thing to Mr. Fish beyond the period of their own existence?
By the law establishing the Overseers, they had no
power beyond leasing land for two years. How
then, could the Overseers grant for life to Mr. Fish
the improvement of the parsonage and Meeting-house?
They might have given it to him from year to year,
while they were in office, but on the abolition of
the Overseers, in 1834, and a restoration of civil
rights to the owners of the fee of the parsonage, the
Marshpee Proprietors, how could Mr. Fish continue
to hold the parsonage against their will? Was
it by virtue of his settlement, so that he now claims
the land as a sole corporation? But a minister
cannot be settled or constituted a sole corporation,
without a parish to settle him. “A minister
of a parish seized of lands in its right as
parsonage lands, is a sole corporation, and
on a vacancy, the parish is entitled to the profits;”
2d Dane’s Abrg. 342. 7 Mass. Rep. 445.
Mr. Fish is not seized of a parsonage in right of
any parish or religious society, and therefore he
cannot be a sole corporation. In point of fact,
there was no legal parish in Marshpee, when Mr. Fish
went there and took possession, under the Overseers,
and not in right of the parish. A parish or precinct
as the law then was, must be a corporation entitled
and required to support public worship, and having
all the powers and privileges necessary for that purpose.
(See 8th Mass. Rep. 91.) And where there has
been no parish as such created in a town, the town
itself will be considered a parish. (15 Mass.
Rep. 296.) Marshpee was not a town. The Marshpee
Indians were minors in law, and there was no legal
parish to settle a minister, or to hold a parsonage,
and no one to make contracts as such. Harvard
College had no power to settle a minister in Marshpee,
nor had the Overseers any such power. Their supervision
was temporal and not ecclesiastical. Besides,
the actual Congregational society which subsisted in
Marshpee, when Mr. Fish was sent there, in 1811, was
composed of a majority of whites. Mr.
Fish himself testified before the Committee, that
the church at Marshpee, in 1811, consisted of sixteen
whites and but five colored persons. The church
members were a majority of whites, so that even had
the church voted to settle Mr. Fish, it would have
been a vote of white men having no interest in the
premises, and not of Indian Proprietors. Mr.
Fish admits that the church passed no vote. It
was asserted by one of the old Overseers, Mr. Hawley,
that five Indians called on him, after Mr. Fish had
preached there, and personally expressed a wish to
have him stay with them, but there was no official
act, and no vote of the church or society, and no assent
of the Proprietors of Marshpee in any form.