In the year 1644, the Indians in Virginia, under the instigation of Opechancanough, successor of Powhatan, undertook to exterminate the colonists in that province, when five hundred persons, who were engaged in celebrating a victory of the king over the Parliamentary army in the war then raging, were massacred at the first surprise. A ship was sent to Boston to procure powder for the defence of the colony, but the general court declined to furnish it. This refusal was owing to the fact that the people of Virginia sympathized with the king in the pending struggle, and to the further fact that three ministers sent out from New England at the instance of some of the "elect," who had found their way into Virginia, were sent out of the province by Governor Berkeley for violating the law--Governor Winthrop declaring that the massacre of the Virginians was a punishment "for their reviling the Gospel and those faithful ministers." * * * * * A law was adopted in Connecticut, 1650, for selling debtors for debt, which remained in force more than a century and a half; and at the same time a law was adopted, upon the recommendation of the commissioners for the United Colonies of New England, providing that Indians refusing or neglecting satisfaction for injuries might be seized and delivered to the party injured "either to serve, or to be shipped out and exchanged for negroes, as the case will justly bear." About this time, the "heretics" at Warwick, one of the settlements in Rhode Island, complained that the authorities of Massachusetts had instigated the Indians to commit depredations upon them, and Easton, subsequently governor of Rhode Island, was reported to have said of the people of Massachusetts, that "the elect had the Holy Ghost and the devil indwelling." Upon hearing of the execution of two persons for witchcraft, the people of Warwick exclaimed "There are no witches on earth, nor devils, but the ministers of New England and such as they." In 1676, a large number of captives, taken in the war against King Philip, in which all of New England was united, were made slaves of, many of them were sent from Boston to Bermuda and sold, including the infant son of King Philip, who, some of the most prominent ministers insisted, should be slain for his father's sins, though the more remunerative expedient of selling him was adopted. The captives who fell into the hands of the Rhode Islanders were distributed as slaves, and Roger Williams, the expelled "heretic" from Massachusetts, received a boy for his share. A large body of Indians assembled at Dover, at the conclusion of the war, to make peace, were treacherously captured and some two hundred of them were sent to Boston, where some were hung and the rest shipped off to be sold as slaves.