After the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, relations between
the newly arrived British settlers and long-established native peoples were uneasy
at best. A major source of tension between the two groups was their differing
approaches to the land. The Native Americans who lived in what is now New England
hunted and gathered nuts to eat, but they also farmed, with corn as their principal
crop. When the settlers arrived, the Native Americans focused on the land’s
resources, assuming the resources would still be at their disposal even if the new
settlers used the land as well. The colonists, in contrast, came from Britain, where
plots of land separate from common land were individually fenced off as areas for
livestock to graze. Livestock suddenly appeared on land the Native Americans had
planned to use for resources, a conflict that became one of the causes of King
Philip’s War (also called Metacom’s War), named for the leader of the Wampanoag
Indians.
The Native Americans and the colonists had lived peacefully together for
nearly fifty years before the war broke out in 1675, but their calm coexistence
ended as the colonists demanded more land from the Native Americans, who felt their
culture was being threatened. Deep-seated resentment bubbled to the surface, and
neighbors became enemies. The war, marked by Native American raids on the colonists’
settlements and the colonists’ retaliation, didn’t end until Philip’s death in 1676.
Chaos and violence characterized the raids on British towns: in Lancaster, for
example, a number of Native Americans arrived at sunrise and opened fire on the
town, using guns they had acquired in trade or in warfare with other settlers.
In addition to killing some colonists, the attackers took captives, not only
in Lancaster but elsewhere. By taking settlers captive, King Philip (also known as
Metacom, though not mentioned by that name in The Sovereignty and Goodness
of God) and his tribesmen gained an effective bargaining tool: the
Native Americans could trade their captives for ransom in the form of money,
weapons, or provisions. The attack on Lancaster in 1675 was one of the earliest
raids, but it did not come entirely without warning. Prior to the attack, rumors had
circulated that the Wampanoag tribes were planning violent raids on the frontier
settlements of what is now western Massachusetts, with Lancaster named as the first
target. Some settlers, including the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, took these rumors
and warnings seriously and traveled to Boston to ask the government there for
military aid. Help did not come soon enough, however, and the attack was
devastating. Many settlers in the town were killed or wounded, and others, including
Mary Rowlandson and several of her family members, were taken captive.
Though born in England, Mary Rowlandson, whose maiden name was White, moved
with her parents to the Massachusetts Bay Colony sometime before 1638.
Fifteen years later, the family moved to Lancaster, where they were considered
wealthy. Though Lancaster was then on the far western frontier of British
settlements, life was relatively peaceful. In 1656, Mary married the Reverend Joseph
Rowlandson. By 1675, she had had four children, the eldest of whom had died as a
young boy. Lancaster was a close-knit community. Members of Rowlandson’s extended
family, including her sisters and their husbands and children, lived nearby, and
neighbors were friends and acquaintances. This closeness no doubt made the attack
all the more devastating: what had been a happy and comfortable extended family was
torn apart, with some family members dead and others taken captive and then
separated from one another in the wilderness. Such was the situation for
Rowlandson’s family and for other families in the village.
Faced with the chaos of the attack and the trials of an experience in
captivity, Rowlandson turned to Puritan theology to make sense of it all. Her
devotion was not surprising, since her husband was a minister and Christian thought
and practice were central in Puritans’ lives. The Puritans were known for their
piety, and they saw themselves as a “community of saints.” At the same time,
however, their society felt scared and guilty. They worried they were not pious
enough and feared, perhaps unconsciously, that leaving England had been the wrong
choice. Their worldview, meanwhile, was marked by a belief that everything happened
for a reason, which suggested that a lesson could be learned from every experience.
Rowlandson did not, therefore, see her captivity as an act of random or undeserved
violence. Rather, she struggled to come to terms with her experiences and to
understand why God had chosen to punish and then save her. She documented her
struggle in her narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, the
true story of her captivity and return to civilization.
Rowlandson’s book, first printed in 1682, is the first of a genre that then
began to flourish: the captivity narrative. Some of these narratives, such as
Rowlandson’s, were told from the first-person point of view. Other narratives, such
as that of Mary Jemison (who was taken captive in the 1750s, three-quarters of a
century after Rowlandson’s captivity), were told in the first person but were
written down by writers or interviewers rather than by the captives themselves.
Still others were delivered as sermons, such as the 1697 sermon by the famous Boston
preacher Cotton Mather, which concerns the separate captivities of two young women,
Hannah Swarton and Hannah Dustan. Significantly, while both men and women were taken
captive by Native Americans, the captivity narrative as a genre consists primarily
of the captivity experiences of women, perhaps because of their perceived
helplessness and innocence. The narratives also share a common religious framework:
they use the same vocabulary of suffering, exile in the wilderness, and ultimate
redemption. Rowlandson’s narrative served as an example for later imitators, but
later narratives were not mere mimicry. Rather, the persistence of the genre for
well over a century suggests that the captivity narrative was a way to express some
of the deepest tensions present in colonial and early American society.
