Religion and Violence in Early America

In my office I keep a curious material artifact of American religious history—a Jim Beam whiskey bottle from 1973 in the shape of Hannah Duston. The bottle's dress slips off her shoulders and her hair flows down her back (very unpuritan attributes). In one hand she holds a hatchet; in the other, a fistful of bloody blots representing the scalps of three Abenaki women, one Abenaki man, and six Abenaki children she murdered in 1697. The bottle's base conveniently contains a brief history lesson: "First woman honored by a statue in the United States—1874 Led Massacre & scalping of ten Indians at Boscawen, New Hampshire, & escaped back to her Haverhill, Mass. family." A war party captured the recently postpartum Duston and her midwife Mary Neff, killing her newborn infant and marching them towards French territory to the north. Once most of the men had departed, Duston, Neff, and another English captive named Samuel Lennardson murdered most of their captors, scalped them, and headed back to Massachusetts Bay to collect a £50 bounty on Native body parts. Cotton Mather honored her with a sermon in which he praised Duston's murderous rampage as "the action of Jael upon Sisera." The Biblical Jael murdered her enemy Sisera by driving a tent peg through his cranium, a tale related in the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges. Mather further reflected that "[i]f we did now Humble ourselves throughout the Land, who can say whether the Revenges on the Enemy, thus Exemplified [by Duston's acts] would not proceed much rather into the Quick Extirpation, of those Bloody and Crafty men."¹ Mather did not expound upon how the killing of children in any way related to the killing of Sisera, although most historians believe that the Abenaki children, like Sisera, were asleep when Duston killed them. In the late seventeenth century, Mather and his congregation understood Hannah Duston's exploits were the slaughter of a puritan holy war, one that envisioned the wholesale annihilation of Native people.

Later representations of Duston's actions emphasized her act as that of a mother. The poet and folklorist John Greenleaf Whittier wrote about Duston in 1831: "Blow followed blow, until ten out of twelve, the whole number of the savages, were stiffening in blood. One escaped with a dreadful wound. The last—a small boy—still slept amidst the scene of carnage. Mrs. Duston lifted her dripping hatchet above his head, but hesitated to strike the blow. 'It is a poor boy,' she said, mentally, 'a poor child, and perhaps he has a mother!' The thought of her own children rushed upon her mind, and she spared him."² It took some imagination to see Duston's murder of ten people as an act of motherly mercy, but Whittier managed it. In the early twenty-first century, we are perhaps slightly less sanguine about her. While Duston has had no shortage of commemorations, ranging from the 1874 statue to elementary schools and health centers, the Hannah Duston bobblehead introduced for sale at the New Hampshire Historical Society in 2008 was roundly criticized and eventually withdrawn. I read my whiskey bottle curio's celebratory optics as an expression of settler colonial heroism—one made in exceptionally poor taste. One acquaintance recently pronounced it "completely bonkers."

Bonkers it might be, but it is a reflection of the long American love affair with religious violence. I use my whiskey bottle to introduce students to questions of settler colonialism, of religious belief, and of violence between Native people and settler populations. Yet Hannah Duston's murderous actions are not usually seen as a part of American religious history, despite Mather's direction connection of Duston's acts with those of the biblical heroine Jael. Even among specialists, our cherished exceptionalist narrative...