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Puritan Captivity Narratives and Identity in the American Revolution

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Puritan Captivity Narratives and Identity in the American Revolution Puritan Captivity Narratives and Identity in the American Revolution Master Thesis American Studies Jesse Milan Beks 10636382 Supervisor: Eduard van de Bilt 29-01-2019 Ethan Allen being held captive before Captain Prescott in Montreal, 1775. By F.C. Yohn, 1902 Table of contents Abstract 4 Introduction 5 I Puritan Conceptions of Good and Evil, the Captivity Narrative Structure and the Development of a Secular Counter-Stream 10 II The Puritan Captivity Narrative as a Revolutionary Metaphor 21 III The Emergence of a Revolutionary Captivity Genre 32 IV Ethan Allen’s Captivity Narrative: The Puritan Literary Influence on a Rough Backwoodsman and Political Opportunist 37 V John Dodge’s Captivity Narrative: The Puritan Captivity Structure Reversed 45 VI The Peculiarity of the Revolutionary Captivity Genre Revealed 50 Conclusion 57 Bibliography 60 Abstract Jesse Milan Beks, 2019 A remarkable development during the Revolutionary era is the revival of Puritan captivity narratives. The rhetorical legacy of the Puritans served as a useful instrument for the definition of American ideas about identity by Revolutionary writers. The circumstances created by the American conflict with Britain made patriotic writers and publishers develop a new interpretation of the Puritan captivity mythology, which was used for Revolutionary propaganda. This thesis aims to explain how the Puritan captivity narrative helped Americans to frame the Revolutionary cause, and how it worked as a prescription for action in the struggle for national independence. The thesis discusses some of the major captivity narratives in the literature of colonial America in order to explain a significant, but often underestimated addition to the development of American frontier literature. 4 Introduction Myth-narratives express the unconscious premises, the patterns of thought, perceptions and sensitivities that instruct the psyche of a culture. They are built upon both individual and collective experience, thus drawing on the deeply underlying structures of human behavior on the one hand and the singularities of human history on the other. Hence they connect individual particularities with universal ideas. Narratives of identity are archetypal and often contained or hidden in daily cultural phenomena like journals and literature, or in oral form by the stories people tell about their lives and the way they perceive the world around them. The material circumstances and peculiarities of a specific moment in history generate the unique ways in which people understand their lives. Besides defining an identity by portraying the worldview of a human culture and summarizing in which ways it relates to others, a myth can also serve as a prescription for action. A myth is built up by words, concepts, and images, which makes it a powerful tool that can determine the direction of history. It provides a framework through which an experience can be understood, and by exemplifying it on its own terms it outlines a suitable way to react to it. In Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1978) Sacvan Bercovitch deals with the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” and its importance for the development of American culture. He traces the evolution of the “myth of America” from the Puritans into the Civil War era, through their most significant literary form, named the “Jeremiad” in Perry Miller’s eponymous essay.1 The Puritans managed to combine spiritual with secular components, by which they formed an idea of exclusivity and world mission through passionate devotion, but also developed notable practical flexibility in order to integrate into the American environment. The ‘Jeremiad’ was the rhetorical vehicle by which American clerics in later days encouraged their people to defend the civil and religious freedoms of the Protestant colonies against the papal French and heathen Indian antichrists. By the early 1770s the British rulers had become the true antichrist and were attributed similar characteristics as the Indians and French had before them, and became regarded as the suppressors of those liberties.2 Throughout the American Revolution all the assets of the ‘Jeremiad’ were invoked in the name of liberty. The Puritan mythology became self- validating as its promulgators proclaimed the new Revolutionary Exodus from Britain. 1 Miller, P., (1953) “Errand into the Wilderness”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1. (3-32) 11. 2 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (Cambridge, MA 2017) 7. 5 A remarkable development in the history of American frontier literature is the sudden revival of the Puritan captivity narrative during the Revolutionary period. Patriotic writers and publishers utilized the Puritan captivity narrative structure to promote the cause for independence from Great Britain. Hereby they used a specific and narrow interpretation of the Puritan literary framework, which particularly focuses on the cultural contrasts between the captor and captives. They used it as a means to formulate a new unique American identity that was significantly different from the British. Moreover, they pointed to the Puritan captivity mythology as a foundational American source. The development of a strong contrast between Americans and the ‘other’ was used in order to mobilize Americans to support the Revolutionary cause. Thus, the Puritan captivity narrative contributed to the growing American awareness of identity and as a justification for action to enforce independence from Great Britain. The specifically strict interpretation of the Puritan captivity experience that the Revolutionaries used becomes apparent when the Revolutionary captivity narratives are placed in context with the wider development of American captivity narratives and frontier literature in the late eighteenth century. This thesis delves into the mythological elements of the Puritan captivity narrative that appear in several captivity narratives written during the Revolutionary era between 1775 and 1783, while keeping in mind the wider developments in the American captivity genre. Several republished Puritan accounts and original Revolutionary captivity narratives are studied in light of the particular circumstances created by the American Revolution, to show how they stand out against the developments in the wider genre of frontier literature. In Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973) historian and cultural critic Richard Slotkin describes an evolution of secularization of the American captivity narrative, away from the traditional Puritan narrative style, toward the end of the eighteenth century.3 With this argument in mind the reversion to the Puritan literary model during the American Revolution seems curious. Revolutionary captivity narratives of the late eighteenth century were indeed subject to changes that paralleled those of the exploration and hunter narratives associated with John Filson’s semi-fictional The Life and Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone (1784), especially in their attitude toward Indians, but on the other hand utilized the Puritan image of the Indian as a metaphor for the new British enemy. 3 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT 1973) 241-243. 6 The thesis starts with giving analysis of the main components of the Puritan captivity mythology that function as the building blocks for the literary structure of Revolutionary captivity narratives. The Puritan captivity narratives contain some of the main mythical materials that make the ‘Jeremiad’, being initiation, death, resurrection, guilt, and redemption, imagined in an archetypal quest through the dark wilderness. The second chapter focuses on the renewed interest in two major Puritan captivity narratives, written by Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637-1711) and John Williams (1664-1729), and discusses how these accounts went through a process of revising, editing, and republishing by Revolutionary propagandists. It also shines a light on the rhetoric in Revolutionary journals and newspapers that reflect some narrative patterns of the Puritan captivity narratives as described above. Then, the third chapter is concerned with the emergence of an actual Revolutionary captivity genre. During the American Revolution the narratives of the experiences written by prisoners of war helped those fighting for independence from Great Britain to formulate a definition of their own identity. The accounts of American prisoners of war often emphasized the cruel treatment by British guards, helping the people who supported the Revolutionary cause to point out the moral difference between themselves and their enemy. The fourth and fifth chapters give an extensive analysis of two influential Revolutionary captivity narratives written by Ethan Allen (1738-1789) and John Dodge (1751-1800). The two narratives show how narrowly filtered interpretations of the Puritan captivity narratives were used by these Revolutionary heroes, but also how, in different ways, they go along with the changes happening in the frontier literature of the late eighteenth century. The sixth and final chapter turns back to Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, and by using a different mode of interpretation tries to pin down the peculiarities of the way in which it was used in Revolutionary narratives. The fact that the Puritan analogy and the implied comparison between Indians and the British turned out
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