Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[204] paid the fine. Sometimes offenders, with a refinement of cruelty, were obliged to “go and talk to the elders.” And if any youth made matrimonial overtures to a young woman without the consent of her parents, or, in their absence, of the County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned. A new etymology for the word “courting.”

A good instance of this mingled influence was in the relation of the ministers to the Indian wars. Roger Williams, even when banished and powerless, could keep the peace with the natives. But when the brave Miantonimo was to be dealt with for suspected treason, and the civil authorities had decided, that, though it was unsafe to set him at liberty, they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter was finally referred to five “elders,” and Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him in cold blood. The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated, and their heroic King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard, was hunted like a wild beast, his body quartered and set on poles, his head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on a gibbet in Plymouth, and one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers returned thanks, and one said that they had prayed the bullet into Philip's heart. Nay, it seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, “the women, as they came out of the meetinghouse, fell upon two Indians, that had been brought in as captives, and in a tumultuous way very barbarously murdered them,” in revenge for the death of some fishermen: a moral application which throws a singular light on the style of gospel prevailing inside the meetinghouse that day. But it is good to know, on the other side, that, when the Commissioners of the United Colonies had declared an Indian war, and the Massachusetts