Hannah Duston
Hannah Duston was a colonial Massachusetts Puritan woman who was taken captive by Abenaki people from Quebec during King William's War, with her first newborn daughter, during the 1697 raid on Haverhill, in which 27 colonists, 15 of them children, were killed. In her account she stated that the Abenakis killed her newborn baby soon after they were captured. While detained on an island in the Merrimack River in present-day Boscawen, New Hampshire, she killed and scalped ten of the Abenaki family members holding them hostage, with the assistance of two other captives.
Duston's captivity narrative became famous more than 100 years after she died. During the 19th century, she was referred to as an American folk hero and the "mother of the American tradition of scalp-hunting." Some scholars assert Duston's story became a legend in the 19th century only because her story was used to justify violence against Native American tribes as innocent, defensive, and virtuous. Duston is believed to be the first American woman honored with a statue.
Biography
Early life
Hannah Emerson was born December 23, 1657, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Michael Emerson and Hannah Webster Emerson; she was the oldest of 15 children. At age 20, she married Thomas Duston Jr., a farmer and brick-maker. The Emerson family would later become the subject of attention when Elizabeth Emerson, Hannah's younger sister, was hanged for infanticide on June 8, 1693. One of Hannah's cousins, Martha Toothaker Emerson, and her father, Roger Toothaker, were accused of practicing witchcraft and tried at the Salem witch trials.Captivity
During King William's War, Hannah, her husband Thomas, and their nine children, including a newborn baby, lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts. On March 15, 1697, when she was 40 years old, the town was raided by a group of about 30 Abenaki from Quebec. In the attack, 27 colonists were killed, and 13 were taken captive, to be either adopted or held as hostages for the French. Hannah's husband Thomas, who was building a new brick home about half a mile away, fled with eight of their nine children. The Indians captured Hannah and her nurse, Mary Neff, set fire to Hannah's home, and forced the two women to march into the wilderness, Hannah carrying her newborn daughter, Martha. According to the account Hannah gave to Cotton Mather, along the way her captors killed six-day-old Martha by smashing her head against a tree:Hannah and Mary were assigned to a family group of 12 people and taken north, "unto a rendezvous...somewhere beyond Penacook, New Hampshire; and they still told these poor women that when they came to this town, they must be stript, and scourg'd, and run the gauntlet through the whole army of Indians." The group included Samuel Lennardson, a 14-year-old boy captured in Worcester, Massachusetts, in late 1695.
Rebellion and escape
The captives were taken north to an island in the Merrimack River at the mouth of the Contoocook River, where, during the night of April 29 or 30, while the Indians were sleeping, Hannah led Mary and Samuel in a revolt:Hannah used a hatchet to kill one of the two grown men, two adult women, and six children. According to Cotton Mather's account, Hannah and her partners let one of the children sleep, "intending to bring him away with them," but the boy awoke and escaped. One severely wounded Abenaki woman also managed to escape the attack.
The former captives immediately left in a canoe, after scalping the dead as proof of the incident and to collect a bounty. They went downriver, traveling only during the night, and after several days reached Haverhill.
Reward
A few days later, Thomas Duston brought Hannah, Samuel and Mary to Boston, along with the scalps, the hatchet and a flintlock musket they had taken from the Indians. Although New Hampshire had become a colony in its own right in 1680, the Merrimack River and its adjacent territories were considered part of Massachusetts; therefore, Hannah and the other former captives applied to the Massachusetts Government for the scalp bounty.Massachusetts had posted a bounty of 50 pounds per scalp in September 1694, which was reduced to 25 pounds in June 1695, and then entirely repealed in December 1696. Wives had no legal status at that time in colonial New England, so her husband petitioned the Legislature on behalf of Hannah Duston, requesting that the bounties for the scalps be paid, even though the law providing for them had been repealed:
On June 16, 1697, the Massachusetts General Court voted to give them a reward for killing their captors; Hannah Duston received 25 pounds, and Neff and Lennardson split another 25 pounds:
Later life
Following her return, Hannah gave birth to a second daughter, Lydia, on October 4, 1698. Her neighbor Hannah Heath Bradley, who had also been abducted in the 1697 raid, was held for nearly two years before she was ransomed, returning to Haverhill in 1699. During Queen Anne's War Indians raided Haverhill again in 1704 and 1707. In yet another raid on Haverhill, Algonquin and Abenaki Indians led by the French officer Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville killed sixteen, including the town's minister.Although she claimed to have been baptized as a child, Hannah rarely attended church and did not take communion until late in life, for reasons that are unclear. In May 1724 she asked to be formally admitted to the Haverhill Center Congregational Church. Her husband had made a similar petition in January of that year.
Following her husband's death Hannah Duston is believed to have lived with her son Jonathan on his farm in southwest Haverhill. She probably died between 1736 and 1738, and was most likely buried near Jonathan Duston's home.
Samuel Lennardson moved to Preston, Connecticut, to join his father. He married and had five children and died on May 11, 1718. Mary Neff died in Haverhill on October 17, 1722. In 1739 Mary Neff's son Joseph was granted two hundred acres of land at Penacook by the General Court of New Hampshire "in consideration of his mother's services in assisting Hannah Duston in killing divers Indians."
Legacy
Written accounts
Contemporary accounts
The event became well known, due in part to Cotton Mather's account in Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of New England. Mather interviewed Hannah after her return to Haverhill, and on May 6, 1697, he preached a sermon celebrating her return from captivity, with Hannah herself in the audience. He later published the story three times in five years: in Humiliations follow'd with Deliverances, Decennium Luctuosum, and in Magnalia Christi Americana. Mather titled the story "A Notable Exploit: Dux Faemina Facti," and compared Hannah Duston's story to the murder of Sisera by Jael in the Old Testament, and to the captivity narratives of Hannah Swarton and Mary Rowlandson. Captivity narratives featuring women were often used as metaphors for the identity struggle evolving in New England at that time, wherein submissive, humble and obedient Puritan women fought to regain their freedom from the oppression of their Indian captors, in the same way that during the American revolution, the long-suffering colonists resisted the oppressive governance by the British crown.Hannah's story also appears in the diary of Samuel Sewall, who had heard the story directly from her on May 12, 1697, less than two weeks after her escape. Sewall's account adds the detail that the night before their escape, one of their male captors showed Samuel Lennardson how to take a scalp:
Hannah's story is recorded in the diary of John Marshall, a bricklayer in Quincy, Massachusetts, who wrote the following entry for April 29, 1697:
Another reference to Hannah Duston is found in the journal of John Pike, in the following entry:
Although Hannah herself never provided a written account of her captivity and escape, the Haverhill Historical Society possesses a letter dated May 17, 1724, addressed to the elders of the church, declaring her desire to be admitted as a full member of the church so that she might take communion with the other congregants, and offering a confession. It seems likely to have been composed from dictation by her minister. In reference to her captivity, the letter states simply:
Later renditions
After Cotton Mather's death, Hannah Duston's story was largely forgotten until it was included in “Travels in New England and New York” by historian Timothy Dwight IV, published in 1821. After this, Duston became more famous in the 19th century as her story was retold by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's version adheres to information provided in primary sources, whereas Whittier describes her "thirst of revenge...an insatiate longing for blood. An instantaneous change had been wrought in her very nature; the angel had become a demon, —and she followed her captors, with a stern determination to embrace the earliest opportunity for a bloody retribution." Hawthorne, clearly horrified, pauses in his retelling to exclaim: "But, Oh the children! Their skins are red; yet spare them, Hannah Duston, spare those seven little ones, for the sake of the seven that have fed at your own breast."Duston's story entered popular imagination along with other tales of violence perpetrated by women, sold as cheap works of short fiction or portrayed on stage in productions intended to appeal to working-class crowds. The rebellion was illustrated in theatrical style in Junius Brutus Stearns' historical painting, Hannah Duston Killing the Indians in which Stearns, for reasons that remain unclear, depicted Samuel Lennardson as a woman. The Indian children Duston killed are omitted. A second painting, showing Hannah's husband fleeing with her children, is now lost. Violent revenge against American Indians was another popular subject of literature and theater, as in Robert Montgomery Bird's 1837 novel Nick of the Woods.
From the 1820s until the 1870s, Duston's story was included in nearly all books about US history, as well as many biographies, children's books, and magazine articles. The story was popular among white Americans when the country was engaged in the westward expansion, which increased conflict with the American Indian tribes living in places where American settlers wanted to live.
Later versions of the story added numerous details not found in any primary source, as in Robert Boody Caverly's Heroism of Hannah Duston. Haverhill tradition, recorded in Mirick's History of Haverhill, adds the details that Hannah was wearing only one shoe when she was captured, that her daughter was thrown against an apple tree from which local people remembered eating fruit, and that the captives had already started down the river when Hannah insisted that they return to take the Indian scalps.