O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney.Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. xv + 376 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

In the fall of 1703, a party of 250 to 300 Native warriors and French soldiers joined at Chambly, just southeast of Montréal, in preparation for a wintertime assault on New England. Rumors of their movements leaked southward to the Connecticut River Valley, where Deerfield, Massachusetts, sat as the most exposed English settlement. Residents raised their guard, but after months of rumors and no attack, complacency eroded Deerfield's vigilance leading to a false sense of security. Meanwhile, the raiding party trudged toward the village, braving weeks of snow and ice to obtain their target. Just before dawn on February 29, 1704, the attackers crept to the edge of Deerfield's modest palisade and, using snowdrifts as ramps, let themselves silently over the wall.

Within minutes, armed men pushed their way into several houses and began killing or capturing their inhabitants. Despite pockets of stout resistance, the whole affair ended rather quickly, leaving most of Deerfield's families touched by death, capture, or property damage. All said, the raiders killed about fifty colonists and carried away another 112 as captives—together accounting for about half of the town's population. Deerfield and neighboring villages assembled a party to pursue the attackers, but, aside from a brief skirmish in a nearby meadow, both the weather and their concern for the captives' safety convinced them to allow the attackers a safe retreat.

As the captors fled north to Canada, they cared for their prisoners as best they could, killing only those who could not continue on their own. After nearly a month of rapid walking, the party disbanded near the St. Lawrence River, dividing the eighty-nine surviving captives among French towns, Native villages, and mission settlements. Over the next several years, Massachusetts negotiated with New France for the release of these captives, only to discover that many of the prisoners were either unable or unwilling to return to New England. By the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, despite a peace agreement written to favor the British, about twenty-five captives remained in Canada never to return.

For the past three centuries, Deerfield's story has resonated with New Englanders as a formative event in the development of their regional identity, prompting a volume of historical interpretations out of all proportion with the town's actual significance. Now, right on time for the raid's tercentennial, Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney have produced an updated and in many ways completely reconceptualized history of the 1704 raid. Rather than a pivotal scene in the great moral drama of American exceptionalism, Captors and Captives treats the Deerfield attack as a minor event that nevertheless offers "an excellent entry point into the histories of Native, French, and English peoples of the colonial Northeast" (p. 3). In the process of telling their story, the authors also offer a model for making sense of our increasingly atomized understanding of colonial North America.

In the exceptionalist mode of early American history, the 1704 attack powerfully symbolized the struggles of wilderness life that set the American colonies apart from their stagnant European ancestors. Both the abundance of new lands and the "savage" dangers of the frontier forced colonists to innovate rapidly or face death by internal decay or external violence. For John Williams, the raid's most prominent victim and its first historian, the attack affirmed New England's chosen place within God's divine plan, calling sinners to repentance and confirming the truth of Williams's brand of Reformation theology. His 1707 account of the raid, The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion, shaped more than two centuries of subsequent historical interpretation.

Although generally written in more secular tones, nineteenth-century histories of the Deerfield raid differed little from Williams's moralistic tale of New English...