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2. “Satan’s Prey” or "L'esclavage de l'hérésie calviniste": The Imperial Battles for Maine's Frontier Souls
- University of Notre Dame Press
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“Satan’s Prey” or “L’esclavage de l’hérésie calviniste” The Imperial Battles for Maine’s Frontier Souls Maine’s lack of religious cohesion haunted orthodox New England ministers, who feared for the souls of the province’s settlers.The most vocal warnings came from Cotton Mather, who asserted that the province’s religious instability jeopardized New England’s entire holy experiment. Mather cautioned Maine’s frontier settlers, known as “outlivers,” that dwelling in the “more Pagan [out]skirts of New England ” would lead to death—or worse.“Satan terribly makes a prey of you,” Mather warned, “and Leads you Captive to do his Will.”1 These prophesies seemed to come to pass when King William’s, Queen Anne’s, and Dummer’s wars brought death, permanent separation and, most important to this study, spiritual reorientation and confusion to many Maine families. Mather took aim at Puritans like Hannah Swarton. Swarton and her family were typical of the outlivers whose choices Cotton Mather so strenuously condemned. The basic contours of Hannah’s life provide little indication of the religious odyssey into which she would be drawn.The daughter of committed Puritans, Hannah spent her early life in the Essex County, Massachusetts, town of Beverly. Wealthy by 69 neither birth nor marriage, she and her husband, John, found land in Essex County beyond their means and were forced to seek opportunities elsewhere.2 Maine was the kind of place that appealed to people of limited means like the Swartons, for in the 1670s, it was still possible to procure decent parcels of land for relatively low prices or in exchange for service. If Maine’s remoteness, climate, and deficiencies in organized civic or religious life worried the Swartons, they left no record of their concerns predating King William’s War. Later writings would be filled with such concerns, at least on the spiritual level. Moving far beyond the safety of the established Puritan communities of northern Massachusetts, the Swartons settled in North Yarmouth, a new community on the northern edge of Casco Bay. Like Casco Bay’s other settlements—Falmouth (now Portland), Spurwink (Cape Elizabeth), and Falmouth Neck—North Yarmouth seemed poised for prosperity, thanks to its location on the bay and the interest this inspired among land speculators from Massachusetts. The town’s economic promise was ostensibly protected by Fort Loyal, built in Falmouth to protect the Casco settlements from local enemies. While the region was economically promising, life there also demanded significant personal sacrifices, including the civic and religious stability the Swartons had known in Beverly and its attendant protection of thick settlement. At the time of their arrival, North Yarmouth also lacked a meetinghouse, a minister, and any semblance of organized religious life. To Hannah Swarton, the baptized child of parents who were church members, the move to Casco “where there was no church or minister of the Gospel” would lead to punishment.3 This came on May 16, 1690, when René Robinau de Portneuf ’s combined force of French and Wabanakis attacked Casco. Hannah’s husband and most likely one of her sons were killed in the attack.The rest of the fort’s inmates, including Sylvanus Davis, were carried into captivity in Wabanakia and Canada. Separated from her three surviving children, Hannah bravely navigated through the multiple worlds of her captors. Stripped of the material symbols of her identity as a New England wife and mother, she clung instead to Reformed religion— the sole element of her precaptivity life that remained. 70 The Spice of Popery [3.235.249.219] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:58 GMT) Like other Maine captives of the frontier wars, Hannah likely encountered Catholics of various strata—Indians, priests, nuns, laypeople—who sought to claim her soul for the Church of Rome. Still, she returned to New England a Protestant. Upon her return to New England, Hannah’s story attracted the interest of Cotton Mather, who tailored her resistance to Catholicism into an eloquent defense of her Puritan convictions. “A Narrative of Hannah Swarton Containing Wonderful Passages Relating to Her Captivity and Deliverance” first appeared in 1697 as part of Humiliations Followed with Deliverances, and later appeared in an expanded version as part of Mather’s monumental work Magnalia Christi Americana in 1702. The extent to which Mather actually consulted Hannah on the details of her religious life in captivity is unknown, but he clearly found the basic outlines of her experiences (which were consistent...