Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/642

622 was still the repulsive term under which they were classed. Many of them kept in family groups in the skirts of the woods, and as they appeared occasionally in the settlements were employed as help in the fields or in lumbering. They were forbidden to enter the white man's dwelling without formal permission. Occasionally in letters and family diaries, written up to a hundred or more years ago, we read of a native man, woman, or youth being employed as a house-servant. The pitiable waifs, the objects of a feeble relenting and a strong anxiety, all under guardianship, living on the remnants of the family table, sleeping in out-buildings, mixed with negro blood, were miserable relics of the native race. There was something pathetic as well as remorseless in the frank word of the whites to these wretched loiterers: “It is not well for either of us that you should stay. Go off.”

Many significant tokens manifest themselves among the printed and still manuscript papers of the old times among us of the shrinking antipathy even of Christian-minded people against coming into very close contact, in hospitality or intercourse, with the better sort of Indians. As I am writing, I recall a few sentences in the journal of Chief-Justice Sewall, a merciful friend both of Indians and negroes. He writes under date of Jan. 30, 1708, that John Neesnummin, an Indian convert and approved preacher, called on him with letters from Rev. Roland Cotton, on his way to Natick to preach, and needing hospitality for the night. “I shew him,” writes Sewall, “to Dr. Mather.” But no invitation came from that quarter. Then, “I bespoke a lodging for him at Matthias Smith's [probably an innkeeper]; but after, they sent me word they could not do it. So I was fain to lodge him in my study.” Horace Greeley, sensitive as he was to every right and claim of humanity, in a letter during his travels in the far West, wrote thus in the “New York Tribune,” June, 1859: —