Tomahawk at the Door
The Deerfield Massacre, 1704 (PVMA Deerfield / Francis Back)
By Richard R. Hough III
This review appears in the Summer 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in Early America
by James L. Swanson (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
In the dead of winter on the American frontier, Mohawk, Abenaki, and Pennacook warriors, climbing snowdrifts, slipped over a protective palisade surrounding the tiny English colonial settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Warriors took ax and tomahawk to doors and windows to gain entry to settler homes. At the house of Reverend John Williams, the town’s pastor, raiders murdered six-year-old John and newborn Jerusha, crushing their skulls at the threshold before their parents. Williams and his wife, Eunice, along with their other three children were taken hostage with other surviving townspeople.
James Swanson’s new book, The Deerfield Massacre, brings to life the English frontier colonies. Swanson creates a terrifying retelling of the raid and explores the complicated history following the attack, which occurred 320 years ago, on February 29, 1704.
Forty-seven inhabitants of Deerfield, mostly children, lost their lives in the raid. Another 112 people were taken captive. Half of those hostages were children. The prize captives were force-marched three hundred miles to Quebec in the dead of winter. Those who could not keep up were executed by club or tomahawk, including Eunice Williams. Eighty-nine survived the march. Of the survivors, many, like Williams’s own daughter, chose to stay among the Iroquois to marry and live as Indians, losing their English language and religion.
We have all but forgotten that day and what it meant to Americans and Indians alike. But Swanson memorializes the raid as among the most important events in early America. The attack had a profound impact on the consciousness of young America, spawning what were known as “captivity narratives.” The Redeemed Captive, written by John Williams, became a literary classic and remains in print.
FRONTIER ORIGINS
Swanson immerses the reader in history’s action, his driving narrative hard to put down. His work is the product of meticulous and well-documented research. Swanson ably surveys the historical context, starting with the open and bloody conflicts, dating to the mid-seventeenth century, between the easternmost of the proud Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy and the English colonists.
Today, Deerfield survives as an idyllic New England town, lined with eighteenth-century homes, a living museum to early America. It is home now to the prestigious prep school Deerfield Academy, which straddles the main Albany Road, bordered by farms. The town’s ancient cemetery resides on campus, with carved headstones of winged death’s heads or crossed bone.
As a student there, I awoke each morning to see the mounded mass grave of the massacre’s dead, mostly children. My own family were Deerfield settlers from the town of Dedham, near Boston. While I had learned about Deerfield’s history, Swanson provides a deeply textured narrative to make sense of the place. Deerfield’s bucolic setting belies the horrors of its frontier origins.
Life in early New England was brutal and harsh. Swanson evokes a scary world full of superstition, where the settlers “feared the supernatural, invisible world of the witches and devils who they believed surrounded them.” Wolves prowled wood edges for prey, as these sustenance farmers tried to carve their civilization out of the wilderness. Violence was meted out on women and children equally as on men. Scalping was practiced by both the Indians and the English.
Native nations and their people suffered, too, torn between intertribal warfare and the Europeans encroaching on their traditional lands. Swanson deftly and sympathetically handles the native nations’ historical position before and after the attack, reviewing the shifting lore of the event, as the town and natives grappled with the past. Swanson renders the native peoples as fully human—people with their own desires, motivations, loyalties, and interests.
Too often, modern history infantilizes the native people as acted upon, as mere reflections of colonists’ actions. Swanson rectifies prior histories that focus on the attacked colonists in this frontier battle. Here, the proud natives occupy an important role, as fully fledged political and social actors, making alliances, waging war and peace, and pursuing the self-determination of their own communities.
“Half the captives were under the age of eighteen,” Swanson writes. “Twelve of them were under the age of five.”
COOLIDGE VS. THE ONONDAGA
It is hard to fathom the bravery of the early settlers and how their struggles shaped the resilience, courage, practicality, faith, and hope of Americans. Calvin Coolidge was of such stock, raised in a small Vermont valley on the farm settled by his ancestors. Swanson’s history illuminates the character and conscience of early Americans like the Coolidges.
Some 220 years after the massacre, Coolidge, as president, signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to indigenous peoples. Previously, members of the tribes had been considered citizens of separate sovereign nations within the United States with treaty rights. In a twist of history that underscores the self-determination of the native peoples, the act was opposed by the Six Nations of Iroquois, the descendant league of tribes that attacked Deerfield in 1704.
In a 1924 letter to President Coolidge (addressed “To Our White Brother”), the chiefs of the Onondaga Nation wrote that they “sternly protest[ed]” the law. The Iroquois believed the act violated prior treaties with the United States, forced citizenship without consent, and diminished the separate and sovereign status of their nations.
Swanson’s approach rescues history from the dryly academic, conveying the animating roots of the American experience, both native and colonist. Swanson’s book is to be highly recommended as a historical corrective as well as a gripping and harrowing tale from America’s forgotten past.
Richard R. Hough III is chairman and CEO of Silvercrest Asset Management Group.