Petition of Thomas H. Lambert, Chairman of the County Commissioners of Dukes County, to the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives

To the Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in General Court Assembled

Respectfully represent the County Commissioners of Dukes County that there are in said County, as appears by the Report of Honorable John Milton Earle, Senate Document N^o 96, of the year 1861,1 upwards of three hundred Indians and People of Color, composing what are known as the Chappaquiddick, Christiantown, Deep Bottom, and Gay Head tribes, all of whom are recognized as the “special and involuntary wards of the State” but are not citizens of either of the towns in Dukes County, neither are they included in the census taken, decennially, by order of Congress.             

They further represent that the costs of criminal prosecution, formerly borne, in part, by the Commonwealth, and now wholly by the County, are greatly increased by the presence therein of this class of people, the books of the jails showing that during the past eleven years, eighty-five percent of the imprisonment for crime, in the jail and house of correction, are of People of Color.             

Your petitioners, therefore, impelled by a sense of duty to their County, earnestly request that provision may be made whereby the Commonwealth shall bear a just proportion of the costs arising from this source.

And, as in duty bound will ever pray,

• 1. The study is known informally as the Earle Report.
• 2. Deleted Text: more that it be referred to Judiciary Committee