Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/366

 This is called Governor Dummer's war; but the most celebrated war was that of Philip of Pokanoket, which occurred between this war and that of the destruction of the Pequods. The cause of Philip's war, which broke out in 1675, and lasted upwards of a year, was exactly that of this subsequent one, and indeed of every war of New England with the Indians—the dissatisfaction of the Indians with the usurpation of the whites. The New England people, religious people though they were, seem to have been more irritable, more jealous, more regardless of the rights of the Indians, and more quick and deadly in their vengeance on any shew of spirit in the natives, than any other of the North American colonies. The monstrous, and were it not for the testimony of unimpeachable history, incredible sums offered for scalps by these states, testify to the malignant spirit of revenge which animated them. Even towards the Narragansets, their firmest and most constant friends, who lived amongst them, they shewed an irritability and a savage relentlessness that are to us amazing. On the faintest murmur of any dissatisfaction of this tribe on account of their lands, or of any other tribe making overtures of alliance to it, they were up in arms, and ready to exterminate it. So early as 1642, they charged Miantinomo, the great sachem of the Narragansets, with conspiring to raise the Indians against them. The people of Connecticut immediately proposed, without further proof or examination, to fall on the Indians and kill them. This bloody haste was, however, withstood by Massachusets. They summoned Miantinomo before the court. He came, and