to answer the charges against them.
On receiving from Gorton a defiant reply, couched in terms which some
thought blasphemous, the government of Massachusetts prepared to use
force. [Sidenote: Providence protests against him] [Sidenote: He flees
to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians]

Meanwhile the unfortunate Miantonomo had rushed upon his doom. The
annihilation of the Pequots had left the Mohegans and Narragansetts
contending for the foremost place among the native tribes. Between the
rival sachems, Uncas and Miantonomo, the hatred was deep and deadly.
As soon as the Mohegan perceived that trouble was brewing between
Miantonomo and the government at Boston, he improved the occasion by
gathering a few Narragansett scalps. Miantonomo now took the war-path
and was totally defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the
present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his
friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By
ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish
torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company
assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas,
threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message
puzzled the Mohegan chief. The appearance of a schism in the English
counsels was more than he could quite fathom. When the affair had
somewhat more fully developed itself, some of the Indians spoke of
the white men as divided into two rival tribes, the Gortonoges and
Wattaconoges. [16] Roger Williams tells us that the latter term, applied
to the men of Boston, meant coat-wearers. Whether it is to be inferred
that the Gortonoges went about in what in modern parlance would be
called their "shirt-sleeves," the reader must decide. [Sidenote:
Miantonomo and Uncas]

In his perplexity Uncas took his prisoner to Hartford, and afterward,
upon the advice of the governor and council, sent him to Boston, that
his fate might be determined by the Federal Commissioners who were
there holding their first regular meeting. It was now the turn of the
commissioners to be perplexed. According to English law there was no
good reason for putting Miantonomo to death. The question was whether
they should interfere with the Indian custom by which his life was
already forfeit to his captor. The magistrates already suspected the
Narragansetts of cherishing hostile designs. To set their sachem at
li