Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/248

228 stepped on the English shore, said he “took seisin of the land.”

If the Indians could have been parties to the argument and discussions as to their natural rights compared with those of European sovereigns whose mariners discovered the continent, they might have suggested that if their possession of the continent, though only as roamers over it, did not assure their ownership, certainly the mere skirting of its ocean-shores by a crew of foreign sailors did not confer a better title.

But these exceptional pleas for the native rights of the savages, as human beings, in the soil which they occupied, were but feeble in view of the prejudgment of the case in favor of the prerogative of Christians over heathen.

The claim as to the reduction of the native tribes to the state of subjects of the monarch to whom the settlers among them owed allegiance seems to have been very distinctly and warmly contested by King Philip, in the contentions between him and the authorities of Plymouth and Massachusetts. Practically, these authorities acted as if they acceded, as by commission or otherwise, to the functions of the crown over the Indians. Even the natives may have appreciated a difference between being subjects of the King of England and being subjects of his subjects. It was especially aggravating to the haughty sachem Philip and his fellows to be summoned as culprit subjects to the colony courts; nor was their irritation relieved at being told that these courts were representing a foreign crown. The chiefs also complained that their own people were thus drawn from their former allegiance to themselves as sachems. They said the whites had no right to intrude themselves between them and their people, or to interfere with their jurisdiction in their forest domains; nor had the whites, unless their intervention was asked by both parties, any justification for intermeddling between Indians and Indians. The whites had sentenced and hung one of Philip's Indians