american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 117menting" the old man. Finally, however, they decided to kill him: "somewould have had him devoured by dogs," wrote Easton, "but the tendernessof some of them prevailed to cut off his head." 79The only major question remaining as King Philip's war drew to itsinevitable close was how to deal with the few natives who still were alive.So many Indians had been "consumed ... by the Sword & by Famineand by Sickness," wrote Cotton Mather's father Increase, "it being nounusual thing for those that traverse the woods to find dead Indians upand down . . . there hath been none to bury them," that there now were"not above an hundred men left of them who last year were the greatestbody of Indians in New England." 80 As to what to do with that handfulof survivors, only two choices-as always--enjoyed any support amongthe English colonists: annihilation or enslavement. Both approaches weretried. Allegedly dangerous Indians (that is, adult males) were systematicallyexecuted, while women and children were either shipped off to theslave markets of Spain or the West Indies, or were kept as servants of thecolonists themselves. The terms of captured child slaves within Connecticutwere to end once they reached the age of twenty-six. But few saw theirday of liberation. Either they died before reaching their twenty-sixth birthday,or they escaped. And those who escaped and were caught usually thenwere sold into foreign slavery, with the blessing of the Connecticut GeneralCourt that had passed specific postwar legislation with this end inmind.One final bit of business that required clearing up concerned the fatesof those scattered Indians who had been able to hide out on islands inNarragansett Bay that were under the colonial jurisdiction of Rhode Island.Rhode Island had remained neutral during the war, and both theIndians and the leaders of the other colonies knew there was less likelihoodof homicidal or other barbarous treatment for native refugees foundin Rhode Island's domain. This infuriated the colonists in Connecticut,Massachusetts, and Plymouth, not only because of their continuing bloodlust, but because the Rhode Islanders were themselves reducing escapedIndians to servitude, even if they were not methodically executing them.The other colonies, "mindful of the cash value of prisoners," writes DouglasEdward Leach, felt that the Rhode Islanders were thus unfairly "nowreaping the benefits which others had sowed in blood and treasure." RhodeIsland's response was that the number of Indians within their territory wasgreatly exaggerated. And it appears that they were right, so successful hadbeen the extermination campaign against the native people. 81By the beginning of the eighteenth century the indigenous inhabitantsof New England, and of most other northeastern Indian lands, had beenreduced to a small fraction of their former number and were living inisolated, squalid enclaves. Cotton Mather called these defeated and scatteredpeople "tawny pagans" whose "inaccessible" homes were now noth-