John Williams (New England minister)
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John Williams (10 December 1664 – 12 June 1729)[
Four of his five surviving children were also released in 1706 and ultimately returned to Deerfield. But his youngest daughter Eunice, seven when captured, had been adopted by a Mohawk family at Kahnawake and became thoroughly assimilated. The French would not take by force captives adopted by their Mohawk allies. She married a Mohawk man and had three children with him.
Williams was a central voice in the smallpox inoculation controversy of 1721. He was an uncle of the notable pastor and
Early life, education and marriage
John Williams was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1664, the son of Samuel Williams (1632–98) and Theoda Park (1637–1718). His grandfather Robert had immigrated there from England with his family about 1638. John had local schooling. Later he attended Harvard College, where he graduated in 1683.
His marriage to Eunice Mather connected him to some of the leading clergy in the colony. She was a niece of Rev
Career
Williams was ordained to the ministry in 1688, and settled as the first pastor in Deerfield. The frontier town in western Massachusetts was one of several on the upper Connecticut River; they were vulnerable to the attacks of French forces and their Native American allies from New France and northern New England. There was no settled border between the villages of these two colonies.
The local
Frontier warfare
In 1702, with the outbreak of
The French depended on their First Nations allies in this raid:
On the night of 28 February 1704, approximately 300 French and Indian soldiers took 109 residents captive, besides killing a total of 56 men, women and children, including two of Williams' children (six-year-old son John Jr., and six-week-old daughter Jerushah) and his African slave Parthena. The raiding party led the Williams' and other families on a march and water travel over 300 miles (480 km) of winter landscape to Canada. En route to Quebec, a Mohawk killed Williams' wife Eunice after she fell while trying to cross a creek, and Frank, another African slave. They killed others, mostly the vulnerable older and youngest people who could not keep up. But they also showed compassion; in his memoir, Williams noted that an Indian had carried his young daughter Eunice when she got tired. Some captives died along the way. Williams remained steadfast and encouraged the other captives with prayer and Scripture along their journey to Quebec. The large party had seven weeks of hard overland travel to reach Fort Chambly at the mouth of the Richelieu River, where it flows into the St. Lawrence River in what is now Quebec.[1]
Captivity and release
While captive, Williams recorded his impressions of French colonial life in New France. Private families treated him courteously; Jesuit missionaries included him at their table for meals, and he was often given comfortable lodgings, including a feather bed. Upon Pierre Maisonnat's release by Boston authorities, Williams was released by Quebec Governor
When his exchange was finally arranged in late 1706, Williams was forced to leave in Quebec his daughter
After celebrations in Boston and giving a sermon there in December 1706, Williams returned to Deerfield. While four of his children had also been freed from captivity, for a time he continued arrangements for having them live with family until the new family house was completed by the community. Stephen lived with an uncle in Roxbury, where he attended school; Samuel lived with another uncle in Charlestown; and Esther lived with Stoddard relatives in Northampton.[3]
In the winter of 1706/1707, Williams wrote a narrative of his captivity called
In summer 1707 Williams's new house was completed. In September of that year, he remarried to Abigail Bissell, a widow from Connecticut and first cousin to his late wife through the Stoddard family. At that time, he collected his children from varied locations in Massachusetts and had them return to Deerfield.[3]
Williams lived and worked in Deerfield until his death in 1729. He made efforts to keep in touch with Eunice and continued to try to persuade her to return to Massachusetts, as did her brother Stephen, who followed his father into the ministry. She did not return until after her father's death.
Williams was a minister of the favored New England Puritans in the same era as Samuel Willard, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, and Solomon Stoddard. He died shortly before the rise of the Great Awakening. He published several sermons.
Inoculation controversy
In 1721 a smallpox epidemic broke out in Boston. Prominent ministers such as Increase Mather and his son, Cotton Mather, advocated the use of inoculations. Rev. Williams emerged as one of their strongest opponents, publishing, with James Franklin (Benjamin's brother), a treatise against the Mathers entitled "Several arguments proving, that inoculating the small pox is not contained in the law of physick, either natural or divine, and therefore unlawful".
Death
Williams died in Deerfield in 1729. His son Stephen became a minister and continued to live there.
It was not until 1741 that Eunice Williams and her husband went to Massachusetts for the first time, persuaded by her brother Stephen's efforts to keep in touch. She made two other visits, including an extended one with her children, but lived in Kahnawake for the rest of her life.[1] The last known survivor of the raid, Eunice Williams, also known by her Mohawk and married name as Marguerite Kanenstenhawi Arosen, died on 26 November 1785.
Notes
References
- ISBN 0-394-55782-4
- Haefeli, Evan and Kevin Sweeney. "Revisiting the Redeemed Captive: New Perspectives on the 1704 Attack on Deerfield," in After King Philip's War, Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Colin G. Calloway, editor. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997, pp. 28–71. ISBN 0-87451-819-9(pbk.)
- Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, colonialism, and the cant of conquest . New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976. ISBN 0-393-00830-4
- ISBN 0-679-44686-9(hc)
- Melvoin, Richard I., New England Outpost, War and Society in Colonial Deerfield. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989. ISBN 0-393-02600-0
- Sheldon, George. A History of Deerfield Massachusetts: The Times when and the People by whom it was Settled, Unsettled, and Resettled, with a Special Study of the Indian Wars in the Connecticut Valley. With Genealogies, Deerfield, MA: 1895 (two volumes)
- Williams, John, edited by Edward W. Clark. The Redeemed Captive. Amherst, MA: The ISBN 0-87023-217-7(Note: First published in 1707.)
- Williams, Stephen W. (1837). Biographical Memoir of Reverend John Williams, with Appendix, containing the Journal of his Son, Reverend Stephen Williams, during his Captivity (Greenfield, Massachusetts: 1837).