"Our Sages are Sageles": A Letter on
Massachusetts Indian Policy
after King Philip's War

Jenny Hale Pulsipher

EDMUND Browne, minister of Sudbury, Massachusetts, rarely troubled the Bay Colony's magistrates before the outbreak of the Indian War in June 1675. That calamity cost the lives of nearly 5,000 Indians and 2,500 English and led to the destruction and abandonment of more than a dozen English towns, most, like Sudbury, on the frontier. 1 The stresses of war on the fringes of English settlement aroused Browne to action. Between September 1675 and July 1677, he sent the governor and council five letters. He requested assistance against Indians "lurking" in the woods near Sudbury, begged release from military service for impressed servants or sons of Sudbury neighbors, and asked that a soldier assigned to his garrison and mistakenly impressed be returned to him. 2 Early in 1677, as the General Court prepared to issue new regulations governing the conduct of Indians remaining in the colony, Browne set to paper his opinion and delivered it to the magistrates sitting at the Middlesex County Quarterly Court. 3	1
Browne's letter reflects the hostility toward Indians that had exploded among the English of Massachusetts Bay Colony during the war. Public outcry against Indians, even allies and Christians, was so pronounced that, as early as August 1675, the Massachusetts Council ordered them to stay within one mile of the center of their villages or risk losing their lives to English patrollers. Prohibitions against selling guns, powder, and ammunition to Indians were quickly extended to all trade, even of basic provisions and food. Within six months of the onset of the war, all Indians not in hostility with the English were shipped to islands in Massachusetts Bay for the English colonists' security—and their own. 4	2
As the tide of war shifted to favor the English in the late spring of 1676, Indians began returning to the colony. The Christian Indians on Deer Island and Long Island were allowed to return to the mainland in May 1676. When the council proclaimed mercy for any Indians who surrendered themselves to English authority in June 1676, hundreds submitted. 5 Some who had "imbrued their hands in English blood" were executed. Others were sold out of the country as slaves. Many children and youths were taken into English homes as apprentices and servants, and still others joined the Christian Indians in several praying towns. Many of the English, their memories of fire and bloodshed still fresh, distrusted the Indians among them and petitioned to have them removed. Others sought to keep their new servants, justifying their need because of the loss of sons, husbands, or brothers. 6 On March 29, 1677, the General Court, to quell the fears of the English, banned Indian servants over twelve years of age from Boston. 7 The Indians still in other Bay Colony towns remained in limbo, with the pall of unrepealed wartime restrictions hanging over them. Protests about the continuing presence of Indian servants in towns and renewed Indian attacks along the Connecticut River and in Maine pressured the government to continue restrictions. . . .