ans; Essex, 1070 Negroes and 8 Indians; Middlesex, 860 Negroes and
45 Indians; Nantucket, 44 Negroes and 227 Indians; Suffolk, 844
Negroes and 37 Indians; Worcester, 267 Negroes and 34 Indians, making
a total of 4900 Negroes and 1697 Indians.[2] After a careful survey of
the Indian situation in 1861, however, it was discovered that only a
part of these Indians had retained their peculiar characteristics and
these had been finally reduced to a few reservations known as the
following: Chappequiddick, Christiantown, Gay Head, Marshpee, Herring
Pond, Natick, Punkapog, Fall River, Hassanamisco, and Dudley. There
were other Indians at Yarmouth, Dartmouth, Tumpum, Deep Bottom,
Middleborough, and a few scattered.[3]

The Indians were generally neglected for the reason that they were
considered beyond the pale of Christianity, despite professions to the
contrary. As a matter of fact, being wards of the State they were
scantily provided for and their fundamental needs were generally
neglected. They were offered few opportunities for mental, moral, or
religious improvement for the reason that the missionary spirit which
characterized Cotton Mather and John Eliot no longer existed. Only a
small sum was raised or appropriated for their rudimentary education
and with the exception of what could be done with the "Williams Fund"
of Harvard College there was little effort made for their
evangelization. Left thus to themselves, the Indians developed into a
state within a state.

When, therefore, the Negroes became conscious of the wrongs they
suffered in slavery, a few early learned to take refuge among the
Indians and even after they were freed in Massachusetts their social
proscription was such among the whites that some free people of color
preferred the hard life among the Indians to the whiffs and scorns of
race prejudice in the seats of Christian civilization. Coming into
contact there with foreigners, who found it convenient to move among
these morally weak people, the Negroes served as important factors in
the melting pot in which the Indians were remade and introduced to
American life as whites and blacks. Referring to the moral condition
of the Fall River Indians, as a case in evidence, an investigator
reported in 1861 that in two families there were twelve cases of
bastardy and in one of them it was said that, of eight children, the
paternity was apparently about equally divided among the Indian,
Negro, and white races.[4]