Hannah Duston

Though she’s all but forgotten today, Hannah Duston was probably the first American woman to be memorialized in a public monument.  The English colonist was taken captive by Native Americans in 1697 during the King William’s War. 

Born in 1657, Hannah Emerson Duston lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts, at a time when disputes among English colonists, the French in Canada, and various Native American nations resulted in a series of wars in the region. King Philip’s War (1675-1676) decimated southern New England Indian nations, which lost between 60 – 80% of their population as well as their political independence. Many were sold into slavery. By the late 1680s and the start of King William’s War, fragments of those southern tribes had joined the Abenaki and other northern New England Indian nations allied with the French to fight the continuing expansion of the English colonists to the north and west. Native men conducted raids on frontier English settlements, burning property, killing or injuring some colonists, and taking others captive, either to ransom them back to their families, or to adopt them as replacements for their own lost family members.

Such was the context in which one group, most of whom were likely Abenaki, attacked the town of Haverhill on March 15, 1697, and encountered 40-year-old Hannah Duston at home with her neighbor Mary Neff. The Indians captured the women, along with some of their neighbors, and started on foot toward Canada. Duston had given birth about a week before. The captors are said to have killed her child early in the journey, but it is more likely the infant died without intervention.

The group traveled for about two weeks, and then left Duston and Neff with a Native American family of two men, three women, and seven children, as well as another English captive, a boy who had been abducted a year and a half earlier from Worcester, Massachusetts. 14-year-old Samuel Leonardson may have been adopted by the family; he certainly had their trust. At Duston’s request, he asked one of the men the proper way to kill someone with a tomahawk, and was promptly shown how.

One night when the Indian family was sleeping, Duston, Neff, and Leonardson, who were not guarded or locked up, armed themselves with tomahawks and killed and scalped 10 of the Indians, including six children. They wounded an older woman, who escaped. A small boy managed to run away. Duston and her fellow captives then left in a canoe, taking themselves and the scalps down the Merrimack River to Massachusetts, where they presented them to the General Assembly of Massachusetts and received a reward of 50 pounds.

Hannah herself never wrote down her story, but three versions of it were published between 1697 and 1702 by the influential Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who emphasized and most likely embroidered the brutality of the Native Americans in it. He compared Hannah to the Biblical heroine Jael, and provided an horrific description of the murder of her child. He seemed unconcerned, however, that Hannah’s murders included six Native children, and he frequently portrayed the Native population as instruments of the Devil to thwart the Puritan mission. 

Hannah’s story faded away after 1702, but in the 1820s, when the nation began to expand westward, there was a revival of interest in her story. The nation’s foremost literary figures, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and John Greenleaf Whittier, all wrote about her. Virtually all histories of the United States from that time contained a version of the story, as did numerous magazines, children’s books, biographies of famous Americans, and guidebooks. Her story helped support the narrative of forced removal of Native populations from their ancestral lands, and it was at this time that her three monuments were erected.

Here is a wonderful article about Hannah in the Smithsonian Magazine:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gruesome-story-hannah-duston-american-colonist-whose-slaying-indians-made-her-folk-hero-180968721/

and another article that describes a movement to remove the statues:

https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/04/28/hannah-dustin-statue-colonial-woman-face-reckoning