SOURCE: "William Apes, Pequot: An Indian Reformer in the Jackson Era, " in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 50, December, 1977, pp. 605-625.

In the following excerpt from an essay on Apess 's life and the history of the Pequot in New England, McQuaid comments on Eulogy on King Philip.

The Mashpees' successful struggle for added measures of self-government stood as one of the very few substantial victories for Indian Rights in the 1830's. Indian groups hung on to tribal territories in New England and New York, but, in the remainder of the nation, removal followed removal. The growing debate over the abolition of slavery relegated the plight of the American Indian to a secondary place in reform thinking. A hazy sentimentality had begun to characterize novels and histories of the Indian being produced in the northeast. But writers like James Fenimore Cooper were glorifying the image of a "vanished race...