Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/356

336 granted was considered revocable by the Indians whenever they were tired of their company. Plymouth court made an enactment that certain of the best necks of land in their bounds, — like Mount Hope, Pocasset, etc., — as being most suitable and convenient for the Indians, should not be purchased from them. In Increase Mather's History of Philip's War, he quotes the well-known letter addressed to him by Josiah Winslow, of Plymouth, in which the writer says that the court strictly reserved the first-mentioned sites to the Indians to prevent their parting with them, which otherwise they would have done. It is in this letter that Winslow makes the positive assertion, that “before these present troubles broke out the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.” Yet Dr. Mather begins his History with this sentence: “That the heathen people amongst whom we live, and whose land the Lord God of our fathers hath given to us for a rightful possession,” etc. Dr. Mather furnishes evidences — of which there are so many more — of that relentless and vindictive, and we may say savage, spirit which burned in the hearts of magistrates, ministers, and people as the consequence of what they had suffered in their very first wars from the exasperated savages. This was invariably the effect on the feelings of whites who had had experience of Indian warfare. Not one throb of pity or sympathy for the natives softens the bitterness poured out upon them by the Mathers. More rancorous even are the terms used of the Indians by the Rev. William Hubbard of Ipswich, whom the Court made the historian of New England. He calls them “treacherous villains,” “the dross of mankind,” “the dregs and lees of the earth,” “faithless and ungrateful monsters,” “the caitiff Philip,” etc. Mather said, “The Lord in judgment had been riding among us on a red horse.”

Between holding lands by fair purchase from the