WHEN CHRISTINE OTIS BAKER returned to the Piscataqua in 1735 and joined the congregational church at Dover, she entered a world strikingly more “religious” in the formal sense than the one she had left behind as an infant captive. In 1689 there had been five congregational churches in Maine and New Hampshire; in 1735 in the very same area there were twenty-one.1 In neighborhoods where there had once been only preaching (and that sporadically), there were now fully organized congregations with deacons and sacraments. It was ironic that Christine, whose father had once been fined for Quaker sympathies, should return from French Catholicism to the respectability of the congregational faith, for Quakers were now tolerated in Dover as elsewhere in northern New England.2
As a Quaker, Christine would have participated in a “Women’s Meeting” which had its own leadership, its own area of jurisdiction, and its own voice in the government of monthly and quarterly meetings.3 Having chosen equality, however, she would also have chosen a way of life at the periphery of New England society. Religion in northern New England was dominated by the congregational way.
More important to the long-range history of New England women than the fighting viragoes who resisted the enemy or the stalwart captives who surmounted the wilderness were the ordinary and invisible women who filled these churches in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Most congregations were predominantly female, though women were denied full participation in the establishment or the governance of religion. At Hampton Falls in 1712, for example, seventy percent of the original communicants were women, yet only men signed the church covenant; women simply assented.4 As members of churches ostensibly organized by the laity, congregational women achieved an equivocal status; they could acquiesce, but not lead.
Still, church membership was one of the few public distinctions available to women. Men could be fence-viewers, deacons, constables, captains, hog reeves, selectmen, clerks, magistrates, tithingmen, or sealers of leather. Women could be members of a gathered church. In a society in which church membership had to be earned, this was no small distinction. Furthermore, church membership was not contingent upon any other social role. A woman could be admitted to the Table of the Lord regardless of the status, economic position, or religious proclivities of her husband. As his deputy, she could reckon with a neighbor. With or without his blessing, she could settle accounts with God. Females not only achieved church membership more frequently than males, but they did so at a younger age. In two Andover churches in the years between 1711 and 1729 women on the average became church members a full decade before men of comparable age, suggesting that godly wives may indeed have led their husbands to Christ, as so many ministers hoped.5 With or without their spouses, women in New England accepted Christ. In the church at Berwick only 39 of 155 women admitted between 1708 and 1752 were joined by their husbands.6
Just as church membership gave women independent status, religious teaching often ratified traditional female values, supporting old wives in their guardianship of sexual mores, elevating charity over commerce and neighborliness over trade, but, above all, transforming weakness into gentleness, obscurity into humility, changing worldly handicaps into spiritual strengths. Women may not have interpreted religion in exactly the same way as ministers, but they cared about the churches. To understand the importance of religion in northern New England, we must consider first the social and then the personal roles fulfilled by religious women in the years between 1650 and 1750.
CHURCHES WERE tax-supported public institutions. As a consequence, controversies over the settlement and maintenance of ministers, the placement of meetinghouses, or the subdivision of congregations often had economic and political ramifications. Most historians have read these events as exclusively public issues, understandably—but mistakenly—ignoring the roles of women. By piecing together scattered evidence from a number of communities, we can discern three significant roles for women in these community battles. Relying upon private power within their own families, women promoted the establishment of religion in outlying areas of older towns; using their influence within the village network as well as with their husbands, women served as guardians of ministerial reputation; and, finally, drawing upon the authority of their own powerlessness, certain women became vessels of the supernatural.
Men signed petitions, wrote the appeals, and cast the votes, but women frequently supplied the energy which established new congregations and parishes in the outlying areas of older towns. The same pattern was repeated over and over again in New England. One segment of a township, pleading distance and inconvenience, asked to be separated from the original. The old, jealous of its power of taxation, refused. The controversies which resulted fill the pages of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century records and figure prominently in community studies by twentieth-century historians. Yet, without recognizing the quite different practical problems of men and women, it is impossible to fully understand the motivations of the “outlivers.” Why, for example, should aspiring freeholders in remote sections of town want to increase their own tax burden? As Richard Bushman has observed, they sometimes “wanted to support a church even before they were financially capable of doing so.”7 They may have been seeking ratification of their own separateness, but they may also have been responding to very real pressures at home. The petitions themselves suggest this. Whether written in seventeenth-century Massachusetts or eighteenth-century New Hampshire, the same argument appears again and again. Aged or feeble persons and especially mothers with young children could not walk three or four miles to meeting every Sunday, especially in winter.
Ann Jenkins and Tamsen Drew had trekked six hundred miles into Canada, but their husbands still signed the petition from Durham Point in 1718 pleading the inconvenience of coming two miles to meeting.8 For women, the problem was not inability to walk, to manipulate a canoe, or to ride a horse. Most women were held at home by breast-feeding, by the care of infants and young children, and by concern over the reliability of servants. The same problems existed in Scotch-Irish settlements in New Hampshire in the 1700s as in Puritan settlements in Connecticut in the 1600s. They were in the nature of female life. In old age Catherine Smith recalled her first years in the new settlement of Bedford in the 1740s. “We could seldom hear a single sermon without going to Londonderry. But we did na’ always stay at home. Annie Orr, and I, carried my Robert in our arms when he was ten months old, travelling on foot, to Mr. McGregor’s meeting; Ben [her husband] went with us, but he did us little good, for he was not worth a fig to carry a bairn.”9
Other fathers may have been more willing to carry their children, but they did not have to care for them during the meeting or feed them between sermons. Entreating her uncle, John Winthrop, Jr., to support the establishment of a church at Mistick, Connecticut, Hannah Gallop wrote of the problems facing mothers who came long distances to meeting and then stayed in the town all day “without any substance” so that those “that have young children sucking, manie times are brought exeding faint, & mutch weakened, & divers are not able to goe al winter.”10
When the inhabitants of Chebacco petitioned the town of Ipswich in 1677 for liberty to call a minister, they complained of the three-to-five-mile journey to the meetinghouse. In winter the days were short and the way hazardous and long. “Though som of us, with som difficulty, doe sometimes assemble with your selves yet the greatest part are constrained to tarry at home.” Children could not attend meeting, and if left at home without supervision or with unreliable servants, they were likely to “prophane that holy day.” The town predictably insisted that these outlivers were not “able to bear the weight of theire owne undertakings.” The taxes simply would not stretch to accommodate another minister. In Ipswich the position of the outlying inhabitants was especially sensitive because the town had been conceived as a nucleated village with farmers living in the center and traveling to the periphery to cultivate their crops. The town implied that the residents of Chebacco had brought their problem upon themselves. They might consider “that what burthen lyes upon them the first day of the week the same or greatter lyes upon theire friends in the towne the other six.”11 But, of course, it was not the men of Chebacco who had been inconvenienced. It was their wives and children. The price men were paying for the comfort of living on their own farms was intense pressure from their women for the right to go to church on Sunday.
That the pressure was indeed coming from the female side of the church is apparent in the next episode in the chronicle of Chebacco. While the men fought it out in town meeting and court, the women privately schemed—and then acted on their own. As the parish clerk so quietly put it in a church history written sometime afterward:
while we were in this great conflict that all things seemed to act against us som women without the knowledge of theire husbands and with the advice of some few men went to other towns and got help and raised the house that we intended for a meeting house if we could git liberty.12
The wives of William Goodhue, Thomas Varney, and Abraham Martin ended up in county court, where they were fined for contempt of authority.13 Their behavior is a classic example of the kind of demonstrative disobedience described in Chapter Ten, but it is also evidence of the concern of at least some New England women for the establishment of their church. Their impetuousness was expensive but effective. Within a few months Chebacco got permission to call a minister. When the church was gathered, it had a building to meet in.
The behavior of the wives of Chebacco is more visible than most female activity in northern New England, but their objective was probably characteristic. Women had a vested interest in the establishment of churches. The relationship between women and the ministry was not always a comfortable one, however. In illness and death or in cases of marital disruption or sexual misbehavior, the authority of the clergy might encounter the equally powerful influence of the old wives of the community. When the interests and perceptions of the two were in harmony, the combination was powerful, but when they were at odds, a clash was possible. The most obvious conflict involved folk magic. Ministers were outraged when they found parishioners draping their doorways with bay leaves or baking witch cakes at the suggestion of a neighbor, but the most serious opposition came not from cunning women, whose activities were easily dismissed as “superstitious,” but from matrons who shared the minister’s basic values.14 In these cases, circumspect church members measured ministerial behavior against ministerial profession and sometimes dropped a telling remark or two into the pot of village gossip. Simmering there, it might boil over in public conflict months or even years later. Women could not control salaries, but they could control reputation, and of course they could use the same weapons in attacking ministers as they used in promoting churches—their influence with their husbands.
Conflict between ministers and influential matrons is at least one ingredient in prolonged and acrimonious church controversies in Rowley in the 1670s, in Salem Village in the 1680s, and in Durham in the 1720s. In October of 1672 Jeremiah Shepard was invited to preach at Rowley for a year. The town already had one minister, Samuel Phillips, who continued as teacher after the death of the old pastor, Ezekiel Rogers. Shepard, though younger than Phillips, was a candidate for Rogers’ position. Obviously, there was the potential for jealousy, but Phillips apparently supported his young colleague during the first year. After sixteen months, though there was some dissension, Shepard’s invitation was renewed, but by spring, when he asked for membership in the church as a prelude to a coming bid for ordination, a vigorous controversy emerged. The church rejected him, not being “satisfied as to his piety, nor spirit.”15
What had the young minister done to offend the sober Christians of Rowley? The evidence is scanty but intriguing. At the end of a tumultuous meeting in which the church voted to cut Shepard off even before his time was up, Samuel Phillips wrote that Shepard had a “loose tongue,” that the church did not like the company he kept, and that they suspected he neglected his studies and his family. Then he added:
In the time of my wife’s long and dangerous sickness he came below to look upon her and there took offense that she did not show him respect though my wife affirms that she bowed her head as well as she could being then entering into her ague fit, but he never would come to see her though I wished him to do it.16
The coughing spell in Mistress Phillips’ parlor was probably the culminating event in a long and perhaps unconscious struggle.
Mistress Phillips was not the only woman to tangle with this self-important young minister. When one of the deacons informed Shepard of the church’s decision, he immediately blamed “Goody Elithorp,” whose comments (to Phillips?) had apparently helped to fuel the opposition. The woman hated him so much, he said, that “if she had an opportunity he doubted not but she would cut his throat, yea, so far as a man can know a woman’s heart by her words she would actually do it.”17 Shepard’s dismay at the inscrutable territory of a “woman’s heart” suggests one source of his difficulty. He simply did not know how to deal with an important part of his constituency.
Contempt for—or, perhaps more accurately, fear of—female power is a crucial element not only in Shepard’s story but also in those of George Burroughs and Hugh Adams. Burroughs, like Jeremiah Shepard, encountered trouble as a new minister in a rural community. He arrived in Salem Village in 1681 and abruptly left in 1683 after his salary had been withheld. For a time he and his wife lived with Captain John Putnam, who later had him arrested for debt as he stood in the meetinghouse pleading for his back salary. Beyond that, little is known of his brief tenure except that his wife died during his stay in Salem. Nine years later he was brought back from Maine and tried as a wizard.18
Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have been unable to fit Burroughs’ story into the larger Porter-Putnam controversy which they believe dominated Salem Village politics in the years before the witchcraft outbreak of 1692.19 This may be because personality rather than politics was the cause of the minister’s troubles. During his witchcraft trial John and Rebecca Putnam told a story in public which had probably been told often in private in Salem Village, perhaps in the hearing of the afflicted girls whose supposed demonic possession brought Burroughs and the other accused witches to trial. (We will return to the religious role of those girls, but for the moment our concern is with Burroughs.) According to the Putnams, during the time that Burroughs lived in their house he had a serious argument with his wife, so serious that he asked them to come into the room and hear it out. Burroughs wanted his wife to “give him a written covenant under her hand and Seall that shee would never reveall his secrits.” The Putnams were astonished. Wasn’t the covenant of marriage covenant enough? All the time that Burroughs was at their house, they added, “he was a very sharp man to his wife, notwithstanding to our observations shee was a very good and dutifull wife to him.”20
By some mysterious process the two main details in this story—the signing of a covenant and the man’s anger with his wife—emerged in the spectral evidence which convicted Burroughs. To the afflicted girls, he was not only a witch but the ringleader of witches, the man who forced women to sign the Devil’s black book. Furthermore, his two dead wives had appeared in their winding sheets and testified that their husband had killed them. Reports from neighbors reinforced evidence from the invisible world. It did not help Burroughs’ case when two matrons from his new congregation in Maine appeared in Salem to tell of his unkindness to his second wife, describing her appeals to neighbors for help and his almost paranoid anxieties about her conversations with other women.21 Burroughs’ secrets were known in the community of women, both in Salem Village and in Maine. When public officials listened to those secrets, the result was devastating.
Hugh Adams was explicit about the source of his trouble: Elizabeth Davis. Mistress Davis’ first contact with the church at Durham after its establishment in 1718 was to ask for baptism for herself and two sons. Like many other adults in this community, she was not yet formally a Christian. Her husband, Lieutenant Colonel James Davis, town moderator, assemblyman, and justice of the court of common pleas, remained outside the fold.22 Elizabeth’s squabble with Adams emerged into the public record in 1723 when she and James both applied for admission to the church at Dover four miles away which both of them had ignored for most of their lives. Adams was furious. He did not mind losing Mistress Davis as a communicant, but he did not want the embarrassment of her acceptance by a neighboring congregation.
He quickly dispatched an “ecclesiastical document” to the “Reverend Honorable and beloved” Mr. Cushing at Dover, detailing the scandalous behavior of Davis and his wife. The Colonel had taken a false oath, Adams said; he had been instrumental in withholding the minister’s salary, had coveted the parsonage land for his son, and had used his position as judge “against his own legal minister for so innocently playing at nine pins at a house no ways license for a Tavern.” But his real crime was in harkening to his wife more than to the Lord of Heaven (or his pastor?). Mistress Davis had publicly railed against Adams by saying that he had spread a lie about Sobriety Thomas, had resisted his efforts to call her son to account for his involvement with said Sobriety, had mocked Christ’s ordinances by saying that a disciplinary meeting was “going to be another cabal,” but especially had been “a busy body at every one of her husbands Courts to be his advisor or intermedler in his passing Judgement in any case.”23 An imperious minister had met an imperious matron! Elizabeth Davis openly defied Adams and she used her influence with her husband to harass him. On November 23, 1723, she and James were admitted to the Dover Church, where they remained until continuing conflict in Durham finally resulted in Adams’ expulsion from the pulpit in 1739. Not surprisingly, Colonel Davis was prominently involved in the settlement of the new minister, Nicholas Gilman.
The ministers in these three stories, though different in other ways, shared two common traits: an acute sensitivity to patriarchal authority and a failure to measure up in some way to the standards they professed. Shepard neglected his studies; Burroughs was unkind to his wife; Adams played at ninepins in a tavern. But their real flaw was more damning: they mistrusted a “woman’s heart.” This is not to say that every case of ministerial disruption in early New England was caused by gender conflict. It is simply to assert that personal as well as economic and social conflicts shaped religious establishment, that the ability to win the confidence of the female members of a congregation was one ingredient in ministerial stability, and that women without formal power might still wield influence.
The third way in which women influenced religion in northern New England was through ecstatic or hysteric utterance as intermediaries between the visible and invisible worlds. Two of the most dramatic examples of this occurred at Salem Village in 1692 and at Oyster River in 1742, in the very churches which had earlier ousted George Burroughs and Hugh Adams. Our objective in citing these cases is not to explain the psychological mechanism which first propelled women and girls into public view, nor to untangle the social and theological complexities which permitted them to stay there, but to delineate a religious role available to New England women.
When Deodat Lawson, a former preacher at Salem Village, heard of the apparent outbreak of demons there, he hastened to investigate. Arriving on Saturday, March 19, 1692, he observed two of the afflicted girls at the local inn and at the home of the Reverend Mr. Parris, in whose family the first demonic possessions had occurred. The next day, having accepted an invitation to preach in the meetinghouse, he encountered even more remarkable evidence of the power of Satan. Seven of the afflicted were there—Mistress Pope, a respectable matron of the town; Goody Bibber, a desperately poor and frequently contentious pariah; four maidservants, Abigail Williams, Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Elizabeth Hubbard; and one child, Anne Putnam. When Lawson opened the morning worship, the entire group fell into fits, causing him to interrupt his prayer. After the psalm was sung, one of the maidservants looked straight at the minister and said, “Now stand up, and Name your Text.” When he had read it, she sniffed, “It is a long Text.” The sermon had hardly begun when the formerly circumspect Mrs. Pope spoke out, “Now there is enough of that.” The child, Anne Putnam, would also have testified out loud if the women around her had not prevented it. Little Anne was certain she had seen a yellow bird sitting on the minister’s hat as it hung on a peg by the pulpit.24 Because their affliction placed them outside society, the possessed could command their minister, speak in the church, and comment on the sermon as no other child, servant, or female adult could have done. Like the disorderly women of Marblehead, they were able to do things that rational persons and especially responsible male officials could not.
In Durham, New Hampshire, in 1742, children, maidservants, and several young men as well saw visions and fell into trances, but Nicholas Gilman, the new pastor in that village, saw this as evidence of God’s rather than Satan’s power. In the afternoon service on March 3, “Mary Reed declared in Publick the close of Her last Vision,” after which Gilman “added a word of Exhortation to the People.” There was no disruption here, because the minister accepted the role of the young woman as seer. When Stephen Busse saw a white dove come down into the meetinghouse on another occasion, Gilman interpreted it as a sign of God’s blessing.25
A detailed comparison of the role of seer in the witchcraft accusations and in the Great Awakening might yield important insights into changes in female roles in northern New England.26 One obvious difference is worth noting here. In Salem Village, visionary girls began by attacking older women. Although men, and even some very prominent men, were eventually included among the accused, in its initial stages it seems to have been an intragender conflict. Young women in tune with the supernatural accused old women of being in tune with the supernatural. The Great Awakening, in contrast, tended to break down both gender and social barriers in a common quest for a witness of the divine. Nicholas Gilman is a striking example of this. Hungering for evidence of the workings of the Holy Spirit, he fine-tuned his spirit to the responses of his listeners, leaning on them as fervently as seeking Christians leaned upon their pastors. This reversal of roles is most apparent in Gilman’s relationship with Mary Reed, an obscure young woman whose very existence in Durham would be unknown except for her amazing influence upon her minister.
On March 26 she came to Gilman’s house in the evening and told him “She had been exceeding full of Joy all day that it Seemd to her she was not here, and it had run in her Mind all day—this Night shall thy Soul be required.” She instructed Gilman to send for her clothes and dispose of them to the poorest persons in town, then she went to bed, and after “many deep Sighs as tho’ Her soul was departing” fell into an “almost breathless sleep.” Since his wife was then away in Exeter, Gilman worried about how his “character and conduct … would be represented abroad,” but when Mary awakened, she assured him that he should not “mind what men said” but should “Mind what the Spirit of Christ Says.” Mary Reed stayed at the Gilman home from Saturday evening until Tuesday morning, sleeping, instructing her minister, praying, and “Singing praises to God in Extempore Verse.”27 Gilman neither counseled nor tried to “cure” Mary Reed. He marveled at her receptivity to the spirit, and when she spoke, he listened. All boundaries—of sex, of wealth, or of education—dissolved in a common rapture. Like the young women of Salem fifty years before, she had become a vessel of the supernatural.28
WOMEN HELPED TO SHAPE religion in northern New England, but it is important to recognize that their effectiveness was dependent upon the approval of the men who voted the taxes, called the ministers, and interpreted the visions. The more successful and dramatic witnesses of female power were also the most short-lived. The women of Chebacco meekly recanted their disobedience. Elizabeth Davis left the Durham church long before the minister she attacked. The visionary young women of Salem and Durham faded into obscurity, while the ministers who supported them soon lost favor with their congregations. The most important story of religion is to be found not on the institutional but on the personal level and especially on the level of belief. For some women, affiliation with a church may have had more social than religious significance, but for others, religion provided a way of ordering the most basic experiences of human life. To approach this inner dimension of religion, we must turn once again to the wartime literature of northern New England, to the crisis of captivity, and to the discovery of heroism which it made possible. Rare self-portraits of two women, Mary Rowlandson and Elizabeth Hanson, show strikingly different responses to pain and death, suffering and sorrow, anger and fear, but especially to the experience of subjection. For these women, Indian captivity heightened trials which all women shared. Their narratives make accessible patterns of female response which might not have been visible otherwise, and they help us to relate the development of religion to the problem of assertiveness raised in the myth of Jael.
One narrative was published in 1680, the other half a century later in 1729. One woman was a Puritan, the other a Quaker. One woman spent her captivity among a community of local Indians who had long associated with the English. The other was seized by a small band of Canadian Indians who eventually sold her to the French. One woman wrote her own story, the other simply told it to a visiting preacher, who took it down, as he said, “from her own Mouth.” Obviously, differences in belief and in circumstances determined contrasts between these two stories. But for the moment let us ignore the stories’ particular historical settings, and consider them as different human responses to a similar situation. Both women were deeply religious Christian Protestants. Both were captured in frightening attacks which resulted in the death of loved ones. Both carried children with them into the wilderness. Both attributed their deliverance to the mercy of God and published their stories in order to promote piety and to return thanks to Him. By examining the survival strategies which the two women used, but especially by looking at their perceptions of their captors and of themselves, we can more fully grasp the interior religious experience available to colonial women.
The primary social category in Mary Rowlandson’s tale is race, in Elizabeth Hanson’s gender. For Mary Rowlandson, the principal determinant of worth was religious status; for Elizabeth Hanson, religious temperament. In practical terms, Mary Rowlandson survived because she knew how to use English huswifery in the service of her captors; Elizabeth Hanson, because she was able to form a bond with Indian women who taught her what she needed to know. In religious terms, Mary Rowlandson was saved because God chose her, though she was utterly helpless and worthless outside His sustaining care. Elizabeth Hanson was saved because patience, long-suffering, and kindness were more powerful than cruelty. To understand the full significance of their contrasting personalities, we must look at each story in some detail.
Mary Rowlandson’s narrative is a powerful and deeply moving piece of writing as long as the reader can suspend twentieth-century judgment and enter a world in which Indians were by definition “atheistical, proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, bruitish … diabolicall creatures … the worst of the heathen.”29 Like much heroic literature in the western world, it sketches a cosmic battle between foul heathens and fair Christians. Within the limitations of such a setting, Mary Rowlandson emerges as a courageous and ruddy heroine, resourceful, feisty, more housewife than saint, a minister’s wife who gave up her pipe-smoking in captivity but not her vivid speech.
Mary Rowlandson suffered the loss of her home and the death of her wounded child, yet she clung to her knitting needles, kept a sure sense of time, and returned to Boston knowing exactly what she had eaten, where she had gotten it, and in whose pot she had cooked it. Her chief work among the Indians was knitting and sewing. Although she served as a slave in Quinnapin’s family, she was resourceful in trading her services with other Indians for extra food, exchanging stockings for a quart of peas or a shirt for a bit of bear meat. Into her pocket went everything she begged or bartered—meal, meat, a parched-wheat pancake fried in bear’s grease, and even a piece of stale cake handed to her by another Lancaster housewife as they were separated. The cake was perhaps a symbolic tie to the orderly world she had left behind: “there it lay, till it was so mouldy (for want of good baking) that one could not tell what it was made of; it fell all to crumbs, and grew so dry and hard, that it was like little flints; and this refreshed me many times, when I was ready to faint.”30 Characteristically, Mary could not resist commenting upon the quality of the baking even in describing the depths of her hunger.
She was prepared to survive captivity not only by her housewifely skills but also by her understanding of the nature of servility. Even though she hated and feared her captors, she knew how to please them. Growing up in a hierarchal society, she had learned what it meant to be an inferior. Among her many losses was a role shift from mistress to maid, a reversal of what she had experienced in the process of maturing and marrying. Metacom understood this humiliation; just before her redemption he told her kindly that she would soon be a mistress again.31 Significantly, Mary’s portrait of Metacom, the man who began the war, is rather benign. She was equally positive in her portrayal of her own master, Quinnapin, who comes across in the narrative as a dignified and rather distant male authority figure. The real focal point of her hatred was Wetamoo, the mistress who had immediate control of her day-to-day life in captivity.
As she was sitting in Wetamoo’s wigwam, Metacom’s maid came in with a child in her arms and asked Mary to give her a piece of her apron to make a diaper for it. Mary told her she would not. Even when Wetamoo commanded her to give up the apron, she refused. When the maid threatened to tear it off herself, Mary angrily retorted that if she did, she would tear the maid’s petticoat. Wetamoo raised a stick “big enough to have killed me,” but Mary dodged it so that it stuck into the mat of the wigwam instead. While Wetamoo struggled to pull it out, she “ran to the Maid and gave her all my Apron.”32 Had Mary Rowlandson been in her own village instead of an Indian camp and had she been able to find a stick (or a shovel or a pot ladle), a similar trespass upon her property or her dignity might have turned into the sort of squabble so frequently reported in county court records. An inability to resist rather than any lack of assertiveness determined Mary Rowlandson’s behavior.
Although she could identify to a certain extent with Metacom and with her master, she was seemingly unaware of the suffering in the Indian camp. Her hunger and cold and pain obliterated the desperation of the Indians, who were literally fleeing for their lives. When a “savage” extended human sympathy, she could only attribute it to Providence. When Wetamoo’s baby died, she observed that now there would be more room in the wigwam.33 Mary Rowlandson’s narrative is deeply and pervasively racist, yet, as many scholars have shown, it is not always difference which arouses fear of an alien person or culture so much as a perceived yet repellent sameness. This is amply illustrated in Mary’s story. She speaks of the Indians as “Salvage Bears” and “roaring lions,” yet the most striking and pervasive animal imagery in the narrative is that which she applies to herself. In captivity she had “only a little Swill for the body, and then like a Swine, must ly down on the ground.”34
Food is a dominant motif in her portrait of herself. She expended most of her energy begging, contriving, or working for food, and yet her hunger was never satisfied. She relished food she had always refused before, things that even dogs or pigs wouldn’t touch—“nuts, acorns, hartychoaks, Lilly roots, Ground-beans, Horse guts and ears, wild birds, Bear, vennison, Beaver, Tortois, Frogs, Squirrels, Dogs, Skunks, Rattlesnakes; yea, the very Bark of Trees.”35 Eating this wild food, she became wild herself. She marveled at her own “Wolvish appetite.” When given something to eat, she would burn her mouth rather than wait for it to cool. Seeing an Indian with a basket of horse liver, she begged a piece, then ate it half-cooked “with the blood about my mouth.”36 Another time she saw an English child “sucking, gnawing, chewing and slabbering” a chunk of boiled horse’s foot. She took it and ate it, “and savoury it was to my taste.”37 There was no false delicacy in this Puritan wife! In fact, there are several incidents which suggest that her Indian captors were more fastidious than she and may even have found her ways somewhat repulsive. When she met Metacom for the second time, he gave her a looking glass and told her to wash herself.38
Mary Rowlandson’s description of her own animal nature in captivity—her groveling, her begging, her unkempt state—are consistent with her theology and with her Calvinist perceptions of the depravity of humankind. In this view, all men and women are savage outside of God’s covenant. But her own debasement served another purpose as well. The one quality she most consistently attributed to her Indian captors was pride—the worldly pride that would inevitably lead to a fall. She was subjected, they were haughty. The oldest of her master’s three wives was “a severe and proud Dame … bestowing every day in dressing her self neat as much time as any of the Gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with Neck-laces, with Jewels in her ears, and Bracelets upon her hands.” The gentility of the Indian wife was expressed not just in her concern for clothing but in the work which she did, which was “to make Girdles of Wampon and Beads.”39 Beside her artifice Mary Rowlandson’s knitting was servile, as she must have known. She was both repelled and fascinated by the pretentious and colorful clothing of her mistress.
In the experience of captivity Mary Rowlandson found a pattern of her own salvation. In the account which she left, students of religion can discern a familiar psychological type.40 An acute consciousness of rank and order is coupled in her portrait with a deep sense of sinfulness and of the fragility of human effort. Long habit as well as immediate need put needles in her hands and peas in her pocket, but though her own skills could sustain her, they could not save her. Knowing the superiority of spiritual things, she found herself relishing the basest of material food, both resisting and embracing her own subjection. Rejecting pride, she projected it upon her captors, finding personal redemption but no charity for her enemy in the humiliation of captivity.
In comparison with Mary Rowlandson, Elizabeth Hanson is a bland and almost passive heroine, perhaps because her narrative is shorter and less colorful, but also because she embodied qualities so often associated with an insipid and confining femininity. She too willingly turned the other cheek. At the end of one long day’s journey her master commanded her to fetch water, but, having sat awhile on the cold ground, she found she could not stand. So she crawled on her hands and knees along the ground until a young woman from another family took pity on her and went to get the water.41 This incident was characteristic of her behavior throughout—never any effort to resist a command, simply a mute appeal to justice in an unquestioning and abject obedience. Yet her gentleness was no mere extension of her weakness but a consciously willed religious response. Elizabeth Hanson simply refused to meet violence with violence. According to one New Hampshire minister, the Hansons may have been captured only because Elizabeth’s husband, a “stiff quaker, full of enthusiasm, and ridiculing the military power, would on no account be influenced to come into garrison.”42
Elizabeth Hanson, like Mary Rowlandson, struggled with hunger and cold. She found it distasteful to eat the entrails of wild animals without cleaning them and marveled that what had once seemed foul could now taste sweet, yet the central focus of her narrative was not on the helplessness and vulnerability of humanity but on the power of “God’s kindness” to surmount “man’s cruelty.” Kindness could be found in the wilderness as well as among Christians—“these People being very kind and helpful to one another, which is very commendable.”43
After a twenty-six days’ march into New France, Elizabeth found herself in an encampment of Canadian Indians, where she quickly established friendships with the women of her master’s family, despite a barrier of language. Because her fourteen-day-old infant had been spared in the attack, her most persistent anxiety during the trek was a waning supply of milk. Her breasts almost dry, she warmed icy brook water in her mouth, letting it trickle out onto the nipple as the child sucked. This, with an occasional broth made from beaver guts, kept the baby from dehydrating, though by the twenty-sixth day all the joints of its backbone were visible. Finally a friendly squaw taught Elizabeth how to make pap from fine cornmeal cooked with walnut kernels which had been cleaned and ground until the mixture “looked like milk.” The shared recipe saved the baby and strengthened a growing bond between the women, who were united in a common fear of the Indian master.44
Elizabeth Hanson’s portrayal of this man is striking. Although he had beaten her, hit her little son, and threatened to kill her baby, he was never merely a “savage” in her eyes but always a struggling human being. She was terrified of his tantrums, yet she observed that “when-ever he was in such a Temper, he wanted Food, and was pinched with Hunger.” Dutiful service (and perhaps her refusal to hate) were her witness against him. After a time the Lord himself “did seasonably interpose” by causing a great sickness to fall upon the man. His wife told Elizabeth that her husband considered his illness a punishment for his mistreatment of the captives. (He had already convinced himself that the baby was a “devil” because it had survived so long on the trail without food.) After his recovery he was not so passionate or so abusive. “This I took as the Lord’s Doing, and it was marvellous in my Eyes.”45
Elizabeth Hanson’s hot-tempered master was never as threatening as Mary Rowlandson’s “salvages.” By humanizing him, she reduced him from cosmic to domestic scale. Facing the abuse of a weak and violent man, she triumphed through her own submissiveness. Like Richardson’s Pamela, she knew the moral power in weakness. The underlying message of her story is clear: God will avenge the weak and powerless, but only so long as they remain weak and powerless. Aggressiveness and virtue are incompatible. In a Quaker narrative of 1729 submissiveness is a Christian rather than a peculiarly feminine quality, though the alignment of the poor captive and the equally downtrodden Indian women against the single abusive male is striking.
Mary Rowlandson’s narrative had epic dimensions because her personal struggle paralleled a national struggle. Religious, political, and personal themes coalesced, as they had in the tale of Hannah Duston. Elizabeth Hanson, on the other hand, stood outside the religious establishment of northern New England. She could sympathize with the Indians because, as a Quaker, she did not fully identify with the war. The two narratives describe a religion of outsiders and of insiders. As a minister’s wife and a covenanted church member, Mary Rowlandson belonged to the elect. For her, salvation came through identification with the powerful—with the saints and with God. For Elizabeth Hanson, salvation did not come through affiliation but through the incorporation or the discovery of Godlike qualities in herself or others.
Now, if we extend the analysis of their captivity beyond the specific imprisonment to the larger world of northern New England, considering the day-to-day and perhaps hardly realized subjection imposed by the hierarchal and patriarchal nature of the society in which they lived, the strikingly different responses of the two women suggest two religious modes available to women. (We are talking here about personal religious responses, not about specific “Puritan” or “Quaker” qualities.) A woman like Mary Rowlandson, struggling to maintain order against the wilderness within, would identify strongly with the role of housekeeper. She would be a supportive wife and a friendly neighbor to women like herself, but extremely suspicious of outsiders and perhaps even aggressive when she felt that her authority or her property had been challenged. Because her sense of worth came through affiliation rather than through merit, she would ally strongly with a minister and a church. A woman like Elizabeth Hanson might identify more closely with the nurturing roles. She would be more trusting of her neighbors, more likely to cross barriers of gender and race in a religious context, but, ironically, even more submissive and obedient, even less likely to resist perceived injustice or oppression, even more reluctant to assume male qualities, and, as a consequence, more fully “feminine” in the nineteenth-century sense. Although she would have substituted the word Christian for the word woman, Elizabeth Hanson would have understood the meaning of Hawthorne’s comment that “woman must strike through her own heart to reach a human life, whatever were the motive that impelled her.”46
There is something disturbingly familiar about the heroism of Elizabeth Hanson. As Ann Douglas has described it, popular literature in nineteenth-century America was permeated with just such innocent victims—pacific civilians, for example, “massacred or mutilated in a war for which” they had “no responsibility,” or guiltless wives of the temperance literature, or long-suffering and ever-patient mothers.47 Such imagery was not invented in the nineteenth century, of course, as Hanson’s story reminds us. It is inherent in Christianity. Nor was it passed on to nineteenth-century America by Quakers, though it was, as Douglas demonstrates, promoted by religious “outsiders”—that is, by members of churches which were tolerated (as Dover’s Quakers were) but on the periphery of social and political life.48
Hanson’s heroism foreshadows later literature, but not because it was new. Hers was one variant among a number of possible religious responses. In northern New England, through most of the colonial period, religion was never far from politics, despite the predominance of women in the churches. Avenging Jaels existed side by side with passive victims because the nationalized religion of the Old Testament coexisted with the personalized religion of the New.
WHEN HANNAH DUSTON sat in Cotton Mather’s church on that morning in 1697, she heard herself simultaneously praised as a deliverer of Zion and admonished as a religious laggard. “You are not now the Slaves of Indians, as you were a few Dayes ago,” Mather told the captives, “but if you continue Unhumbled, in your Sins, You will be the Slaves of Devils.”49 In his private discussion with her, Mather must have discovered that she, like many other men and women of her generation, had neglected the church. Though baptized as children, they had failed either to “own the covenant” or to present the evidence of conversion necessary for full membership.
Cotton Mather was determined to set New England’s heroic Jael squarely upon the road to salvation. Perhaps his sermon had some effect, but, if so, the timing was curious. Hannah Duston owned the covenant in Haverhill First Church in June of 1719, just twenty-two years after her deliverance from the Indians. She was admitted to the Lord’s table five years later, in March of 1724, at the age of sixty-seven. In her profession taken down by Haverhill’s minister, she spoke of her captivity as “the Comfortablest time that ever I had; In my Affliction God made his Word Comfortable to me.”50
Hannah Duston’s long journey to the house of the Lord was not unusual. Few folks in Haverhill were owning the covenant in the last years of the seventeenth century. Perhaps their pastor was too involved with the immediate crises of war to worry about membership statistics. For Hannah, there were other distractions. Soon after her captivity she became pregnant again (for the thirteenth time in her twenty years of marriage). There were meals to be cooked and cows to be milked and a new house to build. Hannah’s eventual conversion followed a rejuvenation of the church under an aggressive new minister, John Brown, and came after a period of relative stability for the town and for the Duston family.51
What we can’t know, of course, is the state of Hannah’s soul during that long period of growing and waiting. Did Mather’s words return to her in the night as she stood over a sickbed or watched her parents die? “Let me tell you, A Slavery to Devils, to be in Their Hands, is worse than to be in the Hands of Indians.” Pondering these words, did she ever think of her sister Elizabeth? If so, she did not say so. She said she had found comfort in the scriptures, and that she had wanted to offer herself “from time to time ever since the Settlement of the present Minister,” but “Delays and fears” had prevailed upon her. Now, at the “Eleventh hour,” she asked to be admitted among the saints.52 Quietly, like hundreds of other women before her, this fierce virago submitted to the law of Christ.
Hannah Duston’s heroism belongs to a particular historical moment. Her violence was possible because she had been raised in a world where women slaughtered pigs and fought their neighbors; it was permissible because it was directed in wartime at a hated enemy; and it was publishable because the established religion in New England had not yet become the refuge of the meek.