Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/60

28 James II and New England. [1676-85 Indian power was wholly broken, and Philip was hunted down and slain. Henceforth New England never had to dread the power of the savages save as a weapon wielded by the French rulers of Canada. The war, no doubt, brought with it heavy loss in life and in the destruction of farm- buildings, garnered crops and live-stock ; but all these are losses which can be quickly made good in the expansive life of a young community. Simultaneously with this conflict an Indian war was being waged in Maine and New Hampshire, provoked mainly by the wanton and brutal murder of an Indian child and by the misconduct of an Englishman, who, being commissioned to arrest some Indians charged with killing settlers, used his authority to kidnap and sell friendly natives. This war was in every way humiliating to the English. It was marked by at least one act of gross treachery on their part ; finally they had to buy peace by the humiliating expedient of paying a corn-tax to the savages. New England soon found itself beset by dangers of another kind. At the Restoration the administration of the colonies was vested in special commissioners. In 1675 it was transferred to a committee of the Privy Council. During those fifteen years Parliament had passed a succession of Acts making up a definite system of restrictions on colonial trade. The chief features of the system were that only English vessels and English subjects might trade with the colonies; that the colonists were restricted to English ports for most of their exports and all their imports ; and that certain duties were imposed on intercolonial trade. The duty of enforcing these regulations was vested in revenue officers appointed in England by the Commissioners of Customs. The newly created colonial authority at once took measures for the more stringent enforcement of this system, and to that end sent out a special commissioner, as he would now be called, Edward Randolph, to inquire and report. Randolph reported specifically on the systematic violation of the Revenue Acts by the New Englanders, and more generally on their factious and disloyal temper. It was no doubt largely due to him that legal proceedings were taken against the charter of Massachusetts. Agents from Massachusetts protested and entreated in vain. In 1684 the charter was annulled by a decree of the Court of Chancery. It seemed as if the accession of James II had brought ruin to the constitutional rights, not only of Massachusetts, but of the whole body of New England colonies. The King himself had experience as a colonial proprietor, and an honest, though it might be a narrow and unintelligent interest in colonial administration. He saw that it was of the greatest importance to bind the colonies together for admini- strative and defensive purposes, but he attempted the task in a manner which showed that he had not the faintest sense of the difficulties with which it was beset. The whole territory from the Delaware to the St Croix was consolidated into a single province and placed under the governorship of Colonel Sir Edmund Andros, a man of good private