ENGLISH 2231: American Literature 1

Cover from an early
edition of Rowlandson's
book

Mary Rowlandson, King Philip's War, and Captivity Narratives

Mary Rowlandson was the wife of a Puritan minister in Lancaster, Massachusetts. On February 20, 1676, she was captured by Native Americans during a raid. This raid was one of many small engagements during a war the colonists called “King Philip’s War” (1675-1676). This was the bloodiest of the early colonial wars against the Native Americans.

American historian Howard Zinn attributes the war to Puritan land greed and their concerns about the Wampanoag tribe trading its lands, which bordered the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to non-Puritans. When an “Indian trader” was murdered, the Puritans attributed the murder to the Wampanoag chief Metacom, and “they began a war of conquest against the Wampanoags, a war to take their land” (Zinn 16). Zinn says that the Puritans “were clearly the aggressors, but claimed they attacked for preventive purposes” (16). Speaking nearer the time of the war, early colonist Roger Williams noted, “All men of conscience or prudence ply to windward, to maintain their wars to be defensive” (qtd. in Zinn 16).

By the end of the war, over 1200 houses had been burned and 600 colonists had been killed. Native American casualties are estimated at 3000, including Metacom himself. Although, the Wampanoags were defeated, battles and raids between the colonists and many tribes continued throughout the colonial period.

Captivity narratives, such as this one by Mary Rowlandson, and missionary reports were the principal ways colonists learned about the Native Americans. These types of narratives became a staple form in early American literature, and served very specific purposes for their writers and readers:

• a justification of the Puritan view of the Native Americans
• a religious confessional
• a demonstration of the triumph of the godly over the forces of Satan and the wilderness
• a demonstration of the perseverance of “the elect”
• a recapitulation of the trials of the “chosen of Israel” and a sign of God’s testing

Rowlandson’s narrative was one of the most widely read prose works of the 17th century in England and America. It was the most widely read captivity narrative. As a group, these captivity narratives were an early version of later dime-novel thrillers (cowboy and Indian stories) through which most Americans came to know the American frontier. These Indian captivity narratives all contained similar “ingredients:”

• details of the life of the Indians
• gory descriptions of such acts as scalping, torture, cannibalism, and “the slaughtering of innocents”
• descriptions of the mysterious wilderness and strange landscapes
• identification of the hero’s or heroine’s adventures with those of the individual Christian who strives for heaven
• the lurking but rarely fulfilled threat of sexual violation by “depraved pagans”