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While Eulogy on King Philip's surfaces treats history, its undercurrents address race. The race problems of Apess's text are political, and to wage in the politics in his day means to struggle with racialist ideologies. The years when Apess published his writing, Eulogy on King Philip, are precisely key years for American expansion. American expansion requires Indian's forced resettlement to lands west of the Mississippi, and it was bolstered by emergent doctrines of racial destiny--virulent discourse that the historical fate of American Indian has been shaped by “Vanishing American” ideology. That is the complex, pervasive 19th entury popular and scientific belief that indigenous Americans were “dying race.” Apess's Eulogy on King Philip implicitly concerns this formalized discourse and attacks it. Strategically choosing the late colonial era as his focus and repeatedly comparing with his own, Apess obliterates the illusion that time has brought progress for Indians. He indicates that Indian-White relations had changed little over time and that it would be naive to assume the direct correlation between Enlightenment rhetoric and enlightened practice. American Indians remained chained under desperate laws and have been left to drag out a miserable life as slaves for nearly two hundred years. Apess equates the treatment of Indians with the degradations of institutionalized slavery. Throughout, The Eulogy on King Philip insists that there is more than a metaphoric link between these two forms of oppression. Apess marks the kinds of connection between enslavement of African-American and dispossession of American Indian. His attack for racist policies toward American Indian is to attack slavery. His text points out analogous, religious, juridical, and economic practices that underlay the dispossession and genocide of American Indians and the enslavement of African- Americans. Subordination of both groups was buttressed by complex moral arguments, by legal sleigh of hand, by scientific discourse. Apess must have perceived in the Abolition movement a powerful ally for Indian reform. He was well aware that the discourses of Indian disappearance and extinction are ideologically invented cultural products.