1692.]

SIR WILLIAM PHIPS GOVERNOR.

399

success. When the troops reached the lakes no boats had been provided for their transportation. A march through the wilderness seemed impossible, and the army turned back. Phips meanwhile had sailed leisurely along the coast and up the St. Lawrence, so leisurely that Frontenac had time to hear of his coming and to move down from Montreal to Quebec and to prepare for defence. When at length the fleet reached the fortress, the attack was so clumsily conducted owing partly to Phips's inexperience in military affairs, and partly to Walley's cowardice and inefficiency that repulse was inevitable. Men were landed at the wrong time and in wrong places; ammunition was wasted in useless bombardments of works on which no impression could be made; useless exposure brought on fatal sickness; cold weather set in and caused a good deal of suffering. A second attempt, in which it was hoped some of these blunders might be corrected, was prevented by a storm which dispersed the fleet. The ships found their way back to Boston as best they could; several were so long at sea that they were given up for lost; one was never again heard of; another was burnt at sea, and a third was wrecked, though the crew was saved. No booty was brought away to help pay the cost of the expedition, which was large enough to impair seriously the finances of the colony; some of the artillery was left behind in the hands of the French, and the loss of life-though Phips denied this was said to have been two hundred men.

To meet the exhaustion of the colonial exchequer, caused by this unfortunate expedition, a resort was had to an issue of paper money. The soldiers were paid off in a currency which soon fell to a discount of about thirty-three per cent. It is greatly to Phips's credit, that feeling himself in a large measure responsible for this public disaster, he redeemed with his own money the depreciated bills which his soldiers had been compelled to accept.

Owing probably in part to this generous act, the credit and popularity of Sir William were little impaired by his military failure. In 1691 he again went to England to interest the King in fresh projects for destroying the French power in Canada, in bringing to an end the Indian raids under French guidance upon the eastern settlements, and to aid the agents in London in obtaining, if possible, the restoration of the old Charter. He returned with a new Charter and as Governor, as we have already said, in May, the next year.

The stubborn friends of the old Charter soon organized themselves into a party in watchful opposition to Governor Phips. It Opposition was, no doubt, a factious opposition, so far as there could be to Phips. any real expectation of restoring the old rule of Puritanic government. But Phips was not a man of much wisdom, of much dignity of char

acter, nor of that experience in political affairs which sometimes suffices in the absence of higher qualities. He made an expedition to Maine against the Indians, which had no brilliant result, while the fort he ordered to be built at Pemaquid was costly, of little use, and gave rise to bitter complaints of the taxation it involved. He was sometimes indolently or ignorantly good-natured, leaving the General Court to follow the bent of its own inclinations without check; and he was sometimes so choleric in temper as to assert what he conceived to be his official privileges, in a way better fitted to the deck of a ship and a disorderly crew than the peaceful citizens of a quiet city. For example, he disputed the authority of the Collector sent from England; and when that officer declined to obey the Governor's order for the release of a ship and cargo, Sir William went down to the wharf, fell upon the Collector and gave him a beating. He had a dispute with a Captain Short, of a British frigate, and on meeting him in the street, upbraided and abused him and finally fell upon him and "broke his head with a cane."

One incident of his administration, however, had political importance. It was common in the country towns of Massachusetts to choose their representatives to the General Court from among the citizens of Boston. The inevitable result was a preponderating influence which usually enabled a few men in Boston to manage affairs to suit themselves. Phips was popular in the country, where probably little was known of his overbearing temper and his ignorance of affairs of state. In 1694, a movement for his removal had gathered so much strength that his friends in the General Court proposed an address to the King against it. The motion was carried, but it was only by a vote of twenty-six to twenty-four, and in the minority were all the members chosen from Boston. A law was immediately enacted requiring that no town should be represented in the General Court by a non-resident. But Phips's enemies at length prevailed, and he was ordered to England to answer the charges made against him. He went in 1694, and about a year after died of malignant fever in London.

CHAPTER XVII.

PHILIP'S WAR.

OUTBREAK OF PHILIP'S WAR. ITS CAUSES. - PHILIP'S EARLIER RELATIONS WITH THE ENGLISH. INDIAN ATTACKS AT SWANSEA, TAUNTON, AND ELSEWHERE. WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. THE FIGHTS AT BROOKFIELD AND HADLEY. THE AMBUSH AT BLOODY BROOK.-EXPEDITION INTO THE NARRAGANSETT COUNTRY.THE SURPRISE AT TURNER'S FALLS. PHILIP ATTACKED AND KILLED NEAR MOUNT HOPE.

Stoughton.

THE conduct of affairs in Massachusetts devolved, when Phips went to England, upon William Stoughton, the Lieutenant- Lieutenantgovernor. The Indian hostilities, which, as the next chap- governor ter will relate, had broken out again in the eastern provinces, soon gave him sufficient occupation, and he was wanting neither in energy nor ability to meet the exigency. But he is better remembered as a benefactor of Harvard College, where a hall still makes his name familiar to each successive generation; less pleasantly remembered as one of Andros's judges in the Ipswich and other trials, where the people resisted the despotic Governor; while as the Chief Justice of the province in the witchcraft persecution, which marked the period of Phips's administration, the distinction he achieved was that of a cruel magistrate in whom superstition overcame all sense of justice.

Before, however, that gloomy page in the history of Massachusetts is turned, it is necessary to revert to a previous bitter experience the last great war in New England with the Indians, an account.

of which, in chronological order, would have interrupted the consecutive narrative of events relating to the charters.

Outbreak of

war.

a

The origin of this war, which broke out in 1675 and lasted for two years, was, of course, in that hidden but inextinguishable Philip's hatred which the red man felt for the white intruder, hatred that might, at any moment, be lit by a single spark and blaze up at once into a mighty flame. Philip, the chief of the Wampanoags, or Pokanokets, who was at the head of this decisive struggle, did not, perhaps, premeditate a war until the temper of his tribe made it inevitable; even when his intentions were suspected, there was no wish, perhaps, for a conflict with the Indians, on the part of the colonists, but rather a dread of it, while the memory of the fate of the Pequots, it was hoped, would deter the savages from so desperate a measure. But there came the inexorable point of time and circumstance where race and interest, civilization and savage freedom, clashed, and forced the bloody conclusion.

Causes of

If it were easier to disentangle the web of Indian politics in New England through the last two thirds of the seventeenth century— from the settlement of New Plymouth to the time when the native tribes were subdued or annihilated, it would be possible, perhaps, to trace events to their immediate causes, to understand that sudden outbreak of relentless hate which blazed through the provinces from Narragansett Bay to the extreme northern and eastern borders. But this we know, the very presence of the whites was a provthe conflict. ocation; instinct alone soon taught the savages that civilization must crowd them out of lands which were useless except they remained a wilderness. Purchase, so far as they understood what purchase meant, was no equivalent for the loss of the hunting-grounds from which they mainly drew the means of existence; practically an exchange of a cart-load or two of clothing and trinkets, a few guns and a little ammunition, for hundreds of square miles, was as much an infringement of the Indians' right to the soil as it was for the whites to take possession of the lands by violence. Purchase meant to the Indian, in the first place, only toleration of a joint occupancy; but when in the course of time it was plain that joint occupancy was impossible, that to the whites there came absolute possession, to themselves absolute expulsion, then the purchase, which they had misunderstood, was as much a robbery as if no price had been paid. Herein was the bitter root of deadly hostility.

Other provocations there were, known and unknown. Personal wrongs and outrages were committed on one side and the other, impossible to be avoided in frontier settlements, however peaceful in theory and even in practice may have been the policy of the state.

1675.]

CAUSES OF THE WAR.

403

Chiefs and tribes became involved in controversies and in the conflict of interests between different colonies. The Indian balance of power would sometimes be thrown in on one side or the other as a preponderating influence; the Indian himself would make use of an alliance with the whites to feed fat some ancient grudge against a rival tribe. So Uncas avenged himself in the death of Miantonomo when Massachusetts involved them in her quarrel with Gorton and his people. So Pumham and Sacononoco were used by the magistrates of Boston to give them a pretext for jurisdiction over the heretics of Shawomet.

Personal

of Philip

allies.

It is impossible now to separate and trace all these personal wrongs, these political expedients, these jealousies of tribes, intensified always by hatred of race, which led, at length, to the war grievances under Philip. If the outbreak seemed sudden and inexpli- and his cable, it was only because the real causes were sometimes remote and often unseen. Who could tell what influence may have been exercised over the mind of Philip by the memory of a feud between his father and Pumham, when Pumham was a tool in the hands of the Masssachusetts Puritans? What was the measure of all the outrages which Uncas for years inflicted upon other Indians, under the protection of his close alliance with the English? Philip had no stronger ally than Nanuntenoo, and he was hardly less