BY 1698 THE MOST FAMOUS WOMAN in New England was Hannah Duston of Haverhill. Cotton Mather had published her story twice, first in a sermon printed in 1697 and again the next year in his history of “the Long War, which New-England hath had with the Indian Salvages.”1 John Pike, sometime minister to the straggling village of Cocheco (Dover), New Hampshire, may have learned the story first from Mather’s accounts, but news of Hannah’s exploit probably spread even more rapidly by word of mouth along the military corridors leading into the war-torn eastern parts. To the list of “Observable Providences” collected in his journal for the year 1697 he added:
March 15.—The Indians fell upon some part of Haverhill, about 7 in the morning, killed and carried away 39 or 40 persons. Two of these captive women, viz. Duston and Neff, (with another young man,) slew ten of the Indians, and returned home with their scalps.2
Hannah Duston’s deed was spectacular. Five days out of childbed, she had marched a hundred miles into the wilderness and with the help of her companion, Mary Neff, and a boy named Samuel Lennardson had not only killed her captors and escaped but had brought home ten scalps to prove it. Little matter that six of those scalps were of children. Boston acclaimed her a heroine.
When Hannah visited the city in April of 1697, the month after her captivity, Samuel Sewall entertained her; Cotton Mather interviewed her and honored her with a sermon at his church; and the Great and General Court, responding to a petition from her husband, Thomas, awarded her a scalp bounty of £25.3 Her name and her significance were to extend beyond her own time and place. Canonized in 1702 in Mather’s monumental Magnalia Christi Americana, she became an American amazon, a defender of Israel, and an archetypal heroine of the New World frontier.
In Cotton Mather’s words, Hannah Duston’s heroism imitated “the action of Jael upon Siseria.”4 The Biblical image was apt. In Jael, Mather found a model which both justified and elevated Hannah Duston’s deed. As recounted in Judges, chapter 4, the tale is a simple one. Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, welcomed the enemy Sisera into her tent, fed him, lulled him to sleep, and then murdered him by driving a tent peg through his head. Retold in the Song of Deborah in Judges, chapter 5, it became a narrative and poetic masterpiece, carefully exploiting the contrasting images of the woman as nurturer and killer.
Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be; blessed shall she be above women in the tent.
As Sisera entered the tent, Jael went beyond the ordinary demands of hospitality, bringing milk and butter when he asked only for water, but once he slept, she acted coolly and with resolution. Putting her hand to the nail, “she smote Sisera, she smote off his head.” The poet relished Jael’s triumph in the rhythmic telling of Sisera’s death: “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.”
Although Cotton Mather lacked the finesse of his Hebrew predecessor, he did grasp the importance for his own story of the contrasting imagery. Hannah Duston had given birth less than a week before her capture and was still attended by her nurse, Mary Neff. Mather highlighted this situation in his account. He described her “sitting down in the chimney with a heart full of most fearful expectation” as the attackers rifled her house and killed her baby. In his description of the captivity itself he again emphasized her femininity, speaking of her “sighs” as well as of her courage. “Like another Hannah,” he wrote, she had no recourse but prayer. In this way he prepared for the ironic conclusion, Hannah’s slaughter of the Indians. In the final scene he simply paraphrased the Bible: Duston’s Indians “bow’d” and “fell” and “lay down” like Sisera before them.5
Mather recognized the chief literary lesson in his model, yet the affinities between the two stories go beyond narrative technique. In both, the heroism of the woman was magnified as a means of rallying and chastising a nation. Jael was instrumental in saving Israel at a time of spiritual and military disintegration. Deborah the prophetess had asked a general named Barak to take ten thousand men and attack the army, but Barak had refused to go unless Deborah promised to go with him. “I will surely go with thee,” she answered, “notwithstanding the journey that thou takest shall not be for thine honour; for the Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman” (Judges 4:4–9). Jael’s heroism was a rebuke to Barak, who had been reluctant to defend his nation. Although Deborah and Jael equal any Biblical male in courage and in fierceness, the purpose of the narrative was not to extol the military potential of women. On the contrary, the effectiveness of the narrative rests on an awareness of role contradiction. Because Jael was womanly in the traditional sense—and remained so—her ability to kill Sisera testified all the more powerfully to God’s part in her triumph. Her faithfulness was a mirror held up to a flagging Israel.
The Hannah Duston of Mather’s story fits this pattern well. In her victory God demonstrated His desire to sustain the American Israel even though many of Israel’s children had abandoned Him. Duston became a killer because the moral order around her had broken down. Moving into a vacuum created by war, she did individually what New England had been unable to do collectively. In the sermon which included the first printed version of Hannah Duston’s story, Mather made this explicit: “If we did now Humble ourselves throughout the Land,” he wrote, “who can say whether the Revenges on the Enemy, thus Exemplified, would not proceed much rather into the Quick Extirpation, of those Bloody and Crafty men.”6
The seventeenth century was the age of the jeremiad, of fearful pronouncements of an impending judgment, a cataclysm made to seem all the more possible by the prolonged struggles of the Indian wars. It was also an age of biography. Through portraits of meek, pious, and prayerful Christians—mostly ministers but also, to an increasing extent, women—New England’s clergymen promoted a vision of a godly New England, a reformed Israel which lived up to the presumed vision of its founders.7 The real Hannah Duston, the flesh-and-blood woman unretouched for Mather’s portrait, fitted awkwardly into this frame, as we shall see. But the drama of her story, as shaped by the Biblical precedent of Jael, fulfilled the dual requirements of “entertainment” and of “holy history” which Cotton Mather set for his Magnalia. In its pages, and in histories of New England written in the centuries since, Hannah Duston plays a colorful but minor part.
Looked at from the viewpoint of women’s history, however, the story has a larger significance. Without challenging the presumed weakness of women or denying the primacy of the nurturing roles, Mather’s account glorified both feminine strength and feminine assertiveness. On one level, of course, Jael was simply acting as a deputy husband. The ability to assume male roles temporarily and then shrink back into submissiveness has been a traditional female quality—especially in wartime. But the myth of Jael goes deeper than that. If woman is capable of assuming male responsibilities in the service of male authority, what is to prevent her from challenging that authority altogether? What contains the immense destructive power beneath the benign feminine mask? Such questions are inherent in the story itself. Even the method of destruction—the nail driven into Sisera’s head—is a rude caricature of the male sexual act.
On the surface at least, this was not a problem which troubled Cotton Mather—in itself an important historical clue, for such questions did concern writers and popular moralists of the nineteenth century, many of whom went to great lengths to deny the aggressive potential of women. One of the ways they did this was to divide women into pure and untouchable blondes and mysterious and dangerous brunettes, good women and bad women. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was more critical of this convention than has sometimes been recognized, nevertheless used it in a number of stories. His characterization of Miriam, the dark lady in The Marble Faun, is worth examining in some detail for its allusions to the myth of Jael.
Like many of Hawthorne’s heroines, Miriam was a woman with a secret. A sinister male figure shadowed her through the streets of Rome, keeping alive haunting images of a troubled past. Miriam longed to rid herself of her oppressor, but because she was a respectable woman (and a character in a Hawthorne novel), she repressed her hatred, venting it only through art in a series of sketches kept in a secret portfolio. One day an innocent young Italian named Donatello came upon her drawings. The first was a sketch “in which the artist had jotted down her rough ideas for a picture of Jael driving the nail through the temples of Sisera.” Donatello found it impressive, but he discerned a contradiction in Miriam’s conception of her subject. At first she had painted Jael as a figure of “perfect womanhood, a lovely form, and a high, heroic face of lofty beauty,”
but dissatisfied either with her own work or the terrible story itself, Miriam had added a certain wayward quirk of her pencil, which at once converted the heroine into a vulgar murderess. It was evident that a Jael like this would be sure to search Sisera’s pockets as soon as the breath was out of his body.8
The reference to money in this passage is telling when contrasted with the story of Hannah Duston, for her motivation for scalping her victims was openly pecuniary. Without scalps, she would have had no proof of her exploit and, as a consequence, no bounty from the General Court.
Such details did not tarnish her heroism in Cotton Mather’s eyes. In fact, he was responsible for recording them. But for the nineteenth-century writer, such opportunism was impossible in a true heroine. In Hawthorne’s view, Miriam’s drawings, “grotesque or sternly sad,” brought out the moral “that woman must strike through her own heart to reach a human life, whatever were the motive that impelled her.”9 For Hawthorne, female aggression was simply contrary to nature. He could not sustain the juxtaposition of qualities inherent in the Biblical and in the colonial myth of Jael.
This is more than a literary curiosity. Hawthorne’s novel highlights a shift in sensibility of great consequence. Such a shift can be seen even more clearly in nineteenth-century accounts of Hannah Duston. Her story, largely forgotten outside her own community by 1800, was revived by Timothy Dwight in his travel sketches published in 1821. For narrative detail, Dwight followed Mather’s account closely, but he introduced an apologetic note foreign to his predecessor. “Whether all their sufferings, and all the danger of suffering anew, justified this slaughter may probably be questioned by you or some other exact moralist,” Dwight wrote.10
Successive writers followed Dwight’s lead. In “A Mother’s Revenge” in his Legends of New England, John Greenleaf Whittier, a Haverhill son, allowed for the temporary insanity of Hannah. Henry Thoreau simply shifted the emphasis in his narrative from the murder to the homeward flight along the Merrimack River. Hawthorne was more blunt. In an account written in 1836 for the American Magazine, he confessed that he admired Thomas Duston, but didn’t know whom to dislike more—Cotton Mather or Hannah Duston. “Would that the bloody old hag had been drowned in crossing Contocook river,” he wrote, “or that she had sunk over head and ears in a swamp, and been there buried, until summoned forth to confront her victims at the Day of Judgment.”11 Hawthorne obviously had some sympathy for the Indians, yet his aversion to Hannah went deeper. Only a “hag” could have behaved in such an unfeminine manner.
By the mid-nineteenth century Cotton Mather’s story had lost its epic dimensions and had become the property of idealized local history and domestic romance, realms in which female submissiveness was assumed. Little wonder that an aggressive and opportunistic woman like Hannah Duston caused discomfort! In the light of this change her story becomes even more interesting for the student of colonial women, raising intriguing questions about the nature of female heroism in early America. Were there other assertive females in the wartime literature of northern New England? Was Hannah Duston’s response to captivity unique? Was her capacity for violence in any way symptomatic of larger patterns of female behavior? This chapter will focus on the first of those questions, exploring the theme of female heroism in the ministerial literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
BY THE TIME Hannah Duston faced the “tawny savages” in her house in Haverhill, war and captivity had become commonplace themes in New England literature. The earliest heroines emerged in the aftermath of Metacom’s Rebellion (or King Philip’s War) of 1675–76, the first of a devastating series of racial conflicts in New England and one of the most destructive wars in proportion to population in American history. The war began in Plymouth Colony, but soon spread into the Connecticut Valley and eventually sparked a related rebellion in Maine. Before the war’s end, fifty-two of the ninety towns in the region had been attacked and twelve destroyed.12 The power of the Indian rebellion was a surprising and demoralizing blow. At the end of the war, surviving red leaders were either executed or exported as slaves, ending any hope of peaceful coexistence of the two races and creating a legacy of fear and hate which would erupt periodically on the northern frontier in the next century.13 Ministerial narratives published at the end of the war attempted to derive historical and spiritual lessons from an experience which had left few New Englanders untouched.
For our purposes, the three most important literary documents of Metacom’s Rebellion are Increase Mather’s A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England (1676), William Hubbard’s A Narrative of the Trouble with the Indians in New England (1677), and Mary Rowlandson’s story of her own captivity, published in 1682 as The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed. The most important motif in all three is not female heroism but female suffering. This is most pronounced in Mather’s history, which invariably depicts women as victims. Describing an attack on a group of churchgoers near Springfield, Mather highlighted not only Indian cruelty but English cowardice. Eighteen well-armed men had fled while two women and their children were captured. “O Lord What Shall I say When Israel turns their backs before their Enemies?” he cried. It was not enough to add that the Indians had killed the babies. Mather heightened the pathos by describing them knocking the infants on the head “as they were sucking their mother’s breasts.”14
The “sucking infant” theme was a popular one with New England writers who wanted to enlarge upon Indian cruelty. The most gruesome example is in Hubbard’s description of an attack on Cape Neddick in Maine. “Having dashed out the brains of a poor woman that gave suck,” he wrote, “they nayled the young Child to the dead body of its mother, which was found sucking in that rueful manner, when the People came to the Place.”15 In her story of Goodwife Joslin, Mary Rowlandson used another version of the “outraged maternity” theme. In this case a woman “big with child” was stripped, placed in the center of a band of singing, taunting Indians, then burned.16 Assaults upon nursing or pregnant women became the chief evidence of Indian cruelty in the narratives, since there were no instances of rape, a fact which clearly astounded white New Englanders.17
Though the heroism of white soldiers appears in a few memorable passages in Increase Mather’s history, there is no room in his narrative for heroines.18 For him, the helpless suffering of women served as a measure of New England’s spiritual and physical desolation. Hubbard’s history of the Massachusetts war doesn’t differ from Mather’s in this respect, but in his related but separate narrative of Indian conflict in Maine, New England’s first frontier heroines emerged. Rowlandson also made use of the passive-victim motif, but she too transcended it, creating a different version of female heroism from the trials of her own captivity. The essential difference between Rowlandson’s and Hubbard’s heroines—the godly captive and the self-reliant virago—can be seen in contrasting incidents involving an escape by water.
Toward the end of February 1676 Mary Rowlandson was with a group of Nipmuck, Narragansett, and Wampanoag Indians near what is now Barre, Vermont, when they received word that an English force was approaching. The “stoutest” men, Mrs. Rowlandson recalled, went off to hold the English army, while the women and children, the old, the sick, and the lame, “like Jehu … marched on furiously.” When they reached the Ware River, the women felled dry trees and made rafts to carry them over. Mrs. Rowlandson was terrified, “being unacquainted with such kind of doings or dangers.” She accounted it a special favor from God that, sitting on a pile of brush in the middle of the makeshift raft, she crossed without getting wet. Her initiation into wilderness Ways was made even more dramatic when a few hours later the same river stopped the pursuing English army. For Rowlandson, the river-crossing was an experience in humiliation, a discovery of her own weakness and vulnerability before God.19 Her heroism lay in her ability to survive by trusting God.
Hubbard’s story of Ann Brackett, though far less detailed, is strikingly different. Mistress Brackett, with her husband, at least one child, and a black servant, had been captured by local Indians led by a man named Simon. When Simon heard of a successful attack on the Arowsick trading house on the Kennebec, he left his captives in a lonely camp on the north side of Casco Bay and went to join in the plunder. Ann Brackett immediately set to work on an “old Burchin Canoe” which she hoped was “an opportunity Providence offered for their escape.” Using a needle and thread found in the camp, she repaired the Indian craft and with her family “crossed water eight or nine miles broad” to Black Point, where they were rescued by a ship bound for Piscataqua.20
As recounted in Hubbard’s history, this story has a fairy-tale quality. One would like to know more about the condition of the canoe and the nature of the repair, but for Hubbard the details were less important than the outcome. He clearly credited Ann Brackett, rather than her husband or the male servant who accompanied them, with the inspiration, the resourcefulness, and the skill which made the escape possible. Unlike Mary Rowlandson, she was acquainted with wilderness “doings & dangers.” Her heroism lay in self-reliance rather than faith.
In another passage in the same section of the history, Hubbard praised a second resourceful heroine, an eighteen-year-old “Virago” whose unusual courage saved fifteen women and children from an assault by “two cruel and barbarous caytiffes.” This unnamed maiden of Newechewanick, “being endued with more courage than ordinarily the rest of her Sex use to be, (the blessing of Jael light upon her) first shut to the dore, whereby they were denyed Entrance, till the rest within escaped to the next house, that was better fortified.” Though wounded and left for dead, she managed to reach the next garrison, “where she was soon after healed of her wounds, and restored to perfect health again.”21
Seventeenth-century historians (like some of their twentieth-century successors) drew sharp contrasts between the compact settlements of Massachusetts with their settled churches and presumably Puritan outlook and the straggling plantations of Maine and New Hampshire where colonists came to fish, not pray. It is a short step from these notions to the idea of colonial history as a conflict between inherited religious and communal values and the acquired individualism of a land-rich frontier. Mary Rowlandson and Ann Brackett might represent the female version of this dichotomy. Rowlandson, the God-fearing Puritan, was a transplanted Englishwoman thrust into an alien American world. Lacking experience with the ways of the forest, Rowlandson dismissed it as the domain of Satan’s hosts. Brackett, a daughter of the Maine frontier, had inherited wilderness craft as well as wilderness courage. At home in the New World, she relied on herself.
Biographical details for the two women give some support to these stereotypes. Mary Rowlandson was born in Somersetshire about 1635 and migrated to Salem, Massachusetts, as a young child. Though she moved with her family to the new town of Lancaster in her late teens and had lived there more than twenty years when taken captive, her narrative gives constant evidence of resistance to what might be described as “frontier” ways. The passage in which she described her first taste of bear meat in captivity is exemplary: “I have sometimes seen Bear baked very handsomely among the English, and some like it,” she wrote, “but the thought that it was Bear, made me tremble: but now that was savoury to me that one would think was enough to turn the stomach of a bruit Creature.”22 For Mary Rowlandson, wild meat was symbolic of a wilderness she feared.
Ann Brackett left no record of her own thoughts or attitudes, yet what can be pieced together of her background contrasts with Rowlandson’s. She was the granddaughter of George Cleeves, an independent fisherman and trader who was the first settler on Casco Bay. She grew up in the most remote and sparsely settled spot in New England, the daughter of Cleeves’ only child, Elizabeth, and Michael Mitton, who was associated with his father-in-law in fishing and trading.23 In contrast to Rowlandson, who described keeping “six stout dogs” in the garrison ready to tear apart any Indian who ventured to the door, the Cleeveses and Mittons depended upon daily intercourse with the natives who surrounded and outnumbered them.24
We know nothing of Brackett’s own religious attitudes, though in reporting her family’s captivity her brother-in-law wrote, “The Lord of late hath renewed his witnesses against us & hath dealt very bitterly with us.”25 One need not imagine the inhabitants of the Maine frontier as a breed apart to recognize that the practical experience of the daughter of an Indian trader might differ in significant ways from that of a minister’s wife.
The differences between Rowlandson and Brackett are useful in describing the probable range of female response to the wilderness, but they should not be pushed too far. There was no rigid contrast between women in agricultural villages like Lancaster and in outlying plantations like Casco Bay. As Rowlandson’s own narrative showed, some of her neighbors enjoyed eating bear, and even within the Brackett family captivity could be interpreted in religious terms. The caution goes deeper than that, however. Although Mary Rowlandson appeared briefly in both Mather’s and Hubbard’s narratives simply as an object of Indian cruelty, she was neither passive nor helpless. Though she showed no inclination to repair birchbark canoes or engage in hand-to-hand combat with invading Indians, she had her own kind of courage, exemplifying not just heroic faith but a practical ability to survive by placing her huswifery skills at the service of her captors. We will return to Rowlandson’s story in Chapter 12. At this point it is enough to note her importance as the first of the literary captives.
Mary Rowlandson’s narrative and William Hubbard’s history introduced two variants of the frontier heroine: the godly captive and the self-reliant virago. In the next fifty years other writers would develop these two and add a third, the pious Christian who served by simply staying put.
AFTER KING PHILIP’S WAR, New England experienced a decade of peace, but in 1689, with the outbreak of King William’s War, local tensions between whites and natives in Maine and New Hampshire were absorbed in what historians have since called “the great struggle for Empire,” the conflict between Britain and France for dominance in North America. King William’s War (1689–1698) and Queen Anne’s War (1703–1713) were largely fought in America by Indians, first Iroquois provoked by the English to attacks on the Canadian frontier, but later and more effectively by various groups of Canadian and Maine Indians, often led by French coureurs de bois in devastating raids on exposed outposts in New York and New England.26
For twenty years a succession of unpredictable and debilitating attacks on the northern frontier wreaked psychological and physical desolation. The events of these wars provided new material for the Boston press. Ministerial literature of the period was already characterized by a conscious effort to elevate the public image, if not the status, of women.27 Because Cotton Mather, the chief exponent of the new emphasis, was also the most prominent historian of the Indian wars, living heroines of the northern frontier took their place in these years beside pious Boston matrons eulogized in countless funeral sermons.
The fighting Jaels prefigured in Hubbard’s history are the most colorful, if not the most significant, of the heroines. Like “Molly Pitcher,” the legendary water-carrier of the Revolutionary War, who fired a cannon in the pressure of a battle, some women learned to shoot in these first French and Indian wars. In describing an assault on Wells in King William’s War, Cotton Mather praised the women of the garrison who “took up the Amazonian Stroke, and not only brought Ammunition to the Men, but also with a Manly Resolution fired several Times upon the Enemy.”28
For every such account which appeared in public records of the period there must have been others which survived only in local tradition or family legend. By the end of the eighteenth century, stories of Oyster River heroines had acquired the vivid detail recorded by Jeremy Belknap, whose information, so he said, was collected from “aged persons” by a descendant of one of the suffering families. According to Belknap, no men were inside a garrison near the house of John Drew when a small party attacked in April of 1706. The women, “seeing nothing but death before them, fired an alarm, and then putting on hats, and loosening their hair that they might appear like men, they fired so briskly that the enemy, apprehending the people were alarmed, fled without burning or even plundering the house which they had attacked.”29 Belknap told of a similar event which occurred at the Heard garrison in Dover in 1712. Again the house was left defenseless when a “woman named Esther Jones mounted guard and with a commanding voice called so loudly and resolutely as made the enemy think there was help at hand, and prevented farther mischief.”30
These stories fit well with the notion of women as deputy husbands able to step into a void created by male absence and fulfill male responsibilities without in any sense altering the prescribed female roles. The emphasis on male disguise in Belknap’s stories is significant. As Mather made clear, firing upon the enemy at Wells required a “manly resolution.”
There is no way of knowing if Philip Moodey’s mother personally used the half-pound of gunpowder he purchased for her in Nicholas Perryman’s store in Exeter in 1722.31 Since the French and Indian Wars forced greater general preparedness on the frontier, women may have become more familiar with firearms than in earlier wars, and a few perhaps learned to load and fire on their own. In 1724 Samuel Penhallow of Portsmouth described the heroism of an Oxford woman who shot and killed an Indian who was attempting to break through her roof. According to local tradition, she had two muskets and two pistols charged and ready for his three companions.32
The question of means may be misplaced, however. The important problem is not whether colonial women had the ability to defend themselves but whether they had the will. There were familiar weapons at hand. Hannah Bradley of Haverhill scalded an attacker with a kettle of boiling soap.33 Given the impulse, a housewife like Hannah Duston, who had undoubtedly slaughtered chickens and skinned and eviscerated animals, would know how to kill and take a scalp.
Thus, a number of intrepid females living on the frontier of New England in the years after 1689 inherited the “blessing of Jael” first invoked by William Hubbard a decade before. They successfully defended themselves and were praised for doing so. This does not mean that fighting was a typical female response. Like most embattled societies before and since, the villages of Maine and New Hampshire evacuated women and children first and expected men to do the shooting.34 The heroism of women like Hannah Bradley or Esther Jones represented possibility, not probability. Presumed weak, women on the northern colonial frontier might prove themselves strong.
Even more persistent than the image of Jael was the image of the godly captive. The title page of one narrative, published in 1728, states the common theme: “God’s Mercy surmounting Man’s Cruelty Exemplifyed in the Captivity and Redemption of Elizabeth Hanson … In which are inserted, Sundry remarkable Preservations, Deliverances, and Marks of the Care and Kindness of Providence.”35 It matters little that Elizabeth Hanson was a Quaker or that she lived on a remote farm in a scattered New Hampshire settlement; the purposes of her narrative, to praise God and to promote piety, were those which had motivated Mary Rowlandson fifty years before and which continued to dominate the sermons and histories of Hanson’s Puritan contemporary Cotton Mather.
Forced into submissiveness, the godly captive proved her strength by surviving, then gave the credit to God. As in Many Rowlandson’s day, her Indian captors stood for the powers of darkness. Yet in the wars at the end of the century God’s enemies had acquired a new and awesome ally. Cotton Mather expressed the ministerial perception of this threat when he wrote in a tract addressed to the inhabitants of the Maine frontier: “We hear of a Vexatious Adversary, Wild Indians, headed and acted by French Papists, breaking in upon you now and then; killing of some, and siezing and snatching away others, for a Captivity, full of miseries.”36 From the perspective of dissenting Protestantism, the Indian-French combination epitomized the twin threats of barbarism and false faith. The ideal captive, then, was a woman like Hannah Swarton, who not only survived the rigors of the wilderness but heroically refused to succumb to the enticements of the “Papists” who rescued her from the Indians.
Frontier women who upheld Protestant piety at home could also become heroines. In his history of Queen Anne’s War, Cotton Mather argued that God was punishing all New England in a conflict which afflicted taxpayers, soldiers, and the families of soldiers in communities throughout the land. But he gave particular emphasis to the trials of “our dear Brethren in the Frontier … who are Posted in the Valley of Achor.”37 The Biblical allusion was to a traditional Palestinian “valley of trouble” where a disobedient Israelite had been stoned for hiding Babylonish spoils salvaged in the conquest of Canaan. New Englanders who searched for Providential design in every event had ample reason to suspect that God had indeed singled out the eastern parts for a special chastening. With the exception of Deerfield in the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts, no other area of New England suffered so acutely in the French and Indian Wars. The vast majority of New England captives taken to Canada between 1689 and 1728 came from the Piscataqua region of Maine and New Hampshire or the isolated plantations along the Maine coast between Wells and Pemaquid.38
Some settlers in these parts shared Mather’s conception of their danger. Hannah Swarton saw her own captivity as a punishment for her family’s negligence in removing from the established community of Beverly, where there was a church and a minister, to the wilderness of Casco Bay, “thereby Exposing our Children to be bred Ignorantly like Indians.”39 John Gyles, a captive of Pemaquid, recalled that after removing to Maine his father had been much troubled by “the Immoralities of a People who had long lived Lawless.”40 Such comments cut in two directions, however. In describing the ungodliness of the Maine frontier, these writers inadvertently testified to the presence there of at least a few articulate settlers of exemplary piety.
John Gyles’ memoir paints a vivid portrait of one zealous Maine Protestant, his own mother. He recalled her last words to him as they were separated in captivity: “Oh! my dear Child! If it were God’s will, I had rather follow you to your Grave! or never see you more in this World, than you should be sold to a Jesuit.”41 So impressive were her fears that when a French priest offered him a biscuit, he hid it under a log, “fearing that he had put something in it to make me love him: for I was very Young, and had heard much of the Papists torturing the Protestants, etc. so that I hated the sight of a Jesuit.”42 Captivity taught Gyles to respect both his Indian and his French captors, but he did not forget his mother’s teachings. When after six years among the Indians he was sold to a French family, he cried in the woods thinking of how his mother had detested “papists.”43
Neither public officials nor the colonial ministry wanted to see the frontier abandoned. From a military standpoint, the settlements in Maine and New Hampshire were a necessary buffer, a ring of defense against further French incursions onto English soil. From a religious viewpoint, the safety of New England rested in extending the protection of God to the “Valley of Achor.” It is not surprising, then, that in the crisis atmosphere of these years some women, especially aged and pious widows, became heroines by refusing to leave their wilderness homes despite the entreaties of friends or relatives.
According to Cotton Mather, Mrs. Elizabeth Heard was miraculously preserved in the Dover Massacre of 1689. She witnessed scenes of desolation which might have overcome a lesser person, but she did not abandon her home in the long war which followed. “This Gentlewoman’s Garrison was the most Extream Frontier of the Province, and more Obnoxious than any other, and more uncapable of Relief; nevertheless, by her presence and courage, it held out all the War, even for Ten Years together,” he wrote, adding that she resisted the offers of her friends to remove to safety in Portsmouth, “which would have been a Damage to the Town and Land.”44
Other Bostonians admired the tenacity of frontier women. In 1710 Samuel Sewall of Boston wrote to Elizabeth Saltonstall of Haverhill, who had recently been widowed, praising her for “the Obligation you lay even upon the Province, by denying your self, and continuing to live in a Frontier Town.” In Sewall’s view, Mrs. Saltonstall’s service to the commonwealth was twofold: he admired both her courage and her piety. As he phrased it, her heroism consisted in “venturing to keep Watch and Ward for the Inward Towns.”45 In his letter Sewall mentioned enclosing a book “as a small Token of my Respect.” He did not give the title, though it may well have been one of the sermons or discourses for women which Cotton Mather was printing so frequently in these years. Women like Mistress Saltonstall perhaps read as well as inspired the public praise extended to their sex in the first years of the eighteenth century.
IN A FUNERAL SERMON preached in 1728 for Katharin Willard, the wife of Massachusetts’ provincial secretary, Mather included a generalized paean to New England women. “There have been, and thro’ the Grace of our God there still are, to be found, in many parts of these American Regions, and even in the Cottages of the Wilderness, as well as in our Capital city, those Handmaids of the Lord, who tho’ they ly very much Conceal’d from the World, and may be called, The Hidden Ones, yet have no little share in the Beauty and the Defence of the Land.”46 Mather was perhaps thinking of the many women he had praised over the past thirty years in his histories of the Indian wars: the assertive viragoes who physically assaulted the enemy, the pious captives who made a trek to Canada a religious quest, and especially the godly Christians whose homes were a barrier to enemy attack and whose presence provided spiritual insurance of God’s care. Hannah Duston of Haverhill, Hannah Swarton of Casco Bay, and Elizabeth Heard of Cocheco served in different ways, but in Mather’s view each woman was a defender of Zion.
Wilderness courage and Protestant piety were both important ingredients in the myth of frontier heroism which was born in the narratives of King Philip’s War and nurtured in the ministerial histories which followed. In real life the relationship between heroism and religion was far more complex. On closer examination, Hannah Duston’s aggression was linked less to a militant Puritanism than to a violent underside in the village culture of New England; Swarton’s resistance to Catholicism was less striking than the capitulation of other captives; while Heard’s home-bound piety, though less spectacular than either, had a greater significance in the long-range history of New England—a significance discovered, however, not in ministerial narratives but in close examination of female roles in the religious development of the region.