Samuel Sewall’s Speech

There was another election, which did not improve the situation.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 1. Continuing Chapter 10.

The half-breed officer, Saint-Castin, son of Baron Vincent de Saint-Castin by his wife, a Penobscot squaw, bore the double character of a French lieutenant and an Abenaki chief, and had joined with the Indians in their hostile demonstration at Arrowsick Island. Therefore, as chief of a tribe styled subjects of King George, the English seized him, charged him with rebellion, and brought him to Boston, where he was examined by a legislative committee. He showed both tact and temper, parried the charges against him, and was at last set at liberty. His arrest, however, exasperated his tribesmen, who soon began to burn houses, kill settlers, and commit various acts of violence, for all of which Rale was believed to be mainly answerable. There was great indignation against him. He himself says that a reward of a thousand pounds sterling was offered for his head, but that the English should not get it for all their sterling money. It does not appear that such a reward was offered, though it is true that the Massachusetts House of Representatives once voted five hundred pounds in their currency — then equal to about a hundred and eighty pounds sterling — for the same purpose; but as the governor and Council refused their concurrence, the Act was of no effect.

All the branches of the government, however, presently joined in sending three hundred men to Norridgewock, with a demand that the Indians should give up Rale “and the other heads and fomenters of their rebellion.” In case of refusal, they were to seize the Jesuit and the principal chiefs and bring them prisoners to Boston. Colonel Westbrook was put in command of the party. Rale, being warned of their approach by some of his Indians, swallowed the consecrated wafers, hid the sacred vessels, and made for the woods, where, as he thinks, he was saved from discovery by a special intervention of Providence. His papers fell into the hands of Westbrook, including letters that proved beyond all doubt that he had acted as agent of the Canadian authorities in exciting his flock against the English.

[Some of the papers found in Rale’s “strong box” are still preserved in the Archives of Massachusetts, including a letter to him from Vaudreuil, dated at Quebec, 25 September, 1721, in which the French governor expresses great satisfaction at the missionary’s success in uniting the Indians against the English, and promises military aid, if necessary.]

Incensed by Westbrook’s invasion, the Indians came down the Kennebec in large numbers, burned the village of Brunswick, and captured nine families at Merry-meeting Bay; though they soon set them free, except five men whom they kept to exchange for the four hostages still detained at Boston.[1] At the same time they seized several small vessels in the harbors along the coast. On this the governor and Council declared war against the Eastern Indians, meaning the Abenakis and their allies, whom they styled traitors and robbers.

[1: Wheeler, History of Brunswick, Topsham, and Harpswell, 54.]

In Massachusetts many persons thought that war could not be justified and were little disposed to push it with vigor. The direction of it belonged to the governor in his capacity of Captain-General of the Province. Shute was an old soldier who had served with credit as lieutenant-colonel under Marlborough; but he was hampered by one of those disputes which in times of crisis were sure to occur in every British province whose governor was appointed by the Crown. The Assembly, jealous of the representative of royalty, and looking back mournfully to their virtual independence under the lamented old charter, had from the first let slip no opportunity to increase its own powers and abridge those of the governor, refused him the means of establishing the promised trading-houses in the Indian country, and would grant no money for presents to conciliate the Norridgewocks. The House now wanted, not only to control supplies for the war, but to direct the war itself and conduct operations by committees of its own. Shute made his plans of campaign and proceeded to appoint officers from among the frontier inhabitants, who had at least the qualification of being accustomed to the woods. One of them, Colonel Walton, was obnoxious to some of the representatives, who brought charges against him, and the House demanded that he should be recalled from the field to answer to them for his conduct. The governor objected to this as an encroachment on his province as commander-in-chief. Walton was now accused of obeying orders of the governor in contravention of those of the representatives, who thereupon passed a vote requiring him to lay his journal before them. This was more than Shute could bear. He had the character of a good-natured man; but the difficulties and mortifications of his position had long galled him, and he had got leave to return to England and lay his case before the King and Council. The crisis had now come. The Assembly were for usurping all authority, civil and military. Accordingly, on the first of January, 1723, the governor sailed in a merchant ship, for London, without giving notice of his intention to anybody except two or three servants.

[Hutchinson, ii. 261. On these dissensions compare Palfrey, Hist. of New England, iv. 406-428.]

The burden of his difficult and vexatious office fell upon the lieutenant-governor, William Dummer. When he first met the Council in his new capacity, a whimsical scene took place. Here, among the rest, was the aged, matronly countenance of the worthy Samuel Sewall, deeply impressed with the dignity and importance of his position as senior member of the Board. At his best he never had the faintest sense of humor or perception of the ludicrous, and being now perhaps touched with dotage, he thought it incumbent upon him to address a few words of exhortation and encouragement to the incoming chief magistrate. He rose from his seat with long locks, limp and white, drooping from under his black skullcap, — for he abhorred a wig as a sign of backsliding, — and in a voice of quavering solemnity spoke thus:

If your Honour and this Honourable Board please to give me leave, I would speak a Word or two upon this solemn Occasion. Altho the unerring Providence of God has brought you to the Chair of Government in a cloudy and tempestuous season, yet you have this for your Encouragement, that the people you Have to do with are a part of the Israel of God, and you may expect to have of the Prudence and Patience of Moses communicated to you for your Conduct. It is evident that our Almighty Saviour counselled the first planters to remove hither and Settle here, and they dutifully followed his Advice, and therefore He will never leave nor forsake them nor Theirs; so that your Honour must needs be happy in sincerely seeking their Interest and Welfare, which your Birth and Education will incline you to do. Difficilia quæ pulchra. I promise myself that they who sit at this Board will yield their Faithful Advice to your Honour according to the Duty of their Place.”

Having thus delivered himself to an audience not much more susceptible of the ludicrous than he was, the old man went home well pleased, and recorded in his diary that the lieutenant-governor and councilors rose and remained standing while he was speaking, “and they expressed a handsom Acceptance of what I had said; Laus Deo.”

[Sewall Papers, iii. 317, 318.]

Dummer was born in New England, and might, therefore, expect to find more favor than had fallen to his predecessor; but he was the representative of royalty, and could not escape the consequences of being so. In earnest of what was in store for him, the Assembly would not pay his salary, because he had sided with the governor in the late quarrel. The House voted to dismiss Colonel Walton and Major Moody, the chief officers appointed by Shute; and when Dummer reminded it that this was a matter belonging to him as commander-in-chief, it withheld the pay of the obnoxious officers and refused all supplies for the war till they should be removed. Dummer was forced to yield.[2] The House would probably have pushed him still farther, if the members had not dreaded the effect of Shute’s representations at court and feared lest persistent encroachment on the functions of the governor might cost them their charter, to which, insufficient as they thought it, and far inferior to the one they had lost, they clung tenaciously as the palladium of their liberties. Yet Dummer needed the patience of Job; for his Assembly seemed more bent on victories over him than over the Indians.

[2: Palfrey, iv. 432, 433.]

There was another election, which did not improve the situation. The new House was worse than the old, being made up largely of narrow-minded rustics, who tried to relieve the governor of all conduct of the war by assigning it to a committee chosen from among themselves; but the Council would not concur with them.

Meanwhile the usual ravages went on. Farmhouses were burned, and the inmates waylaid and killed, while the Indians generally avoided encounters with armed bodies of whites. Near the village of Oxford four of them climbed upon the roof of a house, cut a hole in it with their hatchets, and tried to enter. A woman who was alone in the building, and who had two loaded guns and two pistols, seeing the first savage struggling to shove himself through the hole, ran to him in desperation and shot him; on which the others dragged the body back and disappeared.

[Penhallow. Hutchinson, ii. 279.]

There were several attempts of a more serious kind. The small wooden fort at the river St. George, the most easterly English outpost, was attacked, but the assailants were driven off. A few weeks later it was attacked again by the Penobscots under their missionary, Father Lauverjat. Other means failing, they tried to undermine the stockade; but their sap caved in from the effect of rains, and they retreated, with severe loss. The warlike contagion spread to the Indians of Nova Scotia. In July the Micmacs seized sixteen or seventeen fishing-smacks at Canseau; on which John Eliot, of Boston, and John Robinson, of Cape Ann, chased the marauders in two sloops, retook most of the vessels, and killed a good number of the Indians. In the autumn a war-party, under the noted chief Grey Lock, prowled about the village of Rutland, met the minister, Joseph Willard, and attacked him. He killed one savage and wounded another but was at last shot and scalped.

[Penhallow. Temple and Sheldon, History of Northfield, 195.]

The representatives had long been bent on destroying the mission village of the Penobscots on the river of that name and one cause of their grudge against Colonel Walton was that, by order of the governor, he had deferred a projected attack upon it. His successor, Colonel Westbrook, now took the work in hand, went up the Penobscot in February with two hundred and thirty men in sloops and whale-boats, left these at the head of navigation, and pushed through the forest to the Indian town called Panawamské by the French. It stood apparently above Bangor, at or near Passadumkeag. Here the party found a stockade enclosure fourteen feet high, seventy yards long, and fifty yards wide, containing twenty-three houses, which Westbrook, a better woodsman than grammarian, reports to have been “built regular.” Outside the stockade stood the chapel, “well and handsomely furnished within and without, and on the south side of that the Fryer’s dwelling-house.”[3] This “Fryer” was Father Lauverjat, who had led his flock to the attack of the fort at the St. George. Both Indians and missionary were gone. Westbrook’s men burned the village and chapel and sailed back to the St. George. In the next year, 1724, there was a more noteworthy stroke; for Dummer, more pliant than Shute, had so far soothed his Assembly that it no longer refused money for the war. It was resolved to strike at the root of the evil, seize Rale, and destroy Norridgewock. Two hundred and eight men in four companies, under Captains Harmon, Moulton, and Brown, and Lieutenant Bean, set out from Fort Richmond in seventeen whaleboats on the eighth of August. They left the boats at Taconic Falls in charge of a lieutenant and forty men, and on the morning of the tenth the main body, accompanied by three Mohawk Indians, marched through the forest for Norridgewock. Towards evening they saw two squaws, one of whom they brutally shot, and captured the other, who proved to be the wife of the noted chief Bomazeen. She gave them a full account of the state of the village, which they approached early in the afternoon of the twelfth. In the belief that some of the Indians would be in their cornfields on the river above, Harmon, who was in command, divided the force, and moved up the river with about eighty men, while Moulton, with as many more, made for the village, advancing through the forest with all possible silence. About three o’clock he and his men emerged from a tangle of trees and bushes, and saw the Norridgewock cabins before them, no longer enclosed with a stockade, but open and unprotected. Not an Indian was stirring, till at length a warrior came out from one of the huts, saw the English, gave a startled war-whoop, and ran back for his gun. Then all was dismay and confusion. Squaws and children ran screaming for the river, while the warriors, fifty or sixty in number, came to meet the enemy. Moulton ordered his men to reserve their fire till the Indians had emptied their guns. As he had foreseen, the excited savages fired wildly, and did little or no harm. The English, still keeping their ranks, returned a volley with deadly effect. The Indians gave one more fire, and then ran for the river. Some tried to wade to the farther side, the water being low; others swam across, while many jumped into their canoes, but could not use them, having left the paddles in their houses. Moulton’s men followed close, shooting the fugitives in the water or as they climbed the farther bank.

[3: Westbrook to Dummer, 23 March, 1723, in Collections Mass. Hist. Soc., Second Series, viii. 264.]

From A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 1, Chapter 10 by Francis Parkman

Volume 6 of Parkman’s History of France in North America titled “A Half-Century of Conflict” was itself published in two volumes. This means that “Volume 6” (consistent with how past books published on this website were called) must be called “Part 6”, instead – to avoid confusion. This book is Volume 1 of “A Half-Century of Conflict”. The next book in the series will be called “Part 6, A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume 2”.

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Preface to this book.

This book, forming Part VI. of the series called France and England in North America, fills the gap between Part V., “Count Frontenac,” and Part VII., “Montcalm and Wolfe;” so that the series now forms a continuous history of the efforts of France to occupy and control this continent.

In the present volumes the nature of the subject does not permit an unbroken thread of narrative, and the unity of the book lies in its being throughout, in one form or another, an illustration of the singularly contrasted characters and methods of the rival claimants to North America.

Like the rest of the series, this work is founded on original documents. The statements of secondary writers have been accepted only when found to conform to the evidence of contemporaries, whose writings have been sifted and collated with the greatest care. As extremists on each side have charged me with favoring the other, I hope I have been unfair to neither.

The manuscript material collected for the preparation of the series now complete forms about seventy volumes, most of them folios. These have been given by me from time to time to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in whose library they now are, open to the examination of those interested in the subjects of which they treat. The collection was begun forty-five years ago, and its formation has been exceedingly slow, having been retarded by difficulties which seemed insurmountable, and for years were so in fact. Hence the completion of the series has required twice the time that would have sufficed under less unfavorable conditions.

BOSTON, March 26, 1892

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