The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American RevolutionAuthor(s): Greg SieminskiReviewed work(s):Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 35-56Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713224 .Accessed: 27/06/2012 15:57

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The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American Revolution

CAPTAIN GREG SIEMINSKI

United States Military Academy

A CURIOUS ANOMALY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CAPTIVITY NAR-

rative is the enormous popularity of Puritan accounts during the Rev- olutionary era. Two in particular, by Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, were reprinted at least nine times between 1770 and 1776. Their reappearance is especially noteworthy because they had been reprinted, all told, only three times following their initial publication.1 While these early accounts of captivity among the Indians are com- pelling -indeed, they were bestsellers when they first appeared2 their renewed popularity in the 1770s would seem to be regressive in light of the genre's evolution away from Puritan conventions.

It is widely agreed that the captivity narrative underwent a significant change in the eighteenth century. Authors of the earliest narratives, like Rowlandson and Williams, interpreted their captivity as a form of divine testing in which their rejection of Indian culture was equivalent to resisting a satanic temptation in the wilderness. However, in the hundred years following the publication of the first captivity narrative in 1682, as the genre spread beyond New England and as the claims of Puritanism lost their force, the narratives became increasingly secular and eventually gave expression to a potent cultural myth. Richard Slotkin argues that late eighteenth-century captivities no longer rep- resented God's chastisement and testing of His people to ensure their

Captain Greg Sieminski is an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Military Academy. He is working on a dissertation examining how captivity accounts written between 1770 and 1861 helped define the national culture and promote political revolution.

American Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (March 1990) C 1990 American Studies Association

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faithfulness, but the settler's initiation into the secrets of Indian life.3 While the Puritan accounts regard-assimilation of Indian culture as heretical, narratives of a century later celebrate acculturation through the captives' adoption into a tribe.4 Among the late eighteenth-century narratives, Slotkin identifies John Filson's "The Adventurers of Col. Daniel Boone" (1784) as the earliest and most influential expression of a new, partly-Indianized American culture.5 Although Boone never loses his white cultural superiority during his two captivities among the Shawnee, he masters skills which earn him the respect of his captors and allow him to triumph over the wilderness.6 Boone thus emerges from his experiences part-Indian. His acculturation in "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone," Slotkin argues, gave birth to a secular myth, the legend of the frontiersman as "archetypal American and mediator between civilization and the wilderness. "7 The Puritan narratives republished and, more importantly, imitated during the Revolutionary era -were equally important, however, in defining the American char- acter by proclaiming the rejection of British culture. Far from a re- gression in the evolution of the genre, the resurgent interest in the Puritan narratives represents a crucial development in the emergence of a national culture.

During the Revolutionary era, the colonists began to see themselves as captives of a tyrant rather than as subjects of a king. While this image of collective captivity informed the pre-war political imagination in important ways -expressed, as we shall see, in the republication of the Rowlandson and Williams narratives - it became an even more vital metaphor for the Revolution during the war itself, when numerous Americans actually endured captivity. British armies held captive large portions of the civilian population through occupation and many sol- diers through imprisonment. Ethan Allen, the first American to write about his prisoner of war experience, patterned his Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen's Captivity (1779) after the accounts of Indian captivities. In adapting the genre to serve political ends, Allen created, in effect, a second cultural frontier, this one to the East instead of the West. Crossing this frontier, Allen followed the pattern of earlier Puritan narratives in order to stress his resistance to the culture of his captors. In this way, he affirmed the newborn culture of America. Allen's Narrative was thus the negative complement to Boone's, for it defined the nascent republic in terms of what it had rejected rather than what it had become.

Allen's Narrative represented the culmination of a decade-long pro-

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 37

cess that politicized the genre's early conventions. This process began with the republication of the Rowlandson and Williams narratives, for revolutionary politics had everything to do with their sudden popularity in the 1770s. These two narratives were repeatedly reprinted to shape or express public opinion concerning specific political events of the pre-war period-events which the colonists believed were leading to their enslavement. Because Allen's adaptation of the Puritan narrative altered and exploited its conventions in a manner similar to the ways the colonists exploited them through republication, it is necessary to examine how contemporary events prompted renewed interest in the two accounts.

The first to enjoy renewed popularity was A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Describing the terrors of her capture in an Indian raid on Lancaster, Massachusetts, and the trials of her four-month captivity, Rowlandson's Narrative had been immediately popular when it first appeared in 1682, going through four editions that year.8 But its appeal had waned over the next eight or so decades, having been republished only once in 1720. Then, in 1770, Rowlandson's Narrative was republished three times. Subsequent years saw only a slight decline in its popularity, for it was republished once again in 1771, and twice more in 1773.9 With one exception, all the editions which appeared during this period were published in Boston. '0 Neither the time nor the place was coincidental.

In 1770, Boston was a captive city, having been occupied by British troops since October 1768. The soldiers had been sent to restore order in the face of civil unrest over the Townshend Acts. Friction between Bostonians and the British increased daily, largely as a result of the propagandistic "Journal of Transactions in Boston," a sort of diary of relations between the citizens and the soldiers printed in a Boston newspaper, which "played up the insolence and brutality of the troops."" By the beginning of 1770, tensions were running high. The "trapped and restless mood" of the city at this time was suggested by a new image introduced to the Boston Gazette's masthead. Atop the 1 January 1770 issue was a seated Minerva with a pike and liberty cap in the act of releasing a bird from its cage.'2 The restlessness finally erupted in violence on 5 March 1770. British troops, heckled and perhaps physically threatened by a mob, opened fire, killing five and wounding six. The encounter was immediately and popularly referred to as the Boston Massacre.

In calling this incident a "massacre," the colonists were calling up

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images of the kind they knew best: an Indian raid on a frontier settle- ment. Such an event was a familiar occurrence in the captivity narrative, where it marked the beginning of a captivity experience. The bloody raid leading to Rowlandson's capture is a classic instance:

Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathens ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out. Now we might hear mothers and children crying out for themselves and one another, "Lord, what shall we do? . .. It was a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here and some there, . . . all of them stripped naked.'3

In an oration commemorating the second anniversary of the Boston Massacre, Dr Joseph Warren described a scene which one might almost mistake for Rowlandson's description. He recalled for his listeners:

the horrors of that dreadful night . . . when our streets were stained with the blood of our own brethren-when our ears were wounded by the groans of the dying, and our eyes were tormented with the sight of the mangled bodies of the dead-when our alarmed imaginations presented to our view our houses wrapt in flames, our children subjected to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery,-our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion, -our virtuous wives . .. falling sacrifice to worse than

14 brutal violence....

Three years later, in another address commemorating the Boston Massacre, Warren recalled similar "images of terror" and asked: "Who spread this ruin round us? . .. has the grim savage rushed again from the far distant wilderness? or does some fiend fierce from the depths of hell, . . . hurl . . . deadly arrows at our breast? no; . . . but, how astonishing! it is the hand of Britain that inflicts the wound.'5 Warren invoked the image of the Indian as devil, a characterization familiar in Puritan writings and especially evident in Rowlandson's Narrative, to suggest that the British, in firing on unarmed citizens, shared some- thing of the Indians' fiendishness. He suggested elsewhere in his address that the British shared not only the Indians' barbarous tactics, but their intention of taking the survivors captive. Slavery is a word used re- peatedly in both his orations.16 The fear of slavery is also evident in many letters printed in Boston newspapers following the Massacre. One writer, expressing the views of his fellow townspeople in a letter to the Boston Gazette, characterized the incident as an "attempt to enslave America."'7 The view was typical. The colonists saw the

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 39

Boston Massacre as evidence that they were the captives of savages. There is additional evidence to suggest that the renewed interest in

Rowlandson's narrative was sparked by the Boston Massacre. Wood- cuts which adorn the editions published during this period offer potential clues to the way in which the publishers intended the narrative to be understood."8 The 1773 edition printed by Boyle, who was a Whig,'9 includes a woodcut made specifically for its title page and executed by an artist of some skill (see Figure 1). The cut depicts four Indians lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, three aiming muskets and the fourth wielding a tomahawk at Rowlandson, who stands outside her home with her own musket leveled at her attackers.

The cut is unfaithful to the Narrative in several telling ways. For one, the Indians' method of attack has no basis in the text. Rowlandson describes the Indians attacking her house in a manner typical of their tactics: "Some of the Indians got behind the hill [near the house], others into the barn, and others behind anything that could shelter them; from all which places they shot against the house so that the bullets seemed to fly like hail. . .."20 The line formation from which the figures fight in the woodcut is more characteristic of British regulars than Indians. Indeed, the stance of the Indians bears an uncanny re- semblance to the stance of the soldiers in Henry Pelham's engraving, The Fruits of Arbitrary Powers, and Paul Revere's better-known copy, The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street (see Figure 2), prints of which were widely distributed and frequently recopied in the months and years following the Boston Massacre.2' The four figures in the cut and the first four figures in the engravings (the remaining three being obscured by smoke) are represented on the same side of the scene, stand at the same angle, and appear to be firing a volley from their leveled muskets. One can even see in the woodcut's crude detail an effort to reproduce the facial expressions and coat-like garments of the soldiers in the engravings.22

The woodcut's depiction of Rowlandson also has no basis in the narrative. When she fled from her burning house, she carried in her arms her young daughter, not a musket. Nowhere did Rowlandson suggest that she actively participated in the defense of the house, much less that she wielded a firearm. Representing her as militantly defiant of her captors is not only inaccurate, but contrary to a central spiritual lesson of her Narrative. Repeatedly, she affirmed that, because the Indians are God's instruments for the chastisement of His wayward

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N A R R A T I V E o F T I- E

CAP FIWITY, SUFFERINGS AND REMOVES

o F

iNrs. Mary Roandjbn,

W ho was taken P ifner by the INDI)ANS with Levemal others and treated in At motl barbarou and cruel Manner by thofe

* ile Savages: With many otker rema ble Events during her TRtAVELS.

W1 ritten by her own R , 4 for her prvate fe, and now madc public at the w J-eii of Lime Finds, ad fior ft E?e

* neft of the A-fief -

Prhued at-i

PH 12 W -"F 4

PURITAN CAPTIVrTY NARRATIVE 41

Figke 1. Leni Tride page of Mary Rowandson's Narraive. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Figure 2. Above: Paul Revere, The Bkoody Massacre Perpetated in King Stet. Courtesy, Anerican Antiquarian Society.

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people, patient endurance is obedience to God. But submission was far from the minds of most Bostonians in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre. Thus, rather than accurately reflecting the content of Row- landson's Narrative, the woodcut represented a secular23 and a political version of her story. In the scene, the Indians have been refigured as a tyrannic authority and Rowlandson as a courageous defender of liberty. Indeed, Rowlandson seems to represent a frontier version of the Goddess of Liberty, a figure intimately associated with the American cause in both visual and literary art beginning in the 1760s.24

In addition to Rowlandson's narrative, one other Puritan captivity narrative enjoyed popularity in the years preceding the Revolution. John Williams's The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion was orig- inally published in 1707. Three years before, Williams, minister of the Congregational church in Deerfield, Massachusetts, had been car- ried to Canada by his Indian captors along with a large number of his flock. In his narrative, Williams focused less on the hardships of his captivity than on the cunning efforts of French priests to convert him and his parishioners. His account was thus anti-French and, more especially, anti-Catholic. The narrative, which had last appeared, not coincidentally, during the French and Indian War,25 was reprinted three times during the 1770s, appearing in 1773, 1774, and 1776.26

As with Rowlandson's account, contemporary political events ex- plain the renewed popularity of Williams's narrative. Its representation of a helpless New England Protestant being oppressed by French cul- tural and religious tyranny perfectly expressed the colonists' fears over Britain's conciliatory policy toward the inhabitants of the newly- acquired Province of Quebec. The British had adopted their policy of conciliation in the mid-1760s as the only means for controlling Que- bec's large population of French Catholics. As part of that policy, the British had allowed the appointment of a Catholic Bishop to the See of Quebec in 1766, a position which had been vacant since the end of the French and Indian War. New Englanders were greatly disturbed by the Bishop's appointment. It "was taken for granted in all quarters" that the appointment "portended the eventual establishment of 'popery' and tyranny in the other colonies. "27 Samuel Adams wrote a series of anonymous letters to the Boston Gazette in 1768 to play up these fears .28

His propaganda campaign was so successful that by the early 1770s anti-Catholic sentiment was high. Then, in August, 1773, word reached America that a bill for the government of Quebec was pending in

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 43

Parliament which, if passed, would allow the French Canadians the freedom to practice their religion as they had under the French regime. "At once . . . defenders of orthodox Protestantism broke into print" in New England newspapers to denounce the legislation,29 for the Quebec Act, as it was called, seemed to justify the colonists' worst fears. Not only did it appear to be "a cleverly conceived method of foisting 'popery' on the colonists," it also seemed to be "a scheme to conciliate the Canadians and use them on occasion in subjugating the older British colonies. "30 Because the French had long been responsible for encouraging Indian attacks on New England settlements, this sub- jugation was likely to take the form of Indian raids and captivities.31 But if the French Canadians and their Indian allies were to be the agents of this subjugation, they were not its cause. Consequently, the colonists focused their ire on the British, whom they saw as master- minding a plot to rob them of their religious and political liberties. Their letters on the Quebec Act, just as the published letters on the Boston Massacre, repeatedly use the words "slavery" and "enslave- ment. "32

The close temporal relationship between the colonists' concerns over British policy in Quebec and the renewed popularity of Williams's narrative suggests a connection. The appearance of the 1773 and 1774 editions corresponded to a time of heightened anti-Catholic tension and concern over the Quebec bill. In addition, the sudden cessation of interest in the narrative after 1776 (it was not republished again until 1793)33 corresponded to a general dampening of anti-Catholic sentiment following the Declaration of Independence; once the colonists had proclaimed their political independence, they shrewdly realized that the viability of their new nation depended on the support of powerful allies -the most likely being the Catholic nations of France and Spain. For a devout Puritan like Williams, such a reversal would have been unthinkable, but for the more secular and practically minded revolu- tionaries, the switch was politically expedient.

Thus, in the years just preceding the Revolution, the Rowlandson and Williams narratives were popularized because they expressed the colonists' growing sense of themselves as a people held captive. Whether the politicization of these narratives was part of the colonists' widespread and sophisticated propaganda effort or merely a reflection of it is impossible to say. What can be asserted is that these Puritan captivity narratives were well-suited to support the revolutionaries'

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cause. For one, they were closely associated with the "Founding Fa- thers," whose authority the colonists wanted to invoke as a means to root their national origin in American soil. For another, because Row- landson's narrative had given birth to a new and distinctly American genre,34 its use associated the revolutionary cause not only with a native literary form, but one which had emerged from a unique American experience.

Moreover, the narratives framed that experience in a way which had implications suited to the revolutionaries' political agenda. The cap- tivity experience began and ended in freedom. If the end point endorsed the colonists' desire for independence, the starting point fit the colo- nists' understanding of their past. Correctly or not, they thought of the colonies as self-governing until the imposition of British colonial rule restrained their political liberties. Thus, the frame of the captivity narrative-beginning and ending in freedom-endorsed the colonists' desire to regain liberties which were theirs by right, by historical precedent, and by patrimony.

For the devout Puritan writer -and especially for Mary Rowlandson, who was the wife of a minister, and for John Williams, who was himself one - captivity was an intense religious experience beginning in affliction, leading into a period of testing, and ending in redemption. In the first stage, God, displeased with the Puritan's waywardness, subjected him to sufferings and humiliation in the hands of his Indian captors to quicken his faith. The appropriate response to this divine chastisement was repentance and patient endurance. Colonists of the pre-war period found the Puritan's doctrine of affliction useful-not as a means of highlighting their own waywardness, but Britain's. Like Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, they scored a propaganda victory by portraying themselves as the long-suffering subjects of an unjust king. The Boyle woodcut of a militantly defiant Rowlandson contradicts this portrayal, of course, but herein lies the virtue of the captivity as a metaphor for revolution; the story of affliction becomes a rallying cry for defiance. If the Boyle cut subverts a key lesson in Rowlandson' s narrative, it does so only in the service of a higher law- the inalienable right of liberty.

The second stage of the captivity experience, testing, also suited the revolutionary agenda. Rowlandson's stay among the Indians meant living not only with the people of the devil, but with an alien culture. In Williams's case, the pressures to convert and acculturate were even

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 45

greater because of the proselytizing French Catholics. Since redemption depended upon resisting these pressures, they emphatically rejected the religious beliefs and customs of their captors as a way of affirming their own. To the colonists, this affirmation amounted to an endorse- ment of the culture of their forefathers. If that culture was not exactly American, neither was it exactly British. In the context of late eigh- teenth-century Boston, then, keeping faith through trial had a patriotic, as well as a religious meaning.

The colonists also found the final stage of the captivity experience a suitable expression of their growing sense of national identity and purpose. God granted the Puritan captives their freedom because they had repented and had successfully endured testing. Thus, they emerged from their captivity redeemed. Their deliverance did not assure sal- vation, of course, but did prefigure it. More importantly, since the captive's deliverance represented the society's at large, it validated the community's status as God's Chosen People and foretold its destined liberation. For Puritan New England, this meant liberation from the scourge of Indian raids and captivities; for colonial America, this meant liberation from British tyranny.

By the time the Revolution became a reality, the concept of a people destined to be redeemed from a collective captivity experience had become thoroughly linked in the American imagination with the concept of political rebellion. Just how thoroughly is suggested by the proposal of a captivity scene as the motif for the Great Seal of the United States. Its design, submitted as a proposal to Congress by Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams in July 1776, portrays the Israelites safely across the Red Sea, while their former Egyptian captors are overwhelmed by collapsing walls of water (see Figure 3). As interesting as the scene itself is the motto which encircles it: "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God!"36 The design was later rejected, but only because it was "too busy," not because it was inappropriate. Churchmen had greater success in pop- ularizing the association between the Exodus and the revolutionary cause, as evidenced by many sermons of the period.37 Such associations became even more fixed in the public mind as the war progressed, for what had once been a means for expressing (or, perhaps, reflecting) pre-war propaganda became a fact of life for Americans who found themselves in British-occupied territory and, more especially, for the thousands of Americans who became prisoners of war.

One of the first and most prominent of these was Ethan Allen, whose

46 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

Fig 3. From I-asn, Philip M. The Amica Eag (Bost: New York Graphic Soety, 1975). Couresy, Anmicn Num oat Socety.

rash assault on Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 had resulted in a stunning victory. On 25 September of the same year, he led an equally rash assault on Montreal in which he and about thirty of his men were captured. He spent nearly three years in the hands of the British, finally gaining his liberty in a prisoner exchange on 6 May 1778. Within a year of his release, Allen recounted his captivity in what was the first American prisoner of war narrative ever published.3- His Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen's Captivity was immediately popular, going through at least eight editions in the two years following its appearance.39 Frank

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 47

Luther Mott estimates that it achieved sales approaching 20,000 copies in the first year alone.40 Allen attained this extraordinary popularity not merely because his accusations of British inhumanity toward Amer- ican prisoners made good propaganda, but also because he exploited what those who republished the Rowlandson and Williams narratives had: the potential of the Puritan captivity narrative for expressing the rejection of political and cultural ties to Britain. Essentially, Allen's Narrative functions as a politicized version of Puritan captivity nar- ratives;41 he might well have adapted Williams's title for his own account, calling it The Redeemed Captive, Returning to America.

Although Allen worked within the conventions of the Puritan cap- tivity narrative, Indians appear in his Narrative only at the moment of his capture. Their portrayal shows how Allen adapted these conventions for his own purposes. After Allen surrenders himself and his sword to a British officer from the Montreal garrison, an Indian, invested with all the characteristics Rowlandson ascribes to such "hell-hounds,"42 rushes upon him with musket at the ready:

he seemed to advance with more than mortal speed; . . . his hellish visage was beyond all description; snake's eyes appear innocent in comparison to his; . . . malice, death, murder, and the wrath of devils and damned spirits are the emblems of his counte-nance. . ..

One would expect that only divine intervention could save Allen from a bloody end, but what follows instead is a comic scene in which he "twitches" the British officer between himself and the Indian as a means of defense (212). When another "imp of hell" joins the first in the attack, Allen makes "the officer fly around with incredible velocity" in an effort to maintain the effectiveness of his human shield (222). The degeneration of this scene from spiritual drama to slapstick makes it clear that he does not intend the Puritans' conventional portrait of the Indian to be taken seriously.44 Allen's quarrel is not with the Indians; he had himself tried to solicit the support of tribes along the Canadian border for his raid on Montreal. His primary purpose in invoking the Indian-as-hellhound convention is to show who the real Indians are, to achieve the same British-for-Indian substitution achieved by the colonists following the Boston Massacre.

He does this by setting up an ironic contrast between his relief at being rescued from the Indians and his subsequent treatment by the British. Following his rescue, Allen takes deliberate note of his relief:

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"escaping from so awful a death, made even imprisonment happy; the more so as my conquerors on the field treated me with great civility and politeness" (222). But he discovers immediately afterward that, although his conquerors on the field treat him with great civility and politeness, General Prescott, commander of the Montreal garrison, does not. Prescott comes close to striking his prisoner during their first interview and then decides to execute several of Allen's Canadian followers as traitors and to transport Allen himself to England to be hung for treason (222-23). Thus, Allen quickly learns that he has been delivered from the hands of uncivilized savages into the hands of civilized ones. The Indians, having served to highlight this ironic realization, make no other appearance in the Narrative.

Allen adapts and exploits other Puritan conventions throughout his Narrative. Like the Puritans, he sees his captivity as representative of the community's collective experience. When he was taken to England, his execution depended upon whether he was considered a "rebel," subject to punishment for treason, or a prisoner of war, with a right to humane treatment. Politics had a great deal to do with this question, since the British feared that if they granted their captives status as prisoners of war their action "might be construed as a tacit recognition of American independence ...... "4 Because Allen was the first Amer- ican to face the possibility of trial for treason, the outcome of his case would establish a precedent. Thus, when he learns that he is not to be executed, but to be sent back to America as a prisoner of war, he understands the decision's implications: "my being sent to England, for the purpose of being executed, and [the fear of American retaliation on British captives] restraining them, was rather a foil on their laws and authori-ty . . ." (230). Allen implies that this decision was a first step toward securing not only his independence, but the nation's as well.

Since the nation's independence will be realized on the battlefield, Allen strengthens the representativeness of his captivity by cultivating the illusion of a reflexive relationship between the military situation and his own. When American forces are humiliated early in the war, Allen endures humiliation at the hands of his captors. Even after his return to America, he suffers close confinement and rough treatment for nearly a year aboard English vessels off Cape Fear, New York, and Halifax. As the revolutionaries' situation improves, Allen's does also. He obtains parole in New York in October, 1776, and for most

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 49

of the rest of his eleven months in captivity has free run of the city. From 1777-78, the impressive string of American victories, including Princeton, Trenton, and Saratoga, parallel Allen's progress toward freedom. Allen goes so far as to alter the historical record to develop the parallel. Both the Battle of Saratoga and France's entry in the war on the side of the Americans (prompted by the Saratoga victory) were events that occurred months after Allen was released, but in the Nar- rative he depicts them as occurring before his exchange. He evidently makes this alteration because he wants his release to correspond with what he believes will be the military turning point of the war.

Like the Puritans, Allen shares the lesson of his own captivity in order to bring about the reformation of his readers. The central insight gained during his captivity, of course, is the inhumane way in which the British treat their captives. Allen recasts this insight into the re- ligious framework of the Puritan captivity narrative so that the inhu- manity of the British serves as incontrovertible evidence of their alliance with the devil. Within this framework, recognition of the true nature of the British has spiritual consequences. Allen's Narrative therefore reads like a lay sermon as he works to bring his countrymen to this recognition. He is not alone in his efforts. Heaven itself, Allen suggests, arranges the events of the war in order to expose the enemy's character and win converts to the American cause:

[I]t was . .. a day of trouble.... Our little army was retreating in New- Jersey, and our young men [were being] murdered by hundreds in New- York [prisons]. The army of Britain and Heshland prevailed for a little season, as though it was ordered by Heaven to shew . . . what the British would have done if they could . . . and to excite every honest man to stand forth in the defense of liberty, and to establish the independency of the United States of America forever. (258)

Allen's Narrative is thus a call for a renewal of the people's faith and the salvation of the nation, where faith means patriotism and salvation means independence.

There will be some who do not heed the call, and for Allen, as for the Puritans, the consequences are eternal. Among the unrepentant are the Tories, whose "hellish delight and triumph" at the sight of their countrymen dying in New York prisons classes them with the inhuman British (253). Allen, adapting the words of St. Paul,46 condemns their loyalty to the British as idolatrous and their conduct toward their countrymen as damnable:

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Burgoyne was to them a demi-god. To him they paid adoration; in him the tories placed their confidence, "and forgot the Lord their God," and served Howe, Burgoyne, and Knyphausen, "and became vile in their own imagi- nation, and their foolish hearts were darkened," professing to be great pol- iticians, and relying on foreign and merciless invaders, and with them seeking the ruin, bloodshed and destruction of their country. . . Therefore, God gave them over to strong delusion, to believe a lie, that they might be damned. (263)

The British, of course, are more hardhearted than the Tories and, thus, are unquestionably bound for the infernal regions. Among them, Gen- eral Howe, who was commander of New York during Allen's impris- onment there, and who Allen therefore assumes had knowledge of the plight of the American prisoners, has a welcoming party awaiting him: "legions of infernal devils, with all their tremendous horrors, are im- patiently ready to receive Howe . . . into the most exquisite agonies of the hottest region of hell fire" (269).

As a means for authenticating their faith, the Puritans emphasized their resistance to the beliefs of their captors. Allen does likewise, but only after he has established that American culture differs from British culture. He highlights the difference when he arrives in England. He steps ashore clad in the same garments in which he was captured- the habiliments of the frontiersman, complete with "fawn-skin jacket" (229). The curiosity of the crowds which gather to catch sight of him as he disembarks at Falmouth (229) and as he exercises himself on the parade at Pembroke Castle (233) is aroused by the strangeness of his frontier garb: "I am apprehensive my . . . dress contributed not a little to the . . . excitement of curiosity: to see . . . such a rebel as they were pleased to call me . .. was never before seen in England" (234).47

Representing himself as culturally different from his captors enables Allen to amplify the heroism of his resisting acculturation. The moment of temptation comes when an emissary of General Howe's offers him the rank of colonel and a large tract of land in New England if he will lead a regiment of Tories in Burgoyne's planned New York campaign (261). Allen refuses the offer, telling the emissary that he "viewed the offer of land to be similar to that which the devil offered Jesus Christ, 'To give him all the kingdoms of the world, if he would fall down and worship him; when . .. the damned soul had not one foot of land upon earth [to offer]' " (262). Like the Puritans, Allen suggests that resisting cultural conversion is equivalent to resisting the wiles of the devil.

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 51

But to make a further jibe at the British, Allen does something very un-Puritan. He claims to be won over to the French culture instead. Because of France's willingness to support the American cause, Allen says,

My affections are Frenchified. I glory in Louis the sixteenth, the generous and powerful ally of these states; am fond of a connection with so enterprising, learned, polite, courteous and commercial a nation.. . I begin to learn the French tongue, and recommend it to my countrymen.. . (276)

Allen obviously relished the irony of claiming allegiance to the nation that had been Britain's traditional enemy and that was likely to play a key role in severing it from its colonies forever.

Allen emerges from his captivity, like his Puritan counterpart, a redeemed man. He has observed the character of his captors and rec- ognized it to be savage. He has undergone a trial of faith and remained true. Just as he has been redeemed, so has the nation. The victory at Saratoga has brought foreign military assistance and political recog- nition, seemingly assuring the nation's independence. When Allen returns to his home in Bennington, Vermont, he notes that he "was thought to be dead" (278), suggesting that his captivity has resulted in a rebirth. The analog to his personal regeneration is clear enough: through a collective captivity experience, the colonies have died, and "the rising States of America" have been born (278).

What exactly this personal and national regeneration has given birth to is not certain from the Narrative, for Allen is unable to find a single voice with which to speak as the representative American. John McWilliams has pointed out that Allen seems to want "to create a consistent heroic character for himself," but that he is unable to do so.48 Instead, he plays the roles of a variety of national types: the frontiersman, the Yankee, the gentleman. McWilliams suggests that Allen plays these roles because he had "lost a firm sense of self."49 But Allen's difficulty is representative in the sense that the new nation is just as unsure of its identity as Allen. Perhaps Allen's role playing, which is deliberate, is itself a national characteristic, for it is not unlike that of other contemporary literary figures, such as Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography (1771-1781) and Teague O'Regan in Modern Chivalry (1792-1815). In a pluralistic society, perhaps the most rep- resentative American is the one -with the greatest plurality of selves. However it may be, the virtue of his captivity is that it allows Allen

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to define his cultural identity in negative, rather than positive terms. He identifies his Americanness by means of contrasts with a variety of British audiences and types: he plays the frontiersman-roaring out strings of expletives, wielding his fists like wooden mallets, and chew- ing nails -to awe his revilers into silence; he plays the Yankee to outdo the banter of British wits with native humor and the policy of royal officials with homespun shrewdness; he plays the educated gentleman discussing moral philosophy and behaving with civility and honor to astonish his refined auditors into granting him their respect. Thus, Allen's Americanness emerges, however indistinctly and Cerberus- like, from a triangulation of these contrasts.

Clearly, the 1770s mark a significant period in the evolution of the captivity genre. From the republication of Rowlandson's and Wil- liams's accounts early in the decade to the publication of Allen's in 1779, the captivity narratives both expressed and shaped American revolutionary sentiment. They did so, first, by transforming the cap- tivity experience into a potent metaphor for the Revolution. In appro- priating the Puritan narratives themselves or adopting their conven- tions-even as most contemporary narratives, like Boone's, were rejecting them in favor of secular ones-the colonists harnessed the powerful religious and historical patterns associated with the settlement of New England and with the birth of the Israelite nation. These patterns lent not only authority to the revolutionary cause, but also an air of inevitability, as Allen's confident declaration about the "rising States of America" suggests (278). To a nation whose independence still lay two years in the future at Yorktown, such assurances were comforting and, undoubtedly, the fundamental source of the Narrative's appeal. Perhaps the post-war interest in such captivity accounts as Royall Tyler's novel The Algerine Captive (Walpole, N.H., 1797) and John Foss's Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss, Several Years a Prisoner in Algiers (Newburyport, Mass., 1798)50 can also be explained, in part, as America's attempt to reassure itself about its independence; in the face of its impotence before Barbary pirates, the young nation needed to believe it would eventually assert its sover- eignty.

No less significant is the way the captivity narrative articulated rev- olutionary sentiment by asserting America's cultural distinctiveness. While most contemporary narratives like Boone's stressed the captives' assimilation of another culture, the republished Puritan accounts and

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 53

Allen's Narrative emphasized their resistance to it. Because these latter narratives literally or figuratively represented this culture as British, they declared, in effect, the new nation's cultural independence. That they did so in a genre so uniquely American served to amplify their message. Allen's Narrative defined Americanness in negative (and thus vague) terms, to be sure, but this definition was not less significant for doing so. For Americans poised between two cultures, the myth of separation was as crucial as the myth of acculturation. Indeed, renunciation of British culture was a prerequisite to the creation of an uniquely American one. Again, though, one senses insecurity in the nation's need to assert itself in this way. Richard Slotkin has noted that the Puritans' fear of acculturation was born of a perverse attraction to the wilderness and Indian culture51; similar insecurities seem to arise from the colonists' paradoxical admiration of the culture they so much wanted to renounce. Allen's apparent pleasure in being accepted as an equal among British officers on the eve of his exchange may reflect this attraction, unconsciously revealed once the pressure to acculturate seemed past. His satisfaction in making the "transition from the provost criminals to the company of gentlemen" suggests that he preferred a role more closely associated with Europe than the Yankee or frontiers- man roles associated with America (277). Insecurities arising from this kind of attraction continued to haunt young America as it sought to measure its culture against that of its parent country.

Thus, the Revolutionary era revival of the Puritan captivity narratives and their adaptation by people like Allen represents an important and heretofore unrecognized complement to the frontier narratives in which men like Boone "out-Indianed the Indians" as they laid claim to the wilderness. If the latter was born from a confidence in what the nation hoped it would become, the former originated from an insecurity about what the nation hoped it could resist.

NOTES

1. Bibliographic information on captivity narratives is available in R. W. G. Vail's The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia, 1949). (Where specific editions are referred to in the notes, Vail's entry numbers will appear in brackets.) In the years between initial publication and 1769, Rowlandson's narrative was reprinted only once (1720) [331], while Williams was reprinted twice (1720 and 1758) [332 and 525].

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2. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, 1973), 95-96.

3. Slotkin, 20-24, 267. 4. Slotkin, 247. 5. "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone" was published as a chapter in the

appendix of Filson's The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke and achieved such popularity that it was often reprinted separately and in anthologies (Slotkin, 278).

6. Slotkin, 286-89. 7. Slotkin, 23. 8. Of these editions [211-14], the last appeared in London. 9. These editions, grouped according to the year in which they appeared, are: 1770

[604-06], 1771 [609], 1773 [620-21]. 10. The 1773 edition [621] was printed in New London. 11. Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution: 1763-1783 (Chapel

Hill, 1941), 150. 12. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York,

1976), 145. 13. Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty & Goodness of God .. .; Being a Narrative

of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Reprinted in Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, eds., Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Cap- tivity and Redemption: 1676-1724 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 34-35.

14. Joseph Warren, 5 March 1772 oration delivered in Boston. Reprinted in Hezekiah Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (New York, 1876), 22.

15. Joseph Warren, 5 March 1775 oration delivered in Boston. Reprinted in Niles, 27.

16. See Niles, 20ff and note 35. 17. Woodbridge Brown, Town Clerk of Abington, Letter to the Boston Gazette, 2

April 1770. 18. While woodcuts appear in five of the six editions published between 1770 and

1773, only Boyle's can be taken as a meaningful representation of the publisher's intention. In the case of the other four, the costs of commissioning a skilled artist apparently caused the publishers either to use cuts made for previously published works (as in [604 and 605]), or to employ an unskilled artist to do the cutting (as in [609 and 621]).

19. Boyle's edition is [620]. His Whig sympathies are evident from his journal; see "Boyle's Journal of Occurrences in Boston, 1759-1778," The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 84-85 (1930-31): 142-71, 248-72, 357-82.

20. Vaughan, 33. 21. Although Pelham first executed the engraving, Revere was able to make a copy

and get it to press by 26 March 1770, a week earlier than Pelham, and only three weeks after the Massacre. Clarence S. Brigham, in Paul Revere's Engravings (New York, 1969), calculates that from the two engravings, some 775 impressions were made within a month of the Massacre. In a city of about 17,000 (Silverman, 291), that means that about 3 percent of the population actually possessed a print and that many more saw it. Pelham's and Revere's depiction of the Massacre became even more fixed in the popular imagination in the months and years which followed, for between 1770 and 1772, the engraving (or copies of it) appeared in numerous other prints, in broadsides, and in almanacs (Brigham, 57-64). By the time Boyle's woodcut for Rowlandson's Narrative appeared in 1773, the depiction of the Massacre had achieved almost iconographic status. It is therefore likely that Bostonians recognized

PURITAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 55

the similarity between the stance of the Indians in the cut and the soldiers in the Massacre scene.

22. The similarity between Revere's engraving and the woodcut may even result from common artistry. Revere executed two cuts for Boyle's edition of A Vision of Hell, which appeared the same year as his edition of the Rowlandson Narrative (Brigham, 203). Boyle advertises both in his 1774 edition of Williams's narrative [641] and takes special care to highlight the illustrations-suggesting, perhaps, that the printer connected the two otherwise dissimilar works because of the cuts. Although Revere's daybook has no entry for the Rowlandson cut, as it has for the Vision cut, Brigham observes that "Revere undoubtedly made . . . cuts, which for one reason or another were not entered in his charge accounts . . ." (198). At the very least, one can say that the Rowlandson cut is in the manner of Revere's primitive style.

23. The secularization of Rowlandson's Narrative is also evident in the alteration of her original title in the editions published between 1770 and 1773. Her original title was The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. The title of the editions published in the 1770s is simply A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.

24. E. McClung Fleming, "Symbols of the United States: From Indian Queen to Uncle Sam," Frontiers of American Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne et al. (Lafayette, 1968), 12; Silverman, 86.

25. This edition was printed in 1758 [525]. 26. These editions are, respectively, [625], [641], and [653]. 27. Charles Metzger, The Quebec Act, a Primary Cause of the American Revolution

(New York, 1936), 27n. 28. Metzger, 22-24. 29. Metzger, 39. 30. Metzger, 41. 31. One New York freeholder feared that the Quebec Act would make it possible

for Britain "to turn the Canadians and Indians loose on the frontier settlements" (Metzger, 48).

32. For a sampling of this rhetoric, see Metzger, 40-41. 33. This edition was [957]. 34. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the captivity was popularly recognized

as a literary form (Slotkin, 97). 35. Paul A. Varg, "The Advent of Nationalism, 1758-1776," American Quarterly

16 (Summer 1964): 169-81. 36. Silverman, 323. 37. Michael Walzer, in Exodus and Revolution (New York, 1985), cites four ex-

amples (see ch. 1, note 17), but others could be added to his list, such as Jonas Clark's "The Fate of Blood-thirsty Oppressors, and God's Tender Care of his distressed People" (Boston, 1777).

38. Another captivity narrative, entitled A Narrative of the Capture and Treatment of John Dodge, by the English at Detroit [660], was published in 1779, but, since Allen's account first appeared in the spring (Charles A. Jellison, Ethan Allen: Frontier Rebel [Syracuse, 1969], 219) and Dodge's appeared late in the year (Vail, 307), Allen's work pre-dates Dodge's by half a year.

39. A bibliography of Allen's Narrative appears in John Pell, Ethan Allen (New York, 1929), 276-77. Pell's list shows that it remained popular well after the Rev- olution. At least nineteen editions appeared between 1779 and 1854. Understandably, it was most popular in Allen's native Vermont.

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40. Frank Luther Mott, in Golden Multitudes: The Story of Bestsellers in the United States (New York, 1947), estimates that although Allen's Narrative did not reach the 20,000 sales required for overall best sellers of the 1770-1779 period (304), it was the best-selling publication for the year 1779 (316).

41. At least three critics have noted the debt Allen's Narrative owes to the Indian captivity genre: Slotkin 251-52; John McWilliams, "The Faces of Ethan Allen: 1760- 1860," New England Quarterly 49 (June 1976): 267; Robert J. Denn, "Captivity Narratives of the American Revolution," Journal of American Culture 2 (Winter 1980): 576-77. Beyond noting the debt, however, none of these critics except the first examine how Allen adapts and exploits the early Puritan captivity conventions. Slotkin's ex- amination is itself cursory. Contemporary publishers also associated Allen's Narrative with the Indian captivities. The 1780 edition of Elizabeth Hanson's narrative [667], originally published in 1724 as God's Mercy Surmounting Man's Cruelty, includes an advertisement for Allen's Narrative. The publisher, E. Russell, obviously thought that Allen's prisoner of war narrative would appeal to the same readers purchasing Hanson's traditional account.

42. Vaughan, 35. 43. Ethan Allen, A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen's Captivity ... (Philadelphia,

1779). Reprinted in Henry W. DePuy, Ethan Allen and the Green-Mountain Heroes of '76 (New York, 1854), 221-22. All further quotations are made from this edition and cited in parentheses.

44. Slotkin quotes Allen's description of his encounter with the attacking Indian, but fails to include the slapstick scene which follows (251). This leads him incorrectly to conclude that Allen's use of the typical captivity narrative Indian is a serious reflection of his own attitudes: "[T]he Indian remains an enemy, but he now shares that role with [the European enemy]" (252). The text, in fact, offers no basis for the claim that Allen is an Indian-hater. To the contrary, as a buckskinned frontiersman from Vermont, Allen shares a remarkable resemblance to the part-Indian frontiersman from Kentucky, Daniel Boone.

45. Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners During the American Rev- olution (Athens, Ohio, 1976), 6.

46. Romans 1:21-25. 47. Melville would later borrow from Allen's record of this encounter for several

chapters of his own version of a captivity narrative entitled Israel Potter (1855). Interestingly, Melville's purpose in the novel is precisely to define American culture in terms of its heroes. In Allen's posturing as a half-Indianized frontiersman, Melville finds a more attractive model for the American character than the alternatives he posits, Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones.

48. McWilliams, 270. 49. McWilliams, 270. 50. Foss's narrative was popular enough to require a second, expanded edition the

same year it first appeared. Captivity among Barbary pirates remained a popular literary topic for twenty years, serving as the subject of poems and dramas as well as novels and narratives.

51. Slotkin, 54-56, 98-102, 123-25.