The Indians were generally neglected for the reason that they were considered beyond the pale of Christianity, despite professions to the contrary. As a matter of fact, being wards of the State they were scantily provided for and their fundamental needs were generally neglected. They were offered few opportunities for mental, moral, or religious improvement for the reason that the missionary spirit which characterized Cotton Mather and John Eliot no longer existed. Only a small sum was raised or appropriated for their rudimentary education and with the exception of what could be done with the "Williams Fund" of Harvard College there was little effort made for their evangelization. Left thus to themselves, the Indians developed into a state within a state. When, therefore, the Negroes became conscious of the wrongs they suffered in slavery, a few early learned to take refuge among the Indians and even after they were freed in Massachusetts their social proscription was such among the whites that some free people of color preferred the hard life among the Indians to the whiffs and scorns of race prejudice in the seats of Christian civilization. Coming into contact there with foreigners, who found it convenient to move among these morally weak people, the Negroes served as important factors in the melting pot in which the Indians were remade and introduced to American life as whites and blacks. Referring to the moral condition of the Fall River Indians, as a case in evidence, an investigator reported in 1861 that in two families there were twelve cases of bastardy and in one of them it was said that, of eight children, the paternity was apparently about equally divided among the Indian, Negro, and white races.[4] The reports on the state of the Indians always disclosed the presence and the influence of Negroes among them. "Of the publishments of colored persons interested and the early records of Dartmouth," said J. M. Earle in 1861, "by far the larger proportion of those of them were Negro men to Indian women. In Yarmouth a large portion of those of Indian descent have intermarried with whites until their progeny has become white, their social relations are with those of that color and they are mingled with the general community having lost their identity as a distinct portion of the Hassanamiscoes and it would have been a fortunate thing for all if it had been so with them all. But the mixture in most of the tribes has been more with the Negro race than with the white until that blood probably predominates though there are still a considerable number who have the prominent characteristics of the Indians--the lank, glossy, black hair, the high cheek bones--the bright dark eye and other features peculiar to the race."[5]