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 , 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 (c. 1637-1711) and (1664-1729), and discusses how these accounts went through a process of revising, editing, and republishing by Revolutionary propagandists. It also shines a light on the rhetoric in Revolutionary journals and newspapers that reflect some narrative patterns of the Puritan captivity narratives as described above. Then, the third chapter is concerned with the emergence of an actual Revolutionary captivity genre. During the American Revolution the narratives of the experiences written by prisoners of war helped those fighting for independence from Great Britain to formulate a definition of their own identity. The accounts of American prisoners of war often emphasized the cruel treatment by British guards, helping the people who supported the Revolutionary cause to point out the moral difference between themselves and their enemy. The fourth and fifth chapters give an extensive analysis of two influential Revolutionary captivity narratives written by Ethan Allen (1738-1789) and John Dodge (1751-1800). The two narratives show how narrowly filtered interpretations of the Puritan captivity narratives were used by these Revolutionary heroes, but also how, in different ways, they go along with the changes happening in the frontier literature of the late eighteenth century. The sixth and final chapter turns back to Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, and by using a different mode of interpretation tries to pin down the peculiarities of the way in which it was used in Revolutionary narratives. The fact that the Puritan analogy and the implied comparison between Indians and the British turned out to be so appealing to Revolutionary authors shows us how deep the Puritan confrontation with the wilderness ran through the American conscience. It is not to say that the Puritans were particularly responsible for any attributes of an ‘American identity’ (whatever that is). They did not invent guilt, individualism, a Protestant work ethic, constitutional republicanism, or any other concepts associated with the ‘myth of America’. But their significance for the American culture lies in the sphere of rhetoric, or the scriptural

7 foundations they created on which ideas about identity could be built, specifically in times of crisis, as a source of consistency and cohesion.4 The rhetorical structure of the ‘Jeremiad’ allowed for a gradual transition of focus over the years from an ideal religious world to a secular one based on Enlightenment principles.5 Through this transition the metaphorical potential of the Puritan ideology proved to be strikingly relevant for American writers and publishers in the Revolutionary era and beyond, though Puritan orthodoxy seemed to have vanished by that time. Yet, the implicit nature of the Puritan rhetoric also attracts people in different times to use the Puritan literary framework for their own agenda. This makes it necessary for the contemporary historian to pay close attention to the contextual framework and interpretive approach of the people that build their own ideology upon the Puritan literary tradition. This is especially true for the captivity narratives written in the heat of the Revolutionary conflict, which are the main focus of this study. The richness of Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative, and the great amount of symbolism in it that was used in Revolutionary captivity narratives makes it the cornerstone of this research project. Besides Ethan Allen and John Dodge there are around a dozen known accounts that can be regarded as Revolutionary captivity narratives that carry a political load expressing Revolutionary issues. Yet, Allen’s and Dodge’s accounts are most convincing in revealing the complexity of the conflict, showing continuity and transformation, overlap and contradiction with both the seventeenth-century Puritan captivity mythology and the wider genre of contemporary frontier literature of the 1770s. In terms of historiography Richard Slotkin’s scholarship is of high significance for any study that focuses on the American captivity narrative, and besides Sacvan Bercovitch’ work forms one of the main points of departure in this study. Both scholars in different ways link ideological dilemmas during different stages in American history with the Puritan mythology anchored in the captivity literature. Similarly there is a comprehensive amount of scholarship on the situation of American prisoners during the Revolutionary war, as well as the cultural and ideological dimensions of the conflict. Curiously enough very few of these works pay attention to the Revolutionary captivity genre on itself in light of the Puritan literature from which it inherited its structural basis. Therefor the revival of the Puritan captivity genre

4 Bercovitch, S., (1982) “Rhetoric as Authority: Puritanism, the Bible, and the Myth of America”, Social Conscience Information, Vol. 21, No. 1. (5-17) 5. 5 Bailyn, The Ideological Origins, 192-193.

8 during the Revolutionary era is a subject that has often been undervalued as a significant addition to the legacy of American frontier literature, making new research on this subject a relevant addition to the academic field. The goal of this thesis is look for particular ways in which Americans invoked the Puritan mythology during the Revolutionary era by specifically looking at captivity literature, while keeping a close watch on the distortion, exaggeration, and misinterpretation due to its profound yet abstruse nature. This study is by no means a history of the American Revolution, as it only focuses on historical events that give the necessary historical context to clarify the connection between the Puritan captivity narratives and the politics of the American Revolution. It neither aims to tell the history of the Puritans in , but rather impels the reader to identify the relevance of Puritan captivity literature in a popular insurgency that was mainly focused on political independence and national sovereignty.

9 I Puritan Conceptions of Good and Evil, the Captivity Narrative Structure, and the Development of a Secular Counter-Stream

The American captivity narrative developed in seventeenth-century colonial America, as a reaction to the peculiar position in which Puritan colonists found themselves, on the frontier of inscrutable wilderness populated by dark-skinned people who were so strange to them as to appear like demons. This confrontation came to them only after they had to break the traditional ties with their English homeland, in order to build up a new life in terms that more suited their religious principles. In a time of religious tensions, social disorder and great shifts occurring in the societal hierarchies in Europe these people decided to withdraw from English society completely, and run off into the wilderness to create a new one of their own. In England the religious and secular authorities, as well as most fellow parishioners and business associates opposed their spiritual aspirations, leading to the condemnation and persecution of Puritanism.6 Even the settlers themselves doubted their own intentions of redeeming the demonic wilderness in a strange land for Jesus.

Wilderness is a temporary condition thro’ which we are passing to the Promised Land.7

The Puritan mission of redeeming the wilderness to build a ‘City upon a Hill’ became even more problematic by the character of their new environment.8 They migrated from Jacobean and Elizabethan England, the world of Newton and Shakespeare, to live in a prehistoric wasteland, inhabited by what they regarded as subhuman creatures. The Puritans believed the material world to be corrupted in all its facets and were convinced that it required nothing less than a complete regeneration. In England many of them had made unsuccessful efforts to breathe new moral life into the depraved English church. In America they had to repeat this struggle, but this time on a more fundamental level because in their vision the Indian and the wilderness represented the most explicit symbols of the corrupted material world. Therefor, to subdue the Indian wilderness and make way for a New Jerusalem would

6 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689, (London, 2014) 93. 7 Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New England (London 1862); quoted in: Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT 2001) 26. 8 John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), In: E.S. Morgan ed., Puritan Political Ideas, 1558- 1794 (Indianapolis, IN 2003) 75-93.

10 be a much bigger victory over the Devil than reforming the obscured English church with its saints and ostentatious priests. For the Puritans in seventeenth-century New England the conflict with Indians contained all aspects of social organization and stood at the core of their spiritual perceptions. Being in a small minority in a vast country many English settlers tended to give up parts of their own culture and adjust to the demands of life in the wilderness, thereby adapting to various aspects of the Indian way of life. Especially the second generation of settlers found out that certain Indian ways and methods could be both pleasant and commercially beneficial, causing fears among other Puritans for their communities to be ‘Indianized’. This suspicion about acculturation seems inevitable because their conception of the world simply had no ideological middle ground with that of the Indians, as their literature exposes:

The Natives of the Country now Possessed by the New-Englanders, had been forlorn and wretched Heathen ever since their first herding there; and tho’ we know not When or How those Indians first became Inhabitants of this mighty Continent, yet we may guess that probably the Devil decoy’d those miserable Salvages hither, in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his Absolute Empire over them.9

From the Puritan perspective the Indian embodied the dark forces of the earth, both in the outside world and the internal world of the individual conscience. Puritans tended toward a dualistic conception of good and evil, containing a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness, and found an archetype of it in their own confrontation with the Indians.10 Hence, racial conceptions of opposing forces that competed for civilizational victory on the frontier became essential to their spiritual experience. At the time that the conflict between Puritans and Indians began the first myth-conception of Anglo-American history became apparent in the literature of New England: the Puritan captivity narratives written between 1680 and 1720. They describe the experience of a person’s conversion and purification from sin through the suffering of a tribulation by captivity. The captivity experience takes place within the context of the battle between Christians and Indians, which

9 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England; from its first Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord 1698. In Seven Books (Hartford 1858) 556. 10 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 128-129. Derounian, Kathryn Z., (1987) “Puritan Orthodoxy and the ‘Survivor Syndrome’ in Mary Rowlandson’s Indian Captivity Narrative”, Early American Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1. (82-93) 83.

11 is recognized as the conflict between the material world and the spiritual world, or the Devil and Jesus. One of the first and most influential captivity narratives is that of Mary White Rowlandson, the wife of the minister of Lancaster, Massachusetts, who was captured by Algonquian Indians during King Philip’s War and held for eleven weeks and five days before being ransomed. The narrative describes Rowlandson’s journey through the wilderness as a hostage of the tribe and set out the method for dozens of authors and illustrates, representing the style and imagination of the Puritan captivity narrative better than any other. The account opens with a description of an idyllic life in the frontier settlement of Lancaster. However, the forces of darkness in both the natural world and the soul continually threaten the prosperity of the community. Mrs. Rowlandson describes how the wealth and convenience in the colony made her feel uncomfortable, making her wish that God would punish her to prove her discipline and will to live for him. God seemed to take heed of her prayers when unexpectedly darkness and fire emerged from the forest:

On the Tenth of February, 1675, Came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: Their first coming was about Sun-Rising; hearing the noise of some Guns, we looked out; several Houses were burning, and the Smoke ascending to Heaven. There were five persons taken in one house, the Father, and the Mother and a sucking Child, they knockt on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive.11

The story starts with the family being separated; the mother, representing its values and virtues, is captured and taken into the forest by evil intruders. Right away these alien beings present themselves as demons through their greed, excessive sensuality, and pleasure in savagery:

Oh the roaring, and singing and danceing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night... made the place a lifely resemblance of hell. And as miserable was the wast that was there made, of Horses, Cattle, Sheep, Swine, Calves, Roasting Pigs, and Fowl... some roasting, some lying burning, and some boyling to feed our merciless enemies... I asked them wither I might not lodge in the House that night to which they answered, what will you love English men still?.12

11 Mary White Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). All quotations from: Charles H. Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York 1913) 118. 12 Rowlandson, 121.

12 The family becomes even more disintegrated with the separation of the mother from her children, and her being moved deeper into the haunted wilderness.13 One of the aspects that make Rowlandson’s narrative so compelling is that time is not defined by hours or days, but in ‘removes’, meaning the number of physical transfers of the captive from one place to another, symbolizing the developing phases of alienation from the family, church, and community. Rowlandson’s use of this term can be interpreted to indicate her notion of being increasingly removed from her family as she travels with the Indians through the wilderness. It moreover implies an increasing psychological distance between her and the community despite the fact that the tribe traveled in a circle that almost led back to Lancaster. Even though Rowlandson is captured by demons, she aims to uphold her spiritual purity by resisting several material enticements, as she refuses tobacco, rejects the worship of Indian gods and offers of marriage that could integrate her into the Indian community. This makes her treatment by the Indians worse, causing her to become so hungry that she impulsively steals the bread of another captured white child, the food that was actually given to the child by an old squaw in order for her not to get sick. This moment exposes the meaning of Mrs. Rowlandson’s suffering; she comes to understand that the Indians are not external devils, but rather a reflection of her own sins of contentment, self-indulgence, sexuality, and greed.

I then remembered how careless I had been of Gods holy time, how many Sabbaths I had lost and mispent, and how evily I had walked in Gods sight; which lay so close unto my spirit, that it was easie for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut of the thread of my life, and cast me out of his presence for ever. Yet the Lord still shewed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.14

As a result of this experience Rowlandson starts seeing herself as standing before God’s judgment as a black and Indianized soul, damned and with no chance of being redeemed. But by subjecting herself to God’s will Rowlandson manages to regenerate her spirit and cleanse it from her sins. The end of the narrative implies the need for constant renewal of the

13 During the sixth remove Rowlandson uses the phrase “I went along that day mourning and lamenting, leaving farther my own Country, and traveling into the vast and howling wilderness (132), quoting the last two words directly from Deuteronomy 32:10 (King James Version). The Deuteronomic description of the wilderness typifies the Puritan imagination of the unexplored New World landscape. Michell R. Breitweiser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative, (Madison, WI 1990) 95-96. 14 Rowlandson, 124.

13 psychological process of decline and recovery, suggesting the spiritual rebirth of other captives who wrote down their captivity experiences after her. The mythological potential of Rowlandson’s captivity narrative becomes even more explicit when placed in context with other Puritan literature about Indian captivity. Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was an influential Puritan minister in New England, author, and pamphleteer, who is today mostly remembered for his involvement in the Salem Witch Trials. His narrative “A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning” (1693) portrays Mather’s curing of a bewitched girl named Mercy Short, during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. The seventeen- year-old orphan Mercy was captured during an Indian raid and became possessed by the devil during her captivity. Mather was a professional spiritual healer and called in to expel the demons from Mercy’s soul after she was liberated and moved to Boston. In the narrative Mather works within the Puritan captivity framework but starts where Rowlandson’s account ended, as the captive is physically returned to Boston but is psychologically estranged from God by her experience of captivity. Mather’s job is to complete Mercy’s rescue by driving the Indian demons from the wilderness of her own mind and end the “Captivity of Spectres”.15 In his sermon Humiliations Follow’d with Deliverances (1697) Mather defines the sorrow of the Puritan community through the Indian captivity experience and concludes by reading the story of , which he called “A Narrative of a Notable Deliverance from Captivity”. Once again, the Indian captivity experience and salvation define the journey of the Puritan soul and society through the wilderness toward the Promised Land.16 The structure of the Puritan captivity narrative gives an account of a rebirth of the soul and achieving redemption of the captive through a complex process of violent encounters with the dark forces of the earth. The universe consists of a world and an anti-world. The former represents the situation before captivity, an idealized memory of prosperity and harmony recalling Eden, which is obscured by the fears of dark forces in both the inner spiritual world and the natural world. Suddenly fear becomes reality as Indians arise from the anti-world, as they rip the family apart and carry the mother into the darkness. The captive is forced to live in the anti-world on terms of the enemy by eating the devil’s bread and drinking his wine. While living with the Indians the captive discovers the sins that have corrupted his or her own

15 Cotton Mather, “A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning” (1693), in: George Lincoln ed., Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 (New York 1914) 267. 16 Quoted in: Derounian, Kathryn Z., (1987) “Puritan Orthodoxy and the ‘Survivor Syndrome’ in Mary Rowlandson’s Indian Captivity Narrative”, Early American Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1. (82-93) 86.

14 soul and community from within: “I may say, as it is in Psal. 38. 5, 6. My Wounds stink and are corrupt, I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly, I go mourning all the day long”.17 This encourages the captive to embrace the punishment and undergo the process of regeneration as a divine purpose: “But the Lord renewed my strength still, and carried me along, that I might see more of his Power; yea, so much that I could never have thought of, had I not experienced it”.18 The story ends with salvation; after resisting all its appeals and exorcising the Indian demon the captive returns to the family and church. The intimate encounter with the Indian anti-world teaches the community about its internal sins and shows it how to alleviate the guilt derived from the process, the expulsion of the devil from the community and the soul.

There are several ways to measure the factors that indicate the strength and influence of Puritan captivity literature in later periods. The first type of evidence is revealed by its popularity on the basis of the number of editions and the range of different publishers that printed the narratives in different forms. Statistically captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandson’s were regularly published in journals and as individual copies until the late nineteenth century. From 1680 until the beginning of the Revolutionary conflict the captivity narratives were the only native genre to approach the popularity of European literature in the American colonies, and until 1720, when the earliest secularized hunter-myth-literature emerged, the captivity narratives were the only literary documentation about the frontier.19 Beyond the statistical data there is the evidence of its influence in the general culture, and its presence in daily customs like sermons, ceremonies, art, and literature, and the way it served as a departure for political and religious rhetoric. But to thoroughly test the actual potency of an ideological framework is to work out how it functioned as a model for the viewpoint of people in a different time. More relevant than its popularity is the “testimony to the power of the captivity narratives to express the community’s sense of the meaning of its experience, to rationalize its actions, and to move its people to new actions”.20 Time is the best indicator for the relevance of such a framework, as it shows whether it maintains its

17 Rowlandson, 125. 18 Rowlandson, 123. 19 Slotkin, R., (1971) “Dreams and Genocide: The American Myth of Regeneration Through Violence”, Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1. (38-59) 48. 20 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 96.

15 capacity to articulate and frame the world-view of a culture after a number of decades or even centuries. In Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973) Richard Slotkin describes a series of historical examples in which the ideological framework of the Puritan captivity narrative is present. Narratives about conflict with Indians and subsequent captivity remained central in popular literature so long as the Indian wars lasted, which is until the 1890s.21 Moreover, the themes and events in the Puritan captivity narratives were picked up by newspapers, which often sought to produce sensational stories. The emergence of the American Western and Dime Novels, which remained an essential part of popular literature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more recent art forms like movies and comic books show traces of the Puritan captivity ideology. In “Dreams and Genocide: The American Myth of Regeneration Through Violence” (1971), an essay preceding the aforementioned book, Slotkin offers examples varying from the Civil War to the comparison of American soldiers in the Vietnamese jungle with Puritans in the seventeenth-century wilderness of New England. The argument here is not that the producers of popular culture somehow forced the old Puritan mythology upon the American public, but rather that the transfer of beliefs into different periods of American history shows that numerous generations of Americans found it relevant to their own conception of the world, and typical of their self-image.22 The enduring adoration of these kinds of narratives, the ways in which they were applied, and the metaphorical symbolism that they contained indicate that the captivity narratives articulate the first sufficient myth-literature written in the United States for an American audience. More compelling than its popularity is the evidence of the ability of the captivity narratives to express the people’s awareness of their identity and to justify its actions. The narratives came in a sermon-style, starting with a fragment from the bible and a foreword explaining the moral principles of the text that served both as an advice and a caution for the reader to improve his or her life. In the late eighteenth century the symbolic language use of the Puritans became conventionalized by habitual application, and developed through the demands to better suit the spirit and characterize the experiences of later generations of Americans.

21 Slotkin, “Dreams and Genocide”, 48. 22 Ibid., 49-52.

16 During the Revolutionary era the United States witnessed a remarkable variation in the development of the captivity narrative as a literary genre. Puritan accounts of captivity, especially the ones written by Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637-1711) and John Williams (1664- 1729), saw an extraordinary increase in popularity during the years preceding the American Revolution. Between 1770 and 1776 the two narratives were reprinted at least nine times, which is significant given the fact that they had been reprinted only three times from the moment of their original publication until 1769.23 Although these early Puritan captivity narratives are fascinating accounts, which enjoyed great adoration in seventeenth-century New England during the years following their initial publication, the renewed interest in the 1770s is curious. Richard Slotkin describes how the American captivity narrative went through an evolution of secularization, away from the orthodox Puritan doctrine, which makes this turn-back during the Revolutionary era seem retrogressive.24 It is broadly agreed that the captivity genre underwent compelling changes in the eighteenth century. Both Mary Rowlandson and John Williams understood their captivity as a way of spiritual testing, in which the refusal to adopt Indian cultural elements equaled the resistance to satanic seduction in the wilderness. Yet, in the century that followed after Rowlandson’s first publication in 1682, while the captivity genre spread through different parts of America and Puritan orthodoxy diminished as a major cultural force, both new and old captivity narratives became secularized and came to express a popular myth. Slotkin states that in the years preceding the American Revolution captivity narratives no longer portrayed the punishment and spiritual examination of the people by God in order to assure their loyalty to him, but the exploration of the mysteries of the Indian world.25 Whereas the traditional Puritan captivity narratives described the adoption of Indian practices as blasphemous, the stories of captivity in the late eighteenth century applauded the integration of captives into the Indian culture.26 One of the earliest and most prominent examples of secularized captivity narratives of Indianization is John Filson’s “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone” (1784).27 What is essential to Boone’s narrative is that

23 Rowlandson once (1720), Williams twice (1720 and 1758). R.W.G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia, 1949) 332, 525. 24 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 95-96. 25 Ibid., 20-24, 267. 26 Ibid., 247. 27 “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone” was originally part of Filson’s book The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784). Because it became so popular it was often printed as a separate work.

17 during his two captivities he mastered the Indian skills, which earned him the respect of the Indians, while keeping up his cultural superiority and thereby subduing the American wilderness for white Christian civilization. Boone thus became partly Indianized and his integration in Indian culture symbolizes the secular myth of the frontier-tamer as “archetypal American mediator between civilization and the wilderness”.28 Slotkin moreover argues that the problem with Mrs. Rowlandson’s narrative, and several of her imitators, is that despite the mythic structure they do not contain any images of heroism. He calls the emergence of a “counter stream of myth- the myth of the hunter- but which eventually merged with the mythic structure of the captivity narratives” the result of an increasingly articulated need for a respectable image of human heroism.29 This led to the creation of hero-types like Daniel Boone, Leatherstocking, General Custer, and Davy Crockett. This hunter-hero-type goes into the wilderness voluntarily to determine his destiny and that of the wilderness itself. He gets into close contact with the brute forces of the American wilderness, and in fact gets initiated into the Indian world and adopts some of the Indian characteristics. Herein simultaneously lie his strength and his weakness, because as much as becoming master over the wilderness he also negotiates his own cultural purity. He finally wins the appreciation of his reading audience by managing to maintain his cultural integrity, by serving as an agent of American civilization and progress, and the fact that he has either lived as a captive himself or has served as the liberator of other captives. The folkloristic and secular character of these figures was necessary for their acceptance among the American audience in the late eighteenth century. Yet, Cotton Mather’s A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning (1693) presents an early religious and propagandistic version of the American hero- narrative, in which the hero is defined as the savior of captives who fights the demonic spirits. The American Revolutionary conflict demanded a more sensationalist and original narrative form than the ones used by Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, written by people with experiences of captivity and the expertise to tell a good personal story. This resulted in the fictionalization of captivity narratives, beginning with the imitation of existing captivity experiences and soon moving toward the production of original captivity narratives, whether or not imaginary or semi-fictional. This caused the emergence of literary forms as credible instruments for remarks about identity or the ‘American experience’. The captivity narrative

28 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 23. 29 Slotkin, “Dreams and Genocide”, 44.

18 of prototypical American heroes rising from Indian war narratives, expressing the American ideals, was one of the subgenres within this wider development, and John Dodge and Ethan Allen can be seen as such American heroes representing it. As American writers moved deliberately toward the writing of fiction in the traditional captivity genres, Indian warfare, and travel-explorer narratives, the mythological elements of their subjects tended to emerge more sharply from their background. The artistic pursuit of the Puritan profession of intrinsic introspection is partially responsible for this, a tendency that became increasingly influential once literature itself became a profession in America in the nineteenth century. Whereas the Puritan narrators had to work from actual experiences of encounters with Indians and within their strictly delineated theological framework, the chronicler in the late eighteenth century could depart from a greater legacy of traditions, philosophical hypotheses, literary styles, and cultural codes. This variety enabled narrators to be more direct in their expression and description of individual perceptions and experiences, ultimately emerging in the narratives associated with Revolutionary heroes like Allen and Dodge. Revolutionary captivity narratives of the late eighteenth century were subject to changes that paralleled those of the exploration narratives, especially in their attitude toward Indians. For the Puritans making contact or living together with Indians in the forest was only acceptable within the context of captivity or a missionary journey. Just as the intention to seek a greater understanding of the wilderness emerged in the hunter-explorer-narratives, the intention of getting into a more intimate contact with Indians became more accepted in the captivity narratives written in the second half of the eighteenth century. In fact, the very essence of the captivity narrative began to be reshaped between 1750 and 1800, gradually blurring the boundaries between the captive and the Indian and often even moving toward the acceptance of adoption within the Indian society. Accounts of merchants and diplomats like James Adair (1709-1783) and Henry Timberlake (1730-1765), who had been living with the Chickasaw and Overhill Cherokee with no context of a religious mission or captivity, appeared ever more often.30 Ultimately, the captivity narratives moved toward a narrative style that was openly fictional in response to the tastes and expectations of the American reading public. The symbolic function of the Indian transformed and intensified, both to make him a reliable companion or ally for his American counterpart and to stimulate

30 James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo, Daily Life on the Old Colonial Frontier (Westport, CT 2002) 24- 25.

19 the American recognition of the fraternity between the two. Finally, acculturation and adoption into the Indian world became the ultimate core of the captivity experience.

20

II The Puritan Captivity Narrative as a Revolutionary Metaphor

In the Revolutionary era both the reprinted and imitated Puritan captivity narratives had a different influence on the definition of American nationality by expressing the rejection of British culture. In the 1770s the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies started to see themselves as captives and the British monarch as their captor. This idea of collective captivity was what repolarized the narratives of Rowlandson and Williams, which was expressed by the number of times they were reprinted. Furthermore, the captivity narrative developed into a fertile metaphor during the American Revolutionary War itself as a large number of Americans became prisoners of war. The idea of captivity by the British army was thus applied to American civilians in a figurative sense as they were occupied, and in a literal sense for Americans who were imprisoned. Ethan Allen (1738-1989) was the first American to write down his captivity experience in The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779), and did so by using several rhetorical techniques from the Puritan accounts of Indian captivity. Military academic Captain Greg Sieminski stated “in adapting the genre to serve political ends, Allen created, in effect, a second cultural frontier, this one to the East instead of the West. Crossing this frontier, Allen followed the pattern of earlier Puritan narratives in order to stress his resistance to the culture of his captors”.31 Hereby he validated a new unique American culture. Thus, in his narrative Allen did the opposite of what Daniel Boone did, as he determined the American character by describing what it refused instead of what it adopted. Hence Allen’s narrative represented the politicization of the early Puritan beliefs. The renewed popularity of the genre had for a large part to do with Revolutionary politics, and the incorporation of captivity literature into the world of politics started with a number of republications of the Rowlandson and Williams narratives in the 1770s. The two works were republished numerous times to frame public opinion about the political situation in the years preceding the war. In these narratives the idea of captivity was used as a metaphor for political events, which the people in the colonies believed to be leading to their imprisonment, by an overseas tyrant. Allen and the people who republished the narratives of Rowlandson

31 Sieminski, G., (1990) “The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American Revolution”, American Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (35-56) 36.

21 and Williams adopted and exploited the concept of captivity in a way, which is why it is important to stress how contemporary events revived the interest in the two Puritan stories. Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) was the first of the two original narratives to gain new popularity in the 1770s.32 In the years after its initial publication in 1682 the narrative enjoyed widespread popularity among New England settlers and came out in four different editions.33 Like orthodox Puritanism itself the interest in Rowlandson’s narrative faded out in the following decades and it was only once republished in 1720.34 After half a century of effective silence Rowlandson’s work was republished three times in 1770, once in 1771, and two times more in 1773. Except for one, all the republished editions were printed and published in Boston. Both the time and place are logical when the context of the contemporary political situation of these republications is taken into account.35 In 1768 Boston was occupied by British troops, which led to the Boston Massacre in 1770 and the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Britain had sent in the troops to restore the order in the city after frictions between the colonies and the British arose after Parliament passed the Townshend Acts (1767), strengthening the British authority over the American colonies. Friction emerged mainly as a result of a series of propagandistic newspaper articles called “Journal of Occurrences in Boston”, which was published in the New York Journal and Packet and several Boston newspapers, that took note of the daily interactions between the Bostonians and British soldiers. It focused on emphasizing the soldiers’ atrocities and abuse of the local population.36 On the first of January 1770 the mood of the city was quickly described as “trapped and restless” by the Boston Gazette, showing an image of a seated Minerva who was about to release a dove from its cage with one hand while holding a liberty cap with the other.37 The city’s restlessness finally resulted in violence when British soldiers

32 Rowlandson’s narrative was promoted in the Massachusetts Spy on the 12th and 26th of September and the 3rd of October 1771; New London Gazette, 3 December 1773; Newport Mercury, 7 and 14 March 1774. 33 Sieminski, 37. 34 Derounian, Kathryn Z., (1988) “The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson’s Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century”, Early American Literature, Vol. 23. No. 3. (239-261) 248. 35 For more bibliographic information on reprinted captivity narratives see: R.W.G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia, 1949). 36 Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (Chapel Hill, NC 1941) 150. 37 Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural history of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature ,and Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763- 1789 (New York 1976) 145.

22 killed five people after being physically threatened by a mob. The incident was heavily publicized by leading Revolutionary figures like Paul Revere and Samuel Adams, and quickly earned its name as the Boston Massacre.38 Calling the event a “massacre” was not a coincidence. Propagandists knew that the first thing that the word would bring up in the imagination of the colonists were the public memories of Indian raids on frontier settlements. These memories also brought up the captivity experience with which the colonists had become familiar through Puritan captivity literature. The experience started with the Indian raids but had now returned in a different but recognizable form. The description of the onslaught that led to the captivity of Mary Rowlandson exemplifies this:

Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathens ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out. Now we might hear mothers and children crying out for themselves and one another. Lord, what shall we do?... It was a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here and some there,... all of them stripped naked.39

Two years after the Boston Massacre Dr. Joseph Warren gave a speech on its memorial. His characterization of the slaughter that happened in Boston remarkably resembles Rowlandson’s rhetoric:

The horrors of that dreadful night... when our streets were stained with the blood of our own brethren – when our ears were wounded by the groans of the dying, and our eyes were tormented with the sight of the mangled bodies of the dead – when our alarmed imaginations presented to our view our houses wrapt in flames, our children subjected to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery, – our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion, – our virtuous wives... falling sacrifice to worse than brutal violence....40

38 Robert J. Allison, The Boston Massacre (Carlisle, MA 2006) 21-23, 27. 39 Rowlandson, 34-35. 40 Joseph Warren, 5 March 1772 oration delivered in Boston. Reprinted in: Hezekiah Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (New York 1876) 22.

23 Three years later Warren gave another speech at a memorial for the Boston Massacre in which he reminded his audience of comparable “images of terror”. He asked the audience rhetorical questions that brought up familiar memories of Indian Raids:

Who spread this ruin around us?... has the grim savage rushed again from the far distant wilderness? Or does some fiend fierce from the depths of hell,... hurl... deadly arrows at our breast? No;... but, how astonishing! It is the hand of Britain that inflicts the wound.41

Warren clearly revokes the demonic image of the Indian that is characteristic of the Puritan captivity narratives and which is expressed by Rowlandson. Hence he implies that the British troops, who randomly shot at helpless victims, were similar to the Indians in their savagery. Besides sharing the same barbaric methods the British similarly aimed to captivate innocent Americans. Like many articles in the Boston newspapers Warren often used the word slavery in his addresses, showing that he and his fellow citizens interpreted the Boston Massacre as evidence that a barbaric enemy held them captive. There are more documents that suggest that the renewed interest in captivity literature, and especially Rowlandson’s narrative, was triggered by the atrocities of the Boston Massacre. The republished editions of Rowlandson’s narrative were often decorated with woodcuts that present new insights about the way in which the publishers aimed the story to be conceived.42 A woodcut that was designed for the title page of an edition published in 1773 depicts four Indians standing in line, while two of them hold muskets and two others holding axes and aiming at Mary Rowlandson, who stands outside her house with a rifle, ready to shoot at the Indians. As a matter of fact the image would serve as a more suitable cover for the narrative of Hannah Duston, who actually killed her Indian captors, be it with an axe rather than a rifle.43

41 Warren, 27. Allison, 23. 42 Sieminski, 39. 43 Humphreys, S., (2011) “The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston”, Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2. 149-178. 150.

24

25 The depiction of Rowlandson and the Indians on this woodcut is not just anachronistic in several ways, but very telling about the way people related the story to their own contemporary situation. The Indian raiding technique that Rowlandson described is very different from the method that is depicted in this woodcut. She describes the Indian’s tactics as their typical way of attacking by surrounding their target and creating chaos: “Some of the Indians got behind the hill, others into the barn, and others behind anything that could shelter them; from all which places they shot against the house so that the bullets seemed to fly like hail...”.44 The line-formation that is depicted in the woodcut is more typical of a European- style standing army than that of an Indian tribe. In fact, her original Narrative in no way supports the way Rowlandson is depicted in the woodcut, as she did not carry a musket but her young daughter when she escaped the burning house. Never did she imply to have engaged in fighting with the Indians or to have carried a rifle. The depiction of Rowlandson as a combatant fighting with her captors is historically incorrect but also contradicts the underlying spiritual message of the story. In the original version of her narrative Rowlandson several times says to believe that the Indians are God’s tools used to punish his disobedient people, and that to be saved she had to be patient and obedient to him. But subjugation was not what the people of Boston were intended for. The Rowlandson woodcut is a good example of how a Puritan captivity narrative was reshaped into a secular form and politicized for contemporary uses in the 1770s. It portrays Rowlandson as a heroic defender of American liberty and the Indians as agents of a tyrannical government. Greg Sieminski argued about the artwork “Rowlandson seems to represent a frontier version of the Goddess of Liberty, a figure intimately associated with the American cause in both visual and literary art beginning in the 1760s”. 45 The secularization of Rowlandson’s narrative is also evident in the adjustment of the title in the reprinted versions of the 1770s. The initial title was The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Of all the 1770s editions the title was A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, suggesting a stronger emphasis on her suffering and a less on the religious aspects of the text.

44 Rowlandson, 118. 45 Silverman, 86.

26 John Williams’s Captivity Narrative and the Act

Besides Rowlandson’s Narrative a second Puritan captivity narrative enjoyed renewed interest during the Revolutionary era. John Williams’s story of captivity The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion was first published in 1707. Williams was the minister of the Congregational church of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and had in 1704 been taken captive by Mohawk and was transported to Canada together with a number of his parishioners. Unlike Rowlandson, Williams did not emphasize his sufferings much but instead focused on the sly attempts of French-Canadian priests to convert him and his followers to Catholicism. Therefor his narrative is at least as much directed against French culture and the as it is against Indians. The last version of Williams’s narrative was published during the in 1758 before it was reprinted three times in the years preceding the American Revolution, respectively being 1773, 1774, and 1776.46 Similar to Rowlandson’s narrative, the renewed popularity of Williams’s account was sparked by the contemporary political situation. By reprinting Williams’s narrative the publishers responded to the fears of American colonists for British policies appeasing the settlers in the newly acquired province of Quebec, because the narrative describes a defenseless Protestant minister terrorized by French-Catholic despotism. Britain’s conciliatory policies in Canada in the 1760s were necessary to restrain unrest among the substantial Francophone population in Quebec, and even went as far as to allow the appointment of French-Catholic Bishop Jean-Olivier Briand as the major religious leader of the province in 1766. Down in New England many people were heavily suspicious about the appointment of Briand, as it was viewed as the establishment of popery in the American colonies.47 Anti-Catholic sentiments were stirred up by Founding Father Samuel Adams who wrote a number of letters to the Boston Gazette, which responded to the fears of papal interference in America, causing the sentiments to peak in in the early 1770s.48 Thereafter in 1773 the news reached New England that the colonial authorities in Quebec were awaiting a bill in Parliament, which if adopted, would give the Catholic Church the status of state religion as it

46 Williams’s narrative was promoted in New London Gazette, 9 April 1773 and 23 March and 3 May 1776. Sieminski, 42. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York 1998) 186-190. 47 Charles Metzger, The Quebec Act, a Primary Cause of the American Revolution (New York 1936) 27. 48 Ibid., 22-24.

27 had been when Quebec was under French rule. The Quebec Act, as the law was named soon after, quickly caused the widespread denunciation of anything that was French or Catholic. The New England newspapers wrote fiercely in defense of orthodox Protestant values, and how the bill had justified the colonists’ fears of creeping Catholic influence.49 Besides seeming like a cunning plan to subjugate the inhabitants of the American colonies to papal autocracy, the bill also appeared to abuse Canada as basis from which to do so. For years the French authorities had instigated hostilities between Indians and American settlers, which is why the colonists subsequently identified fears of French cultural influence with Indian raids and captivity.50 The British were considered to be the secret organizers behind the conspiracy of and Indians, which is why the New England colonists focused their fury on the monarch who was assumed to do this to strip them of their political and religious freedoms. Like the letters concerning the Boston Massacre, the stories in the local newspapers regarding the Quebec Act frequently propagated the popular fears of slavery.51 The simultaneously rising fears of British appeasement policies in Quebec and the reviving popularity of Williams’s captivity narrative suggest a correlation between the two. It is plausible that the republished editions of Williams’s narrative in 1773 and 1774 were encouraged by the strong anti-Catholic atmosphere and widely shared concerns about the Quebec Act. This becomes even more likely when considering the fact that after 1776 the narrative was not reprinted again until 1793, suggesting a sudden cease of anti-Catholic tensions after the Declaration of Independence, which can be explained by the colonists’ understanding that their successfully gained independence had depended on the support of Catholic allies Spain and France. This kind of discontinuity in opinion about Catholics would have been unimaginable for pious Puritans like Williams and Rowlandson, but in the relatively secularized 1770s Americans thought in more practical terms, making such a turnaround acceptable for the higher Revolutionary ideal. The renewed popularity of the Williams and Rowlandson narratives in the years prior to the American Revolution was closely related to the emerged idea among colonists to have been captured by a tyrant. It is hard to tell whether the popularization of the narratives was a

49 Bailyn, The Ideological Origins, 97-98. 50 Metzger, 48. 51 Arthur M. Schlessinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764-1776 (Sacramento, CA 2015) 151. Samuel Webster, “The Misery and Duty of an Opress’d and Enslav’d people, represented in a sermon delivery at Salisbury, 14 July 1774”; Printed by Edes and Gill (Boston, MA 1774).

28 result of cleverly designed propaganda or if it simply reflected the politicization of native literature as a whole. Yet, it is safe to believe that the Puritan captivity genre was a convenient tool to propagate the Revolutionary motive. It can be argued that the republished editions were affiliated with the Founding Fathers, whose authority the Revolutionaries aimed to establish as a way to settle their national origin on American land. Moreover, Rowlandson’s captivity narrative had been the beginning of a new literary genre that was exclusively American. So by using captivity narratives for Revolutionary purposes the cause for independence became associated with an art form that derived from a uniquely American captivity experience.52 The literary framework that was applied in the captivity narratives also fitted the production of Revolutionary propaganda, because the stories started and ended with freedom and highlighted the experience of captivity that disturbed this freedom. The end of the captivity narrative represented the colonists’ yearning for political independence, while the beginning of the narratives reflects their perception of their own history. This suggests that the people in the colonies understood themselves to be politically self-determined until the British king decided to restrict their independence in 1768.53 Hence the structure of the captivity narratives, starting and finishing with freedom, encouraged the colonists to reclaim their liberties that had been their historical right and were part of their natural state of existence. The captivity of god-fearing Puritans like Williams, who was a minister, and Rowlandson, who was the wife of one, was an intense spiritual experience that started with deep mourning, after which a period of testing followed that finished with salvation. In the first phase God subjected the captives to shame and hardship by the hands of the Indian captors as a punishment for their misconduct. The right reaction to this godly mortification was to show remorse, patience, and endurance. In the 1770s the colonists in New England used the Puritan captivity concept, not to highlight their own misconduct but that of their British overlords. Thereby they used the idea of unjustness and hardship to propagate themselves as the long- suffering subordinates of a cruel monarch, like Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence. Even though the Boyle woodcut of a combative Mary Rowlandson contradicts the original narrative it shows how the virtue of captivity is used as a metaphor for the

52 Slotkin argues that captivity narratives were generally recognized as a literary genre by the mid-eighteenth century. Regeneration Through Violence, 97. 53 Varg, P.A., (1964) “The Advent of Nationalism, 1758-1776”, American Quearterly, Vol. 16, No. 2. (169-181) 177.

29 Revolution, because the idea of suffering becomes the legitimization for challenging the ruling authority. Thus, the central message in Rowlandson’s narrative is changed from the higher law of God to the higher law of inalienable rights and individual liberty. The second phase of the captivity experience; the testing of the soul through hardship and struggle, likewise fitted the agenda of the Revolutionaries. In their narratives both Rowlandson and Williams were caught up in a foreign and hostile environment. In Rowlandson’s case the sense of alienation came from her being trapped among Indians, who she perceived as the people of the devil, while Williams found himself surrounded by French- speaking Catholics. Both were put under pressure to acculturate or convert to the cultures of their captors and their rejection hereof was what cleansed them from their sins. By resisting the heavy pressures and holding on to their own beliefs to reach salvation they also affirmed their own unique culture, which was not British but American. By reflecting this idea to the Revolutionary atmosphere in Boston during the 1770s the Puritan religious meaning of resistance was replaced by a patriotic definition. The third and final phase of the captivity experience also fitted the Revolutionary agenda, as it could be used to reinforce the colonists’ awareness of their national identity and unity as a people. Rowlandson and Williams were rewarded with freedom by repentance and enduring God’s examination of their obedience, and redeemed from their captivity. In the Puritan narratives the experience of captivity represented the community or larger society, and more importantly affirmed the Puritan position as God’s chosen people and the imbedded destiny of salvation.54 For the seventeenth-century Puritan society this meant the release from Indian raids ravaging communities and capturing Christians. For colonial America in the 1770s this idea of imbedded and self-evident destined freedom represented the liberation from British authoritarianism. In the years just preceding the American Revolution the idea of a nation destined to be liberated from a collective captivity had become fundamentally intertwined with the need for a political uprising of the people in the rebellious colonies. This strong connection is suggested by many artworks, among which was the proposed scene of captivity experience as the logo of the Great Seal of the United States, as proposed to Congress by Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams in July 1776.55 The picture portrays the Israelites crossing the Red Sea

54 Minter, David L., (1973) “By Dens of Lions: Notes on Stylization in Early Puritan Captivity Narratives”, American Literature, Vol. 45, No. 3. (335-347) 341, 347. 55 Sieminski, 45.

30 harmlessly while the walls of water falling down on them repulse their Egyptian captors, and the scene is encircled by the phrase: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God”.56 Numerous religious leaders similarly propagated the connection between Exodus and the fight for American independence at the time, with Washington as the new Moses and Manifest Destiny as the new millennial mission.57 The concept of collective captivity became even more established in the public conscience when the Revolutionary war broke out and fighting started. The idea of captivity that once had been used as a metaphor in pre-war Revolutionary propaganda became reality for colonists with the British occupation of several districts. Captivity became an even more literal reality for the numerous American Revolutionaries who got captured by British troops and became prisoners of war.

56 Silverman, 323. 57 For more information on the uses of Exodus as a Revolutionary metaphor see: Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, 1985).

31

III The Emergence of a Revolutionary Captivity Genre

During the American Revolution, narratives of the experiences of captivity by the British Army stimulated the creation of a definition of American liberty as a key element of the American identity for those fighting for the cause of independence. By drawing attention to the ‘barbarous and cruel’ character of the British treatment of prisoners of war these captivity narratives granted the defenders of the Revolutionary cause the opportunity to underline the differences between themselves and their former British overlords. As these captivity narratives were published in papers, journals, and magazines, the condition of American prisoners of war became a symbol for the struggle of a whole nation trying to acquire its independence from Great Britain.

On Christmas Eve 1776 Charles Herbert, a crewman aboard the privateer vessel Dalton, was imprisoned by British soldiers after being tracked down by a Royal navy frigate. During his captivity he kept a journal of his experience which he kept “concealed, while writing, in his boots, and as each page became full, it was conveyed to a chest with a double bottom, and there secreted until he left prison”.58 The British officers ordered Herbert and his fellow crewmen “down to the cabletier” where they “found nothing but bare cable to lay upon, and that very uneven”, and “nothing but a few rags and a dozen old blankets” to keep them warm.59 Even worse was the heat down in the bottom of the ship that almost suffocated the crewmembers. During the following months of their captivity Herbert and the other Dalton crewmembers saw their conditions remain harsh and were moved around over several vessels in the port of Plymouth, England. The continuing relocation of the crewmembers was due to a legal concern that became one of the central ideological issues during the American Revolution. American captives formed a crucial problem for the British authorities from the beginning of the war, because treating them as prisoners of war would acknowledge the captives as members of a sovereign state,

58 Charles Herbert, and C.H. Pierce ed., Relic of the Revolution, Containing a Full and Particular Account of the Sufferings and Privatations of All the American Prisoners Captured on the High Seas and Carried into Plymouth, England, during the Revolution of 1776 (Boston, MA 1847) 18-20. 59 Francis Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners in the Revolutionary War: The Captivity of William Russel (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD 2001) 42-47.

32 hence recognizing the United States as an independent nation. On the other hand, by treating the American captives as rebellious subjects of the British crown, as they were at the outset of the conflict, these captives were officially imprisoned citizens, which would allow them to claim their rights as British nationals including their release on bail while pending an appeal. The British parliament hoped to solve this issue with the passing the North’s Act in March 1777, but could not prevent it to be a lead off to deeper ideological issues.60 The Act sustained the denial of prisoner-of-war-status to American captives, while at the same time stripping off their rights as imprisoned civilians, hence allowing British officials to detain American captives without a trial or bail. Many captives like Herbert were soon shipped off to Britain where they were held on prison ships or in the notorious Forton and Mill prisons, where their third-rate treatment was based on their inferior status to both British prisoners and officially recognized prisoners of war.61 These practical problems that American captives of war brought to the spotlight reflected a deeper dilemma concerning the identity of inhabitants of the American colonies. In his captivity narrative Herbert writes about the moment that several British soldiers brought their wives aboard the vessel where he was held and describes the commotion that arose when they first saw the American captives. The women asked questions like “what sort of people are they?”, “can they talk?”, “are they white?”, and asserting “they look like our people” and “they talk English”.62 The fact that the women of British crewmen were surprised by the similarities between themselves and the captives is telling for the extent to which the British perceived Americans as the ‘other’, even before the American Revolution started. Although only a relatively small number of people in Britain believed the inhabitants of Anglo-America to be something very different from white British at the wake of the American Revolution, the development of defining colonists as Americans had started a decade earlier in 1763. Interestingly enough this definition of Americans as not fully British did not happen among the colonists themselves but Englishmen, and according to Timothy

60 American prisoners were finally granted prisoner-of-war status in 1782. For more information about legal status of prisoners see: Dzurec, D., (2013) “Prisoners of War and American Self-Image during the American Revolution”, War in History, Vol. 20, No. 4. (430-451) 437-438. 61 For more information about the living conditions on British prison ships see: Larry G. Bowman ,Captive Americans: Prisoners during the American Revolution (Athens, OH 1976) 9-16, and Dzurec, 435-438. 62 Herbert, A Relic of the Revolution, 19-20.

33 Breen served as a significant stimulus for the Revolutionary uprising.63 Richard Slotkin moreover emphasizes the influence of the French and Indian War (1754-1763) on the changing American self-image, as it was the last conflict in which Americans and Brits fought together as allies under the same government, and which made both the similarities and differences between the two people’s more visible.64 While many colonists had kept personal ideas about identity in the private sphere in the decade preceding the American Revolution, the outbreak of the war in 1775 forced many to ponder their loyalty.65 The conflicting definitions of identity in the American colonies represented one of the most profound problems of the Revolution. For decades ideas about shared religion and language had united different parts of British Empire and formed a way to identify a specific ‘other’ in times of war. However, the conflict between American patriots and the British army lacked such clear categories of identity. Complicated as the conflict was, the reactions to it varied greatly among the people in the colonies and even in the British Parliament.66 Narratives of captivity by American prisoners of war and the accounts of their sufferings at the hands of British soldiers were often used by patriots to signify the corrupted character of the enemy. It were these kind of stories around which patriotic Americans tried to make sense of the conflict with Britain, and moreover hoped to gain support for the Revolutionary cause. Stories about the horrific conditions in the prisons under which American captives had to live and the barbaric treatment by British guards were regularly reported in papers and journals of New England. Conditions aboard the prison ships became a rich source of Revolutionary propaganda. In 1777 John Adams (1735-1826) commented in the Pennsylvania Evening Post that the lesson of the innumerable reports of British cruelty against American prisoners could not be taken seriously enough: “I would convince every American that a Nation, so great a Part of which is thus deeply depraved, can never again be trusted with Power over Us”. With these statements Adams hoped to inspire Americans in their support of

63 Richard Merritt, Symbols of American Community: 1735-1775 (New Haven, CT 1966). Breen, T.H., (1997) “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising”, Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 1. (13-39). 64 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 225. 65 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York 1993) 124. 66 Dzurec, 432.

34 the war: “[the] public may be clearly convinced that the War is just, and yet, until their Passions are excited, will carry it languidly on”.67 Supporters of the Revolution came from many different parts of the colonial society, varying from artisans, merchants, or members of the colonial elites. Yet, the stories of British cruelty against American prisoners helped to define the Revolutionary cause across all the societal levels. Throughout the Revolutionary War reports and hearings on the mistreatment of American captives by the British continued to play a significant role in defining and describing the Revolutionary war. Although there exist many American accounts of captivity during the Revolution each of them has a different approach, but taken together these stories helped to develop a definition for what the Americans were actually fighting for and what kind of enemy they faced. Despite the growing awareness among British officials of the propagandistic potential of Revolutionary captivity narratives and stories of prisoner mistreatment, by 1781 there was not much they could do to restrain the rise of negative attention to British cruelty against American patriots.

John Dodge and Ethan Allen initiated the development of Revolutionary captivity literature as a genre. Their narratives both present individual reports of captivity of American patriots and reflect the Puritan narratives of Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, as well as the new frontier genre set out by Daniel Boone.68 In the tradition of the Puritans both Allen and Dodge offered accounts in which they aimed to cast the British as the ‘other’, by emphasizing their own righteousness while undergoing the mistreatment of their savage enemy that held them captive. In both cases the narrator served as a paragon of American virtue in the face of British cruelty, by which they gave a face to the nascent definition of American liberty and identity. The media gave continued attention to prison conditions, offering the authors an attentive audience, and helping especially Allen to grow a great reputation for his

67 Journals of the Continental Congress, 7: 277-9; John Adams to Abigail Adams, 27 April 1777. Letters of Delegates to Congress, 6: 662; 667-8. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 28 April 1777. 68 Other individual captivity narratives published during or following the American Revolution include John Blatchford’s Narrative of the Life and Captivity of John Blatchford (T. Green ed., New London, CT 1788); Israel Potter’s Life and remarkable adventures of Israel R. Potter, (a native of Cranston, Rhode Island) who was a soldier in the American Revolution, after which he was taken prisoner by the British, conveyed to England, where for 30 years he obtained a livelihood, by crying ‘Old chairs to mend’ (H. Trumbull ed., Providence, RI 1824); and William Russell’s captivity narrative, edited by Francis D. Cogliano in American Maritime Prisoners in the Revolutionary War (Annapolis, MD 2001).

35 achievements in upstate New York and Canada. Both accounts were reprinted several times during the Revolutionary war, including a British version of Dodge’s narrative, which totally fits into the bigger picture of American efforts to shape the narrative surrounding the war.69 Both Allen’s and Dodge’s captivity narratives can be considered as hybrids between fiction and reality, blending together actual experiences with conventions deriving from the traditional Puritan captivity literature, while at the same time showing elements of the hunter- hero-type narratives emerging in the 1780s American literature. Although some of their motifs contain the realization of profit and gaining sympathy by the public it does not reduce the value of the narratives. In a slightly different light their efforts to join the wider public opinion about American suffering and British cruelty reveal how deeply this subject had become integrated with the fight for independence. By adopting the literary style of the Puritan captivity narrative Allen brought together two essential elements of the American attempts to cope with the dilemma of identity caused by the conflict with Britain. He synchronously offered an anecdote and an example of behavior while facing a “haughty and cruel nation”.70 Like Ethan Allen’s narrative the story of Charles Herbert became an essential factor of defining the ideological fundamentals of the Revolution, but in his case served this purpose in a different time. Interestingly Herbert’s A Relic of the Revolution only became published over sixty years after the end of the Revolutionary war, but nevertheless contains several elements of the seventeenth-century Puritan captivity genre. In the introduction of the 1847 publication editor Charles Pierce described Herbert as “a true patriot” who would in no circumstance “abandon his country’s interest”, and would give up “anything but the extinguishing of his country’s hope”.71 The description of Herbert as a true patriot who was prepared to endure extreme suffering joins the Puritan captivity narratives and in its own way influenced the process of defining the incipient American identity during the Revolutionary years. Yet, the time of its publication and the heavy editing of the narrative make it a source that tells just as much about historical perspectives on the American Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century.

69 Dzurec, 445. 70 Ibid., 447. 71 Herbert, A Relic of the Revolution, 15-17.

36

IV Ethan Allen’s Captivity Narrative: The Puritan Literary Influence on a Rough Backwoodsman and Political Opportunist

Revolutionary patriot Ethan Allen, known as one of the founders of the state of Vermont, was one of the first and most notable Americans that became captive of the British army. Early in the Revolutionary War he had together with Colonel Benedict Arnold led a successful strategic assaults on Fort Ticonderoga, Fort Crown Point, and Fort St. Johns, which frustrated the communication lines between Northern and Southern units of the British Army, and thereby offered the Continental Army a way to invade Quebec in 1775. On the 25th of September that year, during the Battle of Longue-Pointe, which was his following attempt to take Montreal with a small force, Allen was captured together with around thirty of his men. He lived for nearly three years as a prisoner of the British Army and was released as part of a prisoner exchange on the 6th of May 1778. The next year he wrote down his experience in what became the first captivity narrative of the American Revolution ever published.72 Allen’s account, called The Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen’s Captivity, From the Time of his being taken by the British, near Montreal, on the 25th Day of September, in the Year 1775, To the Time of his Exchange, on the 6th Day of May, 1778 instantly gained great popularity and was reprinted at least eight times between 1779-1781. Between 1779-1854 as many as nineteen editions of the narrative were published, naturally most of which were in Allen’s native Vermont.73 It is estimated that at least 20.000 copies of Allen’s narrative were printed in the first year after its initial publication by which it became the best-selling American publication in the year 1779.74 Allen’s narrative owed its immense popularity to the way it exposes British cruelty against American prisoners of war, which made it an amazing source of Revolutionary propaganda. But more importantly Allen applied the literary framework of Rowlandson and Williams to his narrative, giving it the same potential as the Puritan captivity narratives to enounce the rejection of British culture and the political subservience to the

72 Charles A. Jellison, Ethan Allen: Frontier Rebel (Syracuse, NY 1969) 219. John Dodge’s A Narrative of the Capture and Treatment of John Dodge, by the English at Detroit was also published in 1779, half a year after Allen’s account. 73 Bibliography of Ethan Allen’s narrative in: John Pell, Ethan Allen (New York 1929) 276-77. It shows that Allen’s Narrative remained popular in the years after the American Revolution. 74 Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Bestsellers in the United States (New York 1947) 316.

37 British crown. This makes Ethan Allen’s narrative a good example of the politicization of the classic Puritan captivity narrative. As Greg Sieminski stated Allen “might well have adapted [John] Williams’s title for his own account, calling it The Redeemed Captive, Returning to America”.75 Even though Allen applied the Puritan captivity concept to his own Narrative Indians only show up right after his capture. His description of them demonstrates his adaption of the Puritan attitudes toward Indians for his own Revolutionary objectives, as he attributes them the same kind of characteristics as Rowlandson did. He describes the Indian who came up to him after he had surrendered and handed over his weapon to a British officer from the command post at Montreal:

He seemed to advance with more than mortal speed;... his hellish visage was beyond all description; snake’s eyes appeared innocent in comparison to his;... malice, death, murder, and the wrath of devil’s damned spirits are the emblems of his countenance....76

Though Allen used the Puritan literary conventions a similar spiritual drama does not occur during his interaction with Indians as it does in Rowlandson’s and Williams’s narratives. Within the Puritan ideology only an intervention by God could have rescued Allen in the situation described above, but in the following lines he describes himself pulling the British captain in front of him as a means of protection against the attacking Indian. Even when a second “imp of hell” joined the first Indian in the attack Allen managed to protect himself by dragging the officer around to use him as a human shield.77 Richard Slotkin refers to Allen’s confrontation with the two aggressive Indians but he does not add the following scene with the British officer. This makes his argument, that Allen’s adoption of the Indian image from the traditional Puritan captivity narrative reveals his own attitude toward Indians, arguable. In The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1985) Slotkin states: “The Indian remains an enemy, but he now shares that role with others [the British], who are seen as being in many

75 Sieminski, 47. 76 Ethan Allen, A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (Philadelphia 1779). Reprinted in Henry W. DePuy, Ethan Allen and the Green-Mountain Heroes of ’76 (New York 1854) 221-222. All quotations from this edition. 77 Allen, 222.

38 ways more inimical to the colonies”.78 In fact Allen’s Narrative does not present any evidence that he is a convinced Indian-hater. In contrast, as a rough frontiersman from Vermont, Allen shared significant similarities with the partly Indianized frontier-tamers like Daniel Boone. The text does not particularly focus on Allen’s conflict with the Indians, nor does it emphasize intimate contact with Indians or adoption of Indian cultural elements. As a matter of fact Allen had tried to persuade different tribes along the Canadian borderline to support his attack on Montreal.79 His main intention behind portraying the Indians as hellish souls was to invoke the association of the British with the same bad characteristics, in the same way as the publishers of the reprinted versions of Rowlandson’s Narrative substituted the Indians for British soldiers. One of the ways in which Allen creates this substitution is by emphasizing the contrast of his alleviation after being liberated from the Indians and his following treatment when handed over to the British. He highlights his relief after getting out of the hands of Indians and the difference in manners between the Indians and British: “escaping from so awful a death, made even imprisonment happy; the more so as my conquerors on the field treated me with great civility and politeness”. 80 Yet, it did not take Allen long to discover that the British commander of the Montreal division, General Prescott, did not. The general threatened to torture Allen and ordered several of his men to be executed as conspirators, and Allen himself to be shipped to Britain and sentenced to death for treason. Indians make no other appearances in the Narrative after Allen used them to underline this poignant reality. Allen adjusts and utilizes other Puritan methods throughout his captivity narrative. Like Rowlandson and Williams he viewed his own captivity experience as representative of the wider community, in his case being the American patriots. When he was shipped to Britain the severity of his sentence depended on the definition of his crime; if he was considered a rebel he could most likely be punished for treason, while as a prisoner of war he had the right to good treatment by the authorities. For the British the problem of classifying Allen and other captives as a prisoners of war was that to the colonists this might be interpreted as a disguised recognition of America as an independent nation.81

78 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (Norman, OK 1985) 251-252. 79 Willard S. Randall, Ethan Allen: His Life and Times (New York 2011) 365. 80 Allen, 222. 81 Bowman, 6.

39 Consequently Ethan Allen became a symbol for the American struggle for independence as the first ever American to be sentenced as prisoner of war. This is why the implications of him not being executed for treason but shipped back to Vermont as an American prisoner of war are crucial for the course of the narrative. “My being sent to England, for the purpose of being executed, and [the fear of American retaliation on British captives] restraining them, was rather a foil on their laws and authority”.82 This statement shows that Allen considered the decision of the British authorities to classify him as prisoner of war not only to be the beginning of his own independence, but of the independence of the nation as well. The method of using an individual experience as exemplary for the wider community is also used by Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, and described as “a curious and double present-mindedness” in the Puritan captivity narratives by David Minter.83 The author tries to make his or her story useful to others. Allen also makes the connection between his own situation and the nation’s in the context of the actual armed conflict between American continental troops and the British army. At the same time that he endured hardship and suffering at the hands of his captors, the American Revolutionary forces were humiliated and suffered large losses. Even after being shipped back to America Allen was detained in a small cage and exposed to harsh treatment for about a year aboard a British ship stationed off the American coast. As the war progressed and the American troops were slowly gaining more terrain Allen’s situation also improved. In October 1776 Allen received a conditional release in New York and for the rest of eleven-month sentence was able to walk around freely. The American triumphs between 1777-1778 at Trenton, Princeton, and Saratoga happened nearly synchronically to the improvement of Allen’s position and his final release.84 To create this envisioned parallel Allen even falsified the historical record: in his Narrative he describes the Battle of Saratoga and the entry of France in the war as having taken place before he was brought back to America, while in reality these events happened several months after he was finally released. He willfully adjusted the historical reality in order to make his liberation seem to parallel what he considered to be the climax in the war that turned the tables in favor of the Revolutionaries. In the same way as the Puritans, Allen used his own life experience in order to achieve a transformation of the minds of his readers. The central issue he wanted them to understand is

82 Allen, 230. 83 Minter, 341. 84 Randall, 427.

40 the brutal way in which the British treated their captives, and portray it as representative for the general British attitudes toward Americans. Allen rewrites these notions within the religious captivity framework of the Puritans so that their cruelty functions as evidence for the British collaboration with the devil. The use of this Puritan literary method assigns the discovery of the true character of the British has spiritual implications, because of which Allen’s Narrative can be read as a secular sermon in which he aims to convince his readers to observe the issue. Later in the text it becomes even clearer how he used the idea of revelation by God as a metaphor for the people’s revelation by the Revolutionary ideals. Allen suggests that heaven itself organized the Revolutionary War in order to bring the true nature of the enemy to light and thereby convert Americans to the Revolutionary ideals:

It was... a day of trouble... Our little army was retreating in New Jersey, and our young men [were being] murdered by hundreds in New York [prisons]. The army of Britain and Heshland prevailed for a little season, as though it was ordered by Heaven to shew... what the British would have done if they could... and to excite every honest man to stand forth in the defense of liberty, and to establish the independence of the United States of America forever.85

Allen tries to evoke a reformation of the people’s faith, in this case meaning patriotism, and redemption for the nation, meaning independence from Britain. In the Puritan captivity narratives there are always people who don’t respond to the divine call and for them the consequences are infinite. The same faith awaits them in Allen’s narrative, mainly referring to the American Tories whose “hellish delight and triumph” at seeing their fellow compatriots perish in captivity puts them on the same moral rank as the British.86 Allen accuses them of blasphemy and to their country and their people by using the words of Paul the Apostle:

Burgoyne was to them a demi-god. To him they paid adoration; in him the Tories placed their confidence, ‘and forgot the Lord their God’, and served Howe, Burgoyne, and Knyphausen, ‘and became vile in their own imagination, and their foolish hearts were darkened’, professing to be great politicians, and relying and foreign and merciless invaders, and with them seeking the ruin, bloodshed and destruction of their country... Therefor, God gave them over to strong delusion, to believe and lie, that they all might be damned.87

85 Allen, 258. 86 Ibid., 253. 87 Ibid., 263.

41

Yet, Allen considered the British to be even more heartless and indifferent than the American Tories, which is why they are undoubtedly doomed to the most malevolent corners of Hell. He refers to General William Howe, who was the administrator of New York when Allen was held captive in that state, and who Allen suspected to be aware of the bad circumstances in which American captives had to live, making him destined for an horrific fate: “legions of infernal devils, with all their tremendous horrors, are impatiently ready to receive Howe... into the most exquisite agonies of the hottest region of hell fire”.88 In their efforts to claim a unique culture Rowlandson and Williams dramatized the rejection of the culture and customs of their Indian captors. Allen does so likewise by establishing what he believed to be the critical differences between the American and British cultures. He mainly emphasizes the distinctions during his time in England. After a crossing under filthy conditions he stepped off the boat in Falmouth, dressed in the same clothes that he wore at the moment of his capture, the garbs of a rugged frontiersman including a “fawn- skin jacket”.89 His appearance and the strangeness of his frontier look attracted a crowd that gathered around him in the port from where he was brought up to Pembroke Castle. “I am apprehensive my... dress contributed not little to the... excitement of curiosity; to see... such a rebel as they were pleased to call me... was never before seen in England”.90 Portraying himself as peculiarly different from the culture of his captors made Allen able to emphasize the courageousness of him rejecting integration into the British ways of life. According to the Puritan framework Allen’s moment of testing comes when General Howe offers him a position as colonel in the British Army if he is willing to lead a unit of Tories in an operation in upstate New York. Allen rejects Howe’s offer and tells the intermediary that he considered “the offer of land to be similar to what which the devil offered Jesus Christ, to give him all the kingdoms of the world, if he would fall down and worship him; when... the damned soul had not one foot of land upon the earth [to offer]”.91 In the same way as the Puritans, Allen considers the rejection of acculturation as equal to the refusal of the devil’s deceit. Then, to additionally ridicule the British, Allen did something that strongly contradicts the Puritan conventions: he makes a plea for the French culture as a means of opposing the

88 Allen, 269. 89 Ibid., 229. 90 Ibid., 234. 91 Ibid., 262.

42 British, as a reaction to the willingness of King Louis XVI to support the American Revolution: “My affections are Frenchified. I glory in Louis the Sixteenth, the generous and powerful ally of these states; am fond of a connection with so enterprising, learned, polite, courteous and commercial a nation... I begin to learn the French tongue, and recommend it to my countrymen”.92 Allen clearly enjoyed the mockery of pleading his loyalty to one of Britain’s historical enemies that was likely to play a decisive role in separating it from its American colonies for good. Like Rowlandson and Williams, Allen finally comes out of his captivity as a free man. He has attentively watched the nature of his captors and contextualized it within the Puritan framework, with a clear distinction between good and evil. He went through a test of loyalty to his Revolutionary faith, his nation, and his fellow countrymen, and remained true to his own beliefs. His own redemption served as an example for America as a nation, and Americans as a united people. The Battle of Saratoga gave a decisive victory to the Americans over the British, brought military support from overseas, and official recognition as a nation that brought the United States on the verge of independence.93 When Allen came back to Vermont he found out that the people there thought he had died, making the association of his captivity with reincarnation even stronger. Thus, the metaphorical implication of his personal story is that through a collective experience of captivity the American colonies passed away, and the newly independent United States of America were born, representing a regeneration of the body and soul. Allen’s Narrative does not actually make it clear what his personal rebirth and the collective rebirth of the nation have produced, as he does not manage to find a single identity to represent him and America with. Besides the frontiersman Allen takes on several different types of character that could define America and its people, like the Yankee Doodle, the backwoodsman, or the gentleman. In his essay “The Faces of Ethan Allen: 1760-1860” (1976) historian John McWilliams implies that Allen had through his captivity and the Revolution “lost a firm sense of self”.94 But in terms of the metaphorical implications of his Narrative Allen’s personal identity crisis might as well be representative of the nation as a whole and the uncertainty of its identity, as it may be the case that his personal uncertainty was a national peculiarity, as it was not uncommon with other influential personalities like

92 Allen, 276. 93 John R. Elting, The Battles of Saratoga (Monmouth Beach, NJ 1977) 71. 94 McWilliams, J., (1976) “The Faces of Ethan Allen: 1760-1860”, John New England Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2. (257-282) 267.

43 Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, 1771-1781 (1793) and Teague O’Regan in Modern Chivalry, 1792-1815 (1792). In his aforementioned essay Greg Sieminski describes his vision on the matter by suggesting “in a pluralistic society, perhaps the most representative American is the one with the greatest plurality of selves”.95 Allen’s captivity narrative inspired others to express their condemnation of British cruelty and corruption through literature. In 1781 the same publisher who had published Allen’s narrative printed a poem called “The British Prison Ship”. It was written by Philip Morin Freneau, a patriotic sea captain and newspaper editor who became known as the “poet of the American Revolution”.96 Freneau’s poem echoes many of the indicting elements of Allen’s narrative, strongly judging the British brutalities toward American prisoners, taking on every opportunity to portray the British as cruel devilish enemies. It gives an even more detailed and compressed picture of the atrocities on British prison vessels. He describes how the American ship Aurora, which was built “with wonderous skill, and excellence of art”, was on its way to Philadelphia when it got raided by the “ungenerous Britons” who approached like “famish’d wolves” and took most of the crew captive. They were brought to New York where the British “knaves, subservient to a bankrupt throne”, forced them into the “dark hulks”. On the prison hulk the Aurora crew had to drink “putrid water” and got nothing else to eat but “mouldy bread” and “the flesh of rotten swine”. The men who got sick from the bad food and living conditions on board were taken to the Hunter, which Freneau called a “slaughter-house, yet hospital in name”, an treated by nothing but a “master o’er the murdering tribe”. After describing the horrors under which the crewmen had to live Freneau concluded by encouraging the American people who had “in Freedom’s sacred cause allied” to “a just resentment shew, and glut revenge on this detested foe”. He was convinced that by doing so the American triumph over the British whose “years approach that shall ruin bring [to their] lords, [their] chiefs, [their] desolated king, whose murderous acts shall stamp his name occurs’d”.97

95 Sieminski, 51. 96 Mary S. Austin, Philip Freneau, The Poet of the Revolution; A History of his Life and Times (New York 1901). 97 Philip Freneau, and Evert A. Duyckinck ed., Poems Relating to the American Revolution (New York 1865) 78-101.

44

V John Dodge’s Captivity Narrative: The Puritan Captivity Structure Reversed

Besides Allen’s account John Dodge’s An Entertaining Narrative of the Cruel and Barbarous Treatment and Extreme Suffering of Mr. John Dodge during his Captivity of Many Months among the British (1780) is the only Revolutionary captivity narrative that was printed as an independent volume. It was first published a year after Allen’s narrative in 1780 and echoed its condemnation of the morally corrupted British, and describes Dodge’s own experiences of abuse as a captive. Yet, Dodge’s captivity narrative offers a more complex account compared to Allen’s. Besides reporting in detail the injustices that he faced during his imprisonment, Dodge frequently mentions the property that was stolen off him by his British captors. He furthermore stated to consider the Indians of the Ohio Country as potential allies in the struggle for independence. This idea shows the retreat from certain aspects of the ideological framework that was used in traditional Puritan captivity narratives and utilized by patriotic publishers and press during the Revolutionary era. The captivity narrative of John Dodge is one of the earliest and most influential Revolutionary accounts of captivity. Besides being a patriotic plea for American independence the narrative fits into the wider genre of frontier-hero literature, associated with Daniel Boone, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. The second edition of the narrative, published in 1780, contains a remarkable advertisement by the publisher for the captivity narrative of Ethan Allen. Dodge’s narrative was published in two different newspapers: the Continental Journal (December 30, 1779, and January 6 and 13, 1780), and the Connecticut Gazette (February 2, 9, and 16, 1780).98 Dodge is moreover mentioned as an important frontier figure and observer of Native American tribes in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).99 Dodge’s attitude toward the Native Americans in the Ohio Country is contradictory. Despite having close ties with several of the tribes of the Ohio Country Dodge consistently refers to Indians as ‘savages’. He described how his relations with the tribes were often disturbed by manipulative British attempts to incite Indians and American settlers against

98 Daniel E. Williams ed., Liberty’s Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic (Athens, GA 2006) 18. 99 Ibid., 17.

45 each other. He praised a group of Indians who were ordered to slaughter the people in a settlement of American traders, including women and children, but refused. “To this cruel mandate even some of the Savages made an objection”, implying that the British were even more barbaric than the Indians.100 Yet, throughout the narrative Indians are characterized as immature and gullible. Essential for understanding the narrative is that Dodge, though describing them as primitive and violent, does not look upon the Native Americans as his primary opponents. Besides his captivity the account is highly concerned with the individual freedoms and property rights of Americans, showing a thorough understanding of the Enlightenment philosophy, and how this permitted him and his fellow patriots to stand up against the corrupted British monarchy. His narrative criticizes the confiscation of his property and money on two occasions during his captivity. His open sympathies for the cause of American independence combined with his good relations with the Indians made him a main target of the British commander in Detroit, Henry Hamilton, and his right hand and prison administrator Phillip De Jeane. The final part of the narrative breathes a strong desire for Revolution, concluding with encouraging selfless sacrifice for independence. Dodge’s perspective on Native Americans marks the beginning of a fundamental shift in the captivity narrative as an American literary genre. The ideological framework in which notions of the ‘savage other’ had allowed the Puritans to determine their identity and which American patriots used to define American liberty in the Revolution began to evolve in the late eighteenth-century captivity narratives. In the years following the American Revolution narratives written within the Puritan literary framework were met with frontier narratives in which acculturation, through which the identity of the narrator developed, became the central factor. The traditional Revolutionary narratives of abuse at the hand of a cruel enemy remained significant in efforts to define the American identity, but new narratives about frontier captivity took a significantly different approach. Like the Puritans before them, Revolutionary prisoners of war like Ethan Allen and Charles Herbert had specifically defined their identity by what it was not. In the late eighteenth century frontier narratives began to illustrate so-called frontier tamers who went out into the wilderness as the “archetypal American and mediator between civilization and the

100 John Dodge, An Entertaining Narrative of he Cruel and Barbarous Treatment and Extreme Suffering of Mr. John Dodge during his Captivity of Many Months among the British (1779). Reprinted according to the second edition of 1780 by Torch Press as Narrative of Mr. John Dodge during his captivity at Detroit (Cedar Rapids, IA 1909). 42. All quotations from this edition.

46 wilderness”.101 Richard Slotkin considers John Filson’s The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone (1784) as the earliest milestone in the new frontier genre and highly influential for its further development. This new American identity was not determined by resistance to the culture of a “savage other”, but as the result of a process of acculturation. The frontiersman masters the practical skills and language of his captors by which he earns their respect, but never lets go of the best elements of his superior white Christian culture. By doing so the frontier-tamer arises from his captivity as what historian David Dzurec has called a hybrid between two cultures that “maintains the best of the civilized world, while providing a skill set that enables the American to subdue the natural world as well”.102 As far as Slotkin’s argument goes in Regeneration Through Violence the Boone narrative illustrates the birth of a new genre within American captivity literature. Yet, Dodge’s narrative presents even earlier evidence of the transformation that Slotkin describes. Nearly all the Revolutionary captivity narratives before Dodge follow the Puritan narrative structure in which the captive arise from a trial at the hands of a ‘savage other’, strongly devoted to their country and God. Although Dodge’s narrative goes along with the framework to a fair extent, it presents a crossing between the traditional narrative based on Puritan conventions and the newly emerged explorer narrative. Although most of the narrative focuses on the hardship he experienced at the hands of his British captors, Dodge’s description of his interaction with the Indians of the Ohio Country at the wake of the Revolution, and the important role he assigns to the Indian guide that helps him to travel back home through the wilderness, shows a move in direction of the ‘Boone principle’. Dodge does not in any way dismiss the traditional narrative structure, but takes an important step toward the new frontier identity that Slotkin defines. In Dodge’s self-description of the time before he was imprisoned he embraces many characteristics of the American frontiersman that became the centerpiece of nineteenth- century frontier literature. He was born in Connecticut and migrated West in 1770 to settle in the frontier colony of Sandusky on the South coast of Lake Erie, which functioned as a center for British, French, American, and Indian trade.103 As a merchant on the frontier Dodge learned to speak various languages, including several Native American tongues, and became a reliable trading partner of the native tribes in the Great Lakes Region. As Dodge argues, he

101 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 23. 102 Dzurec, 448. 103 William R. Nester, The Frontier War for American Independence (Mechanicsburg, PA 2004) 26.

47 had a fruitful partnership with the Natives in the region “until the unhappy dispute between Great Britain and America reached those pathless wilds, and roused to war Savages in no ways interested in it”.104 In his opinion most of the tribes that he had contact with reacted positively to American separation from British colonial rule, but only changed their minds after the British began to spread anti-American propaganda, claiming that Americans “were going to murder them all and take their lands”, in an attempt to suppress the American influence in the region.105 As part of this operation Dodge was arrested in his home on 15 January 1776 to be brought to Detroit where he was imprisoned for roughly three years. As to his arrest Dodge strikingly claimed that his level of adjustment to Native American culture had been the underlying reason for the British to imprison him. Thus, the first part of his narrative follows a structure that mirrors the new frontier genre in which the American follows a process of acculturation after immersing himself into a strange culture in the wilderness. Consequent to his imprisonment Dodge’s chronicle returns to the more traditional form of the captivity narrative. Here it shows similarities with Ethan Allen’s account, as he described the harsh treatment by his British captors, calling them “inhuman savages”. When he arrived in Detroit he was told by an officer that the executive authorities wanted to sentence him to death, after which he was “hurried to a loathsome dungeon, ironed and thrown in with three criminals, being allowed neither bedding, straw or fire, although it was in the depth of winter, and so exceeding cold, that toes were froze before morning”.106 Even crueler than his treatment was the fact that he colonial authorities had denied him a fair legal process. Dodge claimed that The British ignored his demand for a lawful hearing and told him that they were “not obliged to give any damn’d rebel a trial”.107 Being under such inhuman conditions and the continuous threat of being killed for nearly three years “at last drove [him] almost to despair”. He told officer De Jeane “to inform the Governor [he was] readier to die at that time than [he] should ever be, and that [he] would much rather undergo his sentence, than be tortured in the dreadful manner [he] then was”.108 The officer denied his appeal to be executed, saying that he would rather leave Dodge to succumb to the consequences of hunger and sickness. “The weather had been so extreme cold,

104 Dodge, 29. 105 Ibid., 33. 106 Ibid., 34. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., 36.

48 and my legs had been bolted in such a manner, that they were so benumbed, and the sinews contracted, that I had not the least use of them; and the severity of my usage had brought on a fever”.109 When his sickness became so critical the authorities brought Dodge to a doctor and placed him in a better shelter out of fear that he would die in captivity. However, after a few weeks of recovery he was thrown back in his dungeon under the same harsh conditions as before. In early 1778 the British authorities moved Dodge to Quebec where he was locked up on a convict ship. In the following summer, after nearly three years in captivity, he was paroled on the condition that he could not leave Canada. Several of his fellow prisoners were brought to New England as part of a prisoner exchange. After his release British officials told Dodge that the reason for his long captivity were fears of the colonial authorities of his “damn’d deal of influence with the Indians”.110 Ultimately, after his parole came to an end in the autumn of 1778, Dodge made the month-long journey through the wilderness from Quebec to Boston with an Indian guide. Upon his arrival American General Horario Gates, who suggested that he be heard for his experience in Congress, welcomed him. In Dodge’s narrative the journey through the woods with an Indian marked the end of his captivity and served as a last reminder of his abusive treatment by his savage British captors. This stands in stark contrast with the traditional Puritan captivity narrative, in which crossing the wilderness with Indians away from the New England settlements marked the beginning of a period of suffering. In Dodge’s Narrative traveling through the wilderness with an Indian companion marked the moment of redemption with his return to freedom. In the way that Dodge reversed the Puritan narrative structure lays the underlying message of his narrative. The true evil nature of the British is emphasized by the fact that Indians, once portrayed as feared enemies in the Puritan narratives, had now become the allies of patriotic Americans. Dodge leaves the reader to “judge whether [Americans] have not a right to revolt from under the dominion of such tyrants”.111 This conclusion therefor offers a combination of the old narrative structure in which a “savage other” is condemned, with a new narrative structure in which American liberty and freedom are defined by an interaction with Native Americans on the frontier.

109 Dodge, 37. 110 Ibid., 50. 111 Ibid., 56.

49

VI The Peculiarity of the Revolutionary Captivity Genre Revealed

About the way in which the Puritan captivity narrative structure developed into a secular frontier version and was used in different shapes by different Revolutionary figures some important questions arise: what was the reason that ideas of acculturation and learning from the Indian culture entered the frontier-literature of the late eighteenth century? Did they arise out of the blue or can they be traced further back into history, and is there an actual link with the early Puritan captivity narratives? Dodge’s captivity narrative proves that Daniel Boone was not the first story in which such processes occurred. This makes it necessary to look at Rowlandson’s captivity narrative once more while using a different interpretive perspective that focuses more closely on moments of doubt. As mentioned before her Narrative breaths a strong discomfort with acculturation and emphasizes the contrast between the Puritan and Indian cultures. Meanwhile there are other elements in the narrative that show signs of appreciation and admiration for the savages, elements that were knowingly overlooked by the producers of Revolutionary propaganda. The fact that Revolutionaries adopted only certain aspects of the traditional Puritan captivity narrative becomes more evident when keeping in mind Sacvan Bercovitch’s book The American Jeremiad (1978), in which he argues that frontier literature and captivity narratives and frontier literature became less self-critical over the decades. This argument is especially true for captivity narratives written during the Revolutionary years, which do not describe a complex spiritual experience but rather a simplified story about good and bad people. Bercovitch states that it was the Whig (or Patriotic) “contribution to the rhetoric of the Jeremiad: they intensified the Puritan emphasis both on process and on control”. “Whereas for the Puritans the unfolding scheme of ‘dispensation’ was circumscribed by Scripture, for the Whigs the Revolution opened into an indefinitely self-renewing rite of passage”.112 In other words: the Whigs stripped the Puritan mythology of its self-critical ability. One of the key factors in this process is the fictionalization and sensationalism of the captivity literature in the late eighteenth century.113 This explanation is crucial for the analysis of the Revolutionary captivity narratives, and the ways they put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on the elements that contrasted themselves with a savage ‘other’, instead of looking

112 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI 1978) 134. 113 Derounian, “Puritan Orthodoxy”, 92.

50 at existing elements of acculturation in the early captivity narratives. This exaggeration is very evident in the republished editions of Rowlandson and Williams’s narratives, as well as in Ethan Allen’s account. Altogether this puts Slotkin’s vision about the positively changing attitudes toward Indian culture in frontier-literature of the late eighteenth century further into perspective. A deeper analysis of Rowlandson’s narrative shows that ideas of acculturation have existed from the earliest captivity narratives onward, but came more to the forefront as the frontier literature became more secularized. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) literature professor Joseph Campbell discusses his theory about the mythological structure of the archetypal American hero-narrative that originated in American literature during the last decades of the eighteenth century. It offers a different context in which to read Mary Rowlandson’s journey through the wilderness and opens up new ways of interpretation. According to Campbell’s hypothesis the hero in question crosses a “threshold of adventure” into a dangerous and supernatural world after he or she has received a ‘call’ to leave home.114 The underworld the hero allows himself to sink into is a place of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, which can be threatening but can also offer a helping hand. During his stay in the underworld the hero obtains a boon (or reward), which he has won from the supernatural beings that he is confronted with through his excellent skill (one of his extraordinary gifts as a hero). Then the hero must retreat from the underworld to his home where he becomes a benefactor to his community through the boon that he has acquired. “The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world”.115 The boons that the hero brings back to his community have specific benefits, by which crucial and previously unsolvable problems of his society can be solved. When applying Campbell’s model to Rowlandson’s captivity narrative it suddenly becomes clear that the ideas of acculturation, which according to Slotkin only began to appear in the late eighteenth century, are in some way already visible in Rowlandson’s narrative. This starts with the first element that Campbell describes, which is the hero’s agency. Rowlandson makes the personal choice to go along with the Algonquians rather than to be killed by them. Instead of becoming a passive victim Rowlandson “maintains the presence of mind necessary to evaluate her life-threatening situation, calculates relative risk, and then

114 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) 245. 115 Ibid., 32.

51 takes action based on her calculation”.116 She speaks to one of the attackers and assures the safety of her and her children: “If I were willing to go along with them, they would not hurt me”.117 During her captivity Rowlandson explores different approaches of interaction with her captors. The result of her observations is that Rowlandson is able to learn the manners and methods demanded for the specific conditions in the American wilderness and is able to survive among the Indians. The best examples hereof are the two times that she successfully manages to get across the rivers in the fifth and sixth removes. The first crossing takes place during the fifth remove at the Baquag River, a branch of the Connecticut River in Northern Massachusetts. Important is her mentioning of the English army, which follows the tribe and exclusively consists of fighting-age men, but is not able to cross the river, while the tribe manages to take all its elders, children, sick and disabled people across.

They were many hundreds, old young, some sick, and some lame, many had Papooses at their backs, the greatest number at this time with us were Squaws, and they travelled with all they had, bag and baggage, and yet they got over this River aforesaid.118

On that very day [the day after she and the tribe crossed the river] came the English Army after them to this River, and saw the smoak of their Wigwams, and yet this River put a stop to them.119

The failure of the English army to cross the river indicates its incapacity to cope with the difficulties of the American wilderness. Rowlandson managed to cross the river by observing and benefiting from the Indians building rafts, and managing to get onto one of them, while her wounds from the attack on Lancaster are still not completely healed. In contrast, the army seems to lack the needed motivation for crossing; as even seeing the ‘smoak of their Wigwams’ does not excite the soldiers enough to face the challenge. On the other hand Rowlandson is able to do what young, healthy, Englishmen cannot: successfully facing the requirements of the American wilderness by employing Indian methods.

116 Denise Macneil, (2005) “Mary Rowlandson and the Foundational Mythology of the American Frontier Hero”, Women’s Studies, Vol. 34, No. 8. (625-653). 629. 117 Rowlandson, 120. Rowlandson’s use of Native American words is more evidence of her adapting to the culture of her captors, and her vision of the Indians differing from the barbarian stereotype. 118 Ibid., 131. 119 Ibid.

52 During the second river crossing Rowlandson learns another Indian survival skill, using a beaver dam as a bridge, and successfully crosses on her own:

It was a cold morning, and before us was a great Brook with ice on it; some waded through it, up to the knees & higher, but others went till they came to a Beaver dam, and I amongst them, where through the good providence of God, I did not wet my foot.120

There are three other ways in which Rowlandson negotiates the wilderness and manages to reconcile certain Indian and Puritan manners: she barters with her captors, protects her husband from them, and assisted the progress of her ransom by which she could return to the Puritan community. Early in the narrative Rowlandson frequently describes how she relies on begging, and not very successfully, to stay alive. However, as her captivity continues she increasingly integrates herself into the tribe and creates a position for herself in which she can barter in goods and services with the members: “Then in came an Indian, and asked me to knit him three pair of Stockins, for which I had a Hat, and silk Handkerchief. Then another asked me to make her a shift, for which she gave me an Apron”. 121 Thus, Rowlandson demonstrated how to negotiate a status for herself within the socioeconomic system of the tribe without giving up her Puritan identity.

The Saggamores met to consult about the captives, and called me to them to enquire how much my husband would give to redeem me. Now knowing that all we had was destroyed by the Indians, I was in great strait: I thought if I should speak of but a little, it would be slighted, and hinder the matter; if of a great sum, I knew not where it would be procured; yet at a venture, I said Twenty pounds, yet desired them to take less; but they would not hear of that, but sent that message to Boston, that for Twenty pounds I should be redeemed.122

Rowlandson determined the quantity of her own ransom, while demonstrating her knowledge of the Algonquian mentality by making sure that the tribe would accept her offer and not “hinder the matter”.123 Her ability to think within the Indian mindset suggests that Rowlandson underwent a process of acculturation, winning the trust of her captors. The interchanges, moreover, demonstrate a fluctuation in adherence as she is no longer entirely Puritan but has become partly Indian. After having negotiated the agreement of her ransom

120 Rowlandson, 131. 121 Ibid., 151. 122 Ibid., 151-152. 123 Ibid., 151.

53 and release, Rowlandson in her acquired position as a mythological hero is prepared to turn back to the Puritan community. With her she brings the ways and methods of cultural and spiritual rebirth that she has achieved in her victory over the dark forces of the natural world. There is no question that the knowledge and skills that Rowlandson described had great value for the Puritan community, as they increased its abilities and broadened its understanding of life in the New World, while simultaneously making way for new conceptions of Puritan and Indian relationships. The most important challenge that Rowlandson exposes with her Narrative is something that the Puritans had not been able to figure out yet: the ability to negotiate with the Indians successfully when in a weaker position, in such a way that the risk of violence is minimized and the will for cooperation stimulated. Cotton Mather, who wrote the preface of the 1682 edition, urges the public to read Rowlandson’s text. Mather explains that Rowlandson’s “dispensation [was] of publick note” and insists that Puritans “Read therefore, Peruse, Ponder, and from hence lay up something from the experience of another, against thine own turn comes”.124 He warns his readers to learn from Rowlandson’s experience in case they find themselves in a similar situation. Although Mather’s intention was mainly to maintain Puritan spiritual chastity, he admits that in the face of challenging the wilderness Rowlandson’s Narrative also offers a set of attitudes and techniques for survival. Along these lines the Puritan spirituality has to be negotiated with a certain degree of pragmatism, given the wilderness they face. Hence Rowlandson offers a regeneration of the Puritan perspective on the wilderness, which blends Puritan and Indian elements into a more flexible social order that increases the potential of European integration into the American continent. Rowlandson acknowledges the ways she has changed and adapted to the tribe as early as the second remove, which begins only hours after the raid on Lancaster. Here she writes “I must turn my back upon the Town, and travel with them into the vast and desolate Wilderness”, showing her determination in challenging the wilderness. She concludes the second remove with saying that there was already “so much that I could never have thought of, had I not experienced it”.125 During the fifth remove she continues: “I was not before acquainted with such kind of dangers”, referring to how she has learned to sleep on the bare ground during winter and to treat her wound with oak leaves, and managed to keep her mind

124 Cotton Mather in Rowlandson, 115, 117. 125 Rowlandson, 122, 123.

54 in control while other captives were losing it.126 Through these experiences Rowlandson developed the pragmatism, fortitude, and vitality that she did not have before her captivity. Hereby she offered the Puritan community a third option in their relations with the Indians, which went beyond the established dichotomy of victims and victimizers, Christians and savages. Had things been going well for the Puritan community in America, and had they been confident that they were able to take on the challenges they faced in a new land with an unfamiliar environment and strange people, Rowlandson’s Narrative might not have gained the popularity and influence that it had. Experiences like Rowlandson’s ruined the symbolic imagery of the Puritans regarding America as their God-given-land to build the New Zion. In several instances Indian methods offered the solutions that the Puritans needed in order to function in America. And the application of Indian methods to Anglo-American problems can be regarded as one of the foundational elements of the archetypal American frontier-hero who is embodied in Daniel Boone, and recognizable in John Dodge. Rowlandson overcame the ‘testing’ that she faced in the form of physical and psychological survival during captivity; enduring the tormenting death of her daughter, finding out how to cooperate with her captors in order to guarantee her own safety, and keeping herself from starving to death. Rowlandson therefor became master over the wilderness without giving up the most important religious and cultural conventions, by which she demonstrated to the Puritans how to survive in America both physically and spiritually. John Dodge’s account shows traces of an important aspect in Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative that is not much commented on by historians. He draws from a wider range of elements from the traditional Puritan captivity narrative, which diverges from the hardline nationalized reprints of Rowlandson and Williams and Ethan Allen’s narrative that were produced during the American Revolution. Ideas of acculturation to Indian ways of life have existed from the time that the earliest captivity literature was written and survived in the secular frontier mythology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They indicate how the narratives in which the contrast with a ‘savage other’ is deliberately emphasized during the Revolutionary era were an exception rather than the norm. Nevertheless, by looking at Allen’s account it becomes evident that the effects of doubt about the own identity present in Rowlandson’s Narrative continued in Revolutionary captivity narratives.

126 Rowlandson, 130.

55 This depiction differs from Slotkin’s argument that the captivity narrative moved from the Puritan version, in which the captives fiercely tried to hold on to their identity, to a version that tended toward acculturation in the Indian culture. It is true that the Boone narrative is very effective in creating the archetypal American hero who mediates between civilization and the wilderness by adopting the best elements of both cultures. However, this does not take away the fact that cultural adjustment and processes of acculturation have been present from the early Puritan captivity literature onward. One can conclude that on this particular point the difference between the Puritan captivity narratives and the late eighteenth-century frontier literature is the increased emphasis that is put on the process of acculturation. This makes the way in which the Revolutionary propagandists used the Puritan captivity framework even more peculiar. Besides secularization the Revolutionaries also “de-Indianized” the Puritan captivity narrative, while at the same time relying on the metaphorical implications of the savage Indian stereotype derived from the Puritan captivity experience.

56 Conclusion

The Puritan captivity narratives served as a rhetorical basis enabling the Revolutionaries to exemplify how ideas about the ‘American experience’ could to be understood. The captivity narrative structure served as a valid vehicle upon which Americans built their ideas of identity, suitable to the contemporary Revolutionary sentiment; they subsequently employed the mythological elements they thought to be useful. It served as a framework through which the American people could make sense of the idea of captivity and the conflict with Britain. Thus it became a highly effective instrument for propaganda. The utilization of the Puritan captivity experience in the production of Revolutionary captivity literature brings the particularities of that specific moment in history to light: the situation of being in need of an identity that was straightforward, accessible, and easy for Americans to associate with, in order to resist an opposing enemy. With their narratives patriotic writers could affirm their own experiences of captivity as an illustrative example for the nation as a whole. Ethan Allen’s Narrative demonstrates how the Puritan captivity framework served his own individual interests; at the same time it attached his experience to the destiny of the nation and the universal principle of self-determination. The American Revolution created a specific and unique environment in which the American people could understand their lives, with the help of a particular kind of captivity narrative. They used a narrowed interpretation of the Puritan captivity framework in order to highlight the differences between themselves and their former British motherland. Thus, a very specific part of the Puritan captivity mythology served as an effective tool in the Revolutionary propaganda rhetoric to define and formulate an identity and American relationships with others. The way in which the producers of Revolutionary propaganda cherry-picked certain elements from the Puritan narratives shows much about how an ideology is created. At this specific moment in history it was necessary for Americans to create an excessively large contrast between themselves and those they were fighting. Because the Puritan captivity narratives offered an archetype of such a contrast when read within a certain context it served as a great propaganda tool and example during the Revolutionary war. The memories of Indian captivity and the Puritan confrontation with the wilderness were thoroughly entrenched in the conscience of Americans, which made the association of British cruelty with Indian raids convincing for many of them. They allowed the metaphorical potential of the Puritan captivity experience to be fully utilized by the press and publishers during the Revolutionary

57 era. But the Puritan narrative received a heavily filtered reading of the historical interaction between American settlers and Indians. The Puritan mythology became even more effective as it was used to encourage Americans to take their fate into their own hands and liberate themselves from the newly emerged tyrant. During the American Revolutionary War the accounts written by prisoners of war helped Americans to define what they were fighting for, especially by focusing on the cruel nature of the British enemy they faced. Patriotic propagandists used the Puritan captivity framework, not to emphasize their own conduct, but that of the British monarchy and soldiers. They exhibited either a lack of understanding of the true essence of the Puritan captivity narrative, or a willful misinterpretation of it, since much of the Revolutionary captivity literature refuses to engage in self-reflection, thus ignoring one of the essential elements of the Puritan captivity experience. An analysis of the Revolutionary captivity narratives and their Puritan roots reveals the deeper structures of the American captivity mythology. John Dodge’s captivity narrative is the most effective in acknowledging the actual complexity of the relationship between American settlers and Native Americans. Dodge offered a combination of the traditional Puritan narrative structure, in which a moral contrast is created between an agent of American liberty and a savage despotic ‘other’, and the secular frontier mythology in which the American identity is defined by an intimate yet intricate relationship between whites and Indians on the American frontier. By applying Joseph Campbell’s interpretation to Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative it becomes clear that processes of acculturation can be traced back to the earliest Puritan captivity literature, but are accentuated as the frontier literature secularized. In fact, the exploration of the Indian world and the mysteries of the wilderness, instead of being features to be overcome, became the very essence of the ‘American experience’. The Revolutionary captivity narratives articulated their sentiments mainly by claiming a cultural distinctiveness, while most contemporary frontier narratives in the late eighteenth century underlined the captive’s adjustment to the culture of the captors. That they did so in a literary genre that was so specifically American intensified their message. As Americans balanced between different cultural identities Allen defined national identity in negative terms, because during the Revolution the legend of separation was more necessary and useful than the legend of acculturation. In fact, at this point in time the rejection of the British culture was more urgent than the creation of a purely American one. The insecurity that was part of the American need to profile itself becomes apparent by Allen’s pleasure in being

58 acknowledged as an equal to the British officers in the last days of his captivity. This pleasure seems to reflect an unconscious appeal to assimilate to the culture of the enemy that is evident in Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative too. After American independence was achieved, uncertainties deriving from this kind of attractiveness continued to occupy the people’s minds in the new republic, as the former colonists sought to measure their culture with others people’s cultures. The resurgence of the Puritan captivity narratives during the Revolutionary era and their revision by patriotic writers and publishers represents a significant, and often undervalued, addition to the development of frontier literature in the late eighteenth century. If the frontier narratives, in which heroes like Daniel Boone subdued the wilderness for Western civilization, arose from confidence about what Americans expected to become, the Revolutionary captivity narratives surely arose from uncertainty about what they were able to resist.

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64 Webster, Samuel., “The Misery and Duty of an Opress’d and Enslav’d people, represented in a sermon delivery at Salisbury, July 14, 1774. On a day set apart for fasting and prayer, on account of approaching public calamities”. Printed by Edes and Gill (Boston, MA 1774). Williams, Daniel E., Liberty’s Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic. Athens, GA 2006. Winthrop, John., “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) 75-93, in: E.S. Morgan ed., Puritan Political Ideas, 1558-1794. Indianapolis, IN 2003. Wood, Gordon., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. Chapel Hill, NC 1998. Wood, Gordon., The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York, 1993.

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