rmity they were ever innocent. Whatever degree of
personal hardship and suffering their female captives were compelled to
endure, their persons were never dishonoured by violence; a fact which
can be predicated, we apprehend, of no other victorious soldiery that
ever lived.

"In regard, moreover, to the countless acts of cruelty alleged to have
been perpetrated by the savages, it must still be borne in mind that the
Indians have had no writer to relate their own side of the story. The
annals of man, probably, do not attest a more kindly reception of
intruding foreigners than was given to the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth
by the faithful Massassoit, and the tribes under his jurisdiction. Nor
did the forest kings take up arms until they but too clearly saw that
either their visitors or themselves must be driven from the soil which
was their own--the fee of which was derived from the Great Spirit. And
the nation is yet to be discovered that will not fight for their homes,
the graves of their fathers, and their family altars. Cruel they were in
the prosecution of their contests; but it would require the aggregate of
a large number of predatory incursions and isolated burnings to balance
the awful scene of conflagration and blood which at once extinguished
the power of Sassacus, and the brave and indomitable Narragansets over
whom he reigned. No! until it is forgotten that by some Christians in
infant Massachusetts it was held to be right to kill Indians, as the
agents and familiars of Azazel; until the early records of even tolerant
Connecticut, which disclose the fact that the Indians were seized by the
Puritans, transported to the British West Indies, and sold as slaves,
are lost; until the Amazon and La Plata shall have washed away the
bloody history of the Spanish American conquest; and until the fact that
Cortez stretched the unhappy Guatimozin naked upon a bed of burning
coals (or General Sullivan's devastation of the Six Indian Nations) is
proved to be a fiction, let not the American Indians be pronounced the
most cruel of men."[101]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 91: Dr. Ramsay's History of the United States, Vol. II., Chap.
xix., p. 325.

"About four weeks after Colonel Zebulon Butler's return, some hundreds
of Indians, a large body of Tories, and about fifty regulars, entered
Cherry Valley, within the State of New York. They made an unsuccessful
attempt on Fort Alden; but they killed and scalped thirty-two of the
inha