Puritan Captivity Narratives and Identity
in the American Revolution
Master Thesis American Studies
Jesse Milan Beks
10636382
Supervisor: Eduard van de Bilt
29-01-2019
Table of contents
Abstract 4
Introduction 5
I Puritan Conceptions of Good and Evil, the Captivity Narrative Structure
and the Development of a Secular Counter-Stream 10
II The Puritan Captivity Narrative as a Revolutionary Metaphor 21
III The Emergence of a Revolutionary Captivity Genre 32
IV Ethan Allen’s Captivity Narrative: The Puritan Literary Influence
on a Rough Backwoodsman and Political Opportunist 37
V John Dodge’s Captivity Narrative: The Puritan Captivity Structure Reversed 45
VI The Peculiarity of the Revolutionary Captivity Genre Revealed 50
Conclusion 57
Abstract
Jesse Milan Beks, 2019
A remarkable development during the Revolutionary era is the revival of Puritan captivity narratives. The rhetorical legacy of the Puritans served as a useful instrument for the definition of American ideas about identity by Revolutionary writers. The circumstances created by the American conflict with Britain made patriotic writers and publishers develop a new interpretation of the Puritan captivity mythology, which was used for Revolutionary propaganda. This thesis aims to explain how the Puritan captivity narrative helped Americans to frame the Revolutionary cause, and how it worked as a prescription for action in the struggle for national independence. The thesis discusses some of the major captivity narratives in the literature of colonial America in order to explain a significant, but often underestimated addition to the development of American frontier literature.
Introduction
Myth-narratives express the unconscious premises, the patterns of thought, perceptions and sensitivities that instruct the psyche of a culture. They are built upon both individual and collective experience, thus drawing on the deeply underlying structures of human behavior on the one hand and the singularities of human history on the other. Hence they connect individual particularities with universal ideas. Narratives of identity are archetypal and often contained or hidden in daily cultural phenomena like journals and literature, or in oral form by the stories people tell about their lives and the way they perceive the world around them. The material circumstances and peculiarities of a specific moment in history generate the unique ways in which people understand their lives. Besides defining an identity by portraying the worldview of a human culture and summarizing in which ways it relates to others, a myth can also serve as a prescription for action. A myth is built up by words, concepts, and images, which makes it a powerful tool that can determine the direction of history. It provides a framework through which an experience can be understood, and by exemplifying it on its own terms it outlines a suitable way to react to it.
In Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1978) Sacvan Bercovitch deals with the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” and its importance for the development of American culture. He traces the evolution of the “myth of America” from the Puritans into the Civil War era, through their most significant literary form, named the “Jeremiad” in Perry Miller’s eponymous essay.1 The Puritans managed to combine spiritual with secular components, by which they formed an idea of exclusivity and world mission through passionate devotion, but also developed notable practical flexibility in order to integrate into the American environment. The ‘Jeremiad’ was the rhetorical vehicle by which American clerics in later days encouraged their people to defend the civil and religious freedoms of the Protestant colonies against the papal French and heathen Indian antichrists. By the early 1770s the British rulers had become the true antichrist and were attributed similar characteristics as the Indians and French had before them, and became regarded as the suppressors of those liberties.2 Throughout the American Revolution all the assets of the ‘Jeremiad’ were invoked in the name of liberty. The Puritan mythology became self-validating as its promulgators proclaimed the new Revolutionary Exodus from Britain.
1 Miller, P., (1953) “Errand into the Wilderness”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1. (3-32) 11. 2 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (Cambridge,
A remarkable development in the history of American frontier literature is the sudden revival of the Puritan captivity narrative during the Revolutionary period. Patriotic writers and publishers utilized the Puritan captivity narrative structure to promote the cause for independence from Great Britain. Hereby they used a specific and narrow interpretation of the Puritan literary framework, which particularly focuses on the cultural contrasts between the captor and captives. They used it as a means to formulate a new unique American identity that was significantly different from the British. Moreover, they pointed to the Puritan captivity mythology as a foundational American source. The development of a strong contrast between Americans and the ‘other’ was used in order to mobilize Americans to support the Revolutionary cause. Thus, the Puritan captivity narrative contributed to the growing American awareness of identity and as a justification for action to enforce independence from Great Britain. The specifically strict interpretation of the Puritan captivity experience that the Revolutionaries used becomes apparent when the Revolutionary captivity narratives are placed in context with the wider development of American captivity narratives and frontier literature in the late eighteenth century.
This thesis delves into the mythological elements of the Puritan captivity narrative that appear in several captivity narratives written during the Revolutionary era between 1775 and 1783, while keeping in mind the wider developments in the American captivity genre. Several republished Puritan accounts and original Revolutionary captivity narratives are studied in light of the particular circumstances created by the American Revolution, to show how they stand out against the developments in the wider genre of frontier literature. In Regeneration
Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973) historian and cultural
critic Richard Slotkin describes an evolution of secularization of the American captivity narrative, away from the traditional Puritan narrative style, toward the end of the eighteenth century.3 With this argument in mind the reversion to the Puritan literary model during the American Revolution seems curious. Revolutionary captivity narratives of the late eighteenth century were indeed subject to changes that paralleled those of the exploration and hunter narratives associated with John Filson’s semi-fictional The Life and Adventures of Col. Daniel
Boone (1784), especially in their attitude toward Indians, but on the other hand utilized the
Puritan image of the Indian as a metaphor for the new British enemy.
3 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier, 1600-1860
The thesis starts with giving analysis of the main components of the Puritan captivity mythology that function as the building blocks for the literary structure of Revolutionary captivity narratives. The Puritan captivity narratives contain some of the main mythical materials that make the ‘Jeremiad’, being initiation, death, resurrection, guilt, and redemption, imagined in an archetypal quest through the dark wilderness. The second chapter focuses on the renewed interest in two major Puritan captivity narratives, written by Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637-1711) and John Williams (1664-1729), and discusses how these accounts went through a process of revising, editing, and republishing by Revolutionary propagandists. It also shines a light on the rhetoric in Revolutionary journals and newspapers that reflect some narrative patterns of the Puritan captivity narratives as described above.
Then, the third chapter is concerned with the emergence of an actual Revolutionary captivity genre. During the American Revolution the narratives of the experiences written by prisoners of war helped those fighting for independence from Great Britain to formulate a definition of their own identity. The accounts of American prisoners of war often emphasized the cruel treatment by British guards, helping the people who supported the Revolutionary cause to point out the moral difference between themselves and their enemy. The fourth and fifth chapters give an extensive analysis of two influential Revolutionary captivity narratives written by Ethan Allen (1738-1789) and John Dodge (1751-1800). The two narratives show how narrowly filtered interpretations of the Puritan captivity narratives were used by these Revolutionary heroes, but also how, in different ways, they go along with the changes happening in the frontier literature of the late eighteenth century. The sixth and final chapter turns back to Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, and by using a different mode of interpretation tries to pin down the peculiarities of the way in which it was used in Revolutionary narratives.
The fact that the Puritan analogy and the implied comparison between Indians and the British turned out to be so appealing to Revolutionary authors shows us how deep the Puritan confrontation with the wilderness ran through the American conscience. It is not to say that the Puritans were particularly responsible for any attributes of an ‘American identity’ (whatever that is). They did not invent guilt, individualism, a Protestant work ethic, constitutional republicanism, or any other concepts associated with the ‘myth of America’. But their significance for the American culture lies in the sphere of rhetoric, or the scriptural
foundations they created on which ideas about identity could be built, specifically in times of crisis, as a source of consistency and cohesion.4
The rhetorical structure of the ‘Jeremiad’ allowed for a gradual transition of focus over the years from an ideal religious world to a secular one based on Enlightenment principles.5 Through this transition the metaphorical potential of the Puritan ideology proved to be strikingly relevant for American writers and publishers in the Revolutionary era and beyond, though Puritan orthodoxy seemed to have vanished by that time. Yet, the implicit nature of the Puritan rhetoric also attracts people in different times to use the Puritan literary framework for their own agenda. This makes it necessary for the contemporary historian to pay close attention to the contextual framework and interpretive approach of the people that build their own ideology upon the Puritan literary tradition. This is especially true for the captivity narratives written in the heat of the Revolutionary conflict, which are the main focus of this study.
The richness of Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative, and the great amount of symbolism in it that was used in Revolutionary captivity narratives makes it the cornerstone of this research project. Besides Ethan Allen and John Dodge there are around a dozen known accounts that can be regarded as Revolutionary captivity narratives that carry a political load expressing Revolutionary issues. Yet, Allen’s and Dodge’s accounts are most convincing in revealing the complexity of the conflict, showing continuity and transformation, overlap and contradiction with both the seventeenth-century Puritan captivity mythology and the wider genre of contemporary frontier literature of the 1770s.
In terms of historiography Richard Slotkin’s scholarship is of high significance for any study that focuses on the American captivity narrative, and besides Sacvan Bercovitch’ work forms one of the main points of departure in this study. Both scholars in different ways link ideological dilemmas during different stages in American history with the Puritan mythology anchored in the captivity literature. Similarly there is a comprehensive amount of scholarship on the situation of American prisoners during the Revolutionary war, as well as the cultural and ideological dimensions of the conflict. Curiously enough very few of these works pay attention to the Revolutionary captivity genre on itself in light of the Puritan literature from which it inherited its structural basis. Therefor the revival of the Puritan captivity genre
4 Bercovitch, S., (1982) “Rhetoric as Authority: Puritanism, the Bible, and the Myth of America”, Social
Conscience Information, Vol. 21, No. 1. (5-17) 5.
during the Revolutionary era is a subject that has often been undervalued as a significant addition to the legacy of American frontier literature, making new research on this subject a relevant addition to the academic field.
The goal of this thesis is look for particular ways in which Americans invoked the Puritan mythology during the Revolutionary era by specifically looking at captivity literature, while keeping a close watch on the distortion, exaggeration, and misinterpretation due to its profound yet abstruse nature. This study is by no means a history of the American Revolution, as it only focuses on historical events that give the necessary historical context to clarify the connection between the Puritan captivity narratives and the politics of the American Revolution. It neither aims to tell the history of the Puritans in New England, but rather impels the reader to identify the relevance of Puritan captivity literature in a popular insurgency that was mainly focused on political independence and national sovereignty.
I
Puritan Conceptions of Good and Evil, the Captivity Narrative
Structure, and the Development of a Secular Counter-Stream
The American captivity narrative developed in seventeenth-century colonial America, as a reaction to the peculiar position in which Puritan colonists found themselves, on the frontier of inscrutable wilderness populated by dark-skinned people who were so strange to them as to appear like demons. This confrontation came to them only after they had to break the traditional ties with their English homeland, in order to build up a new life in terms that more suited their religious principles. In a time of religious tensions, social disorder and great shifts occurring in the societal hierarchies in Europe these people decided to withdraw from English society completely, and run off into the wilderness to create a new one of their own. In England the religious and secular authorities, as well as most fellow parishioners and business associates opposed their spiritual aspirations, leading to the condemnation and persecution of Puritanism.6 Even the settlers themselves doubted their own intentions of redeeming thedemonic wilderness in a strange land for Jesus.
Wilderness is a temporary condition thro’ which we are passing to the Promised Land.7
The Puritan mission of redeeming the wilderness to build a ‘City upon a Hill’ became even more problematic by the character of their new environment.8 They migrated from
Jacobean and Elizabethan England, the world of Newton and Shakespeare, to live in a prehistoric wasteland, inhabited by what they regarded as subhuman creatures. The Puritans believed the material world to be corrupted in all its facets and were convinced that it required nothing less than a complete regeneration. In England many of them had made unsuccessful efforts to breathe new moral life into the depraved English church. In America they had to repeat this struggle, but this time on a more fundamental level because in their vision the Indian and the wilderness represented the most explicit symbols of the corrupted material world. Therefor, to subdue the Indian wilderness and make way for a New Jerusalem would
6 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689, (London, 2014) 93.
7 Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately
Executed in New England (London 1862); quoted in: Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind
(New Haven, CT 2001) 26.
8 John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), In: E.S. Morgan ed., Puritan Political Ideas,
be a much bigger victory over the Devil than reforming the obscured English church with its saints and ostentatious priests.
For the Puritans in seventeenth-century New England the conflict with Indians contained all aspects of social organization and stood at the core of their spiritual perceptions. Being in a small minority in a vast country many English settlers tended to give up parts of their own culture and adjust to the demands of life in the wilderness, thereby adapting to various aspects of the Indian way of life. Especially the second generation of settlers found out that certain Indian ways and methods could be both pleasant and commercially beneficial, causing fears among other Puritans for their communities to be ‘Indianized’. This suspicion about acculturation seems inevitable because their conception of the world simply had no ideological middle ground with that of the Indians, as their literature exposes:
The Natives of the Country now Possessed by the New-Englanders, had been forlorn and wretched Heathen ever since their first herding there; and tho’ we know not When or How those Indians first became Inhabitants of this mighty Continent, yet we may guess that probably the Devil decoy’d those miserable Salvages hither, in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his Absolute Empire over them.9
From the Puritan perspective the Indian embodied the dark forces of the earth, both in the outside world and the internal world of the individual conscience. Puritans tended toward a dualistic conception of good and evil, containing a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness, and found an archetype of it in their own confrontation with the Indians.10 Hence, racial conceptions of opposing forces that competed for civilizational victory on the frontier became essential to their spiritual experience. At the time that the conflict between Puritans and Indians began the first myth-conception of Anglo-American history became apparent in the literature of New England: the Puritan captivity narratives written between 1680 and 1720. They describe the experience of a person’s conversion and purification from sin through the suffering of a tribulation by captivity. The captivity experience takes place within the context of the battle between Christians and Indians, which
9 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England; from its first
Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord 1698. In Seven Books (Hartford 1858) 556.
10 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 128-129. Derounian, Kathryn Z., (1987) “Puritan Orthodoxy and the
‘Survivor Syndrome’ in Mary Rowlandson’s Indian Captivity Narrative”, Early American Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1. (82-93) 83.
is recognized as the conflict between the material world and the spiritual world, or the Devil and Jesus.
One of the first and most influential captivity narratives is that of Mary White Rowlandson, the wife of the minister of Lancaster, Massachusetts, who was captured by Algonquian Indians during King Philip’s War and held for eleven weeks and five days before being ransomed. The narrative describes Rowlandson’s journey through the wilderness as a hostage of the tribe and set out the method for dozens of authors and illustrates, representing the style and imagination of the Puritan captivity narrative better than any other. The account opens with a description of an idyllic life in the frontier settlement of Lancaster. However, the forces of darkness in both the natural world and the soul continually threaten the prosperity of the community. Mrs. Rowlandson describes how the wealth and convenience in the colony made her feel uncomfortable, making her wish that God would punish her to prove her discipline and will to live for him. God seemed to take heed of her prayers when unexpectedly darkness and fire emerged from the forest:
On the Tenth of February, 1675, Came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: Their first coming was about Sun-Rising; hearing the noise of some Guns, we looked out; several Houses were burning, and the Smoke ascending to Heaven. There were five persons taken in one house, the Father, and the Mother and a sucking Child, they knockt on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive.11
The story starts with the family being separated; the mother, representing its values and virtues, is captured and taken into the forest by evil intruders. Right away these alien beings present themselves as demons through their greed, excessive sensuality, and pleasure in savagery:
Oh the roaring, and singing and danceing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night... made the place a lifely resemblance of hell. And as miserable was the wast that was there made, of Horses, Cattle, Sheep, Swine, Calves, Roasting Pigs, and Fowl... some roasting, some lying burning, and some boyling to feed our merciless enemies... I asked them wither I might not lodge in the House that night to which they answered, what will you love English men still?.12
11 Mary White Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). All
quotations from: Charles H. Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York 1913) 118.
The family becomes even more disintegrated with the separation of the mother from her children, and her being moved deeper into the haunted wilderness.13 One of the aspects that make Rowlandson’s narrative so compelling is that time is not defined by hours or days, but in ‘removes’, meaning the number of physical transfers of the captive from one place to another, symbolizing the developing phases of alienation from the family, church, and community. Rowlandson’s use of this term can be interpreted to indicate her notion of being increasingly removed from her family as she travels with the Indians through the wilderness. It moreover implies an increasing psychological distance between her and the community despite the fact that the tribe traveled in a circle that almost led back to Lancaster.
Even though Rowlandson is captured by demons, she aims to uphold her spiritual purity by resisting several material enticements, as she refuses tobacco, rejects the worship of Indian gods and offers of marriage that could integrate her into the Indian community. This makes her treatment by the Indians worse, causing her to become so hungry that she impulsively steals the bread of another captured white child, the food that was actually given to the child by an old squaw in order for her not to get sick. This moment exposes the meaning of Mrs. Rowlandson’s suffering; she comes to understand that the Indians are not external devils, but rather a reflection of her own sins of contentment, self-indulgence, sexuality, and greed.
I then remembered how careless I had been of Gods holy time, how many Sabbaths I had lost and mispent, and how evily I had walked in Gods sight; which lay so close unto my spirit, that it was easie for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut of the thread of my life, and cast me out of his presence for ever. Yet the Lord still shewed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.14
As a result of this experience Rowlandson starts seeing herself as standing before God’s judgment as a black and Indianized soul, damned and with no chance of being redeemed. But by subjecting herself to God’s will Rowlandson manages to regenerate her spirit and cleanse it from her sins. The end of the narrative implies the need for constant renewal of the
13 During the sixth remove Rowlandson uses the phrase “I went along that day mourning and lamenting, leaving
farther my own Country, and traveling into the vast and howling wilderness (132), quoting the last two words directly from Deuteronomy 32:10 (King James Version). The Deuteronomic description of the wilderness typifies the Puritan imagination of the unexplored New World landscape. Michell R. Breitweiser, American
Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative, (Madison, WI 1990) 95-96.
psychological process of decline and recovery, suggesting the spiritual rebirth of other captives who wrote down their captivity experiences after her.
The mythological potential of Rowlandson’s captivity narrative becomes even more explicit when placed in context with other Puritan literature about Indian captivity. Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was an influential Puritan minister in New England, author, and pamphleteer, who is today mostly remembered for his involvement in the Salem Witch Trials. His narrative “A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning” (1693) portrays Mather’s curing of a bewitched girl named Mercy Short, during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. The seventeen-year-old orphan Mercy was captured during an Indian raid and became possessed by the devil during her captivity. Mather was a professional spiritual healer and called in to expel the demons from Mercy’s soul after she was liberated and moved to Boston.
In the narrative Mather works within the Puritan captivity framework but starts where Rowlandson’s account ended, as the captive is physically returned to Boston but is psychologically estranged from God by her experience of captivity. Mather’s job is to complete Mercy’s rescue by driving the Indian demons from the wilderness of her own mind and end the “Captivity of Spectres”.15 In his sermon Humiliations Follow’d with Deliverances (1697) Mather defines the sorrow of the Puritan community through the Indian captivity experience and concludes by reading the story of Hannah Duston, which he called “A Narrative of a Notable Deliverance from Captivity”. Once again, the Indian captivity experience and salvation define the journey of the Puritan soul and society through the wilderness toward the Promised Land.16
The structure of the Puritan captivity narrative gives an account of a rebirth of the soul and achieving redemption of the captive through a complex process of violent encounters with the dark forces of the earth. The universe consists of a world and an anti-world. The former represents the situation before captivity, an idealized memory of prosperity and harmony recalling Eden, which is obscured by the fears of dark forces in both the inner spiritual world and the natural world. Suddenly fear becomes reality as Indians arise from the anti-world, as they rip the family apart and carry the mother into the darkness. The captive is forced to live in the anti-world on terms of the enemy by eating the devil’s bread and drinking his wine. While living with the Indians the captive discovers the sins that have corrupted his or her own
15 Cotton Mather, “A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning” (1693), in: George Lincoln ed., Narratives of the
Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 (New York 1914) 267.
16 Quoted in: Derounian, Kathryn Z., (1987) “Puritan Orthodoxy and the ‘Survivor Syndrome’ in Mary
soul and community from within: “I may say, as it is in Psal. 38. 5, 6. My Wounds stink and
are corrupt, I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly, I go mourning all the day long”.17 This encourages the captive to embrace the punishment and undergo the process of regeneration as a divine purpose: “But the Lord renewed my strength still, and carried me along, that I might see more of his Power; yea, so much that I could never have thought of, had I not experienced it”.18 The story ends with salvation; after resisting all its appeals and exorcising the Indian demon the captive returns to the family and church. The intimate encounter with the Indian anti-world teaches the community about its internal sins and shows it how to alleviate the guilt derived from the process, the expulsion of the devil from the community and the soul.
There are several ways to measure the factors that indicate the strength and influence of Puritan captivity literature in later periods. The first type of evidence is revealed by its popularity on the basis of the number of editions and the range of different publishers that printed the narratives in different forms. Statistically captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandson’s were regularly published in journals and as individual copies until the late nineteenth century. From 1680 until the beginning of the Revolutionary conflict the captivity narratives were the only native genre to approach the popularity of European literature in the American colonies, and until 1720, when the earliest secularized hunter-myth-literature emerged, the captivity narratives were the only literary documentation about the frontier.19
Beyond the statistical data there is the evidence of its influence in the general culture, and its presence in daily customs like sermons, ceremonies, art, and literature, and the way it served as a departure for political and religious rhetoric. But to thoroughly test the actual potency of an ideological framework is to work out how it functioned as a model for the viewpoint of people in a different time. More relevant than its popularity is the “testimony to the power of the captivity narratives to express the community’s sense of the meaning of its experience, to rationalize its actions, and to move its people to new actions”.20 Time is the best indicator for the relevance of such a framework, as it shows whether it maintains its
17 Rowlandson, 125. 18 Rowlandson, 123.
19 Slotkin, R., (1971) “Dreams and Genocide: The American Myth of Regeneration Through Violence”, Journal
of Popular Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1. (38-59) 48.
capacity to articulate and frame the world-view of a culture after a number of decades or even centuries.
In Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973) Richard Slotkin describes a series of historical examples in which the ideological framework of the Puritan captivity narrative is present. Narratives about conflict with Indians and subsequent captivity remained central in popular literature so long as the Indian wars lasted, which is until the 1890s.21 Moreover, the themes and events in the Puritan captivity narratives were picked up by newspapers, which often sought to produce sensational stories. The emergence of the American Western and Dime Novels, which remained an essential part of popular literature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more recent art forms like movies and comic books show traces of the Puritan captivity ideology.
In “Dreams and Genocide: The American Myth of Regeneration Through Violence” (1971), an essay preceding the aforementioned book, Slotkin offers examples varying from the Civil War to the comparison of American soldiers in the Vietnamese jungle with Puritans in the seventeenth-century wilderness of New England. The argument here is not that the producers of popular culture somehow forced the old Puritan mythology upon the American public, but rather that the transfer of beliefs into different periods of American history shows that numerous generations of Americans found it relevant to their own conception of the world, and typical of their self-image.22
The enduring adoration of these kinds of narratives, the ways in which they were applied, and the metaphorical symbolism that they contained indicate that the captivity narratives articulate the first sufficient myth-literature written in the United States for an American audience. More compelling than its popularity is the evidence of the ability of the captivity narratives to express the people’s awareness of their identity and to justify its actions. The narratives came in a sermon-style, starting with a fragment from the bible and a foreword explaining the moral principles of the text that served both as an advice and a caution for the reader to improve his or her life. In the late eighteenth century the symbolic language use of the Puritans became conventionalized by habitual application, and developed through the demands to better suit the spirit and characterize the experiences of later generations of Americans.
21 Slotkin, “Dreams and Genocide”, 48. 22 Ibid., 49-52.
During the Revolutionary era the United States witnessed a remarkable variation in the development of the captivity narrative as a literary genre. Puritan accounts of captivity, especially the ones written by Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637-1711) and John Williams (1664-1729), saw an extraordinary increase in popularity during the years preceding the American Revolution. Between 1770 and 1776 the two narratives were reprinted at least nine times, which is significant given the fact that they had been reprinted only three times from the moment of their original publication until 1769.23 Although these early Puritan captivity narratives are fascinating accounts, which enjoyed great adoration in seventeenth-century New England during the years following their initial publication, the renewed interest in the 1770s is curious. Richard Slotkin describes how the American captivity narrative went through an evolution of secularization, away from the orthodox Puritan doctrine, which makes this turn-back during the Revolutionary era seem retrogressive.24
It is broadly agreed that the captivity genre underwent compelling changes in the eighteenth century. Both Mary Rowlandson and John Williams understood their captivity as a way of spiritual testing, in which the refusal to adopt Indian cultural elements equaled the resistance to satanic seduction in the wilderness. Yet, in the century that followed after Rowlandson’s first publication in 1682, while the captivity genre spread through different parts of America and Puritan orthodoxy diminished as a major cultural force, both new and old captivity narratives became secularized and came to express a popular myth. Slotkin states that in the years preceding the American Revolution captivity narratives no longer portrayed the punishment and spiritual examination of the people by God in order to assure their loyalty to him, but the exploration of the mysteries of the Indian world.25
Whereas the traditional Puritan captivity narratives described the adoption of Indian practices as blasphemous, the stories of captivity in the late eighteenth century applauded the integration of captives into the Indian culture.26 One of the earliest and most prominent examples of secularized captivity narratives of Indianization is John Filson’s “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone” (1784).27 What is essential to Boone’s narrative is that
23 Rowlandson once (1720), Williams twice (1720 and 1758). R.W.G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier
(Philadelphia, 1949) 332, 525.
24 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 95-96. 25 Ibid., 20-24, 267.
26 Ibid., 247.
27 “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone” was originally part of Filson’s book The Discovery, Settlement and
during his two captivities he mastered the Indian skills, which earned him the respect of the Indians, while keeping up his cultural superiority and thereby subduing the American wilderness for white Christian civilization. Boone thus became partly Indianized and his integration in Indian culture symbolizes the secular myth of the frontier-tamer as “archetypal American mediator between civilization and the wilderness”.28
Slotkin moreover argues that the problem with Mrs. Rowlandson’s narrative, and several of her imitators, is that despite the mythic structure they do not contain any images of heroism. He calls the emergence of a “counter stream of myth- the myth of the hunter- but which eventually merged with the mythic structure of the captivity narratives” the result of an increasingly articulated need for a respectable image of human heroism.29 This led to the creation of hero-types like Daniel Boone, Leatherstocking, General Custer, and Davy Crockett.
This hunter-hero-type goes into the wilderness voluntarily to determine his destiny and that of the wilderness itself. He gets into close contact with the brute forces of the American wilderness, and in fact gets initiated into the Indian world and adopts some of the Indian characteristics. Herein simultaneously lie his strength and his weakness, because as much as becoming master over the wilderness he also negotiates his own cultural purity. He finally wins the appreciation of his reading audience by managing to maintain his cultural integrity, by serving as an agent of American civilization and progress, and the fact that he has either lived as a captive himself or has served as the liberator of other captives. The folkloristic and secular character of these figures was necessary for their acceptance among the American audience in the late eighteenth century. Yet, Cotton Mather’s A Brand Pluck’d Out of the
Burning (1693) presents an early religious and propagandistic version of the American
hero-narrative, in which the hero is defined as the savior of captives who fights the demonic spirits. The American Revolutionary conflict demanded a more sensationalist and original narrative form than the ones used by Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, written by people with experiences of captivity and the expertise to tell a good personal story. This resulted in the fictionalization of captivity narratives, beginning with the imitation of existing captivity experiences and soon moving toward the production of original captivity narratives, whether or not imaginary or semi-fictional. This caused the emergence of literary forms as credible instruments for remarks about identity or the ‘American experience’. The captivity narrative
28 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 23. 29 Slotkin, “Dreams and Genocide”, 44.
of prototypical American heroes rising from Indian war narratives, expressing the American ideals, was one of the subgenres within this wider development, and John Dodge and Ethan Allen can be seen as such American heroes representing it. As American writers moved deliberately toward the writing of fiction in the traditional captivity genres, Indian warfare, and travel-explorer narratives, the mythological elements of their subjects tended to emerge more sharply from their background. The artistic pursuit of the Puritan profession of intrinsic introspection is partially responsible for this, a tendency that became increasingly influential once literature itself became a profession in America in the nineteenth century.
Whereas the Puritan narrators had to work from actual experiences of encounters with Indians and within their strictly delineated theological framework, the chronicler in the late eighteenth century could depart from a greater legacy of traditions, philosophical hypotheses, literary styles, and cultural codes. This variety enabled narrators to be more direct in their expression and description of individual perceptions and experiences, ultimately emerging in the narratives associated with Revolutionary heroes like Allen and Dodge. Revolutionary captivity narratives of the late eighteenth century were subject to changes that paralleled those of the exploration narratives, especially in their attitude toward Indians. For the Puritans making contact or living together with Indians in the forest was only acceptable within the context of captivity or a missionary journey. Just as the intention to seek a greater understanding of the wilderness emerged in the hunter-explorer-narratives, the intention of getting into a more intimate contact with Indians became more accepted in the captivity narratives written in the second half of the eighteenth century.
In fact, the very essence of the captivity narrative began to be reshaped between 1750 and 1800, gradually blurring the boundaries between the captive and the Indian and often even moving toward the acceptance of adoption within the Indian society. Accounts of merchants and diplomats like James Adair (1709-1783) and Henry Timberlake (1730-1765), who had been living with the Chickasaw and Overhill Cherokee with no context of a religious mission or captivity, appeared ever more often.30 Ultimately, the captivity narratives moved toward a narrative style that was openly fictional in response to the tastes and expectations of the American reading public. The symbolic function of the Indian transformed and intensified, both to make him a reliable companion or ally for his American counterpart and to stimulate
30 James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo, Daily Life on the Old Colonial Frontier (Westport, CT 2002)
the American recognition of the fraternity between the two. Finally, acculturation and adoption into the Indian world became the ultimate core of the captivity experience.
II
The Puritan Captivity Narrative as a Revolutionary Metaphor
In the Revolutionary era both the reprinted and imitated Puritan captivity narratives had a different influence on the definition of American nationality by expressing the rejection of British culture. In the 1770s the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies started to see themselves as captives and the British monarch as their captor. This idea of collective captivity was what repolarized the narratives of Rowlandson and Williams, which was expressed by the number of times they were reprinted. Furthermore, the captivity narrative developed into a fertile metaphor during the American Revolutionary War itself as a large number of Americans became prisoners of war. The idea of captivity by the British army was thus applied to American civilians in a figurative sense as they were occupied, and in a literal sense for Americans who were imprisoned.Ethan Allen (1738-1989) was the first American prisoner of war to write down his captivity experience in The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779), and did so by using several rhetorical techniques from the Puritan accounts of Indian captivity. Military academic Captain Greg Sieminski stated “in adapting the genre to serve political ends, Allen created, in effect, a second cultural frontier, this one to the East instead of the West. Crossing this frontier, Allen followed the pattern of earlier Puritan narratives in order to stress his resistance to the culture of his captors”.31 Hereby he validated a new unique American
culture. Thus, in his narrative Allen did the opposite of what Daniel Boone did, as he determined the American character by describing what it refused instead of what it adopted.
Hence Allen’s narrative represented the politicization of the early Puritan beliefs. The renewed popularity of the genre had for a large part to do with Revolutionary politics, and the incorporation of captivity literature into the world of politics started with a number of republications of the Rowlandson and Williams narratives in the 1770s. The two works were republished numerous times to frame public opinion about the political situation in the years preceding the war. In these narratives the idea of captivity was used as a metaphor for political events, which the people in the colonies believed to be leading to their imprisonment, by an overseas tyrant. Allen and the people who republished the narratives of Rowlandson
31 Sieminski, G., (1990) “The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American Revolution”,
and Williams adopted and exploited the concept of captivity in a way, which is why it is important to stress how contemporary events revived the interest in the two Puritan stories.
Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson (1682) was the first of the two original narratives to gain new popularity in the
1770s.32 In the years after its initial publication in 1682 the narrative enjoyed widespread popularity among New England settlers and came out in four different editions.33 Like orthodox Puritanism itself the interest in Rowlandson’s narrative faded out in the following decades and it was only once republished in 1720.34 After half a century of effective silence Rowlandson’s work was republished three times in 1770, once in 1771, and two times more in 1773. Except for one, all the republished editions were printed and published in Boston. Both the time and place are logical when the context of the contemporary political situation of these republications is taken into account.35
In 1768 Boston was occupied by British troops, which led to the Boston Massacre in 1770 and the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Britain had sent in the troops to restore the order in the city after frictions between the colonies and the British arose after Parliament passed the Townshend Acts (1767), strengthening the British authority over the American colonies. Friction emerged mainly as a result of a series of propagandistic newspaper articles called “Journal of Occurrences in Boston”, which was published in the New York Journal and
Packet and several Boston newspapers, that took note of the daily interactions between the
Bostonians and British soldiers. It focused on emphasizing the soldiers’ atrocities and abuse of the local population.36 On the first of January 1770 the mood of the city was quickly described as “trapped and restless” by the Boston Gazette, showing an image of a seated Minerva who was about to release a dove from its cage with one hand while holding a liberty cap with the other.37 The city’s restlessness finally resulted in violence when British soldiers
32 Rowlandson’s narrative was promoted in the Massachusetts Spy on the 12th and 26th of September and the 3rd
of October 1771; New London Gazette, 3 December 1773; Newport Mercury, 7 and 14 March 1774.
33 Sieminski, 37.
34 Derounian, Kathryn Z., (1988) “The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson’s Indian
Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century”, Early American Literature, Vol. 23. No. 3. (239-261) 248.
35 For more bibliographic information on reprinted captivity narratives see: R.W.G. Vail, The Voice of the Old
Frontier (Philadelphia, 1949).
36 Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (Chapel Hill, NC 1941) 150. 37 Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural history of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature ,and Theatre
in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789 (New York 1976) 145.
killed five people after being physically threatened by a mob. The incident was heavily publicized by leading Revolutionary figures like Paul Revere and Samuel Adams, and quickly earned its name as the Boston Massacre.38
Calling the event a “massacre” was not a coincidence. Propagandists knew that the first thing that the word would bring up in the imagination of the colonists were the public memories of Indian raids on frontier settlements. These memories also brought up the captivity experience with which the colonists had become familiar through Puritan captivity literature. The experience started with the Indian raids but had now returned in a different but recognizable form. The description of the onslaught that led to the captivity of Mary Rowlandson exemplifies this:
Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathens ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out. Now we might hear mothers and children crying out for themselves and one another. Lord, what shall we do?... It was a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here and some there,... all of them stripped naked.39
Two years after the Boston Massacre Dr. Joseph Warren gave a speech on its memorial. His characterization of the slaughter that happened in Boston remarkably resembles Rowlandson’s rhetoric:
The horrors of that dreadful night... when our streets were stained with the blood of our own brethren – when our ears were wounded by the groans of the dying, and our eyes were tormented with the sight of the mangled bodies of the dead – when our alarmed imaginations presented to our view our houses wrapt in flames, our children subjected to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery, – our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion, – our virtuous wives... falling sacrifice to worse than brutal violence....40
38 Robert J. Allison, The Boston Massacre (Carlisle, MA 2006) 21-23, 27. 39 Rowlandson, 34-35.
40 Joseph Warren, 5 March 1772 oration delivered in Boston. Reprinted in: Hezekiah Niles, Principles and Acts
Three years later Warren gave another speech at a memorial for the Boston Massacre in which he reminded his audience of comparable “images of terror”. He asked the audience rhetorical questions that brought up familiar memories of Indian Raids:
Who spread this ruin around us?... has the grim savage rushed again from the far distant wilderness? Or does some fiend fierce from the depths of hell,... hurl... deadly arrows at our breast? No;... but, how astonishing! It is the hand of Britain that inflicts the wound.41
Warren clearly revokes the demonic image of the Indian that is characteristic of the Puritan captivity narratives and which is expressed by Rowlandson. Hence he implies that the British troops, who randomly shot at helpless victims, were similar to the Indians in their savagery. Besides sharing the same barbaric methods the British similarly aimed to captivate innocent Americans. Like many articles in the Boston newspapers Warren often used the word slavery in his addresses, showing that he and his fellow citizens interpreted the Boston Massacre as evidence that a barbaric enemy held them captive.
There are more documents that suggest that the renewed interest in captivity literature, and especially Rowlandson’s narrative, was triggered by the atrocities of the Boston Massacre. The republished editions of Rowlandson’s narrative were often decorated with woodcuts that present new insights about the way in which the publishers aimed the story to be conceived.42
A woodcut that was designed for the title page of an edition published in 1773 depicts four Indians standing in line, while two of them hold muskets and two others holding axes and aiming at Mary Rowlandson, who stands outside her house with a rifle, ready to shoot at the Indians. As a matter of fact the image would serve as a more suitable cover for the narrative of Hannah Duston, who actually killed her Indian captors, be it with an axe rather than a rifle.43
41 Warren, 27. Allison, 23. 42 Sieminski, 39.
43 Humphreys, S., (2011) “The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston”, Canadian Review of
The depiction of Rowlandson and the Indians on this woodcut is not just anachronistic in several ways, but very telling about the way people related the story to their own contemporary situation. The Indian raiding technique that Rowlandson described is very different from the method that is depicted in this woodcut. She describes the Indian’s tactics as their typical way of attacking by surrounding their target and creating chaos: “Some of the Indians got behind the hill, others into the barn, and others behind anything that could shelter them; from all which places they shot against the house so that the bullets seemed to fly like hail...”.44 The line-formation that is depicted in the woodcut is more typical of a European-style standing army than that of an Indian tribe. In fact, her original Narrative in no way supports the way Rowlandson is depicted in the woodcut, as she did not carry a musket but her young daughter when she escaped the burning house. Never did she imply to have engaged in fighting with the Indians or to have carried a rifle. The depiction of Rowlandson as a combatant fighting with her captors is historically incorrect but also contradicts the underlying spiritual message of the story. In the original version of her narrative Rowlandson several times says to believe that the Indians are God’s tools used to punish his disobedient people, and that to be saved she had to be patient and obedient to him. But subjugation was not what the people of Boston were intended for.
The Rowlandson woodcut is a good example of how a Puritan captivity narrative was reshaped into a secular form and politicized for contemporary uses in the 1770s. It portrays Rowlandson as a heroic defender of American liberty and the Indians as agents of a tyrannical government. Greg Sieminski argued about the artwork “Rowlandson seems to represent a frontier version of the Goddess of Liberty, a figure intimately associated with the American cause in both visual and literary art beginning in the 1760s”.45 The secularization of Rowlandson’s narrative is also evident in the adjustment of the title in the reprinted versions of the 1770s. The initial title was The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Together, with the
Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Of all the 1770s editions the title was A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, suggesting a stronger emphasis on her
suffering and a less on the religious aspects of the text.
44 Rowlandson, 118. 45 Silverman, 86.
John Williams’s Captivity Narrative and the Quebec Act
Besides Rowlandson’s Narrative a second Puritan captivity narrative enjoyed renewed interest during the Revolutionary era. John Williams’s story of captivity The Redeemed
Captive, Returning to Zion was first published in 1707. Williams was the minister of the
Congregational church of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and had in 1704 been taken captive by Mohawk and was transported to Canada together with a number of his parishioners. Unlike Rowlandson, Williams did not emphasize his sufferings much but instead focused on the sly attempts of French-Canadian priests to convert him and his followers to Catholicism. Therefor his narrative is at least as much directed against French culture and the Catholic Church as it is against Indians. The last version of Williams’s narrative was published during the French and Indian War in 1758 before it was reprinted three times in the years preceding the American Revolution, respectively being 1773, 1774, and 1776.46
Similar to Rowlandson’s narrative, the renewed popularity of Williams’s account was sparked by the contemporary political situation. By reprinting Williams’s narrative the publishers responded to the fears of American colonists for British policies appeasing the settlers in the newly acquired province of Quebec, because the narrative describes a defenseless Protestant minister terrorized by French-Catholic despotism. Britain’s conciliatory policies in Canada in the 1760s were necessary to restrain unrest among the substantial Francophone population in Quebec, and even went as far as to allow the appointment of French-Catholic Bishop Jean-Olivier Briand as the major religious leader of the province in 1766. Down in New England many people were heavily suspicious about the appointment of Briand, as it was viewed as the establishment of popery in the American colonies.47
Anti-Catholic sentiments were stirred up by Founding Father Samuel Adams who wrote a number of letters to the Boston Gazette, which responded to the fears of papal interference in America, causing the sentiments to peak in in the early 1770s.48 Thereafter in 1773 the news reached New England that the colonial authorities in Quebec were awaiting a bill in Parliament, which if adopted, would give the Catholic Church the status of state religion as it
46 Williams’s narrative was promoted in New London Gazette, 9 April 1773 and 23 March and 3 May 1776.
Sieminski, 42. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York 1998) 186-190.
47 Charles Metzger, The Quebec Act, a Primary Cause of the American Revolution (New York 1936) 27. 48 Ibid., 22-24.
had been when Quebec was under French rule. The Quebec Act, as the law was named soon after, quickly caused the widespread denunciation of anything that was French or Catholic. The New England newspapers wrote fiercely in defense of orthodox Protestant values, and how the bill had justified the colonists’ fears of creeping Catholic influence.49
Besides seeming like a cunning plan to subjugate the inhabitants of the American colonies to papal autocracy, the bill also appeared to abuse Canada as basis from which to do so. For years the French authorities had instigated hostilities between Indians and American settlers, which is why the colonists subsequently identified fears of French cultural influence with Indian raids and captivity.50 The British were considered to be the secret organizers behind the conspiracy of French Canadians and Indians, which is why the New England colonists focused their fury on the monarch who was assumed to do this to strip them of their political and religious freedoms. Like the letters concerning the Boston Massacre, the stories in the local newspapers regarding the Quebec Act frequently propagated the popular fears of slavery.51
The simultaneously rising fears of British appeasement policies in Quebec and the reviving popularity of Williams’s captivity narrative suggest a correlation between the two. It is plausible that the republished editions of Williams’s narrative in 1773 and 1774 were encouraged by the strong anti-Catholic atmosphere and widely shared concerns about the Quebec Act. This becomes even more likely when considering the fact that after 1776 the narrative was not reprinted again until 1793, suggesting a sudden cease of anti-Catholic tensions after the Declaration of Independence, which can be explained by the colonists’ understanding that their successfully gained independence had depended on the support of Catholic allies Spain and France. This kind of discontinuity in opinion about Catholics would have been unimaginable for pious Puritans like Williams and Rowlandson, but in the relatively secularized 1770s Americans thought in more practical terms, making such a turnaround acceptable for the higher Revolutionary ideal.
The renewed popularity of the Williams and Rowlandson narratives in the years prior to the American Revolution was closely related to the emerged idea among colonists to have been captured by a tyrant. It is hard to tell whether the popularization of the narratives was a
49 Bailyn, The Ideological Origins, 97-98. 50 Metzger, 48.
51 Arthur M. Schlessinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764-1776 (Sacramento,
CA 2015) 151. Samuel Webster, “The Misery and Duty of an Opress’d and Enslav’d people, represented in a sermon delivery at Salisbury, 14 July 1774”; Printed by Edes and Gill (Boston, MA 1774).
result of cleverly designed propaganda or if it simply reflected the politicization of native literature as a whole. Yet, it is safe to believe that the Puritan captivity genre was a convenient tool to propagate the Revolutionary motive. It can be argued that the republished editions were affiliated with the Founding Fathers, whose authority the Revolutionaries aimed to establish as a way to settle their national origin on American land. Moreover, Rowlandson’s captivity narrative had been the beginning of a new literary genre that was exclusively American. So by using captivity narratives for Revolutionary purposes the cause for independence became associated with an art form that derived from a uniquely American captivity experience.52
The literary framework that was applied in the captivity narratives also fitted the production of Revolutionary propaganda, because the stories started and ended with freedom and highlighted the experience of captivity that disturbed this freedom. The end of the captivity narrative represented the colonists’ yearning for political independence, while the beginning of the narratives reflects their perception of their own history. This suggests that the people in the colonies understood themselves to be politically self-determined until the British king decided to restrict their independence in 1768.53 Hence the structure of the captivity narratives, starting and finishing with freedom, encouraged the colonists to reclaim their liberties that had been their historical right and were part of their natural state of existence.
The captivity of god-fearing Puritans like Williams, who was a minister, and Rowlandson, who was the wife of one, was an intense spiritual experience that started with deep mourning, after which a period of testing followed that finished with salvation. In the first phase God subjected the captives to shame and hardship by the hands of the Indian captors as a punishment for their misconduct. The right reaction to this godly mortification was to show remorse, patience, and endurance. In the 1770s the colonists in New England used the Puritan captivity concept, not to highlight their own misconduct but that of their British overlords. Thereby they used the idea of unjustness and hardship to propagate themselves as the long-suffering subordinates of a cruel monarch, like Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence. Even though the Boyle woodcut of a combative Mary Rowlandson contradicts the original narrative it shows how the virtue of captivity is used as a metaphor for the
52 Slotkin argues that captivity narratives were generally recognized as a literary genre by the mid-eighteenth
century. Regeneration Through Violence, 97.
53 Varg, P.A., (1964) “The Advent of Nationalism, 1758-1776”, American Quearterly, Vol. 16, No. 2. (169-181)
Revolution, because the idea of suffering becomes the legitimization for challenging the ruling authority. Thus, the central message in Rowlandson’s narrative is changed from the higher law of God to the higher law of inalienable rights and individual liberty.
The second phase of the captivity experience; the testing of the soul through hardship and struggle, likewise fitted the agenda of the Revolutionaries. In their narratives both Rowlandson and Williams were caught up in a foreign and hostile environment. In Rowlandson’s case the sense of alienation came from her being trapped among Indians, who she perceived as the people of the devil, while Williams found himself surrounded by French-speaking Catholics. Both were put under pressure to acculturate or convert to the cultures of their captors and their rejection hereof was what cleansed them from their sins. By resisting the heavy pressures and holding on to their own beliefs to reach salvation they also affirmed their own unique culture, which was not British but American. By reflecting this idea to the Revolutionary atmosphere in Boston during the 1770s the Puritan religious meaning of resistance was replaced by a patriotic definition.
The third and final phase of the captivity experience also fitted the Revolutionary agenda, as it could be used to reinforce the colonists’ awareness of their national identity and unity as a people. Rowlandson and Williams were rewarded with freedom by repentance and enduring God’s examination of their obedience, and redeemed from their captivity. In the Puritan narratives the experience of captivity represented the community or larger society, and more importantly affirmed the Puritan position as God’s chosen people and the imbedded destiny of salvation.54 For the seventeenth-century Puritan society this meant the release from Indian raids ravaging communities and capturing Christians. For colonial America in the 1770s this idea of imbedded and self-evident destined freedom represented the liberation from British authoritarianism.
In the years just preceding the American Revolution the idea of a nation destined to be liberated from a collective captivity had become fundamentally intertwined with the need for a political uprising of the people in the rebellious colonies. This strong connection is suggested by many artworks, among which was the proposed scene of captivity experience as the logo of the Great Seal of the United States, as proposed to Congress by Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams in July 1776.55 The picture portrays the Israelites crossing the Red Sea
54 Minter, David L., (1973) “By Dens of Lions: Notes on Stylization in Early Puritan Captivity Narratives”,
American Literature, Vol. 45, No. 3. (335-347) 341, 347.
harmlessly while the walls of water falling down on them repulse their Egyptian captors, and the scene is encircled by the phrase: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God”.56
Numerous religious leaders similarly propagated the connection between Exodus and the fight for American independence at the time, with Washington as the new Moses and Manifest Destiny as the new millennial mission.57 The concept of collective captivity became even more established in the public conscience when the Revolutionary war broke out and fighting started. The idea of captivity that once had been used as a metaphor in pre-war Revolutionary propaganda became reality for colonists with the British occupation of several districts. Captivity became an even more literal reality for the numerous American Revolutionaries who got captured by British troops and became prisoners of war.
56 Silverman, 323.
57 For more information on the uses of Exodus as a Revolutionary metaphor see: Michael Walzer, Exodus and
III
The Emergence of a Revolutionary Captivity Genre
During the American Revolution, narratives of the experiences of captivity by the British Army stimulated the creation of a definition of American liberty as a key element of the American identity for those fighting for the cause of independence. By drawing attention to the ‘barbarous and cruel’ character of the British treatment of prisoners of war these captivity narratives granted the defenders of the Revolutionary cause the opportunity to underline the differences between themselves and their former British overlords. As these captivity narratives were published in papers, journals, and magazines, the condition of American prisoners of war became a symbol for the struggle of a whole nation trying to acquire its independence from Great Britain.
On Christmas Eve 1776 Charles Herbert, a crewman aboard the privateer vessel Dalton, was imprisoned by British soldiers after being tracked down by a Royal navy frigate. During his captivity he kept a journal of his experience which he kept “concealed, while writing, in his boots, and as each page became full, it was conveyed to a chest with a double bottom, and there secreted until he left prison”.58 The British officers ordered Herbert and his fellow crewmen “down to the cabletier” where they “found nothing but bare cable to lay upon, and that very uneven”, and “nothing but a few rags and a dozen old blankets” to keep them warm.59 Even worse was the heat down in the bottom of the ship that almost suffocated the
crewmembers. During the following months of their captivity Herbert and the other Dalton crewmembers saw their conditions remain harsh and were moved around over several vessels in the port of Plymouth, England.
The continuing relocation of the crewmembers was due to a legal concern that became one of the central ideological issues during the American Revolution. American captives formed a crucial problem for the British authorities from the beginning of the war, because treating them as prisoners of war would acknowledge the captives as members of a sovereign state,
58 Charles Herbert, and C.H. Pierce ed., Relic of the Revolution, Containing a Full and Particular Account of the
Sufferings and Privatations of All the American Prisoners Captured on the High Seas and Carried into Plymouth, England, during the Revolution of 1776 (Boston, MA 1847) 18-20.
59 Francis Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners in the Revolutionary War: The Captivity of William Russel
