“The Captives Who Wouldn’t Come Home”

Bridging from Lecture 3 — and Closing the Series

The first three lectures were about fear: holy war in New Mexico, total war in New England, and at Salem a multi-causal crisis partly shaped by frontier war. This final lecture turns fear inside out. It follows people captured and carried into the Native and French world that Puritans described as the Devil’s territory, then asks what their documented adult lives reveal about family, faith, community, and belonging. If the series has been about fear, it ends by examining forms of belonging that developed beyond Puritan New England.

Learning Objectives

1. Describe the captivity experiences of Eunice Williams and Esther Wheelwright during Queen Anne’s War, including the 1704 Deerfield raid and its aftermath.
2. Analyze the documented patterns by which some English captives built adult lives in Native or French Catholic communities rather than relocating permanently to New England.
3. Evaluate how historians reconstruct the life of a person who left almost no words of her own, distinguishing what archival silence reveals from what Eunice Williams’s documented actions can establish.
4. Synthesize the series’ continental argument: that borders among English, Native, and French worlds were porous and that captives developed different forms of belonging across them.
5. Assess what these captivity stories reveal about the limits of colonial power — that a society could lose not only wars but its own people, to a world it insisted was inferior.

Section 1: Two Girls, Two Captures

Deerfield, 1704

This lecture is built as a paired portrait of two English Puritan girls captured separately during the same imperial war. Their lives belong together because both moved beyond Puritan New England, but they should not be forced into one identical pattern. Eunice was adopted into a Kanien’kehá:ka family and built her adult life at Kahnawake. Esther moved through Wabanaki family life, a French mission setting, and an Ursuline institution. Their different paths demand comparison rather than collapse.

The first is Eunice Williams. In February 1704, during Queen Anne’s War, a French and Native force attacked Deerfield, Massachusetts, before dawn. Fifty-seven people were killed and 112 were taken captive and marched north through winter toward Canada. Among them was seven-year-old Eunice, daughter of minister John Williams. Her mother was killed on the march. Eunice was taken to Kahnawake, a Catholic Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) community near Montreal with its own political authority, kinship networks, and diplomatic life. There she was adopted into a Kanien’kehá:ka family.

Her father, John Williams, was eventually ransomed and returned to New England, where he wrote a famous captivity narrative, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. The title itself carries the Puritan assumption that captivity was a trial from which the faithful were ‘redeemed’ and returned home. But the title also carries a wound the book cannot close: John Williams was redeemed. His daughter was not.

Wells, and a Different Path

The second portrait is Esther Wheelwright, captured around 1703 near Wells, Maine, as a young girl during a Wabanaki raid. She was incorporated into a Wabanaki family, later moved through a French mission setting, and eventually entered the Ursuline convent in Quebec. Esther became a nun and rose to mother superior of one of French Canada’s most important religious institutions. Ann Little’s biography emphasizes these successive settings as ‘many captivities’: changing forms of kinship, dependency, institutional discipline, and belonging rather than one clean adult decision equivalent to Eunice’s life at Kahnawake.

Section 2: Different Forms of Belonging

Eunice’s Documented Adult Life

The heart of Eunice Williams’s story lies in a durable pattern of adult action. At Kahnawake she was baptized Catholic, given the name A’ongote, adopted into a Kanien’kehá:ka family, married a Kanien’kehá:ka man, and raised a family. Her New England relatives sent emissaries, offered ransoms, and wrote letters in repeated efforts to relocate her permanently. Eunice visited Deerfield and nearby communities three times between 1740 and 1761. After each visit she returned to Kahnawake. Her marriage, family, repeated refusals to relocate, and returns document the durability of her Kanien’kehá:ka and Catholic life without requiring the historian to claim access to an unrecorded inner preference.

It is important to hold two truths at once. Eunice was taken as a child by force; the violence of the Deerfield raid and winter march should not be romanticized. Her adult conduct, however, repeatedly sustained family, community, and Catholic life at Kahnawake. The Puritan captivity narrative expected resistance, redemption, and permanent return. Eunice did not follow that expected arc. The evidence supports that behavioral conclusion more firmly than any claim about what she privately felt.

Esther’s Many Captivities

Esther Wheelwright’s path was not Eunice’s in parallel. She moved through several communities and forms of dependency: birth in a prominent Puritan family, capture and incorporation into a Wabanaki family, residence in a French mission environment, and life within the disciplined institution of the Ursuline convent. She took vows, became a Catholic nun, and eventually rose to mother superior. Her story demonstrates belonging beyond Puritan New England, but through a succession of relationships and institutions unlike Eunice’s family and community life at Kahnawake.

Section 3: The Silence of Eunice Williams

Here the lecture pauses on an archival problem. We have described what Eunice Williams repeatedly did, but she left almost no words of her own explaining why. Nearly everything that survives reaches us through others: her father’s narrative, relatives’ letters, and records produced by people trying to redeem her. Eunice herself is nearly silent in the surviving New England archive.

Section 4: What Belonging Reveals

The Border Was Porous

Eunice Williams and Esther Wheelwright matter beyond their individual stories because their lives expose the limits of a hard boundary between ‘colonial’ and ‘Indian’ worlds. English, Native, and French communities remained politically and culturally distinct, but people crossed among them. Some captives were incorporated into Kanien’kehá:ka or Wabanaki kin networks; others entered French Catholic institutions. Frontier movement was therefore not only a story of colonists expanding outward but also of colonists being absorbed into societies the colonies described as inferior.

This is why the captivity stories belong at the end of a series about Native and imperial power. They reveal a limit that wars and treaties do not fully capture. A colony could lose a battle and recover; it was harder to be unable, across decades of effort, to relocate the minister’s daughter permanently. Eunice’s adult life challenged Puritan claims of civilizational superiority through documented conduct: marriage, family, Catholic faith, repeated refusals to relocate, and returns to Kahnawake after each New England visit.

Closing Synthesis — The Whole Series

This lecture ends a series built around one continental argument approached through four human stories. In New England, a shifting regional war brought colonial settlements near collapse. In New Mexico, autonomous Pueblo nations expelled Spain for twelve years; the revolt redistributed animals and may have accelerated horse-centered networks that Native peoples had already begun building before 1680. At Salem, frontier war partly shaped a multi-causal crisis. Here, at the end, Eunice Williams and Esther Wheelwright reveal different forms of belonging beyond Puritan New England.

The throughline holds across all four: Native nations constrained colonial power and shaped the terms of survival, expansion, and belonging. They did so through war, revolt, diplomacy, kinship, adoption, and the capacity of communities such as Kahnawake to incorporate outsiders into durable family and religious lives. Colonists were never as dominant, secure, or clearly superior as their rhetoric claimed. The continent remained overwhelmingly Native ground.

For students, the durable takeaway is larger than any one episode. Early America was not simply thirteen English colonies with a frontier at the edge, but a contested continent of many peoples in which Native power shaped colonial possibilities. Eunice Williams provides the final, quiet example: after three New England visits, she returned each time to Kahnawake, where her adult family, faith, and community remained.

Independent Study Slide Candidates — Do Not Lose

Live delivery carries three short activities: distinguishing forced childhood capture from documented adult action, separating archival silence from evidence of behavior, and connecting Eunice’s life to the series-wide argument. As the finale, the Independent Study also consolidates the four lectures. Target: 3–6 slides.

1. The Deerfield raid in depth — the 1704 attack, 57 people killed, 112 taken captive, the winter march north, and how one frontier raid produced the story anchoring this lecture. This supplies the violence compressed in live delivery so class time can focus on adult belonging and evidence.
2. The captivity narrative as a genre — how accounts like John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive shaped New England’s self-image, and why Eunice did not follow the expected arc of resistance, redemption, and permanent return.
3. Esther Wheelwright in full — her movement from the Wells raid through Wabanaki family life, a French mission setting, and the Ursuline convent, emphasizing Ann Little’s interpretation of several communities and forms of captivity, dependency, and belonging.
4. Series synthesis slide — the four lectures on one screen, with Lecture 2 noting that Native horse networks predated 1680 and Lecture 3 presenting frontier war as one cause within a multi-causal crisis.

Suggested Readings for Instructor Preparation