Sword of the Wilderness: Literature of the Frontier Experience in Early New England

By

Wesley FiorentinoDecember 2015

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for theMaster of Arts in History

Dual-Degree Program in History and Archives ManagementSimmons College

Boston, Massachusetts

The author grants Simmons College permission to include this thesis in its Library and to make it available to the academic community for scholarly purposes.

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Approved by:

______ Stephen Berry Stephen OrtegaAssociate Professor of History Associate Professor of History

© Copyright Wesley Fiorentino, 2015

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Abstract:

The wilderness of the New World presented a complex set of issues for English settlers. While

frontier life offered no small degree of physical demand and danger, long-held beliefs about wild

frontier colored the imaginations of New Englanders. Physical danger was paralleled with the

danger posed by the spiritually barren wasteland before them. The wilderness around them

threatened to break down their social institutions and turn them savage. Native Americans were

seen as an extension of the wilderness predicament. To Anglo-Americans, the Natives

represented the logical conclusion to the process of de-civilization they so greatly feared. This

anxiety was present in some of the earliest writings of Puritan New England, and would remain

consistent throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. Histories, sermons, and memoirs

expressed the resentment felt by the Puritans for the untamed wilderness before them. The

prevailing social ideal was that society as a whole contended with the dangers of the frontier.

King Philip's War was seen by many leaders in New England as the ultimate clash between the

wilderness and civilized New England. The writings stemming from this conflict, including

captivity narratives and frontier tracts, addressed this same dichotomy but from new

perspectives. Whereas once, the ministry had stressed the need for social cohesion in the face of

the boundless forests and their Native inhabitants, captivity narratives and memoirs of

frontiersmen provided an individualistic mode of expression. This only accentuated the

independence felt by many who subverted the collective Puritan ideal as they expanded further

into the New World, and the accounts of their experiences were impressed in the literary

imagination of America for generations to come.

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Historiography:

Early New England society had always defined itself against what it perceived to be the

wilderness condition of the New World. Preconceived notions of the wilderness, gleaned from

Biblical tradition and crystallized during the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay colony,

characterized the framework of the Puritan commonwealth. While the new communities were to

be founded in the midst of the hostile New England wilderness, they believed that God's

protection of the advocates of true religion would keep the settlers safe as long as they remained

steadfast in their piety. However, the very act of settlement began a prolonged process of deeper

penetration into the frontier in order to cultivate new communities, whether for the spread of

religion or for material gain. The resulting clashes with Native Americans, commonly viewed as

agents the degenerative wilderness, served to reshape popular conceptions regarding the frontier.

The resulting literature, informed by the social theory of New England Puritanism, as well as the

experience of frontier warfare in the late seventeenth century, represents a prolonged shift from

the views of the godly commonwealth about the wilderness toward secular, literary conceptions

of the wilderness experience. Puritan attitudes toward the wilderness and, in turn, the

experiences of conflicts such as King Philip's War, characterized popular imagination of the

North American frontier.

Scholarship on the wilderness in Puritan and early American thought ranges in specific

focus across a number of scholarly fields. Scholars have written on the New England wilderness

with an emphasis toward social theory, literary theory, mythmaking, and formation of national

identity.1 A study of the influence of Puritan wilderness theology on early American literature

1 See: Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: the intellectual significance of the New England frontier, 1629-1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Roy Harvey Pearce, "The Significances of the Captivity Narrative," American Literature 19:1 (March 1947); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1998)

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must account for the research from each of these fields. Puritan social theory implied certain

viewpoints toward the frontier of New England, which in term influenced the writings of New

Englanders during King Philip's War and other conflicts with Native Americans, which then

influenced collective imagination with respect to the New England wilderness which would

characterize popular literature for generations to come. The perception of the wilderness as a

realm diametrically opposed to the ideals of New England society, inherent to Puritan thought,

contributed greatly to the groundwork of a distinctly American frontier literary tradition,

flourishing from the late eighteenth century into the nineteenth century. The writings of New

Englanders about their experiences during the Indian wars of the seventeenth century formed a

crucial bridge in this process. Captivity narratives such as that written by Mary Rowlandson

helped generate a unique genre which would prove extremely popular, while the narrative of

Benjamin Church would provide a prototype of later frontiersman including Filson's Daniel

Boone and Cooper's Natty Bumppo.2

Captivity narratives in particular have been an area of study in which the trace from

Puritan theological tracts to popular frontier narratives has been explored in considerable detail.

Roy Harvey Pearce writes about the contributions of the captivity narrative to the popular

imagination of the New England wilderness. Pearce, a literary theorist and scholar of early

American literature, focuses on representations of Native Americans, as well as on the societies

which produced these representations. In his essay "The Significances of the Captivity

Narrative," Pearce explores the development of the captivity narrative as a literary genre

throughout the colonial period and into the nineteenth century. Rather than focusing on their

historical value, Pearce examines the contributions of captivity narratives to early American

2 See Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, (Boston, 1682).; Benjamin Church, Entertaining Passages relating to King Philip's War, (Boston, 1716).

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popular culture and the development of notions of the frontier and wilderness experience. Pearce

speaks to the aesthetic qualities of even the most spiritually-charged narratives, including that of

Mary Rowlandson, claiming that from the views expressed by captives, relating the harrowing

stories of their suffering, can be gleaned the sensibilities of the greater society toward the

wilderness and its supposedly savage inhabitants. According to Pearce, the true value of the

captivity narrative is not found in firsthand accounts of interactions with Native Americans or

frontier conflicts, but for their ability to enable later generations to tap into the mentalities of the

age. Pearce explains that captivity narratives enable scholars to "see more deeply and more

clearly into popular American culture, popular American issues, and popular American tastes.”3

Pearce makes the case that as the captivity narrative genredeveloped, the fear of and fascination

with the frontier expressed took center stage, while historical accuracy and experience went by

the wayside, and thus narratives gradually became more sensationalist as the Puritan theological

message faded in importance and the realities of wilderness expansion and frontier settlement

grew to greater prominence.

Pearce traces the development of captivity narratives from the early, religiously-focused

accounts such as that of Mary Rowlandson, to those of the later eighteenth century, such as the

account of Peter Williamson's captivity, and argues that a move away from Puritandogma toward

literary exposition with regards to perceived outside threats such as hostile Native Americans

and French neighbors accounts for the shift from direct accounts to more idealized stories.

Pearce insists that, despite an obvious shift in focus over time, such hyperbolic qualities are

present even in the earliest narratives of Puritan captivity among New England's Native

Americans. He notes "a certain aesthetic quality which derives from the freshness and

3Pearce, "The Significances of the Captivity Narrative," 20.

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concreteness of detail" in the way in which Rowlandson "explores her experience."4 The

aesthetic quality, Pearce explains, won out over time in successive narratives, while the "quality

of directness, of concern with describing an experience precisely as it had affected the individual

who underwent it, of trying to somehow recapture and put what were taken as symbolic psychic

minutiae, began to disappear."5 Religious, confessional aspects of earlier narratives, and the

accuracy which accompanied them, diminished in favor of propagandist motives which became

more prevalent in the narratives of the mid- to late-eighteenth century.

In particular, Pearce examines the writings of Puritan theologians such as Cotton Mather

as a turning point in the focus of popular literature about wilderness experience. The exclusive

nature of Puritan society in New England certainly lent itself to distrust of Native Americans, but

Pearce contends that the development of this distrust was exacerbated by widely-read accounts

such as those written and disseminated by public figures like Mather. Pearce points to Cotton

Mather's ecclesiastical history of New England, the Magnalia Christi Americana, as a

particularly influential work in the move towards sensationalism in frontier literature. "If the

Magnalia is the record of godly New England's triumph over the wilderness, part of that record

is of a triumph over the evil dwellers in the wilderness."6 Pearce does not go so far as to say that

the New England ministry purposely played an active role in the stoking of such sentiments, but

he certainly shows how religious leaders contributed to the dissemination of these ideas. While

Pearce's argument regarding Mather's involvement in the scope of captivity narratives is too

rigid, he does touch on an important influence for the development of the genre itself as well as

the wider grouping of wilderness and frontier literature throughout the colonial period.

4Pearce, "Significances of the Captivity Narrative," 3.5Pearce, "Significances of the Captivity Narrative," 3.6Pearce, "Significances of the Captivity Narrative," 4.

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Much of what characterized the captivity narrative of the late seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries was rooted in Christian wilderness theology as well as the ideals and structure of the

Puritan commonwealth in New England.7In Errand Into the Wilderness, Perry Miller examines

the structure and mission of the Puritan commonwealth in the New World and how it was able to

function in practice. For Miller, the government of Massachusetts Bay, and subsequently

Connecticut, represented "the pure Biblical polity set forth in full detail by the New Testament,"

but which included "a due form of civil government...a political regime, possessing power,

which would consider its main function to be the erecting, protecting, and preserving of this form

of polity."8Miller focuses on the potential dual-meaning of the word "errand" in the minds of

early New Englanders. Miller takes the term from Samuel Danforth's 1671 Election-Day

sermon, in which the minister expounded upon the meaning of the presence of Anglo-Europeans

in the North American wilderness in order to remind his contemporaries of the necessity to

follow in the footsteps of the previous generation of settlers.9 Miller interprets the term"errand"

to represent the mission to found a government based on both sound ecclesiastical and sound

civil policy, but also to complete the process of the Reformation, which early New England

leaders such as John Winthrop saw as hopelessly stalled in their native England.10

Miller focuses on the mission of early New England society, with little reference to the

significance of the wilderness in the endeavor. The settlers' "errand" is of primary concern for

Miller. However, several of the issues of early Puritan society examined in later scholarship,

with reference to the wilderness, are identified in Miller's text. In particular, Miller discusses the

7 See: Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; John Williams, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (Boston, 1707), in Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).8 Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 5.9 Samuel Danforth, A Brief Recogniction of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness; Made in the Audience of the General Assembly of the Massachusetts Colony, at Boston in N.E. on the 11th of the third Moneth, 1670, being the DAY of ELECTION THERE (Cambridge: Printed by S.G. and M.F., 1671), Massachusetts Historical Society.10 Miller, Errand, 12.

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problems of New England identity and of Americanization at length. The colonists' vision of

settling the New England frontier drew heavily upon Biblical precedent, as Miller points out, but

the goal of providing the world with an example of a Biblical polity in practice ultimately failed.

"Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone in

America."11 Miller begins his examination of seventeenth century New England society at the

point of their having been left alone. The influence of the wilderness resulted in aprolonged

trend of perceived degeneracy among the successive generations of New Englanders. The issue

of declension, for Miller, is tied directly with the problem of New England identity. Miller

argues that the consistent exposure to New World conditions is the source of "the anxiety and

torment that inform productions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century."12

Successive generations were further and further removed from the achievements and prowess of

the saintly founding fathers. However, the wilderness, either as a theological construct or as the

actual environment, plays only a tangential role in Miller's text. Miller alludes to wilderness

theology sporadically, but it remains largely an implied set of beliefs held by most of the settlers.

Miller is interested primarily in the ideology of the Puritan commonwealth, and he largely

glosses over the effects of the wilderness experience on the development of the New England

colonies. Subsequent scholars take up the discussion of the influence of the frontier on the

Puritan commonwealth.

Moving further than Miller, Peter N. Carroll directly addresses the relationship between

seventeenth century New England and the surrounding wilderness. In particular, Carroll focuses

on how the settlers' theoretical conceptions of the New England frontier were informed by actual

wilderness experience. Carroll demonstrates that early Puritan society in Massachusetts defined

11 Miller, Errand, 15.12 Miller, Errand, 15.

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itself against the wilderness and its perceived dangerous and degenerative influences. At best,

the New England wilderness was a place for rigorous spiritual contemplation and trial. At worst,

it was a realm wholly under the influence of Satan. In his book Puritanism and the Wilderness:

The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629-1700, Peter N. Carroll explores

the way encounters with the New England frontier informed Puritan theology throughout the

seventeenth century and how the resulting theology shaped perceptions of the wilderness in the

mindsets of New England settlers. Established traditions about the wilderness as spiritual

proving ground were imported from England and blended with the Puritan experience in North

America. “The Puritans had developed specific views of the wilderness situation prior to their

migration to Massachusetts Bay.  Derived largely from Biblical metaphors, these concepts

provided New Englanders with elaborate rhetorical devices with which they could judge their

own experiences.”13 Carroll traces the development of Puritan views toward the New England

wilderness from well before the captivity narratives published in the wake of King Philip's War

to the end of the seventeenth century. Carroll examines the thought of New England society as a

whole, which enables him to draw conclusions about the development of Puritan views of the

wilderness over the course of several generations.

Carroll's text does not address captivity narratives or the literary tradition following King

Philip's War, but he does provide an invaluable study of the formation of Puritan ideology as it

relates to perceptions of the wilderness. An understanding of the development of captivity

narratives and other writings published in the wake of late-seventeenth century Indian wars relies

on an insight into the place of the wilderness in Puritan theology which Carroll's work provides.

While Pearce touches on the religious undertones of early captivity narratives, Carroll focuses on

the spiritual endeavors of the Puritan commonwealth throughout the seventeenth century. Pearce

13Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 2.

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explores the ideologies which lent themselves to preconceived notions about the New England

frontier, and which would later inform such developing literary genres as the captivity narrative.

Of particular importance is Carroll's identification of a foundational contradiction in the Puritan

mission in North America, between the desire for an enclosed space for the biblical polity and

the impetus to cultivate the untamed wilderness. Carroll posits that the very principles of the

founders of New England lent themselves to their own subversion. The inherent paradox in the

thinking of Puritan leaders undermined the goal of social cohesion, as it implicitly condoned

wilderness expansion. "The founders of Massachusetts Bay intended to erect a city on a hill, a

unified, organic society bound internally by Christian love. Modelled, in theory, on the medieval

town, such a city would enclose the entire population within the confines of strong walls."14

Carroll observes that this brand of social organization is inherently exclusionary, and goes on to

point out that "the leaders of New England expected the commonwealth to function without

reference to the areas outside of the community."15Carroll identifies the paradox between the

ideal Puritan social structure and frontier expansion as a fundamental flaw in the goal to cultivate

the Massachusetts Bay colony as a community based on the moral and governmental precepts of

true religion.

Carroll argues that this contradiction plagued the Puritan communities of New England

throughout the seventeenth century. "In defending their migration to the New World," Carroll

explains, "the colonists emphasized the importance of settling uncultivated areas.”16 While the

Puritans sought to define themselves against the spiritually barren wilderness surrounding them,

their goal of creating pious communities within that wilderness undercut that view. “The

Puritans’ endorsement of the subjugation of wild lands...provided enterprising settlers with an

14Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 3.15Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 3.16Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 3.

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effective rationalization for expanding beyond the organic community intended by the founding

fathers.”17 Carroll essentially makes the argument that the ideal of the Puritan commonwealth in

New England was doomed from the beginning due to its failure to effectively resolve this

paradox. Recurring waves of settlers looking to move beyond the protective boundary of the

godly society of New England sought to found communities of their own, seemingly encouraged

by the Puritan impetus to cultivate civilization on the frontier. “In time, the colonists celebrated

the process of transforming the wilderness despite the evident dangers to the collective

society."18 Moving beyond the scope of the original Puritan settlements, colonists brought

themselves further into the wilderness and into conflict with its Native inhabitants, all the while

maintaining their exclusionary outlook.

While Carroll demonstrates the debt of early New England to biblical traditions regarding

the wilderness, Roderick Frazier Nash frames the colonists' encounters with the frontier within a

broader context of western perceptions of wild lands. While Peter Carroll, and to a lesser extent

Perry Miller, assumes a certain degree of the influence of a traditional western European outlook

on the New World, Nash, in his book Wilderness and the American Mind, places the settlers'

perceptions within a long history of ideas regarding frontier expansion.Nash discusses "the long

Western tradition of imagining wild country as a moral vacuum, a cursed and chaotic

wasteland."19 Nash observes that suspicion of the wilderness predated Christianity in Western

thought, though the biblical tradition was indeed the type of the Puritans' notions of the forests of

New England. In particular, Nash contrasts the organization of the Garden of Eden with the

chaotic wilderness to which Adam and Eve are banished after the Fall. Paradise meant an

orderly, cultivated landscape, while untamed lands implied sin and degeneracy. This perception

17Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 3.18Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 3.19Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 24.

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informed the early New Englanders both on the physical level, where they faced the challenges

of settling in a hostile frontier, and the spiritual level, where they feared they had entered a realm

under the sway of Satan. "If paradise was early man’s greatest good, wilderness, as its antipode,

was his greatest evil.  In one condition the environment, garden-like, ministered to his every

desire.  In the other it was at best indifferent, frequently dangerous, and always beyond

control."20 The founders of New England needed to cultivate the surrounding frontier in order to

carve out their envisioned society, but also to protect themselves from the dangerous influences

of an unregenerate landscape.

Another important contribution of Nash's text is that he examines the figures who

actively sought to tame the North American wilderness in a way which Miller and Carroll have

not. While Miller and Carroll both refer to the figure of the frontiersman and his importance in

early American imagination, neither of them consider the implications of such a figure for

perceptions of early wilderness cultivation. Carroll discusses the issue of wilderness cultivation

and frontier expansion, but does not go into any great detail about perceptions of actual frontier

figures. Nash, however, examines the frontiersman at length.For Nash, the frontiersmen of early

New England engaged with the wilderness more intimately than most of their fellow colonists,

but this engagement resulted in its destruction rather than in a balance between civilization and

frontier. "Frontiersmen acutely sensed that they battled wild country not only for personal

survival but in the name of nation, race, and God."21 The frontier figures described by Nash were

the agents of the expansionism which undermined the Puritan mission described by Carroll.

However, Nash argues that, rather than favoring the wilderness over the close-knit communities

of Puritan society, frontiersmen sought to tame the wilderness for further cultivation by Anglo-

20 Nash, Wilderness, 9.21 Nash, Wilderness, 24.

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Americans. They may not have prescribed to the social theory laid out by the Puritan founders

of Massachusetts Bay, but they participated in the same Western tradition of frontier settlement.

For Carroll, the Old World ideas and outlooks transplanted in New England along with

its Puritan founders characterized popular notions about the frontier and its wilderness

inhabitants for much of the colonial era. Biblical traditions about wilderness experience

combined with the firsthand of colonists themselves in the often hostile and foreboding New

England environment. This served to form an early Anglo-American societal imagination, a

process largely glossed over by Pearce. When discussing the captivity narratives dispersed

throughout New England in the wake of the destructive Indian wars of the late seventeenth

century, Pearce writes that "the Puritan narrative is one in which the details of the captivity itself

are found to figure forth a larger, essentially religious experience."22 Here, Pearce tangentially

references the wider social, religious framework out of which early captivity narratives were

born, but fails to adequately address the already existent societal values and sentiments which

gave rise to the messages of writers like Mary Rowlandson.

While Pearce takes for granted the exclusionary nature of Puritan social theory, Carroll

explains the concept of the Hedge of Grace as a foundational principle of early New England

social framework, which the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay relied on for protection from the

dangers of the wilderness. The Hedge was the spiritual boundary that protected the city on a hill,

and it was this boundary between the godly Puritan civilization and the ominous frontier which

was reinforced in the minds of everyday New Englanders by the teachings of orthodox ministers

such as Samuel Danforth, Increase Mather, and William Hubbard. Carroll writes that "since the

wilderness represented the world of reprobacy and sinfulness, Puritan theologians stressed the

22Pearce, "The Significances of the Captivity Narrative," 2.

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value of the Hedge as a shield from these corruptions."23 The theory that a sacred Hedge

protected the Puritans from the wilderness stressed that this protection rested on the continued

piety of New Englanders themselves. Influential ministers such as Increase and Cotton Mather

reminded their congregations that as long as they minded God's holy ordinances, they would

remained protected from the perils of the surrounding frontier.The messages of the jeremiad

sermons of the seventeenth emphasized this idea throughout the seventeenth century and

beyond.24 Carroll explores the effects of the ministry's messages on Massachusetts Bay colonists

in the seventeenth century and how these messages shaped popular perception of the wilderness.

The sentiments so often expressed in the literature of King Philip's War, particularly those found

in Mary Rowlandson's narrative, must be considered with relation to this societal model.

Scholarship on the literature written in the wake of King Philip's War almost inevitably

addresses frontier concerns, as the conflict itself, at least in the minds of the men and women

who lived through it, represented a clash between the agents of the wilderness and the inhabitants

of God's commonwealth in the New World. Carroll reaches the climax of his text in claiming

that King Philip's War was a wilderness crisis for New Englanders, rather than a clash between

two equally developed cultures. "Not since the early years of settlement did the wilderness

condition so threaten the existence of New England colonies."25 However, Carroll ends his

examination of the wilderness condition in the minds of Puritan colonists here, rather than

further exploring the effects of the experience of the war on the literature and imagination of

future generations. He does not discuss the genesis of the Puritan captivity narrative or the

accounts of the wilderness experience during the war later recorded by figures such as Benjamin

Church. Carroll demonstrates the social framework which informed and was in turn informed by 23Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 112.24 For more on the role of the jeremiad sermon in Puritan social theory, see SacvanBercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1978).25Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 208.

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frontier experiences such as that of King Philip's War, but he does not explore the influences of

these experiences on the literature or collective imagination of the next generation.

The process of developing the framework of the New England Puritan mindset, reflected

in printed literature and popular imagination is explored in depth by Richard Slotkin in his book

Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, as well as

by more recent scholars including Jill Lepore. Slotkin emphasizes the significance of the

impetus for myth-making in early New England society and how this was achieved by the

Puritan literary culture of the seventeenth century. Though their fields of focus are quite

different, Slotkin and Lepore examine a large number of the same sources and draw similar

conclusions regarding the motives of prominent Puritan writers.26 While Carroll’s text revolves

largely around the development of Puritan social theory, Slotkin focuses on how that social

theory shaped perceptions of the Puritans’ place in the New World in the wake of a succession of

Indian wars. Printed literature formed the basis for the shaping of these perceptions. Print

culture was the primary vehicle of thoughts and ideas in Puritan New England, and this culture

gave rise to the captivity narrative, as well as to sermons, wilderness tracts, and accounts of

conflict with Native Americans.27 The paradox discussed by Carroll, between the emphasis on

the sheltered Bible commonwealth and the drive to push further into the wilderness in search of

land, is at the heart of the literary traditions which Slotkin argues grew out of these experiences.

“One could not maintain religious discipline by purely theological argument or pure civic force,

26 See: Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr With the Indians in New England (Boston, 1675); William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians (Boston, 1677); Nathaniel Saltonstall, The Present State of new England with Respect to the Indian War (Boston, 1675)27 For more on Puritan theology and print culture see Meredith Marie Neuman, Jeremiah's Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); for more on Puritan thought and wilderness conflicts see the introductory chapter to: Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, So Dreadfull A Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-1677 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), as well as introductory chapter to: Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)

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if parishioners were willing and capable of seeking their fortune by itinerating on the edges of

the wilderness; so sermons merged with accounts of frontier hardship.”28 While Carroll focuses

on this tension as the disintegrating factor in the Puritan goal of a city on a hill, Slotkin shifts the

focus to the development of a distinctly American literary tradition which grew out of attempts

by Puritan society to come to terms with the seemingly irreversible trend of inland expansion

into the frontier.

Jill Lepore’s focus is more oriented toward the process by which New England literary

culture undermined and demonized the Puritans’ Algonquian neighbors during King Philip’s

War. In her book The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity,

Lepore explores the literature surrounding the war, emphasizing the colonists’ attempts to defend

their conduct in the conflict. Puritan anxieties over the influences of the wilderness are explored,

as much of the literature Lepore analyzes focuses on the drive to solidify the boundary between

civilized New Englander and savage Indian. The divine Hedge, so important to Carroll’s

argument, plays a prominent role in the racialization of Anglo-American-Indian relations.

However, Lepore discusses the stress of New Englanders on distinguishing between their

justifiable conduct in the war and the brutal, savage behavior of the Native Americans. Lepore’s

argument shows that this movement in literary culture during and after King Philip’s War was an

extension of the theoretical Bible commonwealth which had already defined itself against the

Indian-haunted wilderness. However, Slotkin demonstrates that the circulation of frontier stories

such as that of Benjamin Church led to an unconscious blend of Anglo-American settlers with

the Native Americans in the wilderness, resulting in subsequent popular frontier figures, both

real and imagined, such as Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo.

28Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 19.

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The metaphors developed by the Puritan theologians of New England emphasized the

wilderness experience of the colonists, with particular stress on differentiating the godly

commonwealth from the influence of the wilderness. These metaphors, shaped and expanded

upon in the discourse of distinct literary genres, formed the basis for popular American literary

tradition in future generations. Once the sermons and spiritual tracts began to be informed by the

experiences of the Indian wars, beginning with the Pequot War of 1637 but culminating with

King Philip’s War four decades later, these distinct genres began to emerge. “The Indian war

was a uniquely American experience,” Slotkin writes. “It pitted the English Puritan colonists

against Indian barbarism.”29 These new literary forms were informed by Puritan theology and

exceptionalism, but their emphasis gradually shifted away from spiritual idealism toward popular

sentiment based on the frontier experience.30 “It was within this genre of colonial Puritan writing

that the first American mythology took shape - a mythology in which the hero was the captive or

victim of devilish American savages and in which his (or her) heroic quest was for religious

conversion or salvation.”31While continuous wilderness endeavor and conflict undermined the

original mission of the Puritan commonwealth, its literary tradition survived and translated into

the developing American literary tradition, characterized by popular perceptions of the New

England frontier.

It is important to examine the roles of writers like Mary Rowlandson and Benjamin

Church in forming opinions about the wilderness beyond early New England communities as

well as collective memory of King Philip's War and other conflicts with Native Americans.

While the writings of Increase Mather and other New England ministers are important for a

study of the growth of wilderness ideology in Puritan thought during this period, the narratives of 29Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 21.30 See John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, Alfred K. Knopf, 1994).31Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 21.

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people like Rowlandson and Church, who actually underwent significant wilderness experiences,

contain early iterations of motifs which would become commonplace in later American

literature. Rowlandson's captivity narrative achieves a synthesis of earlier Puritan literary forms,

but also served as a prototype for a new genre which would remain popular among everyday

American readers for at least another century.32 Meanwhile, Church's memoirs of his time in

King Philip's War contribute significantly to the figure of the frontiersman in early American

literature.33 While Carroll does not deal with these sources in any meaningful way, Pearce

addresses only Mary Rowlandson's narrative, though he does go on to discuss John Williams' as

well. Slotkin, and subsequent scholars including Lepore deal with these sources in depth and

discuss at length their role in shaping later literary interplay between perceived civilization and

the ominous frontier which lay beyond its borders.

In his book The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America, John Demos

explores the different sides of captive and frontier experiences. He takes as his subject the

family of the Reverend John Williams of Deerfield, who were taken captive during a raid on

their town on the night of February 28, 1704. Williams, his wife, and children were all taken

captive by a combined force of Frenchmen from Canada and their Native American, mostly

Mohawk, allies. Demos explores Williams’ experience his motivations for composing his

captivity narrative The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. “The memories of captivity

beckoned him to write - another chance to ‘edify’ the faithful - and write he did.”34Demos argues

that, like Rowlandson, John Williams felt the need to write the tale of his captivity for the benefit

32 For more on the influences on Rowlandson's narrative see: Dawn Henwood, "Mary Rowlandson and the Psalms: The Textuality of Survival," Early American Literature 32:2 (1997); Michelle Burnham, "The Journey Between: Liminality and Dialogism in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative," Early American Literature 28:1 (1993).33 See: "Benjamin Church: King of the Wild Frontier," Slotkin and Folsom, So Dreadfull A Judgment, 370; Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 180.34Demos, Redeemed Captive, 51.

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of his contemporaries, that they might know that God would not forsake them, even as he

chastised them. However, Demos explores the experiences of Williams’ other family members

as well, especially the experience of Williams’ daughter Eunice.

Eunice Williams is Demos’ titular unredeemed captive. In telling her story, Demos

provides valuable insight into the sorts of situations faced by captives who were pressured to join

the kin-groups of their captors and the decisions they made. Eunice was adopted into the largely

Mohawk community of Kahnawake in Quebec, adopted Roman Catholicism, and eventually

married a Mohawk man. All this was to the horror of the Williams family back in New England.

Demos accurately gauges the family’s reaction to the news of Eunice’s wedding when he writes

that “they just cannot face it, cannot quite write the words without tears…her husband is a

‘Philistine’ indeed.  An Indian.  A Catholic.  A savage.”35 Demos details a series of attempts by

representatives from New England to convince Eunice to return home, as well as her staunch

refusal on each of these occasions. For Demos, the story of Eunice Williams’ decision to remain

with her adoptive Mohawk kin-group is an example of innumerable captives from New England

who made similar decisions.

The writings of participants and witnesses of King Philip's War build on the foundation

of wilderness ideology developed by New England Puritan social theory and provide common

themes and motifs for later popular literature. Studies of this process of development should be

done from an interdisciplinary approach. Seventeenth century Puritan theology and social theory

should be examined, as well as the literature of New England from the late seventeenth and early

eighteenth centuries. A study of the influence of Puritan ideology on early American literature

can also benefit from perspectives of literary criticism as well as sociology. Pearce, Carroll,

Slotkin, and Lepore each take one of these respective approaches, but much of their work only

35 Demos, Unredeemed Captive, 99.

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tangentially relates to the formation of literary conceptions of the New England wilderness. A

comprehensive study of the development of American popular frontier literature should take all

of these aspects into account in order to accurately demonstrate the influence of the Puritan

worldview on collective notions of the wilderness.

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Introduction:

The wilderness of the New World played a crucial role in the development of the early

American collective imagination. In particular, early New England society consistently

defineditself against what it perceived to be the wilderness condition in which the Native

Americans lived. Preconceived notions of the wilderness, gleaned from Biblical tradition and

crystallized during the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay colony, characterized the framework

of the Puritan commonwealth. While new communities were founded in the midst of the hostile

New England wilderness, their founders believed that God protected them as advocates of true

religion. They were kept safe as long as they remained steadfast in their piety. However, the

very act of settlement, whether for the cause of religion or material gain, began a prolonged

process of deeper penetration into the frontier for the sake of cultivating new settlements.

Resulting clashes with Native Americans,commonly viewed by New Englanders as agents of the

degenerative wilderness, served to reshape popular conceptions regarding the frontier. Literature

resulting from Indian wars, informed by the social theory of New England Puritanism as well as

frontier experience in the late seventeenth century, represented an introduction of the themes of

Puritan wilderness theology into popular literary genres. Puritan attitudes toward the wilderness

and, in turn, the experiences of conflicts such as King Philip's War, characterized the imagination

of the North American frontier in later popular fiction. Images of the hostile wilderness inherent

in the New England consciousness since the first generations of settlement, but it was the

crystallization of these images in new genres such as captivity narratives and tales of frontier

warfare, born out of the experiences of King Philip's War, that gave birth to a distinctly

American frontier literary tradition.

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The turning point for the development of this tradition can be traced to the emergence of

new literary genres, which changed the scope of expression for New Englanders. Men and

women writing in the wake of King Philip's War often articulated familiar ideas in these newly

conceived genres. Captivity narratives introduced uniquely individual accounts of the frontier,

capturing the imaginations of the men and women for whom captivity at the hands of Native

Americans was a distinct possibility. Following the first captivity narratives in New England

came accounts such as those of Benjamin Church, who had ventured into the New England

wilderness to fight alongside and against different Native American groups in order to preserve

the way of life of his fellow Anglo-Americans. The wilderness experience was nothing new to

seventeenth century New Englanders, but it took on a significance and meaning which it did not

possess for earlier generations. Both the destruction of King Philip's War, and the recounting of

individual experiences such as those of Mary Rowlandson and Benjamin Church, informed

perceptions of the frontier for succeeding generations.

The wilderness experience was a fundamental aspect of the early New England Puritan

commonwealth. However, with the advent of destructive Indian wars later in the century came a

new kind of experience. The pervasive New England frontier had always been seen as a

dangerous influence, though the damage done to Puritan communities during conflicts such as

King Philip's War was seen as a new wilderness crisis. No longer is the wilderness simply a

precarious realm beyond the walls of the godly commonwealth but a combative force threatening

New England's very existence. Where the emphasis had once been on the stemming of frontier

expansion, the writings on King Philip's War and after focused on the dangers of the wilderness

invading Anglo-American settlements. Mary Rowlandson expressed this very fear when she

wrote of her home being burned and her friends and relations being butchered around her."Some

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in our houses were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over

our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out."36In

Rowlandson's narrative, Native Americans were emphasized as the active agents of the

treacherous frontier in the sense similarly conveyed in the thought of earlier New England

writers, but her focus was on being attacked on her own ground, rather than during a venture into

the unknown forest.

While Mary Rowlandson wrote of her traumatic experience in Biblical terms, Captain

Benjamin Church related the stories of his exploits in King Philip's War with a markedly

different tone. While Rowlandson was dragged from her home and family in the frontier town of

Lancaster, Church willingly journeyed into the New England forests in order to fight the hostile

Algonquians on their own terms. In his Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War, first

published in 1716, Church wrote of his exploits in combating Native Americans throughout the

frontier of New England. Church was a foundational personality in American frontier literature.

Motifs found in both Rowlandson's narrative and Church's memoirs also appeared in later works

of popular fiction such as John Filson's account of Daniel Boone's adventures and Charles

Brockden Brown's novel Edgar Huntly. The themes of captivity and wilderness conflict would

still be central to nineteenth century works such as the novels of James Fennimore Cooper.

These themes were crystallized in the testimonials of those who witnessed the destruction of

King Philip's War, but were developed in the writing and thought of the founders of New

England and continuously expanded upon to meet the needs of a changing social atmosphere

throughout the seventeenth century.

36 Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness, in Alden T. Vaughan and Edward Clark W.Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

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Scholars have long since considered the interpretation of Mary Rowlandson's narrative as

a jeremiad sermon, projected onto her own experience, for the identity formation and

reaffirmation of late seventeenth century New Englanders. As God's chosen people, the New

England Puritans had to contend with a dangerous wilderness, in which the heathen Indians

lurked seeking their destruction. This was the message of King Philip's War, according to

ministers such as Increase Mather and according to Rowlandson's interpretation of her own

experience. Backsliding New England had to e shown that God could easily destroy them, even

using a seemingly primitive and inferior enemy such as their Native American neighbors.

However, reading Rowlandson's experience as a conversion narrative is more fruitful for

understanding the influence of her text on the development of subsequent frontier literature. As

Patricia Caldwell explains in her book The Puritan Conversion Narrative, New Englanders

seeking full church membership had to prove that they had undergone a true conversion

experience.37 That they had been overwhelmed by their sense of sin and that, in that moment of

lowliness, had felt the spirit of God within them. This was how they proved their sanctity, their

status as a living saint. They were humiliated, but then reaffirmed in their sense of salvation.

It is in this sense that the narratives of Rowlandson and subsequent New England

captives should be understood in order to gain further insight into the development of subsequent

narrative forms such as those of Benjamin Church and later frontier figures. Whereas the

jeremiad sermons of the Puritan ministry emphasized the collective society as a single unit, the

captivity narrative brought the focus down to the individual. Ministers like Increase Mather

were focused on the redemption and salvation of New England as a whole, but the publication of

Rowlandson's story began a trend towards the interest in individual experience. Individual

37 Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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endeavor had been downplayed for decades, for fear that it might undermine the collective

Puritan mission in North America. However, the story of a single woman, even a minster's wife,

captured the attention of readers throughout North America and beyond, and the individual

experience of the frontier remained at the forefront of the imagination of New England readers.

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Chapter I: The Wilderness and the Origins of Puritan New England

As soon as they arrived in the New World, Puritan settlers came to resent the wilderness

surrounding their fledgling communities. The vast, untamed forests of New England were

diametrically opposed to the orderly society which the Puritan founders hoped to build. In a

society functioning according to the ethics of New England's Puritan founders, the newcomers'

community was to be explicitly separated from the uncultivated world around it. Generations

before Mary Rowlandson others expressed dread at the thought of the threat of the looming

wilderness, early New England leaders such as William Bradford articulated similar concerns

over their new environs. The land itself was inhospitable, and the Native inhabitants were

perceived as godless and cruel. Bradford and his fellow Mayflower passengers had anticipated

the New World being "fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil

inhabitants."38However, on their arrival, the Separatists found that their new home was neither as

fit for habitation as they had anticipated nor uninhabited. When they arrived, Bradford lamented

that when he and his companions surveyed the land before them, "what could they see but a

hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men - and what multitudes there

might be of them they knew not."39 Bradford's obvious disappointment upon first seeing New

England is suggestive of a disparity between those who had actually seen North America before

this point and the messages being conveyed to potential settlers still in England. The colonists'

expectations for their new homeland were colored both by preconceived notions about untamed

wilderness and by overly optimistic advertisements about the fecundity of the land in North

America.

38William Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation, 25.39Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation, 62.

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The inconsistency found in the early sources for New England settlement centers on

viewing the North American wilderness as either a land of trial and tribulation or as a new

paradise where settlers could till the fertile soil, leaving spiritual and temporal woes behind them.

Some early writers expressed one of these views, while others expounded the other. Some

writers exhibited both views at one point or another in their texts. Edward Winslow, Mayflower

passenger and prominent Plymouth Separatist, thanked the King of England for planting he and

his fellow Separatists in "such hopefull a Countrey as New-England," and then proceeded to

rebuke certain parties for who would "send over supplies of men...not caring how they bee

qualified" for the hardships of cultivating the New England wilderness.40 While Bradford

conceded that New England appeared "hideous and desolate" upon his first impression, other

colonists continue to extol the virtues of the New World. Thomas Morton, less concerned with

spiritual living and more concerned with the potential for material gain, sang the praises of New

England's landscapes. In his New English Canaan, Morton called New England "the modell of a

Rich hopefull and very beautifull Country, worthy of the Title of Natures Masterpeece."41At the

root of this discrepancy was a set of preconceived notions regarding the nature of the New World

in the minds of colonists arriving there from England.

English settlers came to New England not as blank slates regarding the wilderness, but

primed with the ideas of a longstanding Western and Christian tradition regarding foreboding

woodlands and uncultivated frontiers. Biblical precedents and the biases of Western thought

about seemingly uninhabited wilderness were transferred from the Old World to the New. These

impressions had significant implications for the colonists' reactions to their new homes and to the

Native peoples already living there. For the budding colonies of New England, in particular the 40 Edward Winslow, Good NewesFrom New England; or A True Relation of things very remarkable at the Plantation of Plimouth in New-England (London, 1624), 2-4.41 Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan: Containing an Abstract of New England. Composed in three Bookes (Amsterdam: 1637), Mass. Hist. Soc. 2.

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religiously-charged groups at Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, the North American wilderness

was to be viewed on almost wholly religious terms. The wilderness of New England was

analogous to that wilderness through which the Israelites of the Old Testament had been forced

to wander in order to find the promised land of Canaan. However, writers like Morton seemed to

have thought of the New World as a readymade paradise simply awaiting the arrival of European

settlers. "I appeale to any man of judgment whether it be not a Land, that for her excellent

indowments of Nature may passe for a plaineparalell to Canaan of Israell."42 The consensus

hope for New England was that it would prove to be a veritable promised land for the settlers

who came over from England. However, while colonists like Bradford in Plymouth and John

Winthrop in Massachusetts Bay believed their new homes required proper cultivation, both

literal and figurative, before being seen as a paradise on earth, writers like Morton saw the New

World as a paradise in and of itself, simply waiting for the implanting of settlers from Europe to

reap its benefits.

While colonists writing about their experiences in New England may have disagreed on

exactly how to treat their new surroundings, they drew their initial impressions from a common

source of tradition. In viewing the New England wilderness as either a desolate waste or a

fruitful paradise, the colonists were drawing on Western, Christian conceptions of wild lands.

On one hand, the Puritans saw the wilderness as a dangerous realm, meant to be cultivated for

the sake of founding a society based on the principles of a Biblical polity. This view

characterized the wilderness as a realm devoid of both physical and religious security. On the

other, the New World was seen as a fertile and inviting land, largely uninhabited, and waiting for

European settlers to take advantage of its boundless resources. In essence, the disagreement was

over whether the New World should be seen as a godless realm requiring the importation of both

42 Morton, New English Canaan, 61.

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Christianity and civilization, or a latter-day Garden of Eden offering everything settlers needed

for a safe and contented lifestyle. Both of these viewpoints are charged with preconceived

notions and overlook almost entirely an objective interpretation of the New World and of its

inhabitants, the Native Americans. Roderick Frazier Nash writes that "the emphasis here is not

so much what wilderness is but what men think it is."43 Whether favorable or unfavorable,

impressions of the New England wilderness were made through a religious lens that allowed for

little or no understanding of the environment or its Native occupants on their own terms.

Though he portrayed the Native Americans generally in a more favorable light than early

Puritan writers, Morton's impression of the New England wilderness was more evocative of a

European view of Eden than of the actual wilderness he encountered. For Morton, the New

England environment was "a country whose indowments are by learned men allowed to stand in

a parallel with the Israelites Canaan, which none will deny, to be a land farre more excellent than

Old England in her proper nature."44 The "learned man" would have been obliged to have seen

the similarities between New England and the promised land of the Old Testament. On one

hand, this was a compliment to the land and its features, but it implied that the land was meant

for habitation, that it had been set aside by God for his chosen people. Morton was certainly no

Puritan in the strict sense, but he shared this one view at least with the colonists of Plymouth and

Massachusetts Bay. That the land was there for habitation and cultivation was a view shared by

virtually all of the New England writers of the early seventeenth century, regardless of their

views on related issues such as the Native Americans.In this sense, the disagreement between

men like Morton and the early Puritan establishment was not so much over the nature of the

wilderness itself, but of the settlers' proper place within it.

43 Nash, Wilderness, 5.44 Morton, New English Canaan, 61.

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For the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, the wilderness presented the daunting challenges

of building a godly society in the midst of a spiritually barren wasteland. The New World was to

be settled not for an appreciation for the surrounding wilderness, but for the purpose of carving a

true Christian society out of a forbidding country. In this respect, the founders of Massachusetts

Bay saw themselves as a parallel to the Hebrews of the Old Testament who had had to traverse a

wilderness in order to inhabit the promised land of Canaan. The Puritans themselves had had to

cross the vast Atlantic Ocean and enter the forbidding North American continent in order to

accomplish what they perceived as essentially the same goal.Perry Miller writes that what John

Winthrop and his fellow Puritan colonists sought to build was "the pure Biblical polity set forth

in full detail by the New Testament...no denominational peculiarity but the very essence of

organized Christianity."45 This task required the settlers to found communities within the hostile

new environment, but clearly separated from its scope and influence. This burgeoning social

theory was essentially founded on the Puritans' distrusting of the ominous New England

wilderness.

The Puritan settlers viewed the New World as devoid of all the trappings of civilization

and of true religion. They saw it as a charge from God that they had been sent here to found a

society that would serve as an example to all the world, and England in particular, of a successful

polity grounded in the precepts of Christian government. This meant governing themselves

according to Puritan religious doctrine, but it also meant reshaping the wilderness around them to

look more like the cities and towns of their European homeland. "We must consider that we

shall be as a city upon a hill," explained John Winthrop to his fellow colonists aboard the

Arbellain 1630.46 Winthrop was largely concerned with the "eyes of the people" upon himself

45 Miller, Errand, 5.46 John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (1630), Mass. Hist. Soc.

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and the new colony, but what he implied was that the society would be built specifically apart

from the environment around it. Peter Carroll understands the idea of the City on a Hill as an

exclusionary community founded within the treacherous wilderness of New England.

"Modelled, in theory, on the medieval town, such a city would enclose the entire population

within the confines of strong walls.  In insisting upon social cohesion, the leaders of New

England expected the commonwealth to function without reference to the areas outside of the

community."47 Why were these walls needed? Why was it so important that the new Christian

society maintain the boundary between itself and the frontier? The Puritans' impression of the

New England wilderness as a spiritual wasteland meant that they felt the need to distance

themselves from its influence.

The wilderness presented physical threats such as an often inhospitable environment and

the threat of attack from Native Americans, but the belief that North America was largely under

the sway of Satan was a matter of just as much urgency to the Puritan colonists.They were not

simply relocating to the New World but importing Christian civilization as well. The new

landscape certainly posed very real problems for the settlers, however there existed from the

earliest days of New England settlement a deeper, more psychological resentment of the wild

lands of North America in the minds of the colonists. As Nash explains, "on the direct, physical

level, it constituted a formidable threat to his very survival," but "in addition civilized man faced

the danger of succumbing to the wilderness of his surroundings and reverting to savagery

himself."48The idea of uncultivated land was viewed as incompatible with the values of English

civilization, and thus the vast tracts of wilderness were seen by the Puritans not as a paradise, as

Morton had written, but as a spiritual wasteland that needed cultivating both in the physical and

47 Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 2-3.48 Nash, Wilderness, 24.

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religious sense. Carroll writes that "to many, the savage state of the wilderness signified Satanic

power; they were convinced that America, the land of spiritual darkness, was the realm of the

Antichrist."49 It was deemed necessary by the Puritan leadership to achieve a degree of

separation between the fledgling colony and the dangers of the frontier.

This mistrust of the New England wilderness on the part of the Puritans was extended to

the Native American population as well. As the land was uncultivated and thus lacking the

conditions necessary for Christian civilization, so its Native inhabitants were viewed as

spiritually backward. Worse still, their seemingly "savage" lifestyle was equated with Satan.

Bradford warned in his memoir that those who survived the hardships of settlement in the North

American would still be "in continual danger of the savage people, who are cruel, barbarous and

most treacherous, being most furious in their rage and merciless."50The blanket fear and

prejudice regarding Native Americans that characterized the narratives of captivity and frontier

warfare later in the seventeenth century was expressed in Bradford's reactions to the Separatists'

first encounters with American Indians. Carroll explains that, to the Puritans, the Indians seemed

"trapped in 'the snare of the Divell.'"51 The Indians were essentially seen as an extension of the

uncultivated wilderness. Bradford wrote that they were "only savage and brutish men which

range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts."52 Edward Winslow expressed a similar

sentiment, at least with regards to most Natives, when he recounted an interaction with the

Separatist's ally Hobbamock regarding the Pokanoket sachem Massasoit. "Whilst I lived, I

should never see his like amongst the Indians," Winslow recalled. "He was no lyer, he was not

bloudy and cruell like other Indians."53 While Winslow was complimentary to one specific

49Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 11.50Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation, 26.51Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 11.52Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation, 25.53 Winslow, Good Newes, 27.

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individual in Massasoit, the attitude expressed in his writing was one of general disdain for most

Indians. The "bloudy and cruell" Indians were a reflection of the uncivilized wilderness, as wild

and uncultivated as the desolate wastelands in which they lived. However, this view was not the

universal view of the New England colonists from the beginning.

While the orthodox Puritan doctrine deplored the Native American lifestyle, Thomas

Morton expressed admiration. What early Puritans and Separatists saw largely as the problem of

the "natural" man devoid of civilization, Morton saw as something akin to man in the Garden,

before the Fall. "They may be rather accompted to live richly wanting nothing that is needfull;

and to be commended for leading a contented life."54 Morton, far from adhering to the rigid

Puritan view, recognized the benefits of the Algonquian way of life. He understood the way in

which they lived as having had a unique balance with the wilderness around them. "Now since it

is but food and rayment that men that live needeth...why should not the Natives of New England

be sayd to live richly having no want of either...the beasts of the forrest there doe serve to furnish

them...fish and flesh they have in great abundance."55 Unlike the Puritans and Plymouth

Separatists, Morton appreciated the Native way of life and recognized it as more than simply a

barbaric or savage lifestyle. He understood as an alternative to Western lifestyle rather than

simply primitive. However, Morton drew the ire of Plymouth colony as he was viewed as being

too close with the Natives, celebrating with a Maypole, which shocked the religiously

conservative Separatists. Bradford even accused Morton and his servants of taking Native

women as consorts. Bradford wrote that "Morton became the lord of misrule, and maintained...a

schoole of Athisme."56 Morton's censure and exile from New England is indicative of the

solidifying of the boundaries between growing Anglo-American civilization and the Native

54 Morton, New English Canaan, 58.55 Morton, New English Canaan, 56 Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation,

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Americans in the wilderness. Morton was an example of what many Anglo-Americans,

especially among the Puritan orthodoxy, would come to fear in coming into contact with the

North American wilderness: degenerating into the Indian state.

The banishment of Thomas Morton from the region that became the Massachusetts Bay

colony was representative of a broader trend in the development of New England. Morton's

unseemly behavior, living amongst the Indians, feasting and celebrating with them, and teaching

them to use firearms, was decried by the religiously-minded leaders of Plymouth and later of

Massachusetts Bay. Having suppressed the "riotous and profuse excess" of Morton, the

orthodox leaders of the New England colonies maintained a cultural boundary between the

Native Americans and the colonists, between the wilderness and the European settlements.57 An

Englishman cavorting with the Natives as Morton had was too much for men like William

Bradford to bear. Not only was Morton's activity suppressed, but so were voices like his in the

literary development of New England. It was not until 1637 that his New English Canaan would

be published in England. As such, his favorable descriptions of the Native Americans and of the

conditions of the North American environment were suppressed in the colonies as well. The

Puritan view of the wilderness, as a realm with no redeeming qualities other than its potential for

cultivation, became the mainstream narrative of New England.

The triumph of the Puritan narrative of the North American wilderness had significant

implications for the development of New England. The absence of moderate voices like

Morton's, which expressed sympathy or understanding for a Native way of life, hindered

relations between European colonists and their Algonquian neighbors. Though significant

efforts were made throughout much of the seventeenth century to convert large numbers of

natives to Christianity, a lack of respect for Indian lifestyle and customs on the part of the Puritan

57Beadford, Of Plimouth Plantation,

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settlers undermined the ability of the two peoples to coexist. The view of the wilderness as the

antithesis of the Christian civilization prevented any sort of lasting diplomacy between

Europeans and Native Americans. As Nash explains, "civilizing the New World meant

enlightening darkness, ordering chaos, and changing evil into good.  In the morality play of

westward expansion, wilderness was the villain."58 Even for men like Morton, who showed

some degree of empathy toward Native American culture, perceived the North American

wilderness in terms of its ability to provide for settlers. His identification of the New England

wilderness as a New Canaan may have sounded more optimistic than the views of the early

Puritans and Separatists, but it reflected a general European outlook that favored the cultivation

of the frontier rather than appreciating it on its own terms.

58 Nash, Wilderness, 24.

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Chapter II: Issues of Wilderness Expansion

From the earliest days of the Puritan migrations to New England, the "City on a Hill"

served as the ideal for new settlements. Puritan settlers envisioned communities within the New

England wilderness, but separate from its apparently degenerative influence. Yet, the very act of

colonization implied a venture into an uncharted wilderness. “The external factors behind

frontier expansion - overpopulation and the desire to settle in more fertile areas - were

strengthened...by an internal paradox within Puritan thought.  From the beginning of

colonization, the Puritans emphasized the importance of transforming the wilderness into

cultivated acreage."59 While the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts Bay railed against seemingly

needless dispersion into the wilderness, the fundamental goal of building a new community in

the New World justified, in the minds of many profit-minded colonists, further settlement inland.

"This mission served as a rationale for inland expansion and accelerated the breakdown of the

organic community envisioned by the first settlers of Massachusetts Bay."60 Men like Thomas

Morton, and others throughout the seventeenth century, who traveled beyond the sphere of

influence cast by Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, subverted the ideology of the

Puritan mission, but could point to the mission of cultivating a wilderness to justify their actions.

While Church was comfortable settling along the frontier, far from the perceived safety

of the larger coastal settlements, Mary Rowlandson was an uneasy inhabitant of a frontier town,

left vulnerable during the uncertainty of King Philip's War. The hostile Algonquians repeatedly

targeted Rowlandson's hometown of Lancaster during the conflict and it was one of several

isolated communities devastated by raids. Carroll explains how the paradox of wilderness

59Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 128.60Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 128.

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cultivation lay at the heart of the issue. "The Puritans' endorsement of the subjugation of wild

lands...provided enterprising settlers with an effective rationalization for expanding beyond the

organic community intended by the founding fathers."61 Similarly, John Williams' community at

Deerfield, largely set apart in the frontier of western Massachusetts, wasrepeatedly throughout

the succession of conflicts involving Native Americans in the late seventeenth century.62 While

Rowlandson and Williams, coming from ministerial families, decried the influence of the

wilderness and Native Americans on their experiences, Church largely embraced life along the

fringes of Anglo-American civilization, as Thomas Morton had done in an earlier

generation.Church relished the opportunity to build his own bit of civilization within the

untamed wilderness around him. "Horses and Cattel were including the denizens of town s such

as Lancaster and Deerfield, Church looked to journey ever farther into the New England

wilderness in order to found his own plantation. Not only did these individuals threaten the

integrity of the original Puritan mission in New England, but it brought Anglo-American society

as a while into closer contact and ever more conflict with Native Americans.

Herein lies a problem with the way in which certain figures have been portrayed by

historians in the frontier expansion of early New England. In particular, historians have created

a false dichotomy between men like Morton and Church and their counterparts among the

orthodox Puritan leadership. Richard Slotkin portrays Morton and Church as the polar opposites

of the Puritan establishment in their deeds and lifestyles and yet neither of these two colonists

were as far removed from Puritan ideology as theorists like Slotkin explain in their texts.Slotkin

is correct in his analysis of the issues between Morton and the Puritan and Separatist colonies.

"Morton was the symbol of everything evil and threatening in the New World and their

61Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 3.62 Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians

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ownculture."63 However, Slotkin's estimation of Morton's relationship with the Native

Americans and the wilderness is misleading. "His spiritual and physical separation from the

Separatists was strongly underlined by the intimacy his settlement enjoyed with the Indians.  He

traded with them, avoiding Plymouth regulations, and consorted and slept with them, violating

Plymouth morality."64 Morton's close relations with Native Americans did indeed cause anxiety

amongst the Plymouth Separatists and the early Massachusetts Bay leaders, though Slotkin's

portrayal of Morton remains questionable. On one hand, the Separatists viewed Morton's

practices as indicative of the dangers of wilderness expansion, but on the other hand Morton

himself was participating in the process of wilderness expansion that the Separatists and Puritans

themselves participated in as well. While charges of consorting with Native women and

violating Plymouth trade regulations were an affront to Puritan sentimentality, Morton viewed

the New England frontier as a land ripe for European settlement just as the Plymouth and

Massachusetts Bay colonists did.

Slotkin's discussion of Benjamin Church's narrative betrays this same discrepancy.

Though Church generally maintained better relations with Native Americans, Slotkin tends to

overestimate Church's apparent affection for the North American wilderness compared to

contemporaries such as Increase Mather.

Increased contact with the Natives raised a number of concerns for mainstream New

England society. Firstly, church leaders in Massachusetts Bay voice concern over the spiritual

wellbeing of the settlers living in the isolated frontier communities. For the Puritan ministers,

life in these communities, far from the spiritual and temporal protection of the Hedge and within

the dangerous influence of the wilderness, threatens both the physical livelihood and the souls of

63Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 58.64Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 59.

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those colonists who venture forth beyond the immediate protection of the Bay Colony. The New

England frontier, under the sway of Satan, presents considerable threats to incoming European

settlers. “Because the importation of true religion into this doctrinally barren ground would

threaten the Devil’s kingdom, the Puritans were prepared to meet with strong Satanic opposition

in America.  The Devil, they felt, would muster all his power to prevent the incursion of

Christianity into the wilderness.”65 Ministers like Increase Mather decried what they perceived

as the lax state of the church in many of these frontier communities, blaming this trend, among

others for the war with the Natives. "Yea there have been whole Plantations that have lived from

year to year without any publick invocation of the Name of God, and without his word.  And in

most places Instituted worship (whereby Christians are distinguished from Heathen) hath been

too much neglected."66 Clearly, the concerns over isolated plantations along the New England

frontier were manifold. Not only did excessive wilderness settlement bring colonists away from

the temporal protection of the coastal communities, but also away from the protection afforded

by the firmly established churches within those coastal communities.

While Colonists moving further and further inland seemed to spread the colonial

population thin, they also brought New England society into more direct contact with Native

Americans. The disagreement over how to view the Native lifestyle were brought to a head with

excessive expansion. While generally viewed as uncivilized savages by New England writers,

including both ministers and secular colonists of the seventeenth century, the wholesale fear and

mistrust later expressed in the sermons and histories of the Puritan ministry, was not yet a

universal. Even as William Bradford warned of "the savage people, who are cruel, barbarous

and most treacherous,"67 Thomas Morton wrote that in New England "I found two sortes of

65Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 11.66 Increase Mather, An Earnest Exhortation67 Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation

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people, the one Christians, the other Infidels, these I found most full of humanity, and more

friendly than the other."68 Later in the century, this same disparity in viewpoints was still

discernable between the Puritan elite of Massachusetts Bay and the less religiously-minded

colonists. As he built his new home in the wilds of Rhode Island, Benjamin Church took "the

uttermost caution...to keep my self from offending my Indian Neighbors all round about me."69

Church asserted that he went even further than simply seeking to avoid offending the Natives

living around his new home. He actively cultivated relationships with the Native Americans

around him. In his memoir, Church recalled that he "gain’d a good acquaintance with the

Natives: got much into their favour, and was in a little time in great esteem among them.”70

Clearly, amiable relations between frontier settlers and the New England Natives were possible,

but as tensions over land and sovereignty created rifts between the Natives and the colonists, the

messages of the ministerial elite began to hold more sway in popular imagination.

However, even men like Benjamin Church, who seemed to form friendships with Native

Americans, acted as agents of wilderness transformation, the process so destructive to Native

communities. Church did not move so far from the hub of New England society in order to

embrace a wilderness lifestyle like those of the Algonquians around him. He settled the land

around him and formed a farm, even introducing English livestock into the region. Men like

Church, and Thomas Morton before him, were not decried by the Puritan ministry for their

practices of settling in the wilderness, but for the individualistic scope of their endeavors. The

mission of New England as the New Israel relied upon an exceptionally high degree of social

cohesion, and the dispersion of settlers further into the frontier threatened this goal. The Puritan

orthodox stance was that New England as a civilization needed to stand in opposition to and

68 Morton, New English Canaan, 17.69 Church, Entertaining Passages70 Church, Entertaining Passages

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separate from the wilderness of the New World. As the efforts of ministers like John Eliot

showed, the Native Americans were to become civilized and Christian or were to be kept out of

the scope of New England society. Settling so close to them, apart from the greater portion of

Anglo-American culture as Morton and Church had, was to dangerously blur the lines of

distinctions between them, threatening identity and threatening spirituality.

Well before the onset of King Philip's War, the literature of New England was dominated

by the literature of Calvinist orthodoxy. The spiritually-charged conceptions of the wilderness,

modeled on the experience of the Old Testament Israelites, were disseminated through sermons

and religious tracts printed throughout the colonies. Lepore argues that "literacy in early

America took a particular, ‘traditional’ form, characterized by its religious context, the scarcity

of printed materials, and the habit of repetition."71 As the colonies developed and settlers

dispersed further inland, founding new isolated communities, the message and vision of the

original founders of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies became diluted. Conflict with

Native Americans was a virtually inevitable byproduct of this expansionism. "Land! Land!

hath been the Idol of many in New-England," lamented Increase Mather, sermonizing to his

congregation at the height of King Philip's War. "Whereas the first Planters here that they might

keep themselves together were satisfied with one Acre for each person...and after that with

twenty Acres for a Family, how have Men since coveted after the earth, that many hundreds, nay

thousands of Acres, have been engrossed by one man."72 Mather pined for the days, real or

imagined, of the original settlers who have abandoned old England for the sake of religion. The

successive waves of colonists, settling further inland, undermined the mission of those founding

fathers by abandoning the coastal communities for the wilderness.

71Lepore, The Name of War, 54.72 Increase Mather, An Earnest Exhortation, 1676.

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While Benjamin Church reminisced about his friendly relations with his Indian

neighbors, Increase Mather and other Puritan religious leaders bemoaned the degenerative

influences of Anglo-American society on New England's Native population. It became

increasingly clear throughout the seventeenth century that European influence on Native

communities was as destructive as they had hoped their preaching amongst them would be

instructive. In his Earnest Exhortation, Mather provided something of a paradox about New

England's influence on the Algonquians to illustrate his theological argument about the present

state of the colonies. Mather warned of “those unhappy Indian-trading-houses, whereby the

Heathen have been so wofully scandalized." Mather was a leading voice in criticizing the

unscrupulous trade between settlers and Natives along the frontier. Mather implicitly decried the

Anglo-American influence in referring to the Natives as "scandalized," however, he also implied

that this practice had come back to haunt the colonists severely. "Was it not from the same root

of all evil, that the Indians have been furnished with Arms, and Ammunition?"73 Mather

observed that New Englanders themselves had shortsightedly provided the Natives with the very

weapons with which they now attacked and devastated villages and towns throughout the

colonies. Mather created an effective synthesis of a changing society's realities with the

theoretical punishment of a wayward people who have abandoned their true values.

As the divine protection of the "City Upon a Hill" had potential for both spiritual and

temporal security, so the diminishment of the coastal populations had implications both for the

religious vigor of the Puritan commonwealth and for the safety of new, isolated towns and

plantations founded deep in the untamed wilderness of the New World. "The belief that a

separating wall about the church reinforced the Puritans’ sense of uniqueness and assured them

that they differed considerably from the people beyond the boundaries of the Hedge, the lost

73 Mather, An Earnest Exhortation

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souls who traveled wildly through the chaotic wilderness of the world."74 The concept of divine

protection was promoted by the Puritan ministry to great effect in the era of King Philip's War

and beyond. At the turn of the eighteenth century, long after Philip's death, Cotton Mather still

entreated New Englanders to take heed of the traditional sources of Puritan social cohesion.

“Sirs, A Church-State well-form’d, may fortify you wonderfully!  But then; Oh Let these

Churches, Labour to approve themselves well Cultivated Vineyards.  Beware, O ye Vineyards of

the Lord, Beware lest Wild Grapes be Cherished in you.”75 The Mathers' insistence that the

presence of churches in frontier towns went hand-in-hand with military protection provided a

powerful message in an age when small towns, far removed from the coastal power base, were

under continual threat from the Native Americans in the depths of the surrounding woodlands.

The emphasis was on the collective unit. An overtly Christian town, in construction and in

collective identity. This required not only the protection of arms against the looming wilderness,

but also the symbols and trappings of English civilization.

74Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 110.75 Cotton Mather, Frontiers Well-Defended

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Chapter III: Collective and Individual Wilderness Experience

Many of the most prominent captivity narratives from the late seventeenth and early

eighteenth centuries illustrated the issue of temporal security for the frontier towns of New

England. These narratives also exhibited the concern over the spiritual livelihood of these same

towns. The stories of Mary Rowlandson and John Williams clearly illustrated the precarious

position of many remote New England communities, both in terms of military defense and

religious vigor. Native Americans twice targeted Lancaster, where Rowlandson lived with her

family, during King Philip's War. Native Americans targeted Deerfield, where John Williams

served as minister, repeatedly during King Philip's War and in the subsequent colonial conflicts

of the last decade of the seventeenth century and into the early eighteenth century. Cotton

Mather commiserated with the struggles of settlers in these isolated frontier towns who lived in

daily fear of the dangers of the wilderness. "Your Cottages are Smoked with many things, that

are Irksome to you; Many Briars & Thorns grow about them.  Weary Days and Nights are

appointed for you.  Many of you have a deep share in the Heavy Taxes of the Land.  Your

Possessions are ever now and then Ravished from you, by the Common Spoilers."76 The stories

of the suffering of the members of these communities, witnessing the destruction of their homes

and the deaths of their friends and family members, illustrated clearly for readers in Boston and

other coastal towns the frightful condition of life on the frontier during the era of the Indian wars.

Mary Rowlandson's narrative, the earliest such account of a Puritan held captive among

the Native Americans of New England, exhibited the anxieties of the colony's frontier towns.

Rowlandson's husband, the minister for the town of Lancaster, was away in Boston lobbying for

the greater defense of his remote parish. The focus on both the church and military defense of

76 C. Mather, Frontiers Well-Defended

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the scattered villages on the frontier was a constant struggle for those who lived there. "As this

good Man returned home," wrote Increase Mather in his history of King Philip's War, "he saw

his Lancaster in flames, and his own house burnt down...and knew not what was become of the

Wife of his bosome, and Children of his Bowels."77 The night of the raid itself was described in

frightening detail by Mary in her account, providing insight into the brutal episodes which

caused no shortage of fear for New Englanders settling within the inland wilderness. “Now is

that dreadful hour come that I have often heard of (in time of war as it was the case of others),

but now mine eyes see it.  Some in our houses were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in

their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the

head if we stirred out.”78 Rowlandson specifically mentioned having heard of these sorts of

happenings, but only now saw it for herself. Indeed, anxiety over Indian attacks was inherent to

the condition of New England settlers from the earliest days of migration.

Colonists arriving in the New World lived in daily fear of potential attacks from

neighboring Native groups. Even as the colonies grew in both size and military strength,

tensions with Natives were no small cause for concern. Episodes such as the Pequot War of

1637 and the conflict between the Mohegans and Narragansetts in 1643 evidence the

considerable tension existing between colonial settlements and neighboring Native American

groups in the decades before King Philip's War.79 Accounts such as John Underhill's helped

illustrate experience of the wilderness condition for the more established coastal communities in

New England and for those still living in Old England.80 As Lepore explains, accounts of mid-

seventeenth century conflicts cultivated popular conceptions of the wilderness for readers, and

77 I. Mather, A Brief History78Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 34.79 Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 76; Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 21.80 Underhill, Newes from America; Or, A New and Experimental Discoverie of New England,; Containing, A True Relation of Their War-like Proceedings These Two Yeares last Past (London, 1638).

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accounts written about King Philip's War served a virtually identical purpose. "Stories

chronicling this cruel and bloody war were clearly popular...even in an era profoundly less print-

oriented than our own, several of the accounts, including Mary Rowlandson’s dramatic captivity

narrative, America’s first ‘best-seller,’ probably sold in the thousands."81 First published in

1682, Rowlandson's narrative disseminated to its wide readership the experiences of a Puritan

woman living in a remote, vulnerable town in the wilderness who was carried off into the

wilderness by the hostile Natives. "Little do many think what is the savageness and brutishness

of this barbarous enemy, ay, even those that seem to profess more than others among them when

the English have fallen into their hands."82 Rowlandson criticized herself for not having

considered the precariousness of her position earlier, yet this statement also applied to those in

New England and beyond who read the story of her experience.

Throughout much of Rowlandson's narrative, as with John Williams' account, the hostile

Natives were the agents of the godless wilderness, where Satan held sway and pious New

Englanders were brought to suffer hardships and humiliations. Carroll explains that this attitude

toward wilderness life was especially high as tensions increase between the New England

colonies and the Native Americans. "The frequency of war scares in the New England colonies

convinced the Puritans that the Indians were in league with Satan to drive the English from the

land and thereby disrupt the transmission of the gospel into America."83 The New England

ministry interpreted King Philip's War as a clash between the godly Puritan commonwealth and

the unregenerate wilderness. Native Americans were repeatedly portrayed as Satanic agents in

New England captivity narratives. This portrayal was abundantly clear in Rowlandson's account.

During her first night in captivity, Rowlandson fully confronted what she understood as a display

81Lepore, The Name of War, 52.82 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 36.83 Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 76-77.

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of barbaric, Satanic culture. "This was the dolefullest night that ever my eyes saw.  Oh, the

roaring and dancing and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a

lively resemblance of hell."84 For Rowlandson, as for many writers among the Puritan elite

during this era, the Native Americans were the agents of Satan sent to destroy the budding

community on the shores of New England. Several histories of King Philip's War, written by

ministers like Increase Mather, exhibited this view of New England's Native inhabitants.

The interpretation of King Philip's War and subsequent conflicts with the Native

Americans expounded by Increase and Cotton Mather, as well as other Puritan thinkers, required

the Natives to be treated as the agents of the Satanic influence of the frontier. Carroll explains

that "the hardships of the wilderness condition and the ongoing conflict against Satan and his

Indian associates were frequently exploited by New England apologists to rationalize Puritan

behavior and politics."85 Increase Mather's account of King Philip's War, as well as that

composed by William Hubbard and Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, depicted the

Native Americans as hateful enemies with no self-control or agency of their own. In writing of

several of the attacks on English settlements, Increase Mather wrote that the Indians, in "their

inhumanity," did not so much conduct a proper war in the European sense but rather

"barbarously murthered both men and women...stripping the slain whether men or women, and

leaving them in the open field as naked as in the day wherein they were born."86 William

Hubbard, minister of the town of Ipswich, echoed this sentiment, denying the Native Americans

the same level of agency in the conflict as the English forces, and was reluctant to even refer to

the conflict in the same terms as the wars between sovereign European nation-states. "The

Matter of Fact therein related (being rather Massacres, barbarous inhumane Outrages, than Acts

84 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 36.85Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness, 79.86 I. Mather, A Brief History, in So Dreadfull A Judgement, 90.

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of Hostility, or valiant Atchievements) no more deserve the Name of a War than the Report of

them the Title of an History."87 The Puritans' implicit refusal to recognize Native American

agency in the conflict was the product of the teleological nature of their interpretation of its

events.

This denial of Native American agency also characterized both the sermonizing of King

Philip's War and many of the narratives of the war's captives. In the sermons preached to New

England congregations and in the narratives of Indian captivity read by many in those

congregations, the Native Americans were not so much a sovereign people fighting for their own

cause as they were a heathen force unleashed on the unsuspecting Anglo-American colonies.

For the Puritan ministry, interpreting the Native Americans as a subhuman threat served as a

point from which to promote social cohesion among the scattered villages and towns. “The

Evening Wolves," warned Cotton Mather, "the rabid and howling Wolves of the Wilderness,

would make more frequent havock among you, & not leave the Bones till the morning, did not

your Blessed Shepherd rate them off."88 The Indians were not men and women but devilish

creatures under the sway of Satan that God allowed to ravage the frontier of New England. This

same attitude was expressed throughout Rowlandson's narrative. "I have been in the midst of

those roaring lions and savage bears that feared neither God nor man nor the devil," Rowlandson

lamented as she looked back upon her captivity.89 The Native Americans were animalistic,

satanic savages rather than men and women like the Anglo-Americans of the New England

colonies. This view provided a theological framework from which Puritan thinkers like Increase

Mather rationalized destructive wilderness conflicts.

87 Hubbard, History of the Indian Wars, 15.88 C. Mather, Frontiers Well-Defended89 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Puritans Among the Indians, 70.

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While it was clear for many that King Philip's and subsequent wars with neighboring

Indians were largely the result of the clash of Native and European cultures and the colonial

encroachment on native lands, Puritan theologians also provided a religious context for the crisis.

The successive waves of migration into the New England colonies succeeded in diluting the

original purpose for these new communities. The first generation of Puritans believed that they

were charged by God with carving a pious nation out of the seemingly unpopulated New

England wilderness. However, as leaders like Increase Mather observed, by the onset of King

Philip's War the emphasis on material gain had subverted this mission. "O New-England,"

Mather warned, "because thou servedst not the Lord they God with joyfulness, and with gladness

of heart, for the abundance of all things, therefore it is just with God to say, Thou shalt serve thy

Enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in

want of all things.”90 Mather meant this admonition for virtually all of New England, which he

believed had abandoned its true precepts, but the language here easily applied to the situation of

New England captives among the Native Americans. Serving the "Enemies" was exactly the sort

of experience Rowlandson and other captives underwent in their stories.

Throughout her account, Rowlandson described her experience as a servant of a number

of prominent Native Americans. Other captives such as John Gyles and John Williams provided

similar stories of servitude among the Natives. Rowlandson mentioned a number of occasions

when she performed tasks such as making clothes and similar chores for her masters or their

families. John Gyles described being rewarded with bits of food for his performance of menial

tasks as well. "I was very officious in supplying them with wood and water, which pleased them

so well that they now and then gave me a piece of flesh half-boiled or roasted which I did eat

with eagerness, and I doubt without great thankfulness to the Divine Being who so

90 I. Mather, The Day of Trouble is Near

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extraordinarily fed me."91 For writers like Rowlandson and John Williams, captives with close

ties to the Puritan ministry, serving Native American masters during their respective captivities

represented a particularly charged form of humiliation ordained by God for their pride and

impiety. The early New England captivity narratives, especially the more religiously-focused

narratives written by Rowlandson and Williams, can be read as microcosms of God's

chastisement of New England as a whole.

The warnings preached throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century and into the

eighteenth century by ministers like Increase Mather, derided the loss of focus on the religious

foundations of the founders of New England. Declension in religious matters was a matter of

serious concern for the Puritan leadership. The sermons of Increase Mather and his

contemporaries including Samuel Danforth, commonly referred to as jeremiad sermons, warned

of impending destruction and suffering but also looked optimistically to the future. Many of

Mather's sermons delivered during the era of King Philip's War exhibited these literary qualities.

"There is a black Cloud over our heads, which begins to drop upon us.  Providence hath so

ordered, that our Enemies are come near, and may we not then think that trouble is near?"

Mather predicted just such suffering and devastation in The Day of Trouble is Near, published

shortly before the outbreak of King Philip's War. He was to reassure New Englanders that "God

hath culled out a people, even out of all parts of a Nation, which he hath also had a great favour

towards, and hath brought them by a mighty hand, and an out-stretched arm, over a greater than

the Red Sea, and here hath he planted them, and hath caused them to grow up as it were into a

little Nation."92 While he warned that New England's collective sins undoubtedly brought down

91Gyles, Memoirs, in Puritans Among the Indians, 110.92 I. Mather, The Day of Trouble is Near.

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the wrath of God upon its inhabitants, Mather comforted his audience with the notion that God

chastised them but would ultimately redeem them for His greater purpose.

As in the Biblical stories which the Puritans used to rationalize their experiences, from

the wilderness came the punishment which God meted out for the spiritually lethargic New

Englanders. In his book The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch examines the social context

and theological framework behind the jeremiads of the seventeenth century Puritan ministry.

"The purpose of their jeremiads was to direct an imperiled people of God toward the fulfillment

of their destiny, to guide them individually toward salvation, and collectively toward the

American city of God."93 For the people of New England, the direction of salvation headed into

the wilderness. As the founding generation of the New England colonies left England for a

desolate wilderness, so God brought the perils of the wilderness to bear upon the new and

impious generations of the mid-seventeenth century. "As the children of Israel went through the

Red Sea, and through the Wilderness, before they could enter into Canaan, so must we wade

through a Red Sea of Troubles, and pass through a Wilderness of Miseries, ere we can arrive at

the heavenly Canaan."94 As the original New England settlers made their new homes in a

wilderness to cultivate the ideal godly commonwealth, so successive generations had to contend

with the dangers of the wilderness' influence in order to reaffirm their neglected values.

For the New Englanders of the late seventeenth century, divine punishment for their sins

came in the form of the Indian wars. INcrease Mather and others discussed the offenses against

Native Americans in jeremiad sermons, but only cataloged New England's internal sins and not

offenses of a neighboring people. The hostile Native Americans were essentially stripped of all

agency and humanity in these sermons as well as in the accounts of captives like Mary

93SacvanBercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 9.94 I. Mather, The Day of Trouble is Near.

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Rowlandson. The hostilities of the Native Americans were considered only for the importance

of their role as God's instruments for chastising New England. "I cannot but take notice of the

strange providence of God in preserving the heathen," Rowlandson mused while considering the

severity of her situation.95 Later, when reminiscing on her captivity after she was redeemed, she

wrote that "God strengthened them to be a scourge to His people."96 As Increase Mather argued,

Rowlandson understood her captivity and the war in general as God's disciplining of his people.

Rather than a war with a sovereign people whom they offended, Rowlandson interpreted her

experience as God's redirection of her toward a pious life.

In this sense, Rowlandson's narrative could be read as a jeremiad in narrative form.

During her captivity Rowlandson constantly reflected on her previously sinful and negligent life.

Like warnings given in sermons from Mather and Danforth, Rowlandson saw her suffering as

ordained by God for her sins. Many of the past transgressions in her narrative reflect the

collective sins of New England denounced by Mather. "Now I had time to examine all my

ways...I saw how in my walk with God I had been a careless creature."97 Rowlandson

understood her predicament as a punishment for past transgressions, not as the result of cultural

tensions between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans. This understanding reflected the

more general view of the ministers of the age with respect to the war. Mather assured his fellow

New Englanders that it "should be an affecting humbling Consideration to us, that our heavenly

Father should be provoked to set vile Indians upon the backs of his Children to scourge them so

severely."98 This attitude contributed greatly to the view of the wilderness as a place of trial and

of danger. The Judeo-Christian propaganda of the influential Puritan orthodoxy served to

construct a view of the wilderness as the polar opposite of the ideal society. To the New 95 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 44.96 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 69.97 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 56.98 I. Mather, An Earnest Exhortation

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England colonies the Native Americans represented the very antithesis of moral men and women

and as such were seen as leading a lifestyle irreconcilable with their values.

The New England orthodoxy employed Biblical typology to interpret the meaning behind

the devastations of King Philip's War. From the beginning, Puritan and Separatist settlers

interpreted their experiences as parallels with those of the Old Testament Israelites. The

prevailing ideology among the Massachusetts Bay colonists was that God had directed them into

a wilderness, where they would build a new and pious society according to what they saw as the

true religion. The resistance to further reform in the Church of England in the early seventeenth

century meant that they had to leave the comfort of their homeland for what seemed to be a

desolate wilderness, populated by the barbaric heathen. "What went ye out into the Wilderness

to see?" was the rhetorical question of Samuel Danforth, borrowing from the Book of Matthew,

to the backsliding congregations of the Bay Colony.99 As the Israelites wandered in a wilderness

for forty years in order to come to the promised-land of Canaan, so the reforming settlers of New

England must travel into the wilderness of the New World to found their holy community.

Puritan ministers interpreted the implications of the perceived spiritual declension in the

Bay colony in the mid- to late-seventeenth century, as well as growing tensions with neighboring

American Indians, in terms of the Israelites' experiences. The sins of New England paralleled

with those of the Israelites with similar consequences. “Pride, Contention, Worldliness,

Covetousness, Luxury, Drunkenness and Uncleanness break in like a flood upon us, and good

men grow cold in their love to God and to one another.”100 The Bay colony's original mission

was to turn a desolate wilderness into a developed, godly society, by the middle of the

seventeenth century, but these goals seemed to have been largely abandoned by frontier settlers

99 Danforth, A Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness100 Danforth, A Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness

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seeking more worldly gain. By the 1670s, the consequences of this backsliding were beginning

to appear on the horizon. Ministers saw New Englanders as having grown too comfortable with

their wilderness surrounding. They had come to the New World in order to carve a civilized

community out of the wilderness, but instead that wilderness infiltrated the boundaries of the

Puritan City Upon a Hill.

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Chapter IV: Identity and the Wilderness Experience

The expansion of the Puritan commonwealth into the frontier of New England caused a

number of serious crises. The Puritan orthodox view understood the very real crisis of war with

the Native Americans as a crisis of the wilderness. During the period of King Philip's War and

subsequent Indian wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the 'howling

Wilderness' of the New World tested Anglo-American identity. The portrayal of the war as

anidentity crisis in the sermons and captivity narratives, disseminated throughout New England,

reinforced the cultural disparity between the Anglo-American colonies and the wilderness

lifestyle of the American Indians. The ministers effectively played on the anxieties of the

colonists over their assimilation into a wilderness culture, warning that their straying beyond the

Hedge of God's protection had led them to livre too much like their Native neighbors in the wild.

The settlers in the frontier towns, especially, had grown too comfortable in the surrounding

woodlands and far too lax in their observance of religion.

Throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, religious tracts, captivity

narratives, and other writings reflected the collective anxieties about the loss of English identity

in the New England wilderness. The reaction of the New England ministerial orthodoxy was to

convey a typological representation of the wilderness and its Native American inhabitants,

further cementing the perceived dichotomy between civilized Anglo-American and "savage"

Native Americans in the popular New England imagination. The Biblical parallels expressed in

the jeremiads of the age demonstrated this growing dichotomy. Referencing the humiliation of

the Israelites, Cotton Mather bewailed the situation of his fellow New Englanders within the

insecure frontier towns during a time of war. "We consider the Distressing Circumstances, of

your necessity to seek your Bread, with the Peril of your Lives, from the Sword of the

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Wilderness."101 The orthodox New England ministry had always promoted suspicion of the

forests of the New World, but from the mid-seventeenth century on, the wilderness took on an

active role in threatening the Puritan commonwealth. For ministers like the Mathers, the crises

of the wilderness condition directly resulted from the colonists' forsaking their original religious

mission in favor of personal gain along the frontier.

The sermons of Increase Mather during King Philip's War repeatedly referenced an image

of a hostile wilderness, rising up against the English settlers. Having spread the protective

Hedge of the colonies too thin, New Englanders left themselves vulnerable to the influence of

frontier life and foregone God's defense as a result. "We are greatly confounded because our

dwelling places have cast us out," complained Increase Mather.102 In seeking their fortunes in

isolated communities throughout the wilderness, settlers sacrificed the social cohesion which was

so important to the New England Puritan mission. Puritan thinkers like Increase Mather

provided an effective typological interpretation of a real threat to their society. The sins of the

worldly New Englanders, especially of those living far removed from the powerbase of New

England orthodoxy in Boston, brought the devastations of the savage Indians upon them all. Of

the scale of these devastations, Mather exclaimed "alas that New England should be brought so

low in so short a time...and that by such vile enemyes, by the heathen, yea the worst of the

Heathen."103 Ministers like Increase Mather understood King Philip's War as the inevitable

consequence of New Englanders having embraced the frontier at the expense of their piety.

Many had strayed beyond the scope of the churches and thus rought God's reproachful wrath

upon the heads of all.

101 C. Mather, Frontiers Well-Defended102 I. Mather, An Earnest Exhortation103 I. Mather, An Earnest Exhortation

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The association of the New England frontier with the Old Testament wilderness

experience of the Israelites had profound implications for the formation of Anglo-American

identity. Puritan thinkers equated their society with the Old Testament Israelites and the Native

Americans with the heathen inhabitants of Canaan. This association lent a particularly strong

significance to the differentiation between the two ways of life. While New Englanders had

distrusted the Natives since the earliest days of settlement, by the dawn of King Philip's War they

directly paralleled Natives with the Biblical antagonists of God's chosen people. In the minds of

Puritan ministers, to grow too comfortable with the Natives, to adopt too much of their

wilderness lifestyle, was to forsake the purpose for which God had set aside New England. It

was only fitting, in the minds of ministers like Increase Mather, that God should have allowed

the terrors of the wilderness to rise up to destroy much of what New Englanders built. "If we

learn the way of the Heathen, and become like them, God will punish us by them."104 New

Englanders treaded a thin line between settling in a wilderness according to God's holy

ordinances and abandoning true religion for the unsettled, materialistic lifestyle of their heathen

neighbors. By the dawn of King Philip's War, it was clear, at least to the orthodox ministry, that

as a society they had provoked God's wrath with their spiritual negligence and brought on a

destructive wilderness crisis.

The interpretation of the wilderness crisis as a divine rebuke for New England allowed

the ministry to call upon their congregations to reaffirm the precepts of the founders. This

reaffirmation amounted to the further emergence of Anglo-American collective identity. New

Englanders firmly defined their social identity against the treacherous frontier and its heathen

inhabitants. The Christian, Anglo-American sense of identity was at stake in this wilderness

crisis, just as much as their settlements and livelihoods in the New World. The frontier towns of

104 I. Mather, An Earnest Exhortation

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inland New England were particularly vulnerable during King Philip's War, not simply because

of their remote locations, but because of their isolation from God's churches and holy society in

the New World. To venture too far into the wilderness, unsupervised by the ministry, was to

stray too far from the path of righteousness and thus to risk provoking the terrors of the

wilderness. Lepore characterizes this problem for New England when she writes that “New

England colonists waged war to gain Indian lands, to erase Indians from the landscape, and to

free themselves of doubts about their own Englishness.”105 Concern over isolated English

property on the frontier mirrored concerns over English souls in the remote wilderness. In many

subsequent sermons and captivity narratives during and after King Philip's War, these concerns

were repeated consistently by the ministers, strengthening New Englanders' identification of the

wilderness as a place where Christian souls were constantly at risk.

The Puritan ministry painted King Philip's War as a divine rebuke in order to reaffirm the

Puritan identity, both at the individual and communal levels. Ministers such as Danforth and the

Mathers repeatedly expressed this attitude in their sermons. Captives suggested that this was

how they understood their ordeals as well, through the composition of their narratives. In being

forcibly carried away into the wilderness, captives saw their English identities nearly expunged.

Prolonged exposure to Indian lifestyle and the wilderness condition threatened to erode their

civility until they degenerated into being indistinguishable from the Natives themselves. Indeed,

this was a widespread fear in the colonies even before the war broke out. In 1671, Increase

Mather complained that "we can now see little difference between Church-members and other

men...Professors of Religion fashion themselves according to the world."106 Unlike elsewhere in

the world, New Englanders expected themselves to live according to the ordinances of true

105Lepore, The Name of War, 8.106 I. Mather, The Day of Trouble is Near.

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Christianity, but by the second half of the seventeenth century, this seemed no longer to be the

case. The lure of the frontier drew many away from the coastal settlements where social

cohesion and the influence of the churches was strongest. The fear of ministers and colonial

leaders for these departing colonists was that the seemingly unsettled lifestyles they adopted in

their inland communities amounted to an adoption of Indianness.

By the outbreak of King Philip's War, Increase Mather had gone further than simply

observing a difficulty in distinguishing between church members and other men. He warned

openly that those beyond New England's protective boundaries had essentially abandoned their

English ways for those of the Indians. In particular, Mather targeted towns which lacked

churches or which he perceived as too neglectful of proper worship. "How many that although

they are Christians in name, are no better than Heathens in heart, and in Conversation?  How

many Families that live like profane Indians without any Family prayer?"107  Colonists were

vulnerable enough having moved their families far beyond the immediate reach of the Puritan

powerbases to the east, but not seeing to their proper religious observation was to men like

Mather unconscionable. These men and women were isolated not only from the physical

defense of the New England colonies, but also from the scope of protection for God's chosen

people. Mather summarized this issue when he observed that "in most places Instituted worship

(whereby Christians are distinguished from Heathen) hath been too much neglected."108 The

Puritans' adherence to their orthodox faith was a defining characteristic for the New England

identity when separating New Englanders from Native Americans. Forsaking this cohesive faith

amounted to forsaking a crucial part of that identity. Religion, or specifically the neglect thereof,

is a topic common to many of the early New England captivity narratives.

107 I. Mather, An Earnest Exhortation.108 I. Mather, An Earnest Exhortation.

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Crises of identity abounded in several of the New England captivity narratives, but

especially in those written by captives who had unique ties to the orthodox Puritan

establishment. Mary Rowlandson was perhaps the best example of these captives, but John

Williams of Deerfield, as well as several other prominent captives had close relations with

prominent members of the ministerial elite which colored their narratives and which enabled

them to be widely published. In their narratives, the captives stressed anxieties over their

relationships with God prior to and during their ordeals. Their stories reflected the problems

observed by Increase Mather with regards to religion along the frontier. If Rowlandson, a

minister's wife, had doubts about her own faith, then what could have been said about the rest of

the population of Lancaster? In particular, Rowlandson reminisced on her past failure to

properly observe the Sabbath. "I then remembered how careless I had been of God’s holy time,

how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent and how evilly I had walked in God’s sight."109

Focus on the Sabbath became something of a recurring trope in a number of captivity narratives.

As a formal and regular religious institution expected to be observed by New Englanders,

the Sabbath functioned as a crystallizing symbol which enabled the readers of these narratives to

understand the poor state of worship in frontier towns. John Gyles, who had been taken captive

during King William's War at about the age of ten, wrote of his father's position as minister in

the town of Pemaquid, Maine prior to his captivity. "He was a strict sabbatizer and met with

considerable difficulty in the discharge of his office from the immoralities of a people who had

long lived lawless."110 In a society where religion and the law were closely related, living

"lawless," as Gyles observed, very well could have meant failure to observe the Sabbath or it

could have meant crimes such as theft. Mary Rowlandson would have agreed with this

109 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 38.110 John Gyles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, Etc., in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 95.

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sentiment, and Cotton Mather certainly did as well. "Let no Sabbath-breaking be found among

you," he warned the frontier towns during Queen Anne's War. If you will not be at Leisure for

Devotions on the Lords Day, it may be the Lord will send those Enemies and Alarums upon you,

that shall allow you no Leisure at any time for any Good Employments."111 Spiritual

righteousness was an essential characteristic of the Puritan ideal, thus it should come as no

surprise that many captivity narratives exhibited regrets over past transgressions such as

Sabbath-breaking. King Philip's and subsequent Indian wars exacerbated crises of religious

faith, which was one facet of a greater crisis in both communal and individual identity.

If religious negligence was an offense that often resulted from life in the wilderness, the

trauma of the wilderness condition of New England captives threatened to eradicate Anglo-

American identity completely. The precarious boundaries, both spiritual and temporal,

constructed in order to separate the frontier towns from their wilderness surroundings were

repeatedly eliminated during wilderness conflicts. Colonists used houses, fences, livestock,

clothing, all aspects of Anglo-American lifestyle to distinguish themselves from Natives. These

were torn away and the resulting wilderness experience threatened to eradicate individual

identity at the psychological level as well. As Lepore explains, "in establishing plantations in the

wilderness, the English settlers had sought to mark the land as their own, to clothe the ground as

they clothed their bodies, but King Philip’s War undid their work, denuding both the landscape

and its colonists."112 Frontier wars stripped the land of all that had made the land distinctly

English. This sentiment was more clearly expressed in the narratives of captivity in which

writers recounted seeing their homes destroyed before they were torn away from their civilized

world and carried off by the Natives.

111 C. Mather, Frontiers Well-Defended.112Lepore, The Name of War, 79.

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Captives repeatedly described being stripped of the signs of their English, Christian status

in their narratives. This amounted to a stripping away of facets of their and others' the identities.

captives consistently saw cultural and material boundaries between themselves and Native

Americans blurred, forcing them to remind themselves of their identities for any hope of a

potential salvation. Rowlandson expressed this combination of the sense of extreme loss with

religious anxiety. "We had husbands and father, and children, and sisters, and friends, and

relations, and house, and home, and many comforts of this life, but now we may say as Job,

‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return.'"113 Rowlandson's repeated

references to Biblical passages illustrated her spiritual understanding of her experience. She

herself said she had enjoyed a comfortable life in Lancaster, with a large house and the influence

that came with being the wife of a prominent minister. Her focus on the "comforts of this life"

distracted her from the satisfaction that she should have taken in her relationship with God. She

saw her past preoccupation with worldly pleasures and possessions as a just cause for her

traumatic experience.

Rowlandson and other captivity narrative authors pay close attention to being carried

beyond the boundaries of recognizable, English civilization. They expressed this anxiety

repeatedly either in passages focusing on the stripping away of clothing and other accessories

which marked them and their fellow New Englanders as English. Ministers described this same

anxiety in sermons, decrying the treatment of the bodies of English casualties by the Native

Americans during wartime. Speaking of the brutalized English casualties, Increase Mather

lamented that "the Indians have taken so many and stripped them naked as in the day that they

were born."114 The nakedness of the slain New Englanders was a cause of no small concern

113 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 46.114 I. Mather, An Earnest Exhortation.

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during King Philip's War and well after. As the boundaries between civilization and the

wilderness, represented by English houses and property markers, were torn down during the

conflict, so were the boundaries between English bodies and more savage state of being. "Naked

English bodies had been stripped of the clothes of civility," Lepore observes, and they were "

stripped, sometimes, of their English skin, just as the land had been stripped of its

'improvements.'"115 Bodies left naked in the wilderness were an eerie reminder to New

Englanders of the precarious position they were in with respect to their proximity to the yet

untamed wilderness. The association of the Natives' stripping of dead bodies and carrying off

captives into the wilderness served to further instill a vision of the surrounding wilderness as a

place where men and women lived devoid of the laws of civilization, where Anglo-Americans

would tread in peril of having their identities ripped away from them to the point that they risked

degenerating into a lower form of existence.

Mary Rowlandson and John Williams were also forced to come to terms with the loss of

loved ones in the wilderness. Rowlandson's youngest daughter was wounded in the raid on

Lancaster and died several days later. Williams' wounded wife was unable to bear the hardships

of the journey to Canada and their Native captors kill her rather than burden themselves further.

They demonstrated a religious understanding of their sufferings went hand-in-hand with their

sense of identity in the accounts of these losses. Rowlandson recalled being more disturbed by

the memory of her dead daughter than by her anxiety over her captive children. 'That which was

dead lay heavier upon my spirit than those which were alive and amongst the heathen, thinking

how it...was buried by the heathen in the wilderness from among all Christians."116 Williams

experienced a similar sorrow remembering the fate of his wife. "She traveled not far, for at the

115Lepore, The Name of War, 81-82.116 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 72.

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foot of this mountain the cruel and bloodthirsty savage who took her, slew her with his hatchet at

one stroke, the tidings of which were very awful."117 For their loved ones to have perished in the

wilderness, and to have their bodies left to rot in the open, was a grievous fate indeed. Captives

who survived at least had the opportunity to return home, to the appointed boundaries which

separated Christian from heathen, English from barbarian. Even the dead had an appointed place

in Anglo-American society. Captives lamented that their loved ones had perished far beyond the

realm of recognizable, civilized society and were left there like the beasts of the forest.

Increase Mather complained of the inability to distinguish church members from worldly

men. Captives similarly expressed fear about their continuing ability to distinguish between

themselves and their Indian captors. The wilderness experience tested not only their faith, but

their very sense of self. Captivity narratives illustrated the fears of New England society about

the negative influences of frontier life. The Native Americans were examples of the

overexposure to life in the wilderness. Lepore identifies this anxiety as the colonists’ principal

fear: of "mistaking Englishmen for Indians."118 Boundaries of communal identity such as

building, fences, and walls were destroyed during the wilderness crisis that was King Philip's

War. The accounts of many New England captives during this period demonstrate an analogous

destruction of boundaries at the individual level. At a number of points in her narrative,

Rowlandson recalled seeing Natives dressed as Englishmen, or encountered English-looking

structures that were actually Native dwellings. Rowlandson was confused by these encounters

and bitter about being misled about their identity."A company of Indians to us, near thirty, all on

horseback. My heart skipped within me, thinking they had been Englishmen...for they were

dressed in English apparel...but when they came near there was a vast difference between the

117 Williams, The Redeemed Captive, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 176.118Lepore, The Name of War, 6.

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lovely faces of Christians and the foul looks of those heathens."119 Clearly the appearance of

these Native men did not fit Rowlandson's image of Native Americans.

While Rowlandson was disturbed at having mistaken Natives for Englishmen, however

briefly, she also had a prevailing dread at the prospect of going Native herself. Rowlandson took

pains to stress the differences between herself and her captors, consistently characterizing them

as barbaric and subhuman. John Gyles, after a long captivity among Natives, expressed shame at

his own appearance once he came into contact with Europeans again. "I, who was dressed up in

an old greasy blanket without cap, hat, or shirt (for I had no shirt for the six years but that which

was on my back when I was taken), was invited into the great cabin where many well-rigged

gentlemen were sitting who would fain have had a full view of me."120 As in Rowlandson's

narrative, a strong sense of identity revolved around clothing, this time the clothing worn by the

captive himself. "I endeavored to hide myself behind the hangings, for I was much ashamed,

thinking of my former wearing clothes and of my living with people who could rig as well as the

best of them."121 This strong sense of shame stemmed from the fear that the Frenchmen present

would view him as more Indian than English. Once again, clothing functioned as an image

which conveyed the anxiety over the captive's crisis of identity. Gyles clearly feared that the

Frenchmen might think he had succumbed to his wilderness condition and degenerated into

savagery.

There were outward signs as well in many captivity narratives that spoke of the captives'

longing for the structure of their former lives while they suffered in the wilderness. A number

captives commented on seeing roads, buildings, and other signs of civilized life which offered

them some hope in their misery. Captives noted the markings of Anglo-American civilization

119 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 58-59.120Gyles, Odd Adventures, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 124.121Gyles, Odd Adventures, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 124.

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repeatedly their experiences, perhaps reaffirming their longing for their former lives and their

disdain for the lifestyle of the Native Americans. The mere sight of a "place where English

cattle had been," comforted Mary Rowlandson in her captive state. Soon after this sight,

Rowlandson and her captors "came to an English path," the sight of which Rowlandson claimed

so took with me that I thought I could have freely laid down and died."122 Undoubtedly these

sights filled Rowlandson with emotion during a time when she was suffering after having been

violently ripped away from her family and her home. However, these exclamations also had

significance for her sense of self. In emphasizing her emotional responses to these signs of

English society, Rowlandson distanced herself from implications of her time among the Native

Americans. Most significant of all in this respect was that a number of captives recalled being

given bibles by their masters. Rowlandson, Williams, and Gyles all described receiving bibles,

forming a common motif in early captivity literature. More than any other sign of civilization,

the Bible would have reminded them of the values of their society in their time of trial.

That New Englanders taken captive by the Indians might abandon their old ways for the

lifestyle of the wilderness was in no way a warrantless suspicion.123 Opposite the number of

well-known captives who were redeemed by their New England brethren, an unrecorded number

of captives chose to remain with their captors, effectively adopting the ways of the Native

Americans or French in Canada. Jill Lepore and John Demos have thoroughly examined the

cases of Joshua Tift and John Williams' daughter Eunice respectively.124 Such abandonments

represented, as John Demos explains, "a direct fulfillment of the nightmare prospect: civilized

people willingly turned savage, their vaunted 'Old World' culture overwhelmed by the

wilderness."125 Even captives redeemed from the wilderness had to reinstate themselves among 122 Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 45.123 Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 4.124Lepore, The Name of War, 131; Demos, The Unredeemed Captive.125 Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 4.

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their peers after returning to their homes. Joshua Tift failed to reestablish himself and was

hanged. Unlike Mary Rowlandson, Tift chose to fight alongside his Native captors against the

English. Increase Mather referred to Tift only as "a wretched English man that apostatized to the

Heathen, and fought with them against his own Country-men."126 Small wonder then that many

captivity narratives exhibited such disdain for the ways of the captors, instead the narratives

asserted their piety and English identity.

Rowlandson's narrative repeatedly stressed the transformation of her soul throughout her

ordeal. She insisted upon her having been properly chastised for her past transgressions, but also

having remained properly distant from the culture of her captors. Of her suffering among the

Native Americans, Rowlandson wrote that "they made use of their tyrannical power whilst they

had it, but through the Lord’s wonderful mercy their time was but short."127 In focusing on her

experience as a divine rebuke, such as those in the jeremiad sermons of the Mathers,

Rowlandson's narrative took on the spiritual significance of a conversion narrative. According to

Patricia Caldwell in her book The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American

Expression, the conversion narrative functioned both as a mode of ensuring piety and of

facilitating social cohesion.128 As he implored frontier towns to fortify themselves against the

wilderness, Cotton Mather specifically referred to the inhabitants' conversion. "Delay not your

Conversion to GOD, a Moment...When you get up in a Morning, you don’t know, but a fierce

Enemy may bury his Pole-ax in you before the Evening."129 Her narrative served as a microcosm

for New England's experience during King Philip's War, but also as an account of her own

personal redemption into her society.

126 I. Mather, A Brief History, in Slotkin and Folsom, So Dreadfull A Judgment, 108.127 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 65.128 Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 183.129 C. Mather, Frontiers Well-Defended.

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After having been pulled into the wilderness, Rowlandson had to publish an account not

only of her experience, but of her resistance to the Native way of life. It was not enough to

simply return to her former way of life. She had to validate her return by writing of her

experience, both for the purpose of spreading the word of God's divine plan for New England

and to redeem herself from suspicion of having apostatized to a wilderness lifestyle. In

particular, Rowlandson seemed to have been writing to dispel rumors of her having married one

of her Native captors. "I have been in the midst of those roaring lions and savage bears that

feared neither God nor man nor the devil, by night and day, alone and in company, sleeping all

sorts together, and yet not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me in

word or action."130 While men like Joshua Tift were condemned for having joined the Natives in

fighting the English, women like Rowlandson were much more likely to be condemned or

ostracized for having had relations with Native American men. Although it was important for

Rowlandson to express her happiness at having sighted well-formed paths and captivity, her

identity as a high-ranking Puritan woman likely would have hinged solely on her insistence at

not having had physical relations with a Native American. Her overt disdain for Native culture

went far in achieving this social rehabilitation.

130 Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 70.

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Chapter V: Looking Forward

Conceptions of the wilderness held from the earliest days of New England settlement,

and further crystallized in the popular imagination following the publication of captivity

narratives, characterized the literary portrayals of the frontier experience in the fiction of later

generations. The story of Daniel Boone, popularized by John Filson's account, featured both a

frontier hero in the mold of Benjamin Church and as a captive in his own right.131 These motifs,

present also in early American novels such as Edgar Huntley, featuring a female character

captured by Native Americans, and James Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales drew on

the traditions of both the Puritan captivity narratives and on the celebration of the frontier hero

exhibited in the memoirs of Benjamin Church. These motifs were essential in forming a

collective perception of the frontier in early New England which survived into the literature of

later decades. The conception of the wilderness as a place of trial and adventure for Americans

of European ancestry characterized American literature even beyond the mid-nineteenth century

into the age of the cowboy. These motifs, so inherent throughout several generations of

American literature, found their roots in the writing of the earliest generations of New England

settlers, but were crystallized in the popular imagination in the narratives of captivity and frontier

warfare that freed the wilderness experience from purely religious terms.

Future scholarship on the wilderness in the early American imagination should further

explore the enduring influence of early New England thought on the discussion of the frontier

experience. Biblical precedents characterized reactions to the New World from the earliest days,

but it was the emergence of new literary forms which cemented an enduring vision of the

wilderness in the minds of subsequent generations. The emergence of captivity narratives in

particular represented an important step in the secularization of the wilderness experience.Motifs

131 John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (Wilmington: James Adams, 1784).

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central to the Christian conception of the errand into the wilderness were applied to stories which

concerned everyday men and women in New England just as much as they concerned members

of the Puritan elite. Long after Puritanism had failed as the basis for a political system, stories of

frontier warfare and captivity among Native Americans remained at the forefront of American

literature.Even though the specific religious message of the Puritan ministry faded from

relevance, the frontier as a realm of trial and tribulation for Anglo-Americans remained.

Further consideration of early frontier literature should also take into consideration the

influence of the conversion narrative on the composition of captivity narratives. The

individualistic nature of captivity narratives was a stark change from the collective focus of

jeremiad sermons. While conversion narratives were indeed composed with relation to the

church as a group, they focused on the individual experience of God, rather than on the

experience of a chosen people. This experience most closely resembled the experience of the

captive humiliated at the hands of Indian tormentors in a desolate wasteland. The connections of

this individual experience to the experiences of frontier figures like Benjamin Church should be

considered in further detail. While Rowlandson and other captives did not actively subdue the

wilderness around them as Church did, their accounts formed the basis of a popular genre of

frontier experience which moved past the purely spiritual interpretations of the Puritan clergy.

An understanding of the emergence of the frontier experience in early American fiction hinges

upon individual frontier experience.

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Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America. New York:

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