Three hundred men, women, and children were killed by
the Indians. With fury the white men attacked in return. They sent bodies
of horse into the untouched western forests. They chased and slew without
mercy. In 1646 Opechancanough, brought a prisoner to Jamestown, ended his
long tale of years by a shot from one of his keepers. The Indians were
beaten, and, lacking such another leader, made no more organized and
general attacks. But for long years a kind of border warfare still went on.
Even Maryland, tolerant and just as was the Calvert policy, did not
altogether escape Indian troubles. She had to contend with no such able
chief as Opechancanough, and she suffered no sweeping massacres. But after
the first idyllic year or so there set in a small, constant friction. So
fast did the Maryland colonists arrive that soon there was pressure of
population beyond those first purchased bounds. The more thoughtful among
the Indians may well have taken alarm lest their villages and
hunting-grounds might not endure these inroads. Ere long the English in
Maryland were placing "centinells" over fields where men worked, and
providing penalties for those who sold the savages firearms. But at no time
did young Maryland suffer the Indian woes that had vexed young Virginia.
Nor did Maryland escape the clash of interests which beset the beginnings
of representative assemblies in all proprietary provinces. The second, like
the first, Lord Baltimore, was a believer in kings and aristocracies, in a
natural division of human society into masters and men.
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