The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America | John Putnam Demos

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America | John Putnam Demos | The extraordinary tale and religious journey of a New England girl

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The Unredeemed Cap...

	The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America John Putnam Demos Vintage, 1995 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
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Nominated for the National Book Award, this book is set in colonial Massachusetts where, in 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.

An Ethno-historical Masterwork

John Demos is a pioneer among a newer school of social historians of the American past, focusing on family life and interpersoanl relations of ordinary people rather than deeds of the famous and/or infamous. I read this book many years ago, but I've been reminded of it by reading some accounts of the war between the English and the Wampanoags led by King Philip in 1675. The events of this story of captivity took place a full generation later, and this time the "enemies" were Catholicized Mohawks with a base of assimilation among the French in Canada. The girl whom they kidnapped, astonishingly for the Puritans and ironically for us, converted to Catholicism to marry an Indian man and chose to identify with her captors for the rest of her life. The editorial summary from the Kirkus Review is quite ample:

"From an obscure and isolated event, Demos (History/Yale), a Bancroft Prize-winning historian explodes the easy oppositions between Christian and savage, Indian and white, nature and civilization--oppositions on which the narrative of colonial American history has traditionally been built. In 1704, Mohawk Indians, converted to Catholicism by Jesuit missionaries, allied with the French settlers in Canada, attacked the frontier village of Deerfield, Massachusetts, killing 50 of the very young and old and kidnapping 112 more. They then marched the prisoners to Canada, killing 20 more women and several children along the way as acts of mercy, including the wife and infant son of John Williams, a Puritan minister and a prize hostage. While he and his surviving sons were ultimately released, his daughter, Eunice, who was seven at the time of her capture, remained with her captors, converted to Catholicism, and at the age of 16 married an Indian, with whose people she chose to spend the rest of her life. Among Demos's narrative achievements is his representation of the religious, cultural, political, economic, and psychological orientations that collided in this episode, the web of fears, justifications, and powers revealed in the process of encounter: the Puritan fear of the wilderness, the English fear of the French, the Jesuit missionary fever, the French-Canadian greed, the Indian interpretation of Christianity, and the arrogance with which Puritans interpreted a massacre as an expression of God's will, of redemption and resurrection. This thought-provoking study explores the multiple communities to which apparently simple people belonged and how their domestic lives were overtaken by political events. Fascinating, lively, and especially timely to an age struggling to understand the implications of its own cross-cultural encounters. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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The extraordinary tale and religious journey of a New England girl

A walk through the shady streets of Old Deerfield, Massachusetts, presents many fine views -- the stately old homes, the colonial doorways, the lonely Union Army sentinel atop the town's sandstone monument, and Frank Boyden's splendid prep school, Deerfield Academy. A stroller then comes to the stone markers that recall moments of terror and bravery. On February 29, 1704, the tiny settlement at Deerfield was attacked by the French and the Indians. Many inhabitants, and not a few attackers, met their deaths from musket, tomahawk, blade, and fire.

Eunice Williams, 7, daughter of the settlement's minister, was one of the 112 captives seized by the raiding party. They were taken in an eight-week forced march through the snow across Vermont and south Quebec. Only 92 reached Canada; Eunice's mother was one of those killed along the way.

In Canada, many of the Deerfield children were placed with French Canadian families. They were ultimately ransomed ("redeemed") by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and returned home a few years later. Eunice, however, was one of those given to the Kahnawake Indians in a village not far from Montreal. The French could not peremptorily order the tribe to return her, so talks were delayed. When at least she sat face to face with a delegate from New England, in 1713, she refused to return to Massachusetts, for she had become a member of the tribe, been baptized a Catholic at the Kahnawake mission, and married. Her name was now Marguerite.

It was the lifetime work of her father and brother Stephen to seek her return to New England. Despite his prayers and exertions on her behalf, Eunice's father was never reconciled that his daughter had become an Indian and a Catholic. Stephen was in time accomodated to her decision, her marriage, and her honored station among the Kahnawake as the mother-in-law of a chief, and perhaps her conversion.

Professor Demos's book helps us recall that in the eighteenth century, immense chasms of national loyalty, religion, and form of government divided New England from Canada. One was English, Puritan, and congregational; the other French, Catholic, and feudal. The settlers in both colonies regarded the Indians as "savages." Even the modern reader can feel the agonies involved when Eunice crossed these great cultural divides.

Demos's scholarship is extraordinary. The primary source materials on the massacre, the exchanges, Eunice's life in Canada, and the efforts of her relatives to retrieve her -- the documents, the letters, the diaries -- would probably fit on the top of a desk. Yet from these spare materials, Demos has fleshed out an amazing human story. His use of the sociological and ethnographic materials on the Canadian tribes -- some relying on the Jesuit Relations -- is masterful.

Eunice's story ends with a notation in a Canadian parish register in 1785 -- Father Ducharme buried Marguerite, the mother-in-law of the chief Annasetegen. Demos then movingly portrays her death and her passage to another life through the lenses of the three faiths that touched her life -- Puritan, Catholic, and Indian.

There is an epilogue. In 1837, a group of Indians that included some of Eunice's grandchildren visited Deerfield to pay respects at the graves of her parents. Deerfield's pastor, John Fessenden, preached a sermon to his congregation and the visitors. Just a generation before the great struggle over slavery, Fessenden pondered the "gloomy, repulsive view" that races have fundamental differences. The view engenders in turn jealousy and aversion, enmity, and finally warfare, he said. Looking over the Indian and New England cousins seated before him, he blessed the "workings of that mysterious providence, which as mingled your blood with ours, and which ... admonishes that God ... hath made of one blood all nations of men."

Thanks to John Demos, Eunice Marguerite's soul -- like the stones at Deerfield -- reaches across the centuries with a message.

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Impeccable scholarship, vital insights into culture conflicts of the past, and present

This wonderful book is the best kind of popular history: uncompromising in the standards of its scholarship, yet accessible and fascinating to a broad, non-academic audience of readers interested in the nature of cultural identity, and clashing/co-existing societies. It tells the story of one family forcibly ruptured into two worlds, when an Indian raid carries off family members, including a seven-year-old daughter so thoroughly embedded in her new, Indian (sorry; the tribe are not native Americans but a Canadian offshoot of various native groups) world that by the time her "redemption" is possible, she no longer wishes to return to the world of her birth. Insights, and ironies abound. (Her Puritan family is more distressed at her succumbing to "Popery" than to nativism.) The author meticulously collates, and limits himself to, documented historical data, yet does not hesitate to draw broader, thoughtful conclusions, always delineating the border between provable fact and well-founded projection. This is a work of both socio-psychological depth, and tremendous historic integrity. Whether you come to the book for interesting historical fact, or for deep insight into the nature of cultural intersections and conflicts, you will be well rewarded.

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Interesting history; less than successful attempt at telling it in an engaging fashion

John Demos, the author, is in the upper echelon of academic and professional historians. As we general lay readers know all too well, far too few academic historians write history that is interesting to anyone other than (perhaps) their colleagues or a captive audience of students. From the Preface to THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE, it appears that Demos sought to do his small part to address that situation by writing an academically solid history of a fascinating episode from Colonial America yet doing so "yielding fully" to "a narrative voice."

While I commend the objective, the implementation falls short -- or maybe it is that I just don't care for Demos's particular "narrative voice." In much of THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE, the writing is far too choppy and informal. Demos also has a tendency to underscore and explain the obvious, which contributes to the overall impression that he is somewhat smug and condescending. His fellow academic historian of colonial times, David Hackett Fischer, was much more successful in "Paul Revere's Ride" (published around the same time as THE UNREDEEMED CAPITVE) in writing a highly readable, yet academically rigorous, work of history.

But withal, THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE is interesting. It tells the story of the Williams family, originally of Deerfield, Massachusetts. John Williams was the minister of the town in 1704, when it was raided by Indians and French from Canada, who killed 48 and captured 112, taking them back to Canada, including Williams and five of his children. Williams spent nearly three years in captivity before he was released ("redeemed" in the parlance of the time), and four of his five children also were released after varying periods of captivity. Williams resumed his career as a minister and he became the patriarch of an extended family that was one of the leading families in 18th-Century colonial Massachusetts.

"The Unredeemed Captive" was his daughter Eunice, who was seven at the time of the raid in 1704. She was taken to live in a large settlement of Catholicized Mohawk Indians near Montreal. As things developed, Eunice had no desire to return to her family or English (i.e., Puritan) life in Massachusetts. Instead, she married an Indian and spent the rest of her 89 years as a fully integrated and respected member of the Indian community. The central story and drama of the book revolve around the repeated efforts of the Williams family, and even Massachusetts society at large, to persuade and entice Eunice to return to Massachusetts and colonial English ways of life, including, of course, Puritan religious practices. Indeed, at times it appears that Eunice's adopted Catholic faith caused greater consternation among those back in Massachusetts than her "savage" marriage and lifestyle.

The cultural conflicts are quite intriguing. But part of the discussion of the Puritan side of those conflicts consists of extended and, to me, mind-numbingly boring analyses of Puritan sermons and writings. Curiously, the Puritans, with their religious conventions and tropes, are far stranger to me than the Mohawk Indians.

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Good Early American History

This is an insightful and educational book about the early Puritan society as they struggle for identity in America. Their biggest obstacles include French Catholics and Native Americans. While this book has a place on scholarly bookshelves, it is not my cup of tea.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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