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The memorable treaty was the outcome of this conference,
and under it he accomplished his purpose as long as the men who were
parties to it lived and kept a controlling hand on the affairs of the
colony. It was not encroachments by Carver, Bradford, Window and their
associates, who knew him in the early days, that caused the breach and
little by little widened it until nothing short of the resort to arms
could settle the differences between the two races, but the unjust
suspicions, followed by the arbitrary conduct and petty acts of
annoyance of a later generation. The ambitious designs of the colonists,
when they had attained sufficient strength to walk alone, led them to
attempt to govern the Indians as subjects, to order them about at will,
to interfere in their most intimate tribal affairs, to take jurisdiction
of matters that ought to have been left to tribal councils, instead of
treating them as an independent and politically equal people. It was
this conduct on the part of the whites that broke the chain of
friendship and plunged the colonists into war with the sons of the men
who had befriended them at a time when that friendship was a matter of
life or death to them; a war that cost the colonists thousands of lives
that might have been saved by a little tolerance and a sense of justice,
and that resulted in the extermination of a once proud and powerful
people.
This fatal ending of a friendship so
auspiciously begun cannot justly be charged to Massasoit, nor entirely to
his sons and successors. The history of the times has been written by the
colonists. The Indian has left no chronicle of the events that finally
impelled him to dig up the tomahawk. It is by the white man's records that
both must be judged; and those records convict the colonists of a series
of aggressions of sufficient seriousness to arouse the ire and stir the
blood of any people who had been accustomed to range the forests and fish
the streams ill untrammeled freedom until the white man cunningly forged
the fetters for their free born feet.
Massasoit entered into the treaty in
entire good faith, and with a fixed determination to observe it in
spirit and in letter, as is conclusively shown by the several acts to
which I shall call particular attention, by his overlooking its breach by
the English in refusing to surrender Squanto, and by the fact that the
treaty was never broken by him or his people during the forty years of his
life after it, signing, nor during the short reign of his eldest son and
successor, Wamsutta, nor indeed during the first thirteen years of the
rule of his second son Pometacom; although there were rumblings of the
approaching tempest from 1671. Indeed, the colonists tried to find
evidence of bad faith on the part of Wamsutta ten years before, but the
most they did was to establish their own bad faith in spite of their
efforts to cover it with the cloud of suspicion against him. A further
consideration of the affair with that great chief will appear when we come
to a survey of his short term in his chieftaincy; so I shall dismiss it
for the present with the reflection that some acts on the part of the
whites during the period which we are considering, as recorded by
themselves, are enough to raise the question whether they were not guilty
of a deliberate attempt to so arouse and exasperate the natives, as to
lead them to acts of open hostility to be seized upon as an excuse for
exterminating the race. I am aware that this is a serious indictment, but
it is supported by a series of aggressions that seem inexplicable on any
other theory than that they were deliberately planned, or were perpetrated
with reckless disregard for the rights of the Indians.
Massasoit as I have said, entered into
the pact with Governor Carver in good faith. He was accustomed to dealing
with men whose only bond was their word, with the simple natives, "silly
savages," as Captain Smith calls them, unaccustomed to the ;arts of
civilization and the trick of trying to find excuses for breaking their
pledges, instead of studiously endeavoring to observe them, both in letter
and in spirit; and he then had no reason for supposing that the English
were less sincere, or that they entered into the relations defined in the
pact with the intent to observe it only in so far as it served their
purpose, or as long as it was useful to them. This was one of the lessons
in the higher European civilization that they learned in the bitter school
of experience; and the men who taught them this code of morals had no
right to complain when the results of their teaching reacted upon
themselves. I am reluctant to believe that Carver then looked upon his
treaty in that light; but we find his immediate successor, Bradford,
recording the fact that he, as early as 1622 in the episode arising out of
the perfectly apparent perfidy of Squanto, was more intent upon finding an
excuse for evading the treaty than upon conforming to its provisions.
So when Samoset on March 16, 1621,
appeared in the street of Plymouth, and, after being entertained, departed
on the next day saying he would bring Massasoit, a great Sachem who had
sixty warriors under him; and apparently sent runners who had camped upon the hunting grounds of one of his tribes,
now extinct, and had erected habitations there of a more permanent
character than had ever been attempted before, the Great Sachem himself,
proud ruler of more than thirty villages, with his sixty panieses, took up
the trail of forty miles to visit the intruders, not for the purpose of
expelling them by force, not to trade with them as had been done before
along the coast, but to inquire the purpose of this unbidden camping upon
the grounds of which he was still the rightful owner, even though the
tribe, his tribe, that had occupied them had been wiped out. Possibly he
had in mind the very thing that happened, the formation of a league with
the white men, who fought with "fire and thunder," to assist him in case
of further encroachments by his ambitious neighbor, Canonicus; and for
which he was willing to give a full equivalent, the right to occupy the
land, the assistance of his people in teaching the strangers how to compel
the forest, stream and soil to yield up a subsistence, and to aid them in
case of hostile attacks upon them by tribes over which he had no control,
or which were likely to break away from such restraint as he had over
them.
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Massasoit of the Wampanoags
Massasoit of the Wampanoags
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