John Williams
(1664-1729)
Reverend John Williams was the minister of Deerfield, Massachusetts,
in Feburary 1704 when he was taken captive by Abenaki Indians following a
bloody pre-dawn raid on the frontier village by French and Indian forces.
Although citizens of Deerfield were on the lookout for an attack and had built
a stockade around the town, deep snowdrifts allowed a force of some three-hundred French Canadians, Abenakis, and
Caughnawaga Mohawks to scramble over the stockade and destroy the town, burning
many of the houses, killing residents, and taking more than one hundred
inhabitants as captives, many of whom would not survive the march north to
Canada. The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion is Williams’s account of
his forced march to Canada following his capture and of the two and half years
he subsequently spent in captivity—eight weeks with the Abenakis, the remainder
in French Catholic communities near Montreal.
Deerfield was a
precarious outpost of English colonialism at the turn of the eighteenth
century. Originally settled in 1672, the village was abandoned in 1676 after
Indian attacks during King Philip’s War. The town was resettled in 1682, and
Williams arrived to serve as the town’s spiritual leader in 1686. As the French
and English engaged in battles in Europe—in this case, the War of Spanish
Succession—border skirmishes between
French and English colonists in North America became more active, and
both sides employed Indians to asssist in their war efforts. The 1704 attack on
Deerfield was thus an incident in what the colonists called Queen Anne’s War
(the second of the four French and Indian Wars), a war that was based on
hostilities a continent away but nonetheless offered the occasion for
territorial warfare in New England and Canada.
John Williams was the
grandson of Robert Williams, who emigrated from Norwich to Roxbury in 1637, and
the son of Samuel Williams, a shoemaker and large landholder, who became deacon
and later Ruling Elder in the Roxbury church of John Eliot. He attended Roxbury
Latin School; graduated from Harvard in 1683; became Congregational minister of
Deerfield in 1686; and married Eunice Mather, niece of Increase Mather and
stepdaughter of Solomon Stoddard, in 1687. Williams and his wife had eight
children: John Williams Jr., age 6, and Jerusha Williams 6 weeks, were killed
in the raid on Deerfield. Of the remaining six, four (Samuel, 15, Esther, 13,
Stephen, 10, Eunice, 7 and Warham, 4) were taken captive and marched to Canada.
Williams’s oldest son, Eleazar, also 15, was away from Deerfield at the time of
the attack. Williams’s wife was killed during the march to Canada. Williams was
a prominent and well-connected member of the New England clergy, and his
captivity was a matter of great concern throughout the colony. Governor Joseph
Dudley negotiated the final terms of his release in 1706—terms that involved
the exchange of the notorious French pirate Baptiste for Williams and other New
Englanders. After his release, Williams returned to Deerfield and later married
his wife’s cousin, Abigail Allen Bissell. He wrote the tale of his captivity in
1707, shortly after his “redemption.” The narrative was extremely popular and
eventually went through six editions over the course of the century.
Williams’s narrative
describes the battle in Deerfield and the long march through the snow; the
death of his wife, who, having given birth only a few weeks earlier, could not
keep up with the prisoners and was killed by the Indians; the cruelties and
kindnesses of the Indians; Williams’s attempts to obtain news about his
children, who had been separated from him; his efforts to serve members of his
congregation who were scattered among Indian and French settlements; his
purchase by the French and Jesuit efforts to convert him; his correspondence
with his son Samuel, who briefly converted to Catholicism; and Williams’s
return home after more than two years of bondage, with all of his remaining
children except Eunice, then ten, who chose, to her father’s enduring
consternation, to remain with the Indians.
The narrative is
unusual among captivity narratives because Williams spends the greater part of
his captivity among the French, not among Indians. Yet for the Puritan
Williams, the dangerously foreign religion of Catholicism poses a threat equal
to that of the “savagery” of Indian culture. Throughout the narrative, Williams
details his continued resistance to the pressures of the Jesuits to convert and
his attempts to save his children and other New Englanders from the double
threat of absorption into French Catholic or Indian culture. His son Samuel
does briefly convert to Catholicism, and his daughter Eunice does become a
fully adopted member of the Caughnawaga Mohawks, a tribe of Catholic Indians
living outside Montreal. The narrative tells of Williams’s sorrow upon learning
that Eunice can no longer speak English. Seven years after his release,
Williams returned to her village and met with her, but, as he wrote to a
friend, “she is obstinately resolved to live and dye here, and will not so much
as give me one pleasant look.”
The narrative also
functions as a jeremiad. It warns New Englanders that they have fallen away
from their unique covenant with God, and it demonstrates “the anger of God”
toward his “professing people” and the patience of Christians who are suffering
“the will of God in very trying public calamities!” Williams seeks to offer an
account of his captivity—to render his painful plight meaningful—and thus
ascribes both personal and collective meaning to his experiences in the violent
cultural, religious, economic, and political power struggles among the French,
British, and Indians that roiled New England during the eighteenth century.
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