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Printable Version
Various are the reports and conjectures of the causes of the present Indian war. Some impute it to an imprudent zeal in the magistrates of Boston to Christianize those heathen before they were civilized and enjoying them the strict observation of their laws, which, to a people so rude and licentious, hath proved even intolerable, and that the more, for that while the magistrates, for their profit, put the laws severely in execution against the Indians, the people, on the other side, for lucre and gain, entice and provoke the Indians to the breach thereof, especially to drunkenness, to which those people are so generally addicted that they will strip themselves to their skin to have their fill of rum and brandy....
Some believe there have been vagrant and Jesuitical priests, who have made it their business, for some years past, to go from Sachem to Sachem, to exasperate the Indians against the English and to bring them into a confederacy, and that they were promised supplies from France and other parts to extirpate the English nation out of the continent of America. Others impute the cause to some injuries offered to the Sachem Philip; for he being possessed of a tract of land called Mount Hope...some English had a mind to dispossess him thereof, who never wanting one pretence or another to attain their end, complained of injuries done by Philip and his Indians to their stock and cattle, where upon Philip was often summoned before the magistrate, sometimes imprisoned, and never released but upon parting with a considerable part of his land.
But the government of the Massachusetts...do declare there are the great evils for which God hath given the heathen commission to rise against them....For men wearing long hair and periwigs made of women hair; for women...cutting, curling, and laying out the hair....For profanes in the people not frequenting their meetings....
With many such reasons...the English have contributed much to their misfortunes, for they first taught the Indians the use of arms, and admitted them to be present at all their musters and trainings, and showed them how to handle, mend and fix their muskets, and have been furnished with all sorts of arms by permission of the government....
The loss to the English in the several colonies, in their habitations and stock, is reckoned to amount to 150,000 l. there having been about 1,200 houses burned, 8,000 head of cattle, great and small, killed, and many thousand bushels of wheat, peas and other grain burned...and upward of 3,000 Indians men women and children destroyed....
Source: Albert B. Hart, ed., American History Told by Contemporaries (New York, 1897), Vol. 1, 458-60.
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