Neither of the reverend gentlemen set up schools, and when the Marshpee children were put out to service, it was with the express understanding, as their parents all agree, that they should not be schooled.  Many of those who held them in servitude, used them more like dogs than human beings, feeding them scantily, lodging them hard, and clothing them with rags.  Such I believe has always been the case about Indian reservations.  I had a sister who was slavishly used and half starved; and I have not forgotten, nor can I ever forget, the abuse I received myself.  To keep Indian children from hearing the gospel preached in a land of gospel privileges, in order that they might do work unbefitting the Sabbath at home, has been the practice, almost without an exception, wherever I have had opportunity to observe.  I think that the Indians ought to keep the twenty-fifth of December[5], and the fourth of July, as days of fasting and lamentation, and dress themselves, and their houses, and their cattle, in mourning weeds, and pray to Heaven for deliverance from their oppressions; for surely there is no joy in those days for the man of color.

Let the reader judge from what has been stated, what good the Marshpee Indians have derived from their two missionaries.  I say boldly, none at all.  On the contrary, they have been in the way of the good that would have been done by others.  I say also that all the religious advantages the Indians have enjoyed, have come from other ministers, and members of other churches.  I am equally sure that the money paid for our use, from the Williams Fund, has been a curse, and not a blessing to us.  Had some good Christian minister come to the tribe with half the sum, there is no doubt that God would have made him an instrument to raise up a respectable Christian Society; whereas the fund has only served to build up the missionaries and the whites about the plantation.  I am glad that it has done even this good; though it be to our enemies; for I am not of a spirit to envy the prosperity of others; I rejoice in it.  But I sincerely think it is wrong in the whites to take the gospel from the Indians, as they do in Marshpee, by occupying their meeting-house, and receiving the benefit of the missionary fund.  I mean that the people about Cotuet and Marshpee go to our house, and fill it, to our exclusion, without any charge; while the Indians are enforced by the laws which deprive them of the use of their own lands, to pay a heavy tax, from which they derive no benefit.  Is not depriving them of all means of mental culture the worst of all robberies?  Can it be wondered, that the Indians become more and more degraded?  I presume all honest people will regret that such has been the case.  It will be seen that both the missionaries and their white followers, imbibed all the prejudices of the day, and by disseminating them, hindered others from doing us good.  This is no excuse, however, for the government of this Commonwealth, whose duty it was to see that its red children were not abused in this way.  We greatly fear that our white fathers did not much care about their colored children in Marshpee.  At any rate, it may be some satisfaction to the philanthropists in the country to know how liberal they have been to their poor dependants.