setts to make peace with Uncas they made
preparations for war. A force of three hundred men was raised, one
hundred and ninety from Massachusetts, forty each from Plymouth and
Connecticut, and thirty from New Haven.

Upon the question of appointment of a commander-in-chief colonial
independence came in conflict with federal supremacy. In 1637
Massachusetts was the champion of the principle that all questions
should be decided by a simple majority vote of the commissioners; but
now the Massachusetts general court asserted that no appointment of a
commander should be valid without their confirmation. The federal
commissioners stood stoutly for their rights, and the issue was evaded
for a time by the appointment of Major Gibbons, who was a citizen of
Massachusetts.

The report of these warlike preparations brought the Narragansetts to
terms; but uneasiness still continued, and the subsequent years,
though free from bloodshed, were full of rumors and reports of
hostilities, compelling frequently the interference of the
commissioners in behalf of their friend Uncas. In all these
troubles[6] the question is not so much the propriety of the
particular measures of the federal commissioners as their conduct in
making the confederation a party to the disputes of the Indians among
themselves. The time finally came when Uncas, "the friend of the white
man," was regarded by his former admirers as a hopeless marplot and
intriguer.

More commendable were the services of the federal commissioners with
the Indians in another particular. One of the professed designs of the
charter of Massachusetts was to Christianize the heathen savages, but
more than twelve years elapsed after the coming of Winthrop and his
colonists before New England was the scene of anything like missionary
work. Then the first mission was established in 1643 by Thomas Mayhew
at the island of Martha's Vineyard, which was not included in any of
the New England governments and was under the jurisdiction of Sir
William Alexander. In 1651 Mayhew reported that one hundred and
ninety-nine men, women, and children of Martha's Vineyard and
Nantucket were "worshippers of the great and ever living God."

His example was followed by John Eliot, the minister of Roxbury, in
Massachusetts, who learned to speak the Indian tongue, and in 1646
preached to the Indians near Watertown. The Massachusetts general
court a week later endorsed the purposes of Eliot by enacting that the