The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

“A severe indictment, very severe. But an accurate sign of popular feeling as winter approaches. Night of wolves.” 

Demos analyzes a letter from Solomon Stoddard, a pastoral colleague to John Williams who was based in a small Massachusetts town close to Deerfield. In the letter, Stoddard warns that the Native American way of waging war is particularly “barbarous” and that they “act like wolves.” Demos’s treatment of the letter highlights his flair for re-framing primary source documents in a narrative way.

“The moral of all this seems clear. If you are living at Deerfield in 1704, and if capture is your fate, it’s better by far to be a grown man than a woman, and best of all to be a teenager.” 

Many Deerfield residents who survived the initial Native American attack did not survive the grueling walk from Massachusetts to Canada. Demos analyzes the odds of surviving the walk by demographic. He finds that women fared worse than men, but teenagers of either gender had the highest rate of survival. This passage emphasizes how perilous life was for the Deerfield community, even for survivors of the attack. 

“That he did have a choice—to return to his prewar home or not—there is little doubt. His Deerfield roots had been entirely severed; for the time being, no Williamses resided there.” 

Demos attempts to go deep into the psychology of John Williams and the various characters who populate The Unredeemed Captive. With no historical record to explain his motives, Demos speculates as to why Williams would have been motivated to return to Deerfield in the wake of the massacre. Through careful scholarship, Demos gets a full picture of John Williams’s life—his roots had been severed, he was totally alone in the world—to examine why John might have been tempted to call another place home.

“A set of lives, formerly interwoven, then ripped apart, now painstakingly restitched. The triumphant end to a four-year sequence of privation and suffering.” 

This passage refers to John Williams’s family having been “restitched” after the family members were all torn apart following the Deerfield massacre. This takes place in 1707. 

“This paradigm—presuming, as it does, that captives hold great interest for both God and humankind—sets the tone for all that follows.” 

Demos explains in Chapter 3 that “captive narratives” were popular at the time when John Williams wrote The Redeemed Captive. In this passage, Demos sets the stage for the various captive narratives he explores in Chapter 3, explaining that they held both religious and social significance for colonial readers. 

“In part, too, the narrative is a process of sorting an otherwise jumbled succession of events.” 

Here, Demos refers to John Williams’s written account of his experience in Mohawk captivity, published in 1707 and titled The Redeemed Captive. Demos, in analyzing this account alongside the events themselves, explains that Williams’s narrative is an attempt at organizing his experience in a more linear fashion. This points to the limitations and challenges in the study of history; it also, in some ways, resembles the project that Demos has before him in writing The Unredeemed Captive. 

“If we are different, we are better. Tested in the fires of adversity. Strengthened. Wiser and deeper than we were before.” 

The practice of taking captives was commonplace in colonial America. Though it does not appear explicitly in documents from the time, Demos infers that captives were considered as having a uniquely strong faith within the Puritan community, given the trials they had endured. In the quote above, Demos gives a “voice” to those captives, offering up a first-person (albeit fictional) explanation they might have given to other members of the Puritan community upon their return from captivity. 

“They make a stope [sic] [upon reaching their home village], and strip their prisoners stark naked, and with their painting stuff red them all over, and sett [sic] them before the company that has been to warr [sic].” 

This passage is an excerpt from an Englishman’s diary circa 1709, one of many primary source documents that inform The Unredeemed Captive. It is an eyewitness account of what happened when English captives were first taken to Native American communities. The conventional spelling of colonial English remain intact. Not only do primary sources help ground the text in fact and accuracy, they also give the reader a sense of the feel for language and different speech patterns of the era.

“But, taken as a whole, the sequence reveals something of the complexities of wilderness warfare and diplomacy. Poor communications, fragile alliances, ‘plots,’ and plain misunderstanding: all were part of this volatile mix.” 

This quotation encapsulates the overarching message of Chapter 4: that war, and the business of capturing/returning captives, was fraught with many layers of complexities. 

“They just cannot face it, cannot quite write the words without tears. But they know. And they grieve. For Eunice, their Eunice—a young gentlewoman, daughter to the Reverend Mr. Williams, minister at Deerfield, and child of so many prayers—has just been married. And her husband is a ‘Philistine’ indeed.” 

The Unredeemed Captive is not a work of traditional, historical scholarship but of narrative non-fiction, and Demos delivers facts with dramatic flair. In this passage, Demos reveals the climactic fact in the story of Eunice Williams: She has married a Mohawk man, and thus, in captivity, her fate has been sealed. 

“How John Williams took the ‘melancholy news’ of Eunice’s marriage in Canada is not known, for no single writing of his survives from the relevant period.”

Chapter 5 opens with a statement highlighting what we, as modern-day readers, do not know about John Williams. Just as important to Demos as the facts are the details—from personal stories to key historical data—that go untold when written records are unavailable. Rather than have them lost to history forever, Demos tries to extrapolate from known data what those unknowns might be, which is a primary motif of the book.

“A striking admission here: the limits of the priest’s own authority. They will have what they want, this young Indian and his English-born sweetheart. They would rather be ‘joined’ in the Christian way; but if that is denied them, never mind.” 

One of the numerous primary sources examined throughout the book is a letter written by John Schuyler to Governor Joseph Dudley of Massachusetts in Chapter 5. Here, Demos notes that Schuyler is the first connection to Deerfield who learns of Eunice’s interest in marrying a Kahnawake man. Schuyler’s “striking admission” is that Eunice and Arosen are ignoring the priest who refused to marry them—meaning their hearts are intent on marriage, and so they will marry at whatever cost. Demos emphasizes that Eunice and Arosen’s marriage was not arranged; rather, it was a “love-match” (105). 

“This varied nomenclature directly reflects the ambiguity of their cultural, and geographical, placement—and the extraordinary complexity of their history. Mohawk, Iroquois, Indian, in ascending order of generality; Christian, to a degree; French, in a limited sense; ‘brethren’ to some, allies of others, and, of course, enemies of still others: the Kahnawake were all these, and more.” 

The Kahnawake tribe was known by different names, depending on the group referring to them: The French called them “les Iroquois du Sault,” the Jesuits called them “nos pauvres sauvages,” and English settlers called them the “French Mohawks.” In colonial New England, as Demos notes here, identities shifted depending on location and allegiance—this complicates Eunice’s story.

“What then, might ‘complaisance and necessity’ have meant in the lives of these migrants? Lacking any answer—any hint of an answer—that would come directly from them, we can only speculate. But there are some clues.” 

In Chapter 6, Demos analyzes Jesuit missionary records from a Canadian community called LaPrairie and learns that many Native Americans were immigrating there from neighboring communities. Why did so many Native Americans move to LaPrairie? The Jesuits reported that the Native Americans arrived because they were eager to join the Jesuit faith, but Demos questions this reasoning. Rather than taking the primary source material at face value, Demos seeks other reasons; in this way, his speculation leads to greater truths that are not necessarily reflected in historical documents. 

“About Eunice Williams inside this strangely positioned community [the Kahnawake] we know only a very few, very bare facts. But because Kahnawake was so often described by visitors, it is possible to reconstruct a at least the outlines of her experience there.” 

Demos goes to great lengths to fill in gaps in the historical records that prevent him from telling the fullest possible version of Eunice Williams’s story. Demos also tries to ensure that the way he approaches these gaps is as accurate as possible. For example, in the above quotation, he acknowledges that the facts of Eunice’s existence among the Kahnawake are very sparse; however, he is able to draw from the descriptions by visitors to shape an “outline” of what Eunice’s life was like there.  

“Above all, these ceremonies signaled a crossing of cultural boundaries and incorporation into the Kahnawake community. And in Eunice Williams’s case, the process was delicately invoked by her name itself. A’ongote means, literally, ‘she has been planted as a person.’” 

Crossing boundaries is a major theme in The Unredeemed Captive. Eunice’s experience is the foremost example of boundary crossing, from Puritanism to Native American. In this passage, the meaning of her new Kahnawake name proves her acceptance into her Native American community after crossing these boundaries. 

“But Stephen, too, seems to have flattened that memory [of living among the Kahnawake, when he too was a captive] into stereotypes […] How wretchedly they live. How fortunate am I to have escaped their clutches. And, by implication at least: how unfortunate my poor captive sister. Not for him the sharp-eyed curiosity of a Lafitau.”

This passage, about how no other former captive (especially Eunice’s father and brother, John Williams and Stephen Williams) even attempted to understand why Eunice chose to remain with the Kahnawake. Any writing about them, Demos writes, is chock full of stereotypes. This passage shows the casual style in which Demos writes, as we see him slip into Stephen Williams’s voice to elucidate Stephen’s thought more clearly and intimately.

“Closer. Still closer. John Carter; the Tarbell brothers; William Rogers. But again the summer passed, and the following winter and spring.”

The above quotation describes Stephen Williams’s efforts to find Eunice when she disappears for an extended period of time after her visit to Longmeadow. With no system of mass communication, individuals—mostly traders—would often come bearing news of friends and relatives outside their local communities. John Carter, the Tarbell brothers, and Williams Rogers are three such figures, all conveying word to Stephen about the whereabouts of his sister. With this knowledge, Stephen feels that he is getting “closer” to finally tracking her down.

“The Awakening had, by this point, spread throughout the countryside east of the Connecticut Valley. Word of Eunice’s arrival had also spread […]. Now the two events came together in the context of an extraordinary religious ‘exercise.’ The site was the Mansfield meetinghouse, the preacher Eunice’s cousin Solomon Williams (pastor at Lebanon, Connecticut).” 

During the religious fervor of the Great Awakening, Eunice’s cousin gave a historical sermon on the occasion of her visit to Longmeadow. Throughout the book, Demos weaves larger cultural events (like the Great Awakening) with smaller-scale happenings (Eunice’s visit to Longmeadow) to show the interplay of history on the macro and micro levels. In this way, Demos treats history not as a linear series of events but rather as a complex web of multiple competing narratives, each of which helps shape the course of events.

“On March 28, Eunice and Arosen made their farewells to Longmeadow. On March 29, England declared war on France.” 

Chapter 10 marks the dawn of a new era in Eunice’s story. For the first time in the narrative, the Williamses completely give up hope—40 years after her initial abduction—that Eunice will ever return to Deerfield. Demos contextualizes Eunice’s depart from Longmeadow within a much larger force—intercontinental war—and even infers that the two are connected. 

“How fascinating and (for us) frustrating: only we could hear a few of those Indian stories. But the ease, the comfort, the sense of familiarity are evident, in any case—and are themselves important.” 

Here, Demos analyzes a journal entry by Stephen Williams about a day when Captain Kellogg and Arosen came to visit, sharing with Stephen many “Indian stories.” Demos remarks that it is “frustrating” that we do not have access to these stories because they must have been fascinating. In this way, Demos draws the reader into the various challenges of the historical research process.

“What, then, is the thought and feeling expressed here? Interest. Affection. And, above all, a wish for connection.” 

This is Demos analyzing one of the last—and only—pieces of writing by Eunice Williams. Dated 1771, it is a letter addressed to Stephen Williams, and given that Eunice did not speak English it would have been prepared with the aid of a translator. Demos sees a desire for communion and connection embedded into that brief message.

 “Three different endings, then, representing the three main strands of her long life story. However, in one respect they do converge. Each denies the finality of death—and continues the story toward an endless ‘next world’ future.”

Eunice’s death could be viewed from three different cultural lenses: the Catholic tradition, the Puritan tradition, and the Native American tradition. Demos gives a sweeping overview of each faith’s beliefs surrounding death in this section of the book, fittingly titled “Endings.” Though each religious tradition is vastly different in the particulars, they share one common feature, which is that all believe in some kind of afterlife.