| | 1 | Author: | Thompson
Daniel P.
(Daniel Pierce)
1795-1868 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The doomed chief, or, Two hundred years ago  | | | | Published: | 2003 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 | | | | Description: | It was an anxious, as well as a stirring day with the colonists
at New Plymouth. The public mind, for the last few months,
had been laboring under a very unusual, and a constantly increasing
excitement. Among all classes of men there evidently
existed a deep, though unacknowledged consciousness,
that the calculations of selfishness, craft, and fraud, instead of
obedience to the simple dictates of justice and honesty, had
latterly characterized their intercourse with the Indians.
This, as in most other cases of conscious wrong doing, had
made them, especially the leading men of the colony, peculiarly
sensitive respecting the relations in which they stood
with the red men, filling them with jealousies, suspicions, and
apprehensions, lest the latter, impressed doubtless with the
same or livelier convictions of their wrongs, should be secretly
nourishing thoughts and schemes of redress and retribution.
The colonists were also fully conscious that the injured race
were now no longer the comparatively harmless and contemptible
foes they were in times past, when bows and arrows and
war-clubs were their most formidable weapons, whole scores
of which were scarcely good against a single musket in battle;
but that they had, at this period, almost universally supplied
themselves with fire arms, in the fatal use of which, when
occasion required, they had no superiors, even among the most
expert sharp-shooters of the old world. And especially and
painfully conscious were likewise the leading colonists, that
in addition to the advantages thus possessed by their apprehended
foes, there had now sprung up among them a Master
Spirit who was believed to be fully capable of combining, and
giving direction to all the various elements of their disaffection
with fearful effect. That Master Spirit was Metacom, the
King Philip of subsequent historic renown. And it was not
without reason they feared that he, insulted, fined, and dragooned
as he had been into hollow treaties of peace, would not
long remain inactive or forego—unless prompt and decided
measures were taken to prevent the execution of what was
believed to be his bold and settled design—a war of extermination
against the colonists of New England. “As soon as Captain Willis is able to travel, which I trust
is now, his late captor, or prisoner, or nurse in the woods,
would be gratified to see him at Providence. Enquire of
Governor Williams for | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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