Woman's Life in Colonial Days by Carl Holliday

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_VII. Indian Attacks_

The children whose comment has just been quoted were probably safe from
all dangers except ague and sparking; but in the previous century women
and children daily faced possibilities that apparently should have kept
them in a continuous state of fright. Time after time mothers and babes
were stolen by the Indians, and the tales of their sufferings fill many
an interesting page in the diaries, records, and letters of the
seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. Hear these words from an
early pamphlet, _A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New
England_, inserted in Sewall's _Diary_:

"The Indians came upon the House of one Adams at Wells, and captived the
Man and his Wife, and assassinated the children.... The woman had Lain
in about Eight Days. They drag'd her out, and tied her to a Post, until
the House was rifled. They then loosed her, and bid her walk. She could
not stir. By the help of a Stick she got half a step forward. She look'd
up to God. On the sudden a new strength entered into her. She was up to
the Neck in Water five times that very Day in passing Rivers. At night
she fell over head and ears, into a Slough in a Swamp, and hardly got
out alive.... She is come home alive unto us."

The following story of Mrs. Bradley of Haverly, Massachusetts, was sworn
to as authentic:

"She was now entered into a Second Captivity; but she had the
great Encumbrance of being Big with Child, and within Six Weeks
of her Time! After about an Hours Rest, wherein they made her put
on Snow Shoes, which to manage, requires more than ordinary
agility, she travelled with her Tawny Guardians all that night,
and the next day until Ten a Clock, associated with one Woman
more who had been brought to Bed but just one Week before: Here
they Refreshed themselves a little, and then travelled on till
Night; when they had no Refreshment given them, nor had they any,
till after their having Travelled all the Forenoon of the Day
Ensuing.... She underwent incredible Hardships and Famine: A
Mooses Hide, as tough as you may Suppose it, was the best and
most of her Diet. In one and twenty days they came to their
Head-quarters.... But then her Snow-Shoes were taken from her;
and yet she must go every step above the knee in Snow, with such
weariness that her Soul often Pray'd _That the Lord would put an
end unto her weary life_!"

"...Here in the Night, she found herself ill." [Her child was
born here].... There she lay till the next Night, with none but
the Snow under her, and the Heaven over her, in a misty and rainy
season. She sent then unto a French Priest, that he would speak
unto her _Squaw Mistress_, who then, without condescending to
look upon her, allow'd her a little Birch-Rind, to cover her Head
from the Injuries of the Weather, and a little bit of dried
Moose, which being boiled, she drunk the Broth, and gave it unto
the Child."

"In a Fortnight she was called upon to Travel again, with her
child in her Arms: every now and then, a whole day together
without the least Morsel of any Food, and when she had any, she
fed only on Ground-nuts and Wild-onions, and Lilly-roots. By the
last of May, they arrived at _Cowefick_, where they planted their
Corn; wherein she was put into a hard Task, so that the Child
extreamly Suffered. The Salvages would sometimes also please
themselves, with casting _hot Embers_ into the Mouth of the
Child, which would render the Mouth so sore that it could not
Suck for a long while together, so that it starv'd and Dy'd...."

"Her mistress, the squaw, kept her a Twelve-month with her, in a
Squalid Wigwam: Where, in the following Winter, she fell sick of
a Feavour; but in the very height and heat of her Paroxysms, her
Mistress would compel her sometimes to Spend a Winters-night,
which is there a very bitter one, abroad in all the bitter Frost
and Snow of the Climate. She recovered; but Four Indians died of
the Feavour, and at length her Mistress also.... She was made to
pass the River on the Ice, when every step she took, she might
have struck through it if she pleased."

"...At last, there came to the fight of her a Priest from Quebeck
who had known her in her former Captivity at Naridgowock.... He
made the Indians sell her to a French Family.... where tho' she
wrought hard, she Lived more comfortably and contented.... She
was finally allowed to return to her husband."[90]

The account of Mary Rowlandson's captivity, long known to every New
England family, and perhaps secretly read by many a boy in lieu of the
present Wild West series, may serve as another vivid example of the
dangers and sufferings faced by every woman who took unto herself a
husband and went forth from the coast settlements to found a new home in
the wilderness. The narrative, as written by Mrs. Rowlandson herself,
tells of the attack by the Indians, the massacre of her relations, and
the capture of herself and her babe:

"There remained nothing to me but one poor, wounded babe, and it
seemed at present worse than death, that it was in such a pitiful
condition, bespeaking compassion, and I had no refreshing for it,
nor suitable things to revive it.... But now (the next morning) I
must turn my back upon the town, and travel with them into the
vast and desolate wilderness, I knew not whither. It is not my
tongue or pen can express the sorrows of my heart, and bitterness
of my spirit, that I had at this departure; but God was with me
in a wonderful manner, carrying me along and bearing up my spirit
that it did not quite fail."

"One of the Indians carried my poor wounded babe upon a horse, it
went moaning all along: 'I shall die, I shall die.' I went on
foot after it, with sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I
took it off the horse and carried it in my arms, till my strength
failed and I fell down with it. Then they set me upon a horse
with my wounded child in my lap, and there being no furniture on
the horse's back, as we were going down a steep hill we both fell
over the horse's head, at which they, like inhuman creatures,
laughed and rejoiced to see it, though I thought we should there
have ended our days, overcome with so many difficulties."

They went farther and farther into the wilderness, and a few days after
leaving her home, her son Joseph joined her, having been captured by
another band of Indians. She tells how, having her Bible with her, she
and her son found it a continual help, reading it and praying.

"After this it quickly began to snow, and when night came on they
stopped: and now down I must sit in the snow by a little fire,
and a few boughs behind me, with my sick child in my lap and
calling much for water, (being now) through the wound fallen into
a violent fever. My own wound also growing so stiff that I could
scarce sit down or rise up, yet so it must be, that I must sit
all this cold winter night, upon the cold snowy ground, with my
sick child in my arms, looking that every hour would be the last
of its life; and having no Christian friend near me, either to
comfort or help me."

"...Fearing the worst, I durst not send to my husband, though
there were some thoughts of his coming to redeem and fetch me,
not knowing what might follow...."

"The Lord preserved us in safety that night, and raised us up
again in the morning, and carried us along, that before noon we
came to Concord. Now was I full of joy and yet not without
sorrow: joy, to see such a lovely sight, so many Christians
together; and some of them my neighbors. There I met with my
brother, and brother-in-law, who asked me if I knew where his
wife was. Poor heart! he had helped to bury her and knew it not;
she, being shot down by the house, was partly burned, so that
those who were at Boston ... who came back afterward and buried
the dead, did not know her.... Being recruited with food and
rainment, we went to Boston that day, where I met with my dear
husband; but the thoughts of our dear children, one being dead,
and the other we could not tell where, abated our comfort in each
other...."

And here is the brief story of the return of her daughter: "She was
travelling one day with the Indians, with her basket on her back; the
company of Indians were got before her and gone out of sight, all except
one squaw. She followed the squaw till night, and then both of them lay
down, having nothing over them but the heavens, nor under them but the
earth. Thus she traveled three days together, having nothing to eat or
drink but water and green whortle-berries. At last they came into
Providence, where she was kindly entertained by several of that town....
The Lord make us a blessing indeed to each other. Thus hath the Lord
brought me and mine out of the horrible pit, and hath set us in the
midst of tender-hearted and compassionate Christians. 'Tis the desire of
my soul that we may walk worthy of the mercies received, and which we
are receiving."

This carrying away of white children occurred with surprising frequency,
and we of a later generation can but wonder that their parents did not
wreak more terrific vengeance upon the red man than is recorded even in
the bloodiest pages of our early history. In 1755, after the close of
the war with Pontiac, a meeting took place in the orchard of the
Schuyler homestead at Albany, where many of such kidnapped children were
returned to their parents and relatives. Perhaps we can comprehend some
of the tragedy of this form of warfare when we read of this gathering as
described by an eye-witness:

"Poor women who had traveled one hundred miles from the back
settlements of Pennsylvania, and New England appeared here with
anxious looks and aching hearts, not knowing whether their
children were alive or dead, or how to identify their children if
they should meet them...."

"On a gentle slope near the Fort stood a row of temporary huts
built by retainers to the troops; the green before these
buildings was the scene of these pathetic recognitions which I
did not fail to attend. The joy of the happy mothers was
overpowering and found vent in tears; but not the tears of those
who after long travel found not what they sought. It was
affecting to see the deep silent sorrow of the Indian women and
of the children, who knew no other mother, and clung fondly to
their bosems from whence they were not torn without bitter
shrieks. I shall never forget the grotesque figures and wild
looks of these young savages; nor the trembling haste with which
their mothers arrayed them in the new clothes they had brought
for them, as hoping with the Indian dress they would throw off
their habits and attachments...."[91]

Such distress caused by Indian raids did not, of course, cease with the
seventeenth century. During the entire period of the next century the
settlers on the western frontier lived under constant dread of such
calamities. It has been one of the chief elements in American
history--this ceaseless expectation of warfare with primitive savages.
In the settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, in the
establishment of the great states of the Plains, in the founding of
civilization on the Pacific slope, even down to the twentieth century,
the price of progress has been paid in this form of savage torture of
women and children. Even in the long settled communities of the
eighteenth century such dangers did not entirely disappear. As late as
1782, when an attempt was made by Burgoyne to capture General Schuyler,
the ancient contest between mother and Indian warrior once more
occurred. "Their guns were stacked in the hall, the guards being
outside and the relief asleep. Lest the small Philip (grandson of
General Schuyler) be tempted to play with the guns, his mother had them
removed. The guards rushed for their guns, but they were gone. The
family fled up stairs, but Margaret, remembering the baby in the cradle
below, ran back, seized the baby, and when she was half way up the
flight, an Indian flung his tomahawk at her head, which, missing her,
buried itself in the wood, and left its historic mark to the present
time."[92]

_VIII. Parental Training_

We sometimes hear the complaint that the training of the modern child is
left almost entirely to the mother or to the woman school teacher, and
that as a result the boy is becoming effeminate. The indications are
that this could not have been said of the colonial child; for, according
to the records of that day, there was admirable co-operation between man
and wife in the training of their little ones. Kindly Judge Sewall, who
so indiscriminately mingled his accounts of courtships, weddings,
funerals, visits to neighbors, notices of hangings, duties as a
magistrate, what not, often spared time from his activities among the
grown-ups to record such incidents as: "Sabbath-day, Febr. 14, 1685.
Little Hull speaks Apple plainly in the hearing of his grandmother and
Eliza Jane; this the first word."[93]

And hear what Samuel Mather in his _Life of Cotton Mather_ tells of the
famous divine's interest in the children of the household: "He began
betimes to entertain them with delightful stories, especially
scriptural ones; and he would ever conclude with some lesson of piety,
giving them to learn that lesson from the story.... And thus every day
at the table he used himself to tell some entertaining tale before he
rose; and endeavored to make it useful to the olive plants about the
table. When his children accidentally, at any time, came in his way, it
was his custom to let fall some sentence or other that might be monitory
or profitable to them.... As soon as possible he would make the children
learn to write; and, when they had the use of the pen, he would employ
then in writing out the most instructive, and profitable things he could
invent for them.... The first chastisement which he would inflict for
any ordinary fault was to let the child see and hear him in an
astonishment, and hardly able to believe that the child could do so base
a thing; but believing they would never do it again. He would never come
to give a child a blow excepting in case of obstinacy or something very
criminal. To be chased for a while out of his presence he would make to
be looked upon as the sorest punishment in his family. He would not say
much to them of the evil angels; because he would not have them
entertain any frightful fancies about the apparitions of devils. But yet
he would briefly let them know that there are devils to tempt to
wickedness."

Beside this tender picture we may place one of juvenile warfare in the
godly home of Judge Sewall, and of the effect such a rise of the Old
Adam had upon the soul of the conscientious magistrate: "Nov. 6, 1692.
Joseph threw a knob of Brass and hit his sister Betty on the forhead so
as to make it bleed and swell, upon which, and for his playing at
Prayer-time, and eating when Return Thanks, I whipd him pretty smartly.
When I first went in (call'd by his Grandmother) he sought to shadow and
hide himself from me behind the head of the Cradle: which gave me the
sorrowfull remembrance of Adam's carriage."[94]

Such turmoil was, of course, unusual in the Sewall or any other Puritan
home; but the spiritual paroxysms of his daughter Betty, as noted in
previous pages, were more characteristic, and probably not half so
alarming to the deeply religious father. There seems to be little
"sorrowfull remembrance" in the following note by the Judge; what would
have caused genuine alarm to a modern parent seemed to be almost a
source of secret satisfaction to him: "Sabbath, May 3, 1696. Betty can
hardly read her chapter for weeping; tells me she is afraid she is gone
back, does not taste that sweetness in reading the Word which once she
did; fears that what was once upon her is worn off. I said what I could
to her, and in the evening pray'd with her alone."[95]

Though more mention is made in the early records about the endeavors of
the father than of the efforts of the mother to lead the children
aright, we may, of course, take it for granted that the maternal care
and watchfulness were at least as strong as in our own day. Eliza
Pinckney, who had read widely and studied much, did not consider it
beneath her dignity to give her closest attention to the awakening
intellect of her babe. "Shall I give you the trouble, my dear madam,"
she wrote to a friend, "to buy my son a new toy (a description of which
I enclose) to teach him according to Mr. Locke's method (which I have
carefully studied) to play himself into learning. Mr. Pinckney, himself,
has been contriving a sett of toys to teach him his letters by the time
he can speak. You perceive we begin betimes, for he is not yet four
months old." Her consciousness of her responsibility toward her children
is also set forth in this statement: "I am resolved to be a good Mother
to my children, to pray for them, to set them good examples, to give
them good advice, to be careful both in their souls and bodys, to watch
over their tender minds, to carefully root out the first appearing and
budings of vice, and to instill piety.... To spair no paines or trouble
to do them good.... And never omit to encourage every Virtue I may see
dawning in them."[96] That her care brought forth good fruit is
indicated when she spoke, years later, of her boy as "a son who has
lived to near twenty-three years of age without once offending me."

Here and there we thus have directed testimony as to the part taken by
mothers in the mental and spiritual training of children. For instance,
in New York, according to Mrs. Grant, such instruction was left entirely
to the women. "Indeed, it was on the females that the task of religious
instruction generally devolved; and in all cases where the heart is
interested, whoever teaches at the same time learns.... Not only the
training of children, but of plants, such as needed peculiar care or
skill to rear them, was the female province."[97]

In New England, as we have seen, the parental love and care for the
little ones was at least as much a part of the father's domestic
activities as of the mother's; unfortunately the men were in the
majority as writers, and they generally wrote of what they themselves
did for their children. Abigail Adams was one of the exceptional women,
and her letters have many a reference to the training of her famous son.
Writing to him while he was with his father in Europe in 1778, she said:
"My dear Son.... Let me enjoin it upon you to attend constantly and
steadfastly to the precepts and instructions of your father, as you
value the happiness of your mother and your own welfare. His care and
attention to you render many things unnecessary for me to write ... but
the inadvertency and heedlessness of youth require line upon line and
precept upon precept, and, when enforced by the joint efforts of both
parents, will, I hope, have a due influence upon your conduct; for, dear
as you are to me, I would much rather you should have found your grave
in the ocean you have crossed, or that an untimely death crop you in
your infant years, than see you an immoral profligate, or graceless
child...."[98]

Such quotations should prove that home life in colonial days was no
one-sided affair. The father and the mother were on a par in matters of
child training, and the influence of both entered into that strong race
of men who, through long years of struggle and warfare, wrested
civilization from savagery, and a new nation from an old one. What a
modern writer has written about Mrs. Adams might possibly be applicable
to many a colonial mother who kept no record of her daily effort to lead
her children in the path of righteousness and noble service: "Mrs.
Adams's influence on her children was strong, inspiring, vital.
Something of the Spartan mother's spirit breathed in her. She taught her
sons and daughter to be brave and patient, in spite of danger and
privation. She made them feel no terror at the thought of death or
hardships suffered for one's country. She read and talked to them of the
world's history.... Every night, when the Lord's prayer had been
repeated, she heard him [John Quincey] say the ode of Collins beginning,

'How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest.'"[99]

_IX. Tributes to Colonial Mothers_

With such wives and mothers so common in the New World, it is but
natural that many a high tribute to them should be found in the old
records. Not for any particular or exactly named trait are these women
praised, but rather for that general, indescribable quality of
womanliness--that quality which men have ever praised and ever will
praise. Those noble words of Judge Sewall at the open grave of his
mother are an epitome of the patience, the love, the sacrifice, and the
nobility of motherhood: "Jany. 4th, 1700-1.... Nathan Bricket taking in
hand to fill the grave, I said, Forbear a little, and suffer me to say
that amidst our bereaving sorrows we have the comfort of beholding this
saint put into the rightful possession of that happiness of living
desir'd and dying lamented. She liv'd commendably four and fifty years
with her dear husband, and my dear father: and she could not well brook
the being divided from him at her death; which is the cause of our
taking leave of her in this place. She was a true and constant lover of
God's Word, worship and saints: and she always with a patient
cheerfulness, submitted to the divine decree of providing bread for her
self and others in the sweat of her brows. And now ... my honored and
beloved Friends and Neighbors! My dear mother never thought much of
doing the most frequent and homely offices of love for me: and lavished
away many thousands of words upon me, before I could return one word in
answer: And therefore I ask and hope that none will be offended that I
have now ventured to speak one word in her behalf; when she herself has
now become speechless."[100]

How many are the tributes to those "mothers in Israel"! Hear this
unusual one to Jane Turell: "As a wife she was dutiful, prudent and
diligent, not only content but joyful in her circumstances. She
submitted as is fit in the Lord, looked well to the ways of her
household.... She respected all her friends and relatives, and spake of
them with honor, and never forgot either their counsels or their
kindnesses.... I may not forget to mention the _strong and constant
guard she placed on the door of her lips_. Whoever heard her call an ill
name? or detract from anybody?"[101]

And, again, note the tone of this message to Alexander Hamilton from his
father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler, after the death of Mrs.
Schuyler: "My trial has been severe.... But after giving and receiving
for nearly half a century a series of mutual evidences of affection and
friendship which increased as we advanced in life, the shock was great
and sensibly felt, to be thus suddenly deprived of a beloved wife, the
mother of my children, and the soothing companion of my declining
years."

The words of President Dirkland of Harvard upon the death of Mrs. Adams,
show how deeply women had come to influence the life of New England by
the time of the Revolution. His address was a sincere tribute not only
to this remarkable mother but to the thousands of unknown mothers who
reared their families through those days of distress and death: "Ye will
cease to mourn bereaved friends.... You do then bless the Giver of life,
that the course of your endeared and honored friend was so long and so
bright; that she entered so fully into the spirit of those injunctions
which we have explained, and was a minister of blessings to all within
her influence. You are soothed to reflect, that she was sensible of the
many tokens of divine goodness which marked her lot; that she received
the good of her existence with a cheerful and grateful heart; that, when
called to weep, she bore adversity with an equal mind; that she used the
world as not abusing it to excess, improving well her time, talents, and
opportunities, and, though desired longer in this world, was fitted for
a better happiness than this world can give."[102]

It is apparent that men were not so neglectful of praise nor so cautious
of good words for womankind in colonial days as the average run of books
on American history would have us believe. As noted above, womanliness
is the characteristic most commonly pictured in these records of good
women; but now and then some special quality, such as good judgment, or
business ability, or willingness to aid in a time of crisis is brought
to light. Thus Ben Franklin writes:

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