Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives

A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

A True History ofthe Captivity and Restoration ofMrs. Mary Rowlandson Edited, with an Introduction, by AMY SCHRAGER LANG Introduction At sunrise on February 10,1676, a band ofIndians descended "with great numbers " on the English frontier settlement of Lancaster, Massachusetts. As Mary Rowlandson-the wife of Lancaster's minister and author of the first narrative of Indian captivity-describes it, the attack was launched not by human contestants in a struggle for land and power but by "wolves," "hellhounds," "ravenous bears." For Rowlandson, a well-tutored daughter ofthe Puritans, the Indians were "black creatures in the night," denizens of a "vast and desolate wilderness" resembling nothing so much as that hell which the saints of New England were destined by God himself to subdue. Rejecting the light of the gospel, the Indians were allied with the forces of Satan; failing to cultivate the land, they were, in the biblical phrase, "not a People." There is nothing extraordinary in Rowlandson's representation of the Indians. If anything, she is in perfect accord with the major spokesmen ofthe New England colonies. Not long after the raid on Lancaster, Increase Mather, minister of Boston's Second Church and one ofthe most prominent political leaders ofthe Massachusetts Bay Colony, publishedA BriifHistory ofthe War with theIndians in New-England. Appearing after the death of"King Philip" ofthe Wampanoags but before the end ofthe war that bears his name, A BriifHistory begins with an extraordinary series ofassertions about the meaning ofthe war between the colonists and the Indians: That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God ofour Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been Plotting mischievous Devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun, no man that is an Inhabitant ofany considerable standing, can be ignorant. . . . And whereas [the Indians] have been quiet untill the last Year, that must be ascribed to the wonderfull Providence of God, who did. . . lay the fear of the English, and the dread of them upon all the Indians. ... Nor indeed had [the Indians] such Advantages in former Years as now they have, in respect ofArms and Ammunition.... Nor were our sins ripe for so dreadfull aJudgment, untill the Body ofthefirst Generation was removed, and another Generation risen up which hath not so pursued. . . the blessed design oftheir Fathers, in following the Lord into this Wilderness, whilst it was a land not sown. I 1. A BriifHistory rifthe War with thelndians in New-England (1676; Boston: N.p., 1862), 46. AMY SCHRAGER LANG Mather's opening paragraph is something like a map of the Puritan social imagination in the second half of the seventeenth century. Framed in the biblical language that characterized Puritan discourse from the beginning, A BriefHistory recalls the reader to New England's errand. Like Israel ofold, the first generation of New England saints understood themselves to have a special covenant with God. In fact, God had "sifted a whole Nation that he might send choice Grain over into this Wilderness." Like the children of Israel, they had crossed a Red Sea, the Atlantic, and come to a wilderness, there to build a newJerusalem. Andjust as God spoke to Israel, so he spoke to this new chosen people through the events oftheir personal and communal life. His hand was to be seen in their every success or failure. Convinced of their special status as God's chosen, the Puritans wavered between supreme arrogance and utter self-abasement. As a community, they were committed to a view ofthemselves as a sanctified nation, engaged in God's work in the American "desert." But as individuals, they saw themselves as "poor dependent , nothing-Creatures," relying wholly on God for their "Being, Actions, and the Success ofthem." They were certain of one thing, however: that "God's promise to his Plantations " was, as John Cotton put it in 1630, "firme and durable possession" of a "place oftheir owne." The unfortunate fact that the place they claimed as their own was already inhabited posed no obstacle, for the Puritans believed they had biblical warrant for settlement. One ofthe ways, they insisted, that God "makes room" for his chosen is by casting out "the enemies of a people before them by lawfull warre with the inhabitants, which God cals them unto: as in Ps 44:2 Tlwu didst drive...