The Deerfield Massacre

September 1, 2023

From James L. Swanson, author of the New York Times best-selling Manhunt, The Deerfield Massacre limns the once-notorious, now largely forgotten attack on the English settlement of Deerfield in the Massachusetts colony by French and Indigenous (largely Abenaki) forces. Prepub Alert.

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December 18, 2023
“Once, it was the most famous episode in early American history,” writes bestseller Swanson (Manhunt) in this meticulous account of the eponymous 18th–century massacre, which occurred in an isolated British frontier settlement during Queen Anne’s War. In the predawn hours of February 29, 1704, approximately 240 Native and French raiders attacked the small settlement of Deerfield (in present-day Massachusetts), where they murdered 47 colonists, took 112 captives, and burned most of the town to the ground. Transported over 300 miles north on foot, the survivors became servants or adopted family members in Native communities. One prominent captive, Rev. John Williams, later wrote about his experiences. His eight-year-old daughter, Eunice, who was sent to live with a Mohawk group, eventually assimilated and married. She refused to leave her adopted home years later during an attempted rescue. The latter third of Swanson’s narrative pivots ingeniously from the event itself to examine the town’s subsequent history, drawing on hundreds of years of published accounts, pageants, and tourist attractions to trace the massacre’s afterlife in British and American mythologizing as it evolved to suit the settlers’ changing relationship with Native America (from victimhood, to victory, to guilt). The result is a rewarding close look at the process of history-making.

January 1, 2024
A consequence of centuries-long imperial rivalries, the 1704 Deerfield Massacre in Massachusetts revealed what could befall settlers of the colonial interior: captivity, terror, and slaughter. The event, which Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, correctly calls "one of the most dramatic episodes in colonial American history," didn't greatly alter New England's settlement. However, it did exemplify the extraordinary risks that pious, land-seeking colonists were willing to take to settle and farm lands claimed not only by Britain, but also by France and Indigenous people always threatened by Europeans' dispossession. On the snowy Massachusetts frontier that January day, Deerfield lost 63 of its 300 inhabitants to tomahawks, rifles, and arson; 112 others were seized, of whom 89 survived a 300-mile, two-month trek into Quebec. The story's central figure is the Rev. John Williams, who lost his wife and one child but whose daughter survived to spend her life voluntarily among the Native Americans who'd captured her. Relating the harrowing story, its survivors' three-year captivity, and the international context in which their release unfolded, Swanson doesn't add much to what's long been known. His fresh contributions appear in the chapters on the massacre's aftermath over the next four centuries. Native raids continued, spurring politicians, orators, and clerics to draw various lessons--many moral, some opportunistic. Townspeople and heirs of the victims erected memorials to the victims, and pageants built around heritage became a tradition. Films were shot, preservation undertaken, nostalgic tears shed for simple ways lost, and, recently, descendants of the Native assailants warmly received. "By 1776," writes Swanson, "the Deerfield Massacre was a long distant past in a place that the Founders would have found unfamiliar, strange, and even alien to them." A solid, up-to-date, briskly told history of death, resilience, and recovery in the American past.

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February 1, 2024
Just before dawn on February 29, 1704, French soldiers from Canada and Native American allies attacked Deerfield, Massachusetts, which was puzzlingly underdefended. Of 300 residents, 50 were killed and over 100 were captured and marched 300 miles through deep snow to Quebec. Swanson's account of the raid and prior conflicts between the English and Native Americans are fast-paced and mostly free of stereotypes and judgments found in earlier writings about European and Native American frontier warfare. Native Americans adopted many of the captives, some of whom wished to remain in Native American society. The English ransomed other captives and they returned to Massachusetts, if not necessarily to Deerfield. Swanson chronicles relief, happiness, and trauma experienced by surviving captives and residents. He describes how succeeding generations have reinterpreted the raid, including how Abenaki citizens and Deerfield residents built bridges to each other after the raid. Some post-raid information may be too detailed for some readers. Swanson concludes by explaining how the story of the Deerfield Massacre has been reframed to better reflect the concerns and losses of all involved, not just the settlers.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.