In all twenty-six men.  The whole regiment, drawn from the whole County of Barnstable, mustered but 149 men, nearly one-fifth of whom were volunteers from the little Indian Plantation of Marshpee, which then did not contain over one hundred male heads of families!  No white town in the County furnished any thing like this proportion of the 149 volunteers.  The Indian soldiers fought through the war; and as far as we have been able to ascertain the fact, from documents or tradition, all but one, fell martyrs to liberty, in the struggle for Independence.  There is but one Indian now living, who receives the reward of his services as a revolutionary soldier, old Isaac Wickham, and he was not in Bradford’s regiment.  Parson Holly, in a memorial to the Legislature in 1783, states that most of the women in Marshpee, had lost their husbands in the war.  At that time there were seventy widows on the Plantation.

But from that day, until the year 1834, the Marshpee Indians were enslaved by the laws of Massachusetts, and deprived of every civil right which belongs to man.  White Overseers had power to tear their children from them and bind them out where they pleased.  They could also sell the services of any adult Indian on the Plantation they chose to call idle, for three years at a time, and send him where they pleased, renewing the lease every three years, and thus, make him a slave for life.

It was with the greatest effort this monstrous injustice was in some degree remedied last winter, by getting the facts before the Legislature, in spite of a most determined opposition from those who had fattened for years on the spoils of poor Marshpee.  In all but one thing, a reasonable law was made for the Indians.  That one thing was giving the Governor power to appoint a Commissioner over the Indians for three years.  This was protested against by the friends of the Indians, but in vain; and they were assured that this appointment would be safe in the hands of the Governor.  They hoped so, and assented; but no sooner was the law passed, than the enemies of the Indians induced the Governor to appoint as the Commissioner, the person whom of all others they least wished to have, a former Overseer, against whom there were strong prejudices.  The Indians remonstrated, and besought, but in vain.  The Commissioner was appointed, and to all appeals to make a different appointment, a deaf ear has been turned.  It seems as if a deliberate design had been formed somewhere, to defeat all the Legislature has done for the benefit of this oppressed people.

The consequences have been precisely what the Indians and their friends feared.  Party divisions have grown up among them, arising out of the want of confidence in their Commissioner.  He is found always on the side of their greatest trouble; the minister who unjustly holds almost 500 acres of the best land in the plantation, wrongfully given