US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0011/00111.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH00111}
$Pretitle{10}
$Title{Our Country:  Volume 2
Chapter XXXI}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Lossing, Benson J., LL.D.}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{indians
massachusetts
new
philip
english
hundred
england
upon
king
war}
$Volume{Vol. 2}
$Date{1905}
$Log{}
Book:        Our Country:  Volume 2
Author:      Lossing, Benson J., LL.D.
Volume:      Vol. 2
Date:        1905

Chapter XXXI

     King Philip - His Patriotism - Anger of His People - He Declares War -
Terrible Events of that War - Death of Philip and Fate of His Son - Death of
Charles II and Accession of James II - Andros Made Governor-General -
Revolution in England - Andros Driven from Boston - French Jesuits in America
- The French and Indians - A Congress of Delegates in New York - Canada
Invaded - The English Repulsed - New Charter for Massachusetts.

     MASSASOIT, as we have observed, kept his treaty with the English
inviolate so long as he lived.  He died in 1661, at the age of about eighty
years, leaving two sons whom the English called, respectively, Alexander and
Philip.  The former did not long survive his father, when Philip became chief
sachem and warrior of the Wampanoags, with his royal residence on Mount Hope,
not far from Bristol, Rhode Island.  He was called King Philip. He resumed the
covenants with the English made by his father, and observed them faithfully
for a dozen years.

     It had become painfully evident to Massasoit before his death that the
spreading colonies would soon deprive his people of their land and
nationality, and that the Indians would become vassals of the pale race. The
more warlike Philip pondered these possibilities with deep bitterness of
feeling, until he resolved to strike an exterminating blow against the English
in defence of his country and his race.  His resolution was natural and
patriotic.  His unaided warriors would be inadequate to the work; so, in the
primeval forest at Mount Hope, surrounded by seven hundred fighting men, he
planned a confederacy of the New England tribes, which might have numbered
about twenty-five thousand souls.  It was a difficult task, the power of so
many being overshadowed by that of the English, weakening and dividing them.
Before any actual conspiracy was effected, Philip found himself compelled to
declare war and lift the hatchet.

     At that time there were many Christian converts among the Indians, who
were firmly attached to the English.  The Wampanoags had always discouraged
the spread of Christianity among themselves, but there were many "praying
Indians" there.  One of these - John Sassamon, who had been educated at
Cambridge, where John Harvard had established a college - was a sort of
secretary to Philip.  Becoming acquainted with the plans of the sachem, lie
revealed them to the authorities at Plymouth.  For this treachery he was
murdered, and three Wampanoags, who were convicted of the crime on very
slender testimony, were hanged.  The anger of the tribe was fiercely kindled
by the event, and they were clamorous for war.  The cautious Philip hesitated,
for he knew his weakness.  His young warriors would not listen to reason.
They taunted him with causing the wrongs which his people endured because of
his unwillingness to fight.  Then they pointed to the humiliation and disgrace
of his people when, a few years before, their firearms were taken from them by
the jealous white men.  His eyes kindled with rage.  He had never forgotten
nor forgiven that injury.  The reminder excited his fiercest wrath.  Springing
from his seat he snatched up a bow and quiver, a gleaming hatchet and a keen
knife, and vowed that none of these weapons should sleep whilst a pale-face
remained in New England.  He sent his women and children to the Narragansets
for protection and yielding his judgment to passion, he trampled upon solemn
treaties and kindled the flames of war.  Swift runners were dispatched to
other tribes to arouse them to co-operation, and he required all of his
followers to curse the white man and to swear eternal hostility to his race.
It was but a foolish rushing to destruction.  It has been well said Frenzy
prompted their rising.  It was but the storm in which the ancient inhabitants
of the land were to vanish away.  They rose without hope, and therefore they
fought without mercy.  To them, as a nation, there was no to-morrow.

     Philip struck the first blow at Swanzey, twenty-five miles southwest from
Plymouth.  It was on the 4th of July, 1675.  Expecting hostilities, the people
had been to the house of worship to engage in fasting and prayer.  As they
were returning - men, women and children - the savages fell upon them
furiously, slaying and capturing many, while others fled to the surrounding
settlements.  The country was aroused.  Armed men from Plymouth, Boston, and
other places near, joined, and making a forced march toward Mount Hope,
besieged the Wampanoags in a swamp several days.  Philip escaped with most of
his followers, and took refuge with the Nipmucs in the interior of
Massachusetts, who espoused his cause.  At the head of fifteen hundred
warriors he pressed through the forests to the beautiful valley of the
Connecticut to lay waste the settlements there.

     Meanwhile the armed white men entered the country of the Narragansets,
and compelled Canonchet, son of Miantonomoh, then chief sachem of that people,
to make a treaty of friendship with the English.  When Philip heard of this he
was amazed.  His stout heart almost failed.  But reflecting upon the perilous
nature of his enterprise and his position, and that everything depended upon
vigorous action, he aroused other tribes to join him in exterminating the
pale-faces by the methods of treachery, ambush, and surprise.  The scourge
that now appeared was terrible.  Men in the fields, families in their beds at
midnight, and congregations in houses of worship, were murdered.  The English
settlements east of the Hudson then numbered about fifty thousand souls, and,
at one time, it seemed probable that few of them would escape the fury of the
savages, who hung upon and enveloped the parties like a consuming fire.

     The Wampanoag chief entered the Connecticut Valley at Springfield, and
swept northward almost to the present line between Massachusetts and Vermont
like a destructive tornado, leaving desolation in his track.  Near Brookfield,
a party of twenty Englishmen, while on their way, at near the middle of
August, to treat with the Nipmucs, fell into an ambush and were treacherously
murdered.  Almost every house in Brookfield was set on fire - excepting a
stone one - into which the people had gathered for safety.  There they were
besieged two days, when the Indians set the house on fire.  Just at that
moment a shower of rain came like a providence and put out the flames, and at
the same time a relief party of white people, under Major Willard, arrived,
and drove away the savages.  Early in September a hot battle was fought at
Deerfield, where seven hundred Indians were defeated by one hundred and eighty
Englishmen; but a week later, prowling savages laid the town in ashes.  On the
same day - the Sabbath - Hadley was attacked, and, as we have seen, was saved
by the bravery of Goffe the regicide.

     For a moment the scourge was stayed at Hadley, but it soon swept
mercilessly over other settlements.  The blood of many valiant young men,
under Captain Beers, flowed freely in the paths of Northfield, late in
September.  A few days afterward a company of young men of highest character -
"the flower of Essex" - under Captain Lathrop, were murdered by many hundred
Indians on the banks of a little stream near Deerfield, which is yet known as
Bloody Brook, when the savages were beaten off by others who came to the
rescue.  Springfield was burned, and Hadley was again assailed.

     The Indians were masters of the situation, and Philip, encouraged by his
successes, now resolved to attack Hatfield, the chief settlement above
Springfield.  He was joined by the natives there who, until then, had been
friendly to the English.  They showed much zeal, and at near the close of
October, Philip gathered his warriors around a huge fire, when the braves
engaged in the wild scalp-dance, chanting heroic songs.  Upon long poles they
exhibited trophies of their horrid work - the long shining tresses of women
and even the bright curls of little maidens whom they had slain - as they
whirled around the flames with fearful contortions of limbs and body. Then,
with almost a thousand warriors, the Wampanoags fell upon the settlement.  The
people were prepared for the onslaught.  They had palisaded their houses with
heavy timber standing upright in the ground bound close together with green
withes, and the upper ends sharpened. Behind these stood armed men and
resolute women waiting for the approach of the Indians, and when they came
they were repulsed with such slaughter that Philip left the Connecticut
Valley, with his shattered forces, and fled to Rhode Island.  The
Narragansets, in violation of their recent treaty with the English, received
him with open arms, became his allies, and, late in the year, went out upon
the war-path with him.

     This perfidy of Canonchet and his people was terribly punished by the
English at the close of the year.  Fifteen hundred armed men from
Massachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut, under Captain Josiah Winslow, marched
into the Narraganset country.  The Indians, three thousand strong, had
gathered in their wigwams within a large fort in the bosom of a dark swamp
near the present village of Kingston, Washington county, Rhode Island, with
their store of winter provisions.  Snow had fallen to a great depth, and the
savages felt secure for the season.  Suddenly, at near the end of December,
Winslow and his little army appeared before the fort in the frozen swamp.
They soon beat down the feeble palisades, and in the course of a few hours
hundreds of men, women and children, with all the provisions, perished in the
fire.  About a thousand warriors were killed or wounded, and several hundreds
were made prisoners.  Among the latter was Canonchet, who was put to death.
Philip, and a remnant of the Narragansets, escaped, and took refuge with the
Nipmucs.  Eighty Englishmen were killed, and one hundred and fifty were
wounded.  The surviving savages suffered fearfully.  Hiding in a cedar swamp,
with no shelter but evergreen boughs, no food but nuts and roots which they
might find beneath the deep snow, many of them perished.  So disappeared the
dominion of the Narragansets.

     Philip was not idle during the winter.  He tried in vain to induce the
Mohawks to join him.  Some of the exasperated Indians eastward of
Massachusetts flocked to his standard, and early in the spring of 1676 the
work of destruction began.  In the course of a few weeks, the war spread over
an area of almost three hundred miles.  Villages and isolated dwellings were
burned, and their inmates were destroyed.  Weymouth, Groton, Medford,
Lancaster and Marlborough, in Massachusetts, were laid in ashes and Warwick
and Providence, in Rhode Island, were given to the flames.

     A terrible scene occurred at Lancaster.  Forty-two persons took shelter
in the house of Mary Rowlandson.  It was set on fire by the Indians.
"Quickly," wrote Mrs. Rowlandson in her narrative, "it was the dolefullest day
that ever mine eyes saw.  Now the dreadful hour is come. Some in our house
were fighting for their lives others wallowing in blood the house on fire over
our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred
out.  I took my children to go forth; but the Indians shot so thick that the
bullets rattled against the house as if one had thrown a handful of stones.
We had six stout dogs, but none of them would stir."  A bullet went through
Mrs. Rowlandson's side, and another through a child in her arms, and she was
made captive, having of her family only one poor wounded babe left.  Down I
must sit in the snow," she continued, "with my sick child, the picture of
death, in my lap.  Not the least crumb of refreshing came within our mouths
from Wednesday night until Saturday night, except a little cold water."

     Quarrels among themselves soon weakened the power of the Indians.  The
Nipmucs and the Narragansets charged their misfortunes to the ambition of
Philip.  The alliance was dissolved.  The eastern Indians hastened to their
mountain fastnesses.  Many who had been in arms surrendered to avoid
starvation.  Others marched off to Canada and joined some of the tribes there
and Captain Benjamin Church, the most famous Indian fighter of his day, hunted
and slew all the hostile red-men he could find.  Between two and three
thousand of them perished or submitted in the course of the year 1676, and the
proud Narragansets, to whom other tribes had paid homage, were reduced to a
hundred bowmen.  Like the Pequods, they were utterly ruined.

     Philip eluded his pursuers for several months, hiding in many places,
with a resolution to never surrender.  He had a handful of faithful followers,
but he cleaved the head of one of these friends with his hatchet, because he
counselled submission.  At last circumstances conquered his pride and his
will.  He returned secretly to Mount Hope.  His wife and son were soon
afterward made captive, when the "last of the Wampanoags" bowed beneath this
crushing misfortune, and said "Now my heart breaks I am ready to die." Captain
Church was then close upon his track; and a few days afterward, a faithless
Indian shot him in a swamp.  Church cut off the dead king's head with his
sword, and it was borne upon a pole into Plymouth while hymns of thanksgiving
were sung by the people.  The ghastly trophy was placed upon the palisades and
the people slept that night with a sense of security which they had not felt
for years.

     The disposition of Philip's little son - the heir to the throne of
Massasoit - was a subject of grave debate.  Some of the elders proposed
putting him to death.  Others suggested selling him as a slave.  The most
profitable measure appeared to be the most merciful, and the boy was sold to
be a bond-slave in Bermuda.  So perished the dynasty of the good Massasoit,
and so ended the famous King Philip's War.  The Mohegans, who held sway in
Connecticut, were firm friends of the English, and not a drop of blood was
shed in that colony during the war.  The other colonies had suffered
dreadfully.  More than six hundred men, chiefly young, had fallen in the
struggle.  Thirteen villages had been destroyed.  A large number of women and
children had been murdered or carried into captivity.  Full six hundred houses
were burned, and the cost of the expenditures and the losses equalled in value
half a million dollars.  The war was carried on a little longer by the Eastern
Indians, for they drew supplies from the French in Acadie.  Finally, in 1678,
hostilities were ended by a treaty.

     While Massachusetts was feeling the heavy losses of her sons and
treasure, the English government attempted to carry out a long-cherished
desire of the king to resume the control of the colony.  The Privy Council
sent Edward Randolph, a greedy adventurer and faithful servant of his royal
master, to collect the customs at Boston, to exercise other authority as the
agent of the crown, and to spy out the strength and weakness of the people.
Randolph excited the cupidity, fears and jealousy of the king and his court,
by exaggerating the number of the population, wealth, power and independence
of the colony; and, being rejected by the authorities of Massachusetts, his
wrath gave vehemence to his assertions.  The governor (Leverett) was firm in
his opposition to Randolph's pretensions.  "The king," he said, "can in reason
do no less than let us enjoy our liberties and trade, for we have made this
large plantation in the wilderness at our own charge, without any contribution
from the crown."  Because of this spirit of independence, the people were
reproached.  "You are poor," said the Earl of Anglesey, "and yet proud."

     They were justly "proud."  They had established a free and flourishing
state, and were resolved to maintain their natural and chartered rights at all
hazards.  When Randolph, by royal authority, declared the charter of
Massachusetts to be void, and attempted to govern, the people spurned him.
Then the king resolved to make the colony a "more palpable dependence," and
issued a writ of quo warranto - a command for the authorities to appear before
the monarch and his council and show by what warrant they held jurisdiction in
Massachusetts.  It was his intention to exercise the arbitrary power of his
grandfather, James the First, if necessary, by taking possession of the domain
without forms of law; but a pliant High Court of Chancery decided in the
king's favor.  Before the monarch could effect his object he died.  That was
early in 1685.

     Charles's brother, the Duke of York, now ascended the throne as James the
Second.  More tyrannical than his predecessor, he declared, without the
formalities of law, the charter of Massachusetts to be void, and appointed

 Joseph Dudley president of the country from Rhode Island to Nova Scotia. All
England, misinformed by the rulers, approved the measure, and the tone of
society there was one of contempt for the plantations.  Dryden, whose muse was
then subservient to the crown, wrote in a dramatic prologue:


     "Since faction ebbs, and rogues go out of fashion, Their penny scribes
take care In inform the nation, How well men thrive in this or that
plantation."How Pennsylvania's air agrees with Quakers, And Carolina's, with
Associators.  Both e'en too good for madmen and for traitors.  Truth is, our
land with saints is so run o'er, And every age produces such a store, That now
there's need of two New Englands more."


     Dudley vas succeeded by Edmund Andros, who arrived in Boston late in
1686, bearing the commission of viceroy or governor-general of all New
England.  His character and purpose have already been considered in an earlier
section.  The rigid executor of his master's will, he soon made the rod of
oppression keenly felt.  He abridged the freedom of the press; interfered with
marriage contracts, and frequently extorted money - levied "blackmail" -
advanced the fees of all officers of government, and threatened to make the
Church of England the established religion in all America.  The people of
Massachusetts resented his conduct, and, in compliance with the doctrine of
Cromwell's motto, "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God," they were about
to drive him out of the colony by force of arms, when the news came from
England that James had been driven from the throne.  That news reached Boston
in April, 1689, with the welcome tidings that Protestant William and Mary were
on that throne.

     This intelligence, like an electric spark, kindled an insurrection which
burst out spontaneously in Boston, and in a few hours the revolt became
universal.  Andros sent soldiers to arrest the venerable Simon Bradstreet,
then ninety years of age, as the most obnoxious republican in the city.  He
was governor when the king struck down the liberties of Massachusetts by
taking away its charter.  The people immediately reinstated him.  From the
balcony of the State-House, the vigorous old man, with long white hair and
beard flowing over his shoulders and breast, addressed the populace with
eloquent words.  They seized Andros and fifty of his most obnoxious
associates, and cast them into prison.  A Committee of Safety was appointed.
An assembly of representatives were soon convened. That body, by unanimous
vote, declared their ancient charter to be resumed. In May, William and Mary
were proclaimed in the colony; and from their sovereigns the provisional
government of Massachusetts received a letter sanctioning their late
proceedings, and directing them to send Andros to England to answer the
charges preferred against him.

     Another storm of disaster was now brooding over Massachusetts.  King
James (who was a Roman Catholic) had fled to the court of Louis the
Fourteenth, a co-religionist and kinsman, who espoused his cause.  William, as
Prince of Orange, was then at the head of a coalition of several powers in a
Protestant league against Louis and soon after his accession, England became a
member of that league and declared war against France. Hostilities between the
two nations began the same year (1689) and the quarrel soon extended to their
respective colonies in America.  Here it became a strife chiefly for a
monopoly of the fur-trade and the fisheries. The conflict then opened, and
which continued more than seven years, is known in our history as KING
WILLIAM'S WAR.

     There was a powerful and controlling religious element in that contest,
and in others which occurred between the French and English in America.  In
fact the power of France had been carried into the heart of the American
continent more by the zeal and patience of religious enthusiasts, than by the
ambition of monarchs, the wisdom of statesmen, or the greed of commoner.

     Coeval with the rise of Protestantism in Germany, was the foundation of a
society designed to counteract its influence.  It was established by Ignatius
Loyola, a Spanish enthusiast, and was called the Society of Jesus. It is
better known in later times as the Order of Jesuits.  Their organization was
as perfect as any which human wisdom has yet devised for a special object.
They are not a society of priests, but of Roman Catholics of every degree,
bound by a solemn oath to extend the sway of the Church of Rome, and to fight
Protestantism wherever it may be found.  Their missionaries were soon found
proselyting in every quarter of the globe. They regarded as a brother every
man, without respect to skin or lineage and the French Jesuits, who were the
pioneers of French dominion in America, regarded every convert to Christianity
among the savages an enfranchised citizen of France.  Whole tribes came under
their spiritual sway, and many of the votaries of commerce, who followed them
into the wilds of America to traffic with the Indians, made wives of the
native maidens, and so established strong social ties between the French and
the savages.  When, therefore, the former quarrelled with the English, they
could rely upon the latter as faithful allies and this barbarian element in
the contest made border wars tenfold more distressing to the English
colonists, especially to those of New England.  The border settlers in New
York had the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, like a strong wall, between
themselves and the Indians in Canada.

     The eastern Indians were easily excited into hostility by those white
allies.  Dover, a frontier town of New Hampshire, was the first to feel the
violent hands of the mongrel foe.  There three hundred Indians had been
treacherously doomed to slavery years before.  Revenge had slumbered now it
was awakened and was gratified.  The venerable Major Waldron, then eighty
years of age, and a local magistrate, had been a party to the treachery. On a
warm evening in July, 1689, two squaws craved lodging at his house. They lay
upon the floor, and in the night they unbarred the doors and let in several
painted warriors.  The aroused old man seized his sword and fought valiantly,
until he was overpowered, when, with bitter taunts, they tortured him to death
in his own hall.  Then they laid his house in ashes, killed twenty of the
garrison, and carried away nearly thirty persons and sold them as slaves to
the French in Canada.

     In August, a party came from Penobscot, after being purified by
confession by Thury a Jesuit priest, and captured the garrison at Pemaquid,
which Andros had established there.  In February following, Governor Frontenac
sent three hundred French and Indians from Montreal to destroy Albany.
Through deep snows they made their way as far as Schenectady, a frontier town
on the Mohawk, and at midnight burned the dwellings and murdered more than
sixty of the inhabitants there.  Seventeen of the slain were children.  Early
the next spring several eastern villages shared the same fate, and scores of
women and children were carried away captives and suffered untold cruelties.

     These atrocities - murders in cold blood - aroused all the colonies to a
sense of danger, and on the suggestion of Massachusetts, a congress of
delegates from several colonies met at New York on the first of May, 1690, to
devise measures for the general security.  Already the colony of Massachusetts
had fitted out an expedition against Acadie, under Sir William Phipps, of
Pemaquid, consisting of eight vessels with eight hundred men.  He seized Port
Royal, and obtained plunder sufficient to pay the expenses of the expedition.
The town was again plundered by English privateers from the West Indies, in
June so retaliation went on.  The Congress at New York resolved to invade
Canada by land and sea, with an army that should march from the Hudson River
by way of Lake Champlain to Montreal and, at the same time, a strong naval
armament was to ascend the St. Lawrence and attack Quebec.  The army was
placed under the command of a son of Governor Winthrop, of Connecticut, the
cost of the expedition being borne jointly by that colony and New York; and
Milborne, son-in-law of Leisler [see Chap. XXVIII of this work], undertook to
furnish the supplies. The command of the fleet, which was composed of
thirty-four vessels manned by two thousand New Englanders, was given to
Phipps.

     The army moved from Albany early in July, at a snail's pace.  At the
beginning of September the bulk of them had only reached the head of Lake
Champlain, where they remained, while some troops, and Indians of the Five
Nations, under Colonel Peter Schuyler, pushed on toward the St. Lawrence. Old
Frontenac was in Montreal when an Indian runner told him of the approach of
the invaders.  He called out his Indian allies.  Taking a tomahawk in his
hand, he danced the war-dance and chanted the war-song, in their presence, and
then led them against the foe.  Schuyler was repulsed, and the whole army
returned to Albany.  Leisler charged Winthrop with treachery, and Winthrop, in
turn, charged the failure of the expedition to the inefficiency of Milborne in
furnishing supplies.

     Meanwhile Phipps, without charts or pilots, had crawled cautiously around
Acadie and up the St. Lawrence for nine weeks, giving a swift Indian runner an
opportunity to go from Pemaquid to Canada with the news of Phipps' departure,
in time to allow Frontenac to reach Quebec before the arrival of the hostile
fleet.  The fortifications of the ancient town were strengthened; and when
Phipps arrived before it, and sent a summons for its surrender, his message
was treated with derision.  It was then the middle of October.  Hearing of the
failure of the land expedition, Phipps weighed anchor and crawled cautiously
back to New England before the winter storms set in.  The French and Indians
in Canada and Acadie were greatly elated, and the repulse was considered so
important by Louis that he ordered a commemorative medal to be struck, with
the legend:  FRANCE VICTORIOUS IN THE NEW WORLD.  These military operations
exhausted the treasury of Massachusetts, and the government emitted bills of
credit to the amount of about one hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars.
This was the first paper-money ever issued on the American continent.

     Soon after his return from the St. Lawrence, Sir William Phipps went to
England to solicit aid for the colonies in their further warfare with the
French and Indians, and to assist in efforts there to procure a restoration of
the charter of Massachusetts which King James had annulled. Aid was refused
and instead of restoring the old charter, William gave a new one, by which
Massachusetts, Plymouth, Maine and Nova Scotia were united under the name of
Massachusetts Bay Colony," and was made a royal province, with Phipps as
governor.  The baronet was a man of dull intellect, rudely educated, utterly
lacking in qualities of statesmanship, headstrong, egotistical, superstitious,
patriotic, and every way unfitted as a leader in civil and military affairs.
He had gained distinction in his native colony only by his wealth and title,
both of which were acquired by his successful raising of treasure from a
Spanish ship with a diving-bell.  He returned to Massachusetts in 1692,
bringing the new charter with him.

     The people of Massachusetts were not only dissatisfied with the new
charter, but offended by it, for it greatly abridged their liberties.  Wise
and enlightened statesmen and churchmen in England advised William and his
Parliament not to make the liberties of the colonists less.  Tillotson, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, charged the king "not to take away from the people
of New England any of the privileges which Charles the First had granted
them." to wise advice.  Others did likewise but the government refused to
listen The king reserved the right, in the new charter, to appoint the
governor, his deputy and the secretary of the colony, and of repealing all the
laws within three years after their passage.  This robbery of their liberties
alienated the affections of the people from the mother country.  It was one of
the series of blunders made by the crown and ministers which fostered
discontent in the colonies and tended to the final dismemberment of the empire
in 1776.

     Yet in some respects the new charter was an improvement upon the old.
While the rights of citizens were abridged in some things, they were enlarged
in others.  Toleration was granted to every form of the Christian religion
excepting, unfortunately, the Roman Catholic and the right of suffrage - to
vote - was no longer restricted to members of Congregational churches, but was
made almost universal.  Bigotry and intolerance were, so far, disarmed and
they never afterward held controlling sway in the policy of the State.

     Here let us pause a moment in our narrative of political transactions and
of the horrid war then raging, to consider a strange social feature in the
story of Massachusetts, known as SALEM WITCHCRAFT.