Hannah Emerson Duston & Book Giveaway!

By Susan Page Davis

Among my husband’s more colorful ancestors is Hannah Emerson Duston, also known as the Hatchet Lady and the Haverhill Hero.

Hannah was born in Haverhill, a town in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1657. She married Thomas Duston (also spelled Dustan or Dustin) in 1677. Over the next nineteen years, she gave birth to twelve children, the last being Martha Duston, born
March 9, 1696/7. A relative of Hannah’s named Mary Neff, probably her aunt, was acting as her nurse in the days following the birth.

The French encouraged the Indians to raid English settlements during King William’s War (1689–97), and on March 15, 1697, band of Abenaki made such a raid on Haverhill. Twenty-seven women and children were killed in the raid.

Less than a week after giving birth, Hannah Duston was captured along with her infant daughter and Mary Neff. Hannah’s husband reportedly tried to persuade her to let him carry her to a safe place. Apparently she felt his energy would be better spent saving the other children and told him to save them. He rode his horse after the fleeing children, determined to save at least one, and fired on the Indians who tried to follow. He managed to escape with all seven to the nearest garrison. The Abenaki gave up the pursuit and turned back to raid the house. Mary Neff had stayed with Hannah.

Artist's portrayal of Thomas Duston saving his children.

The interlopers burst into the cabin and captured the two women. The baby was brutally killed, being dashed against a tree by one of the Abenaki soon after their march began. Hannah and Mary were taken northward by their captors. The thirteen captives from Haverhill were divided into smaller parties of Indians, who probably planned to take them to Canada. With Hannah's party was a boy, Samuel Lennerson or Leonardson, about 12 or 13 years old, who had been captured more than a year earlier in another raid.

This painting portrays Hannah and Samuel in action.

About two weeks after their capture, they had traveled about 100 miles from Haverhill, north of what is now Concord, New Hampshire. The party paused at an island (afterward known as Penacook Island, or Dustin Island) in the confluence of the Merrimack and Contoocook rivers on the evening of March 29. The two women were told that after a short journey to a further village they would be stripped and beaten.

During the night, Hannah and the boy Samuel secured hatchets and attacked their captors. Ten were killed, nine of them, most accounts say, by Hannah. The three captives then used a canoe to escape, but Hannah turned back and scalped the 10 corpses to have proof of the exploit. Scalps could be handed in for a bounty during the war.

Painting by artist Junius Brutus Stearns, depicting Hannah's escape,
 with an assist from Mary.

After facing many hardships, they reached Haverhill safely. They presented their story to the General Court in Boston on April 21, which awarded the sum of 25 English pounds to Hannah Duston and half that to each of her companions. Hannah Duston lived out the rest of her life quietly, moving to Ipswich after the death of her husband in 1732.

Mary, Samuel, and Hannah flee the island.

In his book The Haverhill Emersons, author Charles Henry Pope, a respected New England historian, said, Hannah’s deed “was one of the chief means of checking the cruelties of the Indians, showing them that ‘weak women’ would meet their atrocities in kind.” He also stated that Hannah “was at no other time in her life found lacking of the gentleness and peaceful character of woman; this deed was the product of maddening experience.” (Pope’s Emerson genealogy was published in Boston in 1913.)

Hannah has been memorialized in two statues of her wielding a hatchet, one in the town of Haverhill, Mass., and the other near the site of her escape in Boscawen, N.H.

The monument at Boscawen, N.H.

The monument in Haverhill, Mass.

    


Our family happened upon the monument on the island in Boscawen by chance while traveling in New Hampshire. I saw the sign and told my husband to stop. We were near a monument to his ancestor. We took the kids and walked down a shady path and along an old railroad track until we came upon the statue. It seemed an odd, isolated place for such a memorial, but this was the place where Hannah defended herself and made her escape.

The historical marker in Boscawen, N.H. Photo by Craig Michaud at en.wikipedia

You can read an article about Hannah published in Yankee Magazine in 1995 here:
http://www.yankeemagazine.com/article/history/hannah-duston-scalped-Indians

In recent years, a few people have protested the honor shown to Hannah and tried to cast her as a murderer and have the statues taken down. I have to agree with the people of Haverhill who refused to remove the monuments. Hannah is a heroine.

*** In Hannah's honor, I am giving away two copies of books from my White Mountain Brides series, either paperback or digital. Leave a comment below and enter the drawing for one of these New Hampshire colonial books centered on the Dover Massacre of 1689: Return to Love, A New Joy, or Abiding Peace. ***

Susan Page Davis is the author of more than fifty published novels. A history major, she’s always interested in the unusual happenings of the past. She’s a two-time winner of the Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award, and also a winner of the Carol Award and the Will Rogers Medallion, and a finalist in the WILLA Awards and the More Than Magic Contest. Visit her website at: www.susanpagedavis.com .

Pilgrims and Puritans--What's the Difference?

by Dr. Rebecca Price Janney

My history students often want to know the difference between the Pilgrims and Puritans, so I dedicate this story to both groups as we near Thanksgiving when they are much on our minds.









Let’s go back to the reign of Elizabeth I. After her Roman Catholic sister Mary’s rule, Elizabeth reinstated Anglicanism as England’s official religion. However, a small group of highly educated people struggled with the similarities they saw between the Church of England and the Roman church. Known as the Puritans because they desired to purify Anglicanism, they objected to the clergy’s elaborate liturgical robes, as well as the use of candles, incense, and music in services, all which they believed were distractions from true worship. Instead, the Puritans stressed the importance of Bible study and desired to make God’s Word accessible and understandable to ordinary people.  They also believed deeply in the doctrine that faith alone, as opposed to good works, could get a person to heaven. 

At that time, many Puritans believed the Anglican Church could be reformed from within, but another group of them wanted to separate from it because it was too corrupt. These “Separatists” or “Pilgrims” left England in 1606 for Leyden in Holland in order to practice their beliefs unencumbered by the state church. 


They enjoyed a dozen years of relative peace, but they had struggled with finding more than menial employment because of their immigrant status.  The Pilgrims decided to seek a place where they might have full religious liberty and live above a subsistence level.  In 1620 the Pilgrims made the decision to come to America, sailing from England in the fall after several unfortunate delays. It was the worst time of the year for The Mayflower’s voyage, but it couldn’t be helped.



After a tumultuous 64-day journey across the Atlantic, they arrived at Cape Cod on November 9, committing themselves to a compact, or written agreement, that would lead away from the rule of kings and queens toward democratic self-government. The Pilgrims settled at Plymouth where they constructed primitive huts in which to weather the cruel Massachusetts winter, and many fell sick, leading to the deaths of over half the 102 immigrants. 

Their leader, Governor William Bradford, vividly described their grim, desperate situation:

"If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world. . . . What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say, 'Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity. . . .'”


Considering that the group of mostly peasants, town laborers and shopkeepers were ill-suited to life in the wilderness, they came through their ordeal remarkably well. As Bradford put it, “they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country.” Another Pilgrim said, “It is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again.”

In the meantime, conditions in England became progressively worse in general, and for the Puritans in particular.  Nor was the church they loved about to be reformed. People’s behavior had deteriorated, the streets were polluted with human waste, and life was cheap. According to Peter Marshall and David Manuel, “England had become a nation without a soul. A beggar could die of exposure in a merchant’s doorway, and the merchant, arriving to open up in the morning would be irate at having to step over the body. . . .” 

Under James I’s successor, Charles I, the Puritans suffered persecution, and many went to prison. (Think John Bunyan and Pilgrim’s Progress.) In 1628 the Council for New England issued a grant to a group of Puritans to establish a settlement between the Charles and Merrimack Rivers in Massachusetts, and 66 men ventured there, later to be joined by 200 more men who would begin to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A lawyer named John Winthrop was elected Governor and followed with his own set of colonists.




The Puritans viewed New England as a New Canaan, a promised land that God would use as an experiment in Christian living, “a city upon a hill” for all the world to see. Halfway between England and the New World, Winthrop preached a sermon, “A Modelle of Christian Charity,” on the deck of the Arbella. With an ocean breeze stirring his dark hair, he proclaimed:


"We must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in the worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the ways of God and all professours for Gods sake."

When the Puritans reached the shores, they found the settlement in a dilapidated state, with only 85 of the nearly 300 men who’d gone before them remaining--the others had died or turned back. Under Winthrop’s leadership, however, the Puritans established a firm foundation for themselves and all who would follow them. The Puritans quickly outnumbered the Pilgrims in the new land, and by the late 17th century, had absorbed their numbers.



Tell me, are you related to any of these early English settlers to America? If my research is accurate, then some of my family members were Puritans who came here in the early 1630s. One of my DAR friends can trace her lineage back to Captain Myles Standish, who came over on the Mayflower! I would love to hear your story.


 




Rebecca Price Janney is a theologically trained historian whose 18 published books deal mainly with people and themes in America history, including Great Stories in American History, and Then Comes Marriage? A Cultural History of the American Family. She lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and son. www.rebeccapricejanney.com