Massasoit, the father of Philip, was the true friend to the English, and when he was about to die, took his two sons Alexander and Philip, and fondly commended them to the kindness of the new settlers, praying that the same peace and good will might be between them, that had existed between him and his white friends. Upon mere suspicion, only a little while afterwards, the elder, who succeeded his father as ruler among his people, was hunted in his forest home, and dragged before a court, the nature and object of which he could not understand; but the indignity which was offered him and the treachery of those who thus insulted him, so chafed his proud spirit, that a fever was the consequence, of which he died. And this is not all. The son and wife of Philip were sold into slavery, as were also many others of the Indians taken captive during the colonial wars. “Yes,” says a distinguished orator, [2] “they were sold into slavery,—West Indian slavery! an Indian princess and her child sold from the cool breezes of Mount Hope, from the wild freedom of a New England forest, to gasp under the lash, beneath the blazing sun of the tropics! ‘Bitter as death,’ aye, bitter as hell! Is there any thing, I do not say in the range of humanity,—is there any thing animated, that would not struggle against this?” Nor is this indeed all. A kinswoman of theirs, a princess in her own right, Wet-a-more of Pocasset, was pursued and harassed till she fell exhausted in the wilderness, and died of cold and starvation. There she was found by men professing to be shocked at Indian barbarity, her head severed from her body, and carried bleeding upon a pole to be exposed in the public highways of a country, ruled by men who have been honored as saints and martyrs. “Let me die among my kindred.” “Bury me with my fathers,” is the prayer of every Indian heart; and the most delicate and reverential kindness in their treatment of the bodies of the dead, was considered a religious duty. There was nothing in all their customs that indicated a barbarism so gross and revolting as these acts which are recorded by New England historians without a censure, while the lamentations which the Indian utters in his grief at seeing his kindred dishonored and his religion reviled, are stigmatized as savage and fiendish. If all, or even a few who ministered among them in holy things, had been like Eliot, who is called “the apostle to the Indians,” and deserves to be ranked with the apostles of old; or Kirkland, who is endeared to the memory of every Iroquois who heard his name, it could not have become a proverb or a truth that civilization and Christianity wasted them away.