In the first century of English invasion, we can make two faults about how people lived in North America. The first is the common one that many, if not most, of us shared in childhood: that the first time the English colonists of the Atlantic coast engaged in friendly and familial relationships with the nations along the coast, until things caused a conflict, after which the nations lost, lost, and eventually melted away. The next error is to go to the other end of the spectrum and create a picturesque depiction of ancestral life, which is only shattered by the arrival of conceited and obedient Europeans, with Massachusetts Bay’s Puritans taking home the title for most conceited and agressive. As in most movements of interpretation and therefore redefinition, the truth often lies somewhere between the spectrum’s ends, and even then is usually more of a zig- zag than a predetermined point. The long history of the human species itself is a history of continuous action, movement, integration, absorption, intermingling and—not the least—genocidal conquest, in which the number of saints is dangerously small and the percentage of sinners sickeningly great. Taken along, it gives researchers much reason to be innovators, much less supporters.
James Swanson demonstrates that despite all this craziness, it is still possible to navigate the stormy traditional waters of imperial America in a honest and compassionate manner. Swanson is best known for his books on Abraham Lincoln, starting with Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution ( 2001 ) and Manhunt: The 12- Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer ( 2006 ). However, he has since written about the Jefferson Davis pursuing after the Civil War, the Kennedy and King assassinations, and the infamous Deerfield murder from 1704, which has shifted decades later. Strangely, he traces his beginnings as a writer to a fellowship year at Traditional Deerfield in northern Massachusetts” to examine furniture, paintings, gold, architecture, landscapes, ceramics, textiles, gravestones, historic preservation, and, of course, the massacre of 1704″, and he has been a numerous return visitor for events and reunions. He acknowledges that there is a kind of place where “any visitor runs the risk of falling into an ecstatic antiquarian frenzy that can overwhelm the senses.”
Swanson, however, is careful not to wax too ecstatically, especially since the Deerfield of 1704 was far from being a place that engendered ecstasy. One of Jacobean England’s numerous uneven experiments in colonizing North America was the Massachusetts Bay colony’s original invention, which was the colonial government of. The word uneven is used deliberately: The English government was Europe’s poorer relation among its empires and preferred to franchise- out the planting of English colonies around the world to commercial outfits—as if, for instance, the U. S. government had franchised- out the 1969 moon landing to G. E. or Westinghouse. The unevenness entered into the picture because the franchisees were often straw buyers for a variety of radical dissenters—Quakers, Puritans, Catholics—whom the English government was only too happy to be rid of. These colonists were made to realize that they were on their own once they were landed on the North American seaboard. If they failed ( as they did in Virginia ), the home government in London would grant them only the most minimal bankruptcy oversight. Additionally, Britain would establish no garrisons to protect them and spend no money to defend them.
That put a lot of pressure on the colonists, both in terms of dealing with the tribes they encountered, from the Powhatans of Virginia to the Wampanoags of New England, as well as with the much more organized, hostile, French colonial settlements in Canada. The Massachusetts Bay government encouraged the construction of a number of outpost settlements on the western fringe of the colony to serve as a shield against intrusions and uprisings. Deerfield, 100 miles west of Boston, was laid out between 1669 and 1671 as the northernmost of these outposts, which meant that it was in constant danger of attack, first from the Wampanoag uprising in 1675 known as” King Philip’s War”, and then from recurring attacks from French Canada, with the French employing tribal allies to augment their small European numbers. The town was designed like a garrison, with a massive meeting house in the center, 43 well-built private residences along one street, and a palisade surrounding them all. Farmers ferried out from the town to the fields and meadows that sped down the Deerfield river, a smaller Connecticut river, but were always prepared to retreat to the palisade if danger loomed.
Which it did, frequently. In 1675, an attack killed 8 Deerfielders in one raid, ambushed 60 more just two weeks later, and burned the town. Rebuilt in 1682, Deerfield was attacked four more times between 1693 and 1696. ” Strangers tell us they would not live where we do for twenty times as much as we do”, grumbled the town’s Puritan minister, John Williams. And many Deerfielders would likely not have moved there, either, if there had n’t been the tax exemptions the Massachusetts government had provided.
The French kept coming, though, and each new transatlantic war between France and England sparked new raids by the French and their tribal allies, who frequently planned them with the intention of holding hostages who could then be held for ransom. Deerfield was warned that it might face renewed attack when Queen Anne’s War broke out in 1702. But for months, nothing disturbed Deerfield’s quiet, and the town grew complacent. They had no inkling that a massive raid—some 50 French and Canadian regulars and militia, plus up to 300 Abenakis, Hurons, Mohawks, Pennacooks, and Iroquois—was about to descend on them.
The predawn attackers were over the palisade and into Deerfield before any alarm could be raised, with the help of a significant snowstorm that had piled drifts up to the top of the 10-foot palisade. A rescue party from nearby Hatfield was forced to retreat, resisters were shot to death, and houses were broken into. The infant children of John Williams, among them, were among the fifty colonists killed, and 111 others were taken and forced onto a long march toward Canada.
The conditions of the march were reminiscent of Bataan: Anyone who could not keep up ( beginning with John Williams’s wife, Eunice, and eventually 18 others ) was simply tomahawked or starved. The Deerfield captives waited two months before arriving in Montreal, and the majority were then driven out of French or tribal settlements until they could be extorted. Jesuit missionaries visited their prisoners to encourage them to convert to Catholicism, while the tribes began integrating the English children into tribal life in order to replace their own losses in the war. Four Deerfielders escaped and made unfathomable travel back to Massachusetts. But in the end, only 59 of the Deerfield hostages were returned in a deal brokered in 1706, remarkably, 33 of them ( including John Williams ) restarted life in Deerfield.
From the first, the Deerfield raid was a sensation, and it became the source of one of the most influential” captivity narratives” written in colonial New England, John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. His son, Stephen, also survived captivity and went on to a career as a minister himself. His sister, Eunice, however, did not return. She instead converted to Catholicism and married a Mohawk man, François- Xavier Arosen.
Swanson receives Deerfield’s second story, which includes how the massacre was remembered, how that memory was changed over time, and how Deerfield transformed itself into an open-air museum that attempted to combine all the disparate elements of the Deerfield sacking into some sort of harmonious narrative. The so-called Indian door from a Deerfield house, still bearing the marks of numerous tomahawk blows, is the only actual physical remnant of the 1704 raid. However, that has not prevented Deerfield from appearing in a series of stories, from the early 20th century to a 2004 festival that featured representatives of the Abenaki, Huron, Pennacook, and Mohawk—even the French.
Swanson is not accusatory, he is also not romantic. The attackers committed some abominable deeds, and their heirs committed some abominable deeds. And one keeps both in mind because human fragility demands that we recall the atrocities of the past in order to remind ourselves not to repeat them in the present, and because human aspiration demands that we recognize the resilience of humanity, even in the most violent and unfair circumstances, and because human flourishing in the present necessitates a confidence that the past can be faced and accepted without flinching, without self-righteousness, and without falsehood or evasion. That will not make us optimists, but it will give us something better to feed on than despair.
The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in Early America
by James L. Swanson
Scribner, 336 pp.,$ 30
Allen C. Guelzo is director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in Princeton University’s James Madison Program and author of Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy and the American Experiment ( Knopf, 2024 ).
