winthrop (August, 1638,) men tioning the continual alarm. There hath been great hubbub in all these parts, as a general persuasion that the time was come of a general slaughter of natives, by reason of a murder committed upon a native within twelve miles of us, by four desperate English." The dread by which the Indians were possessed, of outrages upon themselves, produced an equal alarm among the settlers. The distrust always existing between unassimilated and alien races easily led to apprehensions of a general massacre. This was the primitive form of panic in the Providence Plantations both among English and Indians. They were not much moved by the rise and fall of beaver, or by the fluctuations of wampumpeag. But now there was good reason for alarm, for, says Williams, (August 14, 1638),3 "the natives, friends of the slain had consultation to kill an Englishman in revenge." As of late on our western frontier, the resentment of the Indians endangered every whiteman within their reach. The barbarous notion of the individual responsibility of every member of a tribe, for the acts of every other, led to as gross crimes in revenge. Says Williams at a later day, "the Nayantic Sachems resolve that for so many lives as are taken away by the English, or the Mohegans and Pequots with them, they will take revenge on Mr. Throckmor

4

(1)See Williams's letter of Jan. 10, 1637-8. Narr. Club Pub.. VI. 84-85, also p. 66 for some account of one William Baker, who "is turned Indian,” goes naked, etc. See also Williams's letter to Gov. Leverett, Jan. 14, 1675, (p. 379 of the same), concerning Joshua Tift, a renegade English

man.

(2) Narr. Club Pub., VI. 110, 111.

(3) Key, pp. 116, 117.

(4) Letter to Winthrop, July 21, 1640, Narr. Club Pub., VI. 138.

ton at Prudence, or Mr. Coddington &c., or Providence or elsewhere." There was no improvement as years went on. The story is repeated with a change of names, by the "border ruffians" of the western frontier. Two centuries ago, their predecessors made New England insecure, and thwarted every effort to gain the confidence of the native race. Massachusetts

dealt sternly with all such. That excellent old institution, the gallows, did a salutary work among them. Rhode Island had not a government strong enough to copy her example and the "outlying plantations" suffered the penalty of a government too free, or too weak for the times.

If in the midst of this barbarism, Williams looked about him for aid in his benevolent work, he gained from his own people little more than he did from Massachusetts. No other man in the Plantations save Benedict Arnold, could speak the language of the Narragansetts. At best the settlers conversed with the Narragansetts in a jargon of English and Indian which served for the purpose of beggary or trade. The small religious society which Williams had founded, does not appear to have felt any interest in his work, or to have been in any way a partaker in it. Those who left it, became equally unfriendly to him, and to each other. They had other questions which seemed more interesting. Williams had, we may believe, no aid from Richard Scott, who has assured us of his personal dislike for him in his letter to George Fox, and very little from William Harris, his life-long antagonist touching the proprietary estate. Sectarian antipathies, especially bitter in that age, prevented any union for the benefit of the Narragansetts. Gorton was the only other old planter who felt an interest in their welfare, and his peculiar theories precluded any coöperation with his former

(1) See also Williams to Winthrop, Dec. 10, 1649, Narr. Club Pub., VI. 188. Concerning murders by Englishmen or natives, citations might be multiplied.

(2) So late as 1652, his difficulties were not removed. See his "Bloody Tenent yet more Bloody.," Narr. Club Pub., IV. 371-72,

(3) New-England fire-brand quenched." Appendix,

adversary. The obscurity of Gorton's style, made him sufficiently unintelligible to Englishmen, and gave erroneous ideas of his doctrine to ignorant Indian hearers. Some of the Massachusetts Indians went to Prudence and Warwick, and heard Gorton's preaching, an account of which they gave to Eliot or to his friends. They thought that Gorton was opposed to all government or magistracy whatsoever. Probably they had only learned his views of the old voluntary compact before the first charter. The magistrates of Massachusetts would gladly have thwarted any purposes of his. At a later day," the Quakers felt little interest in the Indians except as partakers in their trade. Their sympathies were confined to their own society, and they dissuaded all alike from listening to any preachers but their own, as they only were partakers of the light within. They had some pretext for this in Massachusetts." In Rhode Island, where they had experienced no ill usage, their interference with his labours provoked much of the rancour of Williams's controversial writing. He wrote thus to Throckmorton, one of the earliest and most vituperative of Fox's converts :*

SO

"I heartily wish that your hands were washed from the bloody trade of Liquours to the Indians, which even the Quakers have practised, telling the Indians that the Quakers only know God, and therefore would sell them Powder and Liquors cheaper and they would not mix water with Rhum as others did; that by many sudden deaths, what by Consumptions and Dropsies, the Barbarians have been murthered, hundreds if not thousands in the whole Countrey, and more in this colony than in any other part of the countrey beside that I have heard of against which I have witnessed from Court to Court in vain."

This is a specimen of the controversial style popular in the seventeenth century in the "Towne Streete" and at the Town Mill. Against any undertaking of Williams, the "Foxians"

(1) Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 3d series, IV. 135, 136, 137.

(2)1674. Daniel Gookin, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1st series, I. 203.

(3) Gookin, (in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., I. 202-3), says that the Quakers at Nantucket dissuaded the Indians from listening to Mayhew or from reading the Scriptures.

(4)"George Fox digg'd out." Narr. Club Pub. V. 33.

were especially bitter, and any contemptuous speeches of them, he could repay in kind, and with usury.

Thus unaided and alone, Williams went on in his benevolent endeavours. In earlier days, he had probably found in them, relief under a sense of injuries then recent and grave, and in after years, a refreshment amid the controversies with his brother freeholders which disquieted his later life. He could only prosecute the work at intervals of rest from labours for his daily bread, and during his monthly visits to his trading-house at Narragansett. Having no assistants he could establish no school for training up a new and better generation of young Narragansetts, to be in turn the teachers of their fellows. We have no description of his methods. Everything of this sort is but conjecture. His beliefs were less stern and ironbound than those of his Puritan neighbours, but still they were far enough above the moral level of his hearers. He gained their good will by protecting them from injustice, and by attentions in their sickness and suffering. For example, in August,1 1651, he wrote to Gov. Winthrop of Connecticut for medicines and plasters, for the Indians. He had some medical books, and knew how to prescribe ordinary remedies. By his disinterested friendship which they all acknowledged,-seeking neither plunder nor annexation, he gained an influence over the Narragansetts, such as few other men have established over an Indian tribe.

In the seventeenth century the English had but newly begun their dealings with barbarous races. Many believed that these would recognise the superiority of Christian civilisation when it was presented to them, and accept its teachings. Williams, in some degree shared in this opinion, and was more hopeful of speedy success than men engaged in such enterprises are wont to be at the present day. His sanguine temperament at first misled him. He thought that Indians were anxious for light and truth, when their chief desire was for English knives, fishing-lines, and hardware. He was ready to introduce these,

(1) Probably August. Narr. Club Pub., VI. 213.

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