Historia, filosofía-biografia-pensamiento

In 1676 central Massachusetts was again aflame. Lancaster was sacked and burned, its inhabitants nearly all either carried captive or put to death with indescribable atrocities. Mrs. Rowlandson, wife of the Lancaster Minister, also her son and two daughters, were among the captives. We have this brave woman's story as subsequently detailed by herself. Her youngest, a little girl of six, wounded by a bullet, she bore in her arms wherever they marched, till the poor creature died of cold, starvation, and lack of care. The agonized mother begged the privilege of tugging along the corpse, but was refused. She with her son and living daughter were ransomed, after wandering up and down with the savages eleven weeks and five days. From Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative we have many interesting facts touching the Indians' habits of life. They carried ample stores from Lancaster, but soon squandered them, and were reduced to a diet of garbage, horses' entrails, ears, and liver, with...

Simultaneously with the Stuart Restoration another cloud darkened the New England sky. Since the Pequot War, Indians and whites had in the main been friendly. This by itself is proof that our fathers were less unjust to the red men than is sometimes charged. They did assume the right to acquire lands here, and they had this right. The Indians were not in any proper sense owners of New England. They were few--by 1660 not more numerous than the pale-faces--and, far from settling or occupying the land, roamed from place to place. Had it been otherwise they, as barbarians, would have had no such claim upon the territory as to justify them in barring out civilization. However, the colonists did not plead this consideration. Whenever districts were desired to which Indians had any obvious title, it was both law and custom to pay them their price. In this, Roger Williams and William Penn were not peculiar. If individual white men sometimes cheated in land trades, as in other negotiations, th...

If in these things the new polity was inferior to the old, in two respects it was superior; Suffrage was now practically universal, and every species of religious profession, save Catholicism, made legal. Also, Massachusetts territory was enlarged southward to take in all Plymouth, eastward to embrace Maine (Sagadahoc) and Nova Scotia. Maine, henceforth including Sagadahoc, that is, all land eastward to the Saint Croix, remained part of Massachusetts till March 15, 1820, when it became a member of the Union by itself. Nova Scotia, over which Phips's conquest of Port Royal in 1690 had established a nominal rather than a real English authority, was assigned to France again by the Treaty of Ryswick, 1697. See also: 1688