America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (7 page)

While the practice of running the gauntlet has provided Hollywood with some vivid moments, its true intent may not have been cruel torture for the tribe’s entertainment. “Running the gauntlet was an initiation rite common among certain Indian tribes,” notes historian Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola. “Many terrified captives described as torture what was apparently intended to test the survival of the fittest and to serve as an introduction—even a welcome—upon arrival at an Indian village.”5 This interpretation fits in neatly with another of colonial America’s most famous captivity stories: after the | 47 \

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founding of Jamestown in 1607, Captain John Smith lay prostrate with his head upon a stone, as he later told it, about to be brained by an Indian war club, when the maiden Pocahontas lay across his body and saved his life. The legendary incident is now acknowledged to have been an initiation ceremony rather than a threatened execution. Or, at most, it was a symbolic execution in which the Indians asserted their dominion over the captive Smith.

But for Hannah Dustin and Mary Neff, such distinctions would have offered small solace. To them, it must have seemed that death or survival as servants to the Indian family were their only prospects.

Upon learning the Indians’ plan to take them north to Canada, Hannah Dustin set her mind to escape.

In the predawn hours of March 31, as her captors lay asleep, Hannah roused Mary and Samuel. The three resourceful New Englanders found tomahawks and, with little difficulty or hesitation, dispatched ten of the sleeping Indians—six of them children—sparing only an old woman and a small boy.

At Hannah Dustin’s suggestion, young Samuel Lennardson had acquired the grim skills to carry out this plan from one of the Indians. A famous later account imagined the deadly tutorial session: “ ‘ Strike ’em there,’ said he placing a finger on his temple and he also showed him how to take off the scalp. . . . The English boy struck the Indian who had given him the information, on the temple, as he had been directed.”6

Setting out from this horrific bloodletting, Hannah Dustin was sufficiently self-possessed to return to the wigwam to take the Abenakis’ scalps in order to prove what she and the other two escapees had done. The Massachusetts Bay Courts had enacted a bounty for the scalps of Indians three years earlier, in 1694. Although the bounty had since been reduced and then repealed, Hannah Dustin thought | 48 \

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it might be worth the effort if they not only made good their escape but profited from the ordeal as well. This extraordinarily plucky decision may have resulted from some mingling of Yankee thrift and Puritan work ethic, along with some of that legendary colonial American pioneer bravado—perhaps mixed with a measure of vengeance at the memory of what had been done to Hannah’s newborn child. With ten scalps wrapped in a linen kerchief—later to be displayed in Haverhill’s historical society—the trio scuttled all of the Indians’ canoes save one, and in that one they started out on their journey back to Haverhill, about sixty miles downriver.

Early this morning the deed was performed, and now, perchance, these tired women and this boy, their clothes stained with blood, and their minds racked with alternate resolution and fear, are making a hasty meal of parched corn and moosemeat, while their canoe glides under these pine roots whose stumps are still standing on the bank. They are thinking of the dead whom they have left behind on that solitary isle far up the stream, and of the relentless living warriors who are in pursuit. Every withered leaf which the winter has left seems to know their story, and in its rustling to repeat it and betray them. An Indian lurks behind every rock and pine, and their nerves cannot bear the tapping of a woodpecker. Or they forget their own dangers and their deeds in conjecturing the fate of their kindred, and whether, if they escape the Indians, they shall find the former still alive.

— H e n r y Dav i d Th o r e au,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)7

The two women and the young boy eventually reached the safety of Haverhill, and when word of their escape reached Boston, they | 49 \

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would be feted as heroes. Later brought to the seat of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the redeemed captives received a grand welcome. Although the bounty for scalps had actually expired, the Massachusetts General Court made a special case for the brave mother and her com-patriots. Accounts vary, but most agree that Hannah Dustin received a reward of £25, while Mary Neff and young Samuel split another £25—significant purses for colonial American farmers. All three also enjoyed hearty congratulations, along with a great many dinner invita-tions. In a short time, Hannah Dustin was the most famous woman in America.

This heroic tale of “redemption” and victory over the Indians, and by extension their French allies, was hailed in Puritan Massachusetts, possibly all the more because of Hannah Dustin’s somewhat disreputable family history. Her father, Michael Emerson, had been in legal trouble for abusing his Haverhill neighbors and family, which included nine children; six other children had died in infancy. In a time when corporal punishment of children was the norm, Emerson had been convicted and fined for “cruel and excessive beating” of one of his daughters. Another Emerson daughter, Mary, had been sentenced, along with her husband, to be whipped for the crime of fornication before marriage, a crime taken very seriously in Puritan Massachusetts. As David Hackett Fischer notes, “Even in betrothed couples, sexual in-tercourse before marriage was regarded as a pollution which had to be purged before they could take [their] place in society and—most important—before their children could be baptized.”8

Far more notoriously, Hannah’s unmarried sister Elizabeth— the victim of the earlier beating at her father’s hand and already the mother of one “fatherless” little girl—had been tried and convicted of infanticide for the strangling of infant twins; their paternity remained | 50 \

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a secret she took to the gallows. At Elizabeth Emerson’s hanging on June 8, 1693, Cotton Mather had preached a sermon he considered one of his best, using for his text Job 36:14: “They die in youth and their life is among the unclean.”9

Before Hannah Dustin’s exploits provided him with such a mother lode of material, Cotton Mather had gained great notoriety for his writings on witchcraft and for his central role in the Salem witch trials of 1692–93. His 1689 book,
Memorable Providences Relating to
Witchcrafts and Possessions,
had practically served as a textbook for the Salem prosecutions, and three of the five judges in the Salem trials were friends of his and members of his congregation. The son of Increase Mather, the equally illustrious and influential Puritan leader and president of Harvard College, Cotton Mather would now serve as the chief instrument in turning Hannah Dustin’s tale of captivity and vengeance into a Puritan parable of divine justice. In his accounts, Hannah’s perseverance triumphed over the twin perils of popery and native savagery.

In several pamphlets and later in his landmark 1702 book known as
The Ecclesiastical History of New England,
Mather repeated Dustin’s tale for its enormous propaganda value. It had all the ingredients the Puritan preacher needed for his purposes: depraved Indians—baby killers, no less—working in concord with the papist French, set against a virtuous Massachusetts wife and mother capable not only of saving herself and her fellow captives but also of striking a blow against the forces of idolatry and Satan. This despite the fact that Hannah Dustin was not a member of any church at the time. She officially joined Haverhill’s congregation only in 1724, at age sixty-seven. 10

Mather’s account made Hannah Dustin a colonial-era icon. Although overlooked or entirely forgotten by more recent American his-

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tory books, Dustin could lay claim to a singular distinction: a statue honoring her was unveiled in 1874, the first permanent statue of a woman erected in the United States. It immortalized Dustin, hatchet in one hand, scalps in the other.

While some details of Hannah Dustin’s extraordinary escape were undoubtedly embroidered upon as the story grew over time into regional legend, there was nothing at all extraordinary in the fact that Hannah Dustin and the others had been taken captive by Indians.

That was a risk that came with the territory in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century America, and throughout New England in particular.

One scholarly estimate counted more than 1,640 New Englanders taken hostage by Indians between 1675 and 1763. 11 Not all reacted as Hannah Dustin did. According to Carol Berkin’s history of colonial women, “at least one-third of the women taken to New France chose to remain, and at least 40 percent converted to Catholicism and married French husbands.”12 That was not a story Cotton Mather wished to explore.

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t h e t h r e at o f attack and capture posed by Indians was so preva-lent by the latter 1600s that the people of Massachusetts and other New England colonies must have slept with one eye open, a loaded gun at the ready. The reality of the perils they faced stands at odds with the comfortable, legendary American epic of the Puritan arrival, which extols rugged individuals seeking religious freedom in their “New Jerusalem” and sharing happy meals with the natives. The real story is, of course, far more complicated. It is a long, twisting tale of the struggle for power and land: the struggle between native Americans and European settlers; the epic contest among France, the Neth-

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erlands, Spain, and England for control of the New World; and the struggle of religious dissenters in a place that tolerated none.

Many of these threads come together in the history of another Puritan woman who did not share Hannah Dustin’s fate or fame. Like tens of thousands of other Puritans, Anne Hutchinson and her family came to New England to escape religious and political persecution in their English homeland. No doubt she arrived with an impassioned dream of creating what Puritan leader John Winthrop famously called “a city upon a hill” when he led the great Puritan migration to New England in 1630. But for the outspoken, headstrong, and eventually rebellious Anne Hutchinson, that vision took a different course. She found herself locked in a contest of wills that captured all of the conflicting forces at play in early New England.

Born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1591, Anne Marbury was the daughter of a Cambridge-educated minister and Puritan reformer. Although most girls did not attend school then, young Anne did learn to read, at her father’s insistence. Literacy, and the ability to read the Bible in particular, were essential to Puritans, who believed in the iner-rancy of Scripture, and the rise of the printing press had made it possible for many people to own a Bible, if no other books. 13

The exception also likely to be found in the Marbury household and other English Protestant homes at the time was John Foxe’s
Book
of Martyrs
(1563), a history of Christian martyrs through the ages, highlighting the worst excesses of the Inquisition and focusing especially on the persecution and gruesome torture of Protestants during the reign of Catholic queen Mary Tudor. A work of Protestant propaganda, the book included lurid descriptions of the racking, boiling oil, burnings, and other tortures suffered under “Bloody Mary” as she attempted to restore Catholicism to England. Foxe’s treatise was an essential build-

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ing block in the formation of a nationalist and Protestant identity in England. Queen Mary’s successor, her Protestant half sister Elizabeth, ordered that a copy of
The Book of Martyrs
be secured at every parish lectern in England.

At age twenty-one, following her father’s death, Anne married William Hutchinson, a prosperous cloth merchant, and the couple settled in Alford, where Anne began working as a midwife and healer who grew herbs and was familiar with their use, especially in childbirth.

The Hutchinsons joined the congregation of Reverend John Cotton, a highly regarded young Puritan minister, who had been “born again”

and attracted an avid following. Hutchinson became a devoted follower who proclaimed Cotton’s message, especially to those women for whom she served as midwife.

The Hutchinsons’ world was shaken at its foundations in 1626, when King Charles I succeeded to the English throne and began a new round of persecution of Protestants in an attempt to restore the Church of England’s ties to Roman Catholicism. Adding in no small measure to the Puritans’ unhappiness was a “forced loan” to the throne that the king had decreed. In 1629, when the House of Commons balked at these changes, Charles I dissolved Parliament, which was to English Puritans “the last bulwark against heresy and sin,” in Edmund S. Morgan’s phrase. The strife accelerated in 1633 when Charles’ chief political advisor, William Laud, was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Royal patronage and parish appointments were now in the hated Laud’s hands.

England’s Puritans howled. But with Laud’s accession to the most powerful post in the Church of England, the suppression of Protestants accelerated. In addition to instituting changes in the decoration of churches and forms of Anglican worship, all of which reeked of popery | 54 \

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to Puritans, Laud believed in the divine authority of kings—undoubtedly an appealing notion to his patron, King Charles I. As archbishop, Laud also held to the theological belief that men could win salvation by their own willpower and acts. This went beyond the order of worship and church decorations. To the Puritans, it was pure heresy.

Largely derived from Calvin’s teachings, the Puritan view held that salvation—what they called “justification”—came only through God’s grace. Believing that God had chosen before birth those who were to be saved, the “elect,” the Puritans believed that no ritual, no purchase of indulgences, nor even good works made any difference. Even those granted divine grace had to constantly prove their worthiness by their actions. This endless striving to cleanse one’s soul, called “sanctification,” literally meant behaving like a “saint,” which referred to those set apart by God, not the saints canonized by the Catholic Church.