It may be supposed that in such services at this time a Christian feeling of charity and forgiveness was not uppermost.  Among the captives was a son of Philip, the little swarthy lad of nine years for whom Mrs. Rowlandson had made a cap, and the question as to what was to be done with him occasioned as much debate as if he had been a Jesse Pomeroy [34] or a Chicago anarchist.  The opinions of the clergy were, of course, eagerly sought and freely vouchsafed.  One minister somewhat doubtfully urged that “although a precept in Deuteronomy explicitly forbids killing the child for the father’s sin,” yet after all “the children of Saul and Achan perished with their parents, though too young to have shared their guilt.”  Thus curiously did this English reverence for precedent, with a sort of grim conscientiousness colouring its gloomy wrath, search for guidance among the ancient records of the children of Israel.  Commenting upon the truculent suggestion, Increase Mather, soon to be president of Harvard, observed that, “though David had spared the infant Hadad, yet it might have been better for his people if he had been less merciful.”  These bloodthirsty counsels did not prevail, but the course that was adopted did not lack in harshness.  Among the sachems a dozen leading spirits were hanged or shot, and hundreds of captives were shipped off to the West Indies to be sold into slavery; among these was Philip’s little son.  The rough soldier Church and the apostle Eliot were among the few who disapproved of this policy.  Church feared it might goad such Indians as were still at large to acts of desperation.  Eliot, in an earnest letter to the Federal Commissioners, observed:  “To sell souls for money seemeth to me dangerous merchandise.”  But the plan of exporting the captives was adhered to.  As slaves they were understood to be of little or no value, and sometimes for want of purchasers they were set ashore on strange coasts and abandoned.  A few were even carried to one of the foulest of mediaeval slave-marts, Morocco, where their fate was doubtless wretched enough. [Sidenote:  Indians sold into slavery]

In spite of Church’s doubts as to the wisdom of this harsh treatment, it did not prevent the beaten and starving savages from surrendering themselves in considerable numbers.  To some the Federal Commissioners offered amnesty, and the promise was faithfully fulfilled.  Among those who laid down arms in reliance upon it were 140 Christian Indians, with their leader known as James the Printer, because he had been employed at Cambridge in setting up the type for Eliot’s Bible.  Quite early in the war it had been discovered that these converted savages still felt the ties of blood to be stronger than those of creed.  At the attack on Mendon, only three weeks after the horrors at Swanzey that ushered in the war, it was known that Christian Indians had behaved themselves quite as cruelly as their unregenerate brethren.  Afterwards they made such a record that the jokers and punsters