Martino Dissertation Final for Submission
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“Her Extraordinary Sufferings and Services”: Women and War in New England and New France, 1630-1763 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Gina Michelle Martino-Trutor IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Kirsten Fischer May 2012 © Gina Michelle Martino-Trutor 2012 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As training in the discipline of history begins well before doctoral work, I would like to start by thanking the people who shaped my earliest historical thinking. At St. Olaf College, I learned that history was more than dates, facts, and documentary footage. Mike Fitzgerald and Dolores Peters were particularly influential in encouraging my interest in social and cultural history during this period. The time spent earning my M.A. at Minnesota State University, Mankato prepared me for the rigors of a Ph.D. program. Special thanks go to Gretta Handke, Larry Witherell, and Chuck Piehl for their guidance. Thank you also to my M.A. adviser, Chris Corley, who introduced me to early modern history. I will always be thankful for his faith in my abilities and his willingness to (kindly) push me to make my work better than I knew it could be. During my doctoral work, numerous faculty members at the University of Minnesota have helped me develop as an historian. Special thanks are due to my dissertation committee, Lisa Norling, Jean O’Brien, Tony Brown, and Barbara Welke, for their time, their ideas, and their support as this project has progressed. I would like to express my gratitude to Lisa Norling for her help as I began to pull my ideas together. In particular, her suggestion that I take a second look at Mary Beth Norton’s work helped me put my findings in historiographic perspective. I am also grateful to Sarah Chambers, Anna Clark, and Ed Griffin for their insights during the early phases of this project. ii I am fortunate to have found a mentor in Kirsten Fischer, an adviser who has guided my development as both a scholar and a teacher at the University of Minnesota. Throughout this process, she has performed the delicate act of simultaneously encouraging and challenging me. I could not be more grateful for her ideas, support, and generosity of time and spirit. Generous grants including the Donald Burch Fellowship, the Michael Kraus Research Grant from the American Historical Association, and the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota have been critical to the success of this project. I would also like to thank the staff at the Massachusetts State Archives, the Library and Archives of Canada, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and the Peabody Essex Museum for their resourcefulness and guidance. I would like to extend special thanks to the staff of the History Department at the University of Minnesota, especially Sarah Stockburger, Kacey Trygstad, Amanda Nelson, and Rachel Ayers for their administrative help and for our fruitful Recruitment Weekend collaboration. Without their help throughout my time here, I would not have been able to complete my degree. I am also grateful to the members of the Early American History Workshop who read parts of this dissertation and who helped me hone my analytical skills, especially Demetri Debe, Kirsten Fischer, Katie Goetz, Ed Griffin, Katherine Hayes, John Howe, Joanne Jahnke-Wegner, Rus Menard, Lisa Norling, Jean O’Brien, Eric Otremba, Don Ross, and Kathleen Vandevoorde. I also received excellent suggestions from attendees of iii the Fortieth Annual Algonquian Conference and the Seventh Biennial Conference of the Society of Early Americanists, where I presented portions of my dissertation. My dear friends—especially Steph and Laura—have shown incredible patience with their frequently disappearing, dissertating friend. I am thankful that you have always been there when I resurface! Santi, Geneva, and Matías Vallejo: first friends, now family. Thank you for your kindness, sense of fun, and for asking us to be godparents to Matías. Mom, Dad, Annie, and Tommy: families of origin don’t get any better than this. Thank you for being there during all the ups and downs of both my life and this project! Thank you also to my wonderful extended family, especially Jerry and Mary Reckin, Joe and Pola Martino, my brother-in-law Jim Hougas, my new neice, Estelle, and the uncles, aunts, and cousins of my Martino and Reckin families. I would also like to thank Barry, Kathy, and Clayton Trutor for their love and encouragement. Much love to my grandmother, Juanita Beseda Reckin, who cannot be here to celebrate with me. Thank you for telling me stories about the past and helping me do my first historical research. My husband, Johnny Trutor, has been a constant source of support, patience, and inspiration. From the disseration’s intital concept to the latest version of the completed draft, he has been a friend, a fellow scholar, and a tireless research road-tripper. (Together, we have driven nearly 7,000 miles to and from my archives!) Thank you for believing in my ideas and for helping to make this possible. iv DEDICATION To Dr. Johnny v ABSTRACT In the border wars that wracked French and English colonies in northeastern North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women assumed visible, often violent roles in frontier communities that blurred the lines between military and domestic actions as well as settler and soldier identities. Scholars who have noted incidents in which women take up arms in these conflicts largely see their actions as anomalous due to a lack of context and a fragmented source base. Using sources such as petitions, diaries, laws, sermons, newspapers, letters, and chronicles, this dissertation demonstrates that, far from anomalous, these incidents resulted from government policies and cultural beliefs that prompted and even encouraged women to assume central and supporting roles in these wars. This comparative approach in studying Euro-American women in New England and New France, as well as Native women when sources permitted it, is relatively new. Women in the “northeastern borderlands” of seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England and New France remain poorly understood. This is particularly true regarding women’s participation in the border wars. Often forbidden from evacuating to safety, women kept watch, worked directly with officials in administering forts, and fought alone and with their husbands when under attack. Far from marginalizing these women’s actions, most important men in Euro-American societies met their activities with approval and encouragement. Political and religious leaders even used accounts of women’s participation in the border wars as propaganda that served local, regional, and imperial agendas. In the eighteenth century, a greater European military presence resulted in an increased separation of the home and the front. In response, debates arose in New England over the role of the Crown in protecting settlers whose fortified towns had previously acted as a first line of defense. In New France, where the danger shifted from the St. Lawrence River Valley to the coast, women’s economic and bureaucratic roles increased, while their physical participation in the defense of the colony decreased. Stories of women’s participation in these conflicts were culturally persistent, and nineteenth-century authors employed these accounts to express new identities and agendas. Appearing in both local and regional histories, stories of women’s participation in the border wars both reflected and shaped a new ideology of separate spheres while justifying past, present, and future colonization of the continent. In examining women’s participation in the wars of the northeastern borderlands, this dissertation complicates commonly held assumptions regarding the roles of women in early modern societies. It also argues that these roles may have been more flexible than previously recognized. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION page 1 CHAPTER 1 Gendering Spaces and Spheres of War-Making in New England (1630-1713) page 42 CHAPTER 2 La Commandante and La Bonne Femme Primot: Rank, Gender, and War-Making in New France (1630-1713) page 103 CHAPTER 3 A Discourse of Amazons: Transatlantic Propaganda in New England and New France (1630-1713) page 150 CHAPTER 4 War, Women, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century New France and New England page 199 CHAPTER 5 Memory and Women’s Participation in the Border Wars in Northern New England page 250 CONCLUSION page 287 BIBLIOGRAPHY page 292 1 INTRODUCTION In August 1693, Major John Pynchon penned a report to Governor William Phips of Massachusetts that detailed an Indian raid on Brookfield, a town in the central region of the colony.1 Witnesses identified the group of approximately twenty-six Indians as Canadian in origin, likely Abenaki from Pemaquid, near the border between Maine and Acadia.2 The attack was motivated by their own military and political interests, as well as by their commitment to the French in the ongoing King William’s War (1688-1697). The raiding party killed most of the members of the Woolcott, Mason, and Lawrence families. They also captured Mrs. Mason, her young child who was later killed, and one of Thomas Lawrence’s sons, about eighteen years of age. After pursuing the party for over a day, Pynchon’s subordinate, Captain Colton, found the group and retrieved Mrs. Mason and the young Lawrence.3 Relaying the experiences of the captives to the governor, Pynchon conveyed Mrs. Mason’s account, as Lawrence was incapacitated. In his letter, Pynchon assured Governor Phips that Mrs. Mason was “a lively & Intelligent woman.”4 Throughout her statement, Mrs. Mason demonstrated a solid understanding of the origin, strategic goals, and the previous actions of her former captors.