Pioneers and Founders

by Шарлотта Мэри Йондж

  There was deadly terror among the English. The Indians swarmed down at night on lonely villages and farmhouses, slew, scalped, burnt, and now and then carried off prisoners to be tortured to death, and children to tell by and by strange tales of life in the wigwams. The militia were called out, but left their houses unprotected. At Newich-wannock, the farmhouse of a man named Tozer was attacked by the Indians when only tenanted by fifteen women and children. A girl of eighteen, who was the first to see the approach, bravely shut the door and set her back against it; thus giving time for the others to escape by another door to a better secured building. The Indians chopped the door to pieces with their hatchets, knocked the girl down, left her for dead, and hurried on in pursuit of the others, but only came up with two poor little children, who had not been able to get over the fence. The rest were saved, and the brave girl recovered from her wounds; but other attacks ended far more fatally for the sufferers, and the rage and alarm of the New Englanders were great. A few of the recently taught and unbaptized Indians from what were called the "new praying towns" had joined their countrymen; and though the great body of the converts were true and faithful, the English confounded them all in one common hatred to the Red- skin. The magistrates and Government were not infected by this blind passion, and did all they could to restrain it, showing trust in the Christian natives by employing them in the war, when they rendered good and faithful service; but the commonalty, who were in the habit of viewing the whole people as Hivites and Jebusites, treated these allies with such distrust and contumely as was quite enough to alienate them.

  In July 1675, three Christian Indians were sent as guides and interpreters to an expedition to treat with the Indians in the Nipmuck country. One was made prisoner, but the two officers in command gave the fullest testimony to the good conduct of the other two; nevertheless they were so misused on their return that Mr. Gookin declared that they had been, by ill-treatment, "in a manner constrained to fall off to the enemy." One was killed by a scouting party of praying Indians; the other was taken, sold as a slave, and sent to Jamaica; and though Mr. Eliot prevailed to have him brought back, and redeemed his wife and children, he was still kept in captivity.

  The next month, August, a number of the Christian Indians were arrested and sent up to Boston to be tried for some murders that had been committed at Lancaster. Eliot and Gookin succeeded in proving their perfect innocence, but the magistrates had great difficulty in saving their lives from the fury of the mob, who thirsted for Indian blood, and both minister and major were insulted and reviled, so that Gookin said on the bench that it was not safe for him to walk in the streets; and when Eliot met with a dangerous boat accident, wishes were expressed that he had been drowned.

  Natick was looked upon with so much distrust and aversion that Government, fearing occasions of bloodshed, decided that the inhabitants must be removed to Deer Island. On the 7th of October a great fast-day, with prayer and preaching, had been held, and fierce and bitter entreaties had been uttered against the Indian Sachems, especially Philip. One wonders whether Eliot-now seventy-one years old-felt it come home to him that he knew not what spirit he had been of when he had prayed for the death of the Moorish prince. It must have been a heart- breaking time for the aged man, to see the spot founded in so much hope and prayer, the fruit of so much care and meditation, thus broken up and ruined, and when he was too old to do the like work over again. At the end of that month of October, Captain Thomas Prentiss, with a party of horse and five or six carts, arrived at Natick, and made known the commands of the Government. Sadly but patiently the Indians submitted. Two hundred men, women, and children were made to get together all they could carry, and marched from their homes to the banks of the Charles River. Here, at a spot called the Pines, Mr. Eliot met them, and they gathered round him to hear his words of comfort, as he exhorted them to meek patience, resignation, and steadiness to the faith. The scene was exceedingly affecting, as the white-haired pastor stood by the river-side beneath the tall pines, with his dark-skinned, newly reclaimed children about him, clinging to him for consolation, but neither murmuring nor struggling, only praying and encouraging one another. Captain Prentiss and his soldiers were deeply touched; but at midnight, when the tide was high enough, three large boats bore the Indians over to Deer Island. Here they were, transplanted from their comfortable homes in the beginning of a long and very severe winter; but, well divided by the river from all suspicion of doing violence, they fared better than the praying Indians of the new town of Wamesit. A barn full of hay and corn had been burnt, and fourteen men of Chelmsford, the next settlement, concluding it had been done by the Wamesit Red-skins, went thither, called them out of their wigwams, and then fired at them, killing a lad and five women and children. After all, the fire had been caused by some skulking heathen Indians; but though the Government obtained the arrest of the murderers, the jury would not find them guilty. The Wamesit Indians fled into the forest, and sent a piteous letter:-"We are not sorry for what we leave behind, but we are sorry that the English have driven us from our praying to God and from our teacher. We did begin to understand praying to God a little." They were invited back, but were afraid to come till cold and hunger drove them to their old abode, and then the indefatigable Eliot and Gookin visited them, and did all in their power to bring about a better feeling towards them in Chelmsford.

  This whole autumn and winter-a terribly severe one-seems to have been spent by these good men in trying to heal the strifes between the English and the Indians. Wanalanset had fled, true to his father's policy of never resisting, and they were sent to invite him back again; but when he returned, he found that the maize grounds of his settlement had been ploughed up by the English and sown with rye, so that his tribe had most scanty subsistence.

  Several settlements of Christians were deported to Deer Island. One large party had been made prisoners by their heathen countrymen and had managed to escape, but when met with wandering in the woods by a party of English soldiers, were plundered of the little the heathens had left them, in especial of a pewter cup, their communion plate, which Mr. Eliot had given them, and which was much treasured by their native pastor. The General interfered in their behalf, but could not protect them from much ill-usage. The teacher was sent with his old father and young children to Boston, where Mr. Eliot saw and cheered him before he was conveyed to Deer Island. There, in December, Eliot, with Gookin and other friends, frequently visited the Indians, now five hundred in number, and found them undergoing many privations, but patient, resigned, and unmurmuring. The snow was four feet deep in the woods by the 10th of December that year, and the exertion and exposure of travelling, either on snow-shoes or sledges, must have been tremendous to a man of Mr. Eliot's age; but he never seems to have intermitted his labours in carrying spiritual and temporal succour to his people, and in endeavouring to keep the peace between them and the English.

  The hard winter had had a great effect in breaking the strength of the enemy, and they were much more feeble on the renewal of the war in the spring. The good conduct of the praying Indians had overcome the popular prejudice so much that it was decided to employ them to assist the scanty forces of the English in hunting down the hostile tribes, and Gookin boasts of their having taken and slain more than 400 foes in the course of the summer of 1676, which one would scarcely think was very good for their recent Christianity. In the mean time, the absence of all the able- bodied men and hunters reduced their families to such distress that serious illness broke out among them, and Major Gookin caused them to be brought to the neighbourhood of Cambridge, where there was good fishing, and where he could attend to them, and provide them with food, clothing, and medicine.

  In August Philip was killed, the English believing themselves to "have prayed the bullet straight into his heart;" and his head was carried about on a pole, in a manner we should have called worthy of the Indians themselves, did we not recollect that there were a good many city gates at home with much the same k
ind of trophy, while his wife and children-miserable fate!-were, like many others of the captives, sold into slavery to the sugar planters in Jamaica.

  After this the war did not entirely cease, but the Christian Indians were allowed to creep back to their old settlements at Nonantum, and even at Natick, where Mr. Eliot continued periodically to visit and instruct them; but after this unhappy war there were only four instead of fourteen towns of Christian Indians in Massachusetts, and a blow had been given to his mission that it never recovered.

  Still there was a splendid energy and resolution about this undaunted old man, now writing a narrative of the Gospel History in his seventy-fourth year, now sending Robert Boyle new physical facts, now protesting hard against the cruel policy of selling captive Indians into slavery. What must not the slavery of the West Indian isles, which had already killed off their native Caribbeans, have been to these free hunters of the North American forest, too proud to work for themselves, and bred in a climate of cold, dry, bracing air? And even in the West Indies, a shipload of these miserable creatures was refused in the over-stocked market, and the horrors of the slave-ship were prolonged across the Atlantic, till at last Mr. Eliot traced the unhappy freight to Tangier. He at once wrote to conjure the excellent Mr. Boyle to endeavour to have them redeemed and sent home,-with what success, or if any were left alive, does not appear.

  He had the pleasure of seeing a son of good Major Gookin become the minister of a district including Natick, and likewise of the ordination at Natick of an Indian named Daniel Takawombgrait. Of his own six children only one son and one daughter survived him. Benjamin, the youngest son, was his coadjutor at Roxbury, and was left in charge there while he circulated amongst his Indians, and would have succeeded him. The loss of this son must have fallen very heavily on him; but "the good old man would sometimes comfortably say, 'I have had six children, and I bless God for His free grace; they are all either with Christ or in Christ, and my mind is now at rest concerning them.'"

  When asked how he could bear the death of such excellent children, his answer was, "My desire was that they should have served God on earth, but if God will choose to have them rather serve Him in heaven, I have nothing to object against it, but His will be done."

  His last letter to Mr. Boyle was written in his eighty-fourth year, and was a farewell but a cheerful one, and he had good hopes then of a renewal of the spirit of missions among his people. But though his Christians did not bely their name in his own generation, alcohol did its work on some, consumption on others; and, in 1836, when Jabez Sparks wrote his biography, there was one wigwam at Natick inhabited by a few persons of mingled Indian and Negro blood, the sole living remnants of the foundation he had loved so well. Nevertheless, Eliot's work was not wasted. The spark he lit has never gone out wholly in men's minds.

  His wife died in 1684, at a great age, and her elegy over her coffin were these words from himself: "Here lies my dear faithful, pious, prudent, prayerful wife. I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me."

  He had become very feeble, and was wont to say, when asked how he did, "Alas! I have lost everything: my understanding leaves me, my memory fails me, my utterance fails me, but, I thank God, my charity holds out still; I find that rather grows than fails."

  He was forced to give up the duties of his office to a new pastor, and though often entreated to preach again, he would hardly ever do so, by reason, he said, that it would be wronging the souls of his people, when they had an able minister; and when he preached for the last time on a fast day, on the 63rd Psalm, it was with an apology for what he called the poorness, and meanness, and brokenness of his meditations.

  "I wonder," he used to say, "for what the Lord lets me live. He knows that now I can do nothing for Him."

  Yet he was working for Him to the utmost of his power. A little boy in the neighbourhood had fallen into the fire, and lost his eyesight in consequence. The old minister took him into his house to instruct, and first taught him to repeat many chapters in the Bible, and to know it so thoroughly that when listening to readers he could correct them if they missed a word; after which he taught him Latin, so that an "ordinary piece" had become easy to him.

  The importation of negro slaves had already begun, and Mr. Eliot "lamented with a bleeding and a burning passion that the English used their negroes but as their horses or oxen, and that so little care was taken about their immortal souls. He look'd upon it as a prodigy, that any bearing the name of Christians should so much have the heart of devils in them, as to prevent and hinder the instruction of the poor Blackamores, and confine the souls of their miserable slaves to a destroying ignorance, merely through fear of using the benefit of their vassalage." So, old as he was, he induced the settlers around to send him their negroes on certain days of the week for instruction; but he had not made much progress in the work before he became too feeble to carry it on. He fell into languishments attended with fever, and this he viewed as his summons. His successor, Mr. Nehemiah Walters, came to live with him, and held a good deal of conversation with him.

  "There is a cloud," he said, "a dark cloud upon the work of the Gospel among the poor Indians. The Lord renew and prosper that work, and grant it may live when I am dead. It is a work which I have been doing much and long about. But what was the word I spoke last? I recall that word. My doings. Alas! they have been poor and small, and lean doings, and I'll be the man that shall throw the first stone at them all."

  Mather relates that he spake other words "little short of oracles," and laments that they were not correctly recorded; but it appears that he gradually sank, and died in his eighty-seventh year of age, at Roxbury, in the year 1690. His last words were, "Welcome joy."

  CHAPTER II. DAVID BRAINERD, THE ENTHUSIAST.

  The Indian pastor of Natick, who had been trained by Mr. Eliot, died in 1716, and two years later was born one of the men who did all in his power, through his brief life, to hold up the light of truth to the unfortunate natives of America, as they were driven further and further to the west before the advancing tide from Europe.

  The fourth son among nine children, who lost both parents at a very early age, David Brainerd, though born above the reach of want, had many disadvantages to contend with. Both his parents had, however, been religious people, the children of ministers who had come out to America in the days of the Pilgrim Fathers, and settling at Haddam in Connecticut, trained up their families in the stern, earnest, and rigid rules and doctrines of Calvinism, which certainly, where they are accepted by an earnest and thoughtful mind, have a great tendency to stimulate the intellect, and force forward, as it were, the religious perceptions in early youth. David was, moreover, a delicate child, with the seeds of (probably) hereditary decline incipient, and at seven or eight years old he drew apart from play, thinking much of death, and trying to prepare by prayer and meditation. His parents' death increased these feelings, and while living at East Haddam, under the charge of his brothers, and employed in farm work, the boy was continually struggling with himself in silence, disliking all youthful mirth and amusement, fasting, watching and praying, and groaning over the state of his soul. At nineteen, the wish to become a minister came upon him, and he began to study hard at all spare moments; and in another year, at twenty, he went to reside with Mr. Fiske, the minister of Haddam, and in him found, for the first time, a friend to whom he could open his heart, who could understand the anxieties and longings within him, and who gave him advice to withdraw himself from the young companions whose gay spirits were uncongenial to him, and spend more time with the graver and more religious.

  Whether this were good advice we do not know, but a period of terrible agony had to be struggled through. It seems plain, from comparison of different lives, that in the forms of religion which make everything depend upon the individual person's own consciousness of the state of his heart and feelings, instead of supporting this by any outward tokens for faith to rest upon, the more humble and scrupulous spirits often undergo fe
arful misery before they can attain to such security of their own faith as they believe essential. Indeed, this state of wretchedness is almost deemed a necessary stage in the Christian life, like the Slough of Despond in the Pilgrim's Progress; and with such a temperament as David Brainerd's, the horrors of the struggle for hope were dreadful and lasted for months, before an almost physical perception of light, glory, and grace shone out upon him, although, even to the end of his life, hope and fear, spiritual joy and depression alternated, no doubt, greatly in consequence of his constant ill-health.

  In 1739, in his twenty-first year, he became a student at Yale, and, between hard work and his mental self-reproach for the worldly ambition of distinction, his health broke down, haemorrhage from the lungs set in, and he was sent home, it was supposed, only to die. He was then in a very happy frame of mind, and was almost sorry to find himself well enough to return to what he felt to be a scene of temptation. That same year, his head was entirely turned by the excitement of George Whitfield's preaching; he was carried away by religious enthusiasm, and was in a state of indiscreet zeal, of which his better judgment afterwards repented, so that he destroyed all the portion of his journal that related to that year. Indeed, his vehemence cost him dear, for, in the heat of a discussion, he had the misfortune to say, "Mr. Whittlesey, he has no more grace than this chair I am leaning upon." Mr. Whittlesey was one of the college tutors, and a gossiping freshman who overheard the words thought proper to report this to a meddling woman, who immediately walked off to the Rector of the college with the awful intelligence that young Brainerd said that Mr. Whittlesey had no more grace than a chair!

  The Rector had not the sense to silence the silly slander; he sent for the freshman, took his evidence, and that of the young men with whom Brainerd had been conversing, and then required him to make public confession and amends to Mr. Whittlesey before the whole assembled college,-a humiliation never previously required, except in cases of gross moral misconduct. The fact was, that the old-fashioned hereditary Presbyterianism, which had had time to slacken in the hundred years since the foundation of the colony, was dismayed at the new and vivid life imported by Whitfield from the Wesleyan revival in the English Church. It was what always happens. A mixture of genuine sober-minded dread of extravagance, or new doctrine, and a sluggish distaste to the more searching religion, combine to lead to a spirit of persecution. This was the true reason that the lad's youthful rashness of speech was treated as so grave an offence. Brainerd's spirit was up. Probably he saw no cause to alter his opinion as to Mr. Whittlesey's amount of grace, and he stoutly refused to retract his words, whereupon he was found guilty of insubordination, and actually expelled from Yale. A council of ministers who assembled at Hartford petitioned for his restoration, but were refused, the authorities deeming themselves well rid of a dangerous fanatic.