of the Narragansets, his father being dead. The outrage and insult had such an effect upon the high-spirited youth, that they threw him into a fever, which speedily proved fatal.[1]
They were these and the like injuries that drove Philip to concert that union of the Indians which, in 1675, alarmed New England. We need not follow the particulars of the war. It was hastened by a premature disclosure; and Philip has been always taxed as a murderer for putting to death John Sausaman, a renegade Indian who betrayed the plot to the English. The man was a confessed and undoubted traitor, and his death was exactly what the English would have inflicted, and was justified, not merely by the summary proceeding in such cases of the Indians, but by the laws of civilized war, if such an odd contradiction of terms may pass. Philip, after a stout resistance, and after performing prodigies of valour, was chased from swamp to swamp, and at length shot by another traitor Indian, who cut off his hand and head, and brought them to the English. His head was exposed on a gibbet at Plymouth for twenty years; his hand, known by a particular scar, was exhibited in savage triumph, and his mangled body refused burial. His only son, a mere boy, was sold into slavery.
It was during this war that the settlers lived in such a state of continual alarm from the Indians, and such adventures and passages of thrilling interest took place, as will for ever furnish topics of conversation in that country. It was then that the congregation was alarmed while in church at Hadley, in Massachusets,
- ↑ Hutchinson's Hist. of Massachusets Bay. Also Douglass, Hubbard, Gorge, and other historians of the time.
