ct the question.
They were savages, and fought white men as they and their fathers had
always fought each other. How then should a community of Christian men
have dealt with them? Were they to contend as savages or civilized men?
As civilized men, or rather as men who had forsaken a land of
civilization for purer abodes of piety and peace? The Pequod war shows
how little their piety could be trusted when their passions were
aroused."

"After a week's marching, they came at day-break on the Indian wigwams
and immediately assaulted them. The 'massacre' (so their own chronicler,
Mr. Bancroft, has termed it) spread from one hut to another; for the
Indians were asleep and unarmed. But the work of slaughter was too slow.
'We must burn them,' exclaimed the fanatic chieftain of the Puritans;
and he cast the first firebrand to windward among their wigwams. In an
instant the encampment was in a blaze. Not a soul escaped. Six hundred
Indians, men, women, and children, perished by the steady hand of the
marksman, by the unresisted broadsword, and by the hideous
conflagration.

"The work of revenge was not yet accomplished. In a few days a fresh
body of troops arrived from Massachusetts, accompanied by their
minister, Wilson. The remnants of the proscribed race were now hunted
down in their hiding places; every wigwam was burned; every settlement
broken up; every cornfield laid waste. There remained, says their
exulting historian, not a man or a woman, not a warrior or child of the
Pequod name. A nation had disappeared from the family of men." "History
records many deeds of blood equal in ferocity to this; but we shall seek
in vain for a parallel to the massacre of the Pequod Indians. It brought
out the worst points in the Puritan character, and displayed it in the
strongest light. When their passions were once inflamed, their religion
itself was cruelty. A dark, fanatical spirit of revenge took possession,
not, as in other men, by first expelling every religious and every human
consideration, but, what was infinitely more terrible, by calling to its
aid every stimulant, every motive that religion, jaundiced and
perverted, could supply. It is terrible to read, when cities are
stormed, of children thrown into the flames, and shrieking women
butchered by infuriated men who have burst the restraints of discipline.
It is a dreadful licence; and true and gallant soldiers, occur when it
may, feel that their profession is disgraced. But