ger Williams that the land belonged to the indians. Although Grossman says that the Puritan legal system was "strict," but not "harsh" as it was initially applied to the indians, often when land was purchased from indians, who had little concept of private property, the indians would fall prey to sharp practice (109). One such trick was "fining [an] Indian for minor abuses . . . and then 'rescuing' him from the debt he was unable to pay by discharging the fine in return for a tract of his land" (Nash 80).
The indians could easily have driven out the settlers in the early to mid 17th century, had they been united, but they "were divided into warring tribes of varying cultural levels who spoke a bewildering variety of languages and did not appear to be permanently domiciled in any one spot" (Ver Steeg 35; Peckham 16). Although the four New England colonies, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth, Rhode Island and Connecticut, were disunited by boundary and other disputes, all but Rhode Island united for common defense in the loose New
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