Hannah Duston

Hannah Duston (also spelled Dustin, Dustan, Durstan, Dustun, Dunstun, or Durstun) (born Hannah Emerson, December 23, 1657 – March 6, 1736, 1737 or 1738) was a colonial Massachusetts Puritan woman who was taken captive by Abenaki people from Quebec during King William's War, with her first newborn daughter, during the 1697 raid on Haverhill, in which 27 colonists, 15 of them children, were killed. In her account she stated that the Abenakis killed her newborn baby soon after they were captured. While detained on an island in the Merrimack River in present-day Boscawen, New Hampshire, she killed and scalped ten of the Abenaki family members holding them hostage, with the assistance of two other captives.
Duston's captivity narrative became famous more than 100 years after she died. During the 19th century, she was referred to as an American folk hero and the "mother of the American tradition of scalp-hunting." Some scholars assert Duston's story became a legend in the 19th century only because her story was used to justify violence against Native American tribes as innocent, defensive, and virtuous. Duston is believed to be the first American woman honored with a statue.
Hannah Emerson was born December 23, 1657, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Michael Emerson and Hannah Webster Emerson; she was the oldest of 15 children. At age 20, she married Thomas Duston Jr., a farmer and brick-maker. The Emerson family would later become the subject of attention when Elizabeth Emerson, Hannah's younger sister, was hanged for infanticide on June 8, 1693. One of Hannah's cousins, Martha Toothaker Emerson, and her father, Roger Toothaker, were accused of practicing witchcraft and tried at the Salem witch trials (1692–93).
During King William's War, Hannah, her husband Thomas, and their nine children, including a newborn baby, lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts. On March 15, 1697, when she was 40 years old, the town was raided by a group of about 30 Abenaki from Quebec. In the attack, 27 colonists were killed (half of them children), and 13 were taken captive, to be either adopted or held as hostages for the French. Hannah's husband Thomas, who was building a new brick home about half a mile away, fled with eight of their nine children. The Indians captured Hannah and her nurse, Mary Neff (1646–1722, née Corliss), set fire to Hannah's home, and forced the two women to march into the wilderness, Hannah carrying her newborn daughter, Martha. According to the account Hannah gave to Cotton Mather, along the way her captors killed six-day-old Martha by smashing her head against a tree:
Hannah and Mary were assigned to a family group of 12 people (probably Pennacooks) and taken north, "unto a rendezvous...somewhere beyond Penacook, New Hampshire; and they still told these poor women that when they came to this town, they must be stript, and scourg'd, and run the gauntlet through the whole army of Indians." The group included Samuel Lennardson (1683–1718, also spelled Leonardson, Lenorson or Lennarson), a 14-year-old boy captured in Worcester, Massachusetts, in late 1695.
The captives were taken north to an island in the Merrimack River at the mouth of the Contoocook River, where, during the night of April 29 or 30, while the Indians were sleeping, Hannah led Mary and Samuel in a revolt:
Hannah used a hatchet to kill one of the two grown men (Lennardson killed the second), two adult women, and six children. According to Cotton Mather's account, Hannah and her partners let one of the children sleep, "intending to bring him away with them," but the boy awoke and escaped. One severely wounded Abenaki woman also managed to escape the attack.
The former captives immediately left in a canoe, after scalping the dead as proof of the incident and to collect a bounty. They went downriver, traveling only during the night, and after several days reached Haverhill.
A few days later, Thomas Duston brought Hannah, Samuel and Mary to Boston, along with the scalps, the hatchet and a flintlock musket they had taken from the Indians. Although New Hampshire had become a colony in its own right in 1680, the Merrimack River and its adjacent territories were considered part of Massachusetts; therefore, Hannah and the other former captives applied to the Massachusetts Government for the scalp bounty.
Massachusetts had posted a bounty of 50 pounds per scalp in September 1694, which was reduced to 25 pounds in June 1695, and then entirely repealed in December 1696. Wives had no legal status at that time in colonial New England, so her husband petitioned the Legislature on behalf of Hannah Duston, requesting that the bounties for the scalps be paid, even though the law providing for them had been repealed:
On June 16, 1697, the Massachusetts General Court voted to give them a reward for killing their captors; Hannah Duston received 25 pounds, and Neff and Lennardson split another 25 pounds:
Following her return, Hannah gave birth to a second daughter, Lydia, on October 4, 1698. Her neighbor Hannah Heath Bradley, who had also been abducted in the 1697 raid (and two of her children killed), was held for nearly two years before she was ransomed, returning to Haverhill in 1699. During Queen Anne's War Indians raided Haverhill again in 1704 and 1707. In yet another raid on Haverhill (1708), Algonquin and Abenaki Indians led by the French officer Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville killed sixteen, including the town's minister.
Although she claimed to have been baptized as a child, Hannah rarely attended church and did not take communion until late in life, for reasons that are unclear. In May 1724 she asked to be formally admitted to the Haverhill Center Congregational Church. Her husband had made a similar petition in January of that year.
Following her husband's death (between 1724 and 1732) Hannah Duston is believed to have lived with her son Jonathan on his farm in southwest Haverhill. She probably died between 1736 and 1738, and was most likely buried near Jonathan Duston's home.
Samuel Lennardson moved to Preston, Connecticut, to join his father. He married and had five children and died on May 11, 1718. Mary Neff died in Haverhill on October 17, 1722. In 1739 Mary Neff's son Joseph was granted two hundred acres of land at Penacook by the General Court of New Hampshire "in consideration of his mother's services in assisting Hannah Duston in killing divers Indians."
The event became well known, due in part to Cotton Mather's account in Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702). Mather interviewed Hannah after her return to Haverhill, and on May 6, 1697, he preached a sermon celebrating her return from captivity, with Hannah herself in the audience. He later published the story three times in five years: in Humiliations follow'd with Deliverances (1697), Decennium Luctuosum (1699), and in Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Mather titled the story "A Notable Exploit: Dux Faemina Facti," (Latin: "The leader of this deed/exploit was a woman") and compared Hannah Duston's story to the murder of Sisera by Jael in the Old Testament, and to the captivity narratives of Hannah Swarton (captured in 1690) and Mary Rowlandson (captured in 1675). Captivity narratives featuring women were often used as metaphors for the identity struggle evolving in New England at that time, wherein submissive, humble and obedient Puritan women fought to regain their freedom from the oppression of their Indian captors, in the same way that during the American revolution, the long-suffering colonists resisted the oppressive governance by the British crown.
Hannah's story also appears in the diary of Samuel Sewall, who had heard the story directly from her on May 12, 1697, less than two weeks after her escape. Sewall's account adds the detail that the night before their escape, one of their male captors showed Samuel Lennardson how to take a scalp:
Hannah's story is recorded in the diary of John Marshall (1634–1732), a bricklayer in Quincy, Massachusetts, who wrote the following entry for April 29, 1697:
Another reference to Hannah Duston is found in the journal of John Pike (1634–1714, son of New Jersey judge John Pike), in the following entry:
Although Hannah herself never provided a written account of her captivity and escape (there is no evidence that she was literate), the Haverhill Historical Society possesses a letter dated May 17, 1724, addressed to the elders of the church, declaring her desire to be admitted as a full member of the church so that she might take communion with the other congregants, and offering a confession. It seems likely to have been composed from dictation by her minister. In reference to her captivity, the letter states simply:
After Cotton Mather's death, Hannah Duston's story was largely forgotten until it was included in “Travels in New England and New York” by historian Timothy Dwight IV, published in 1821. After this, Duston became more famous in the 19th century as her story was retold by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's version adheres to information provided in primary sources, whereas Whittier describes her
Hawthorne, clearly horrified, pauses in his retelling to exclaim:
Duston's story entered popular imagination along with other tales of violence perpetrated by women, sold as cheap works of short fiction or portrayed on stage in productions intended to appeal to working-class crowds. The rebellion was illustrated in theatrical style in Junius Brutus Stearns' historical painting, Hannah Duston Killing the Indians (1847) in which Stearns, for reasons that remain unclear, depicted Samuel Lennardson as a woman. The Indian children Duston killed are omitted. A second painting, showing Hannah's husband fleeing with her children, is now lost. Violent revenge against American Indians was another popular subject of literature and theater, as in Robert Montgomery Bird's 1837 novel Nick of the Woods.
From the 1820s until the 1870s, Duston's story was included in nearly all books about US history, as well as many biographies, children's books, and magazine articles. The story was popular among white Americans when the country was engaged in the westward expansion, which increased conflict with the American Indian tribes living in places where American settlers wanted to live.
Later versions of the story added numerous details (including dialogue and the names of the Indians) not found in any primary source, as in Robert Boody Caverly's Heroism of Hannah Duston (1875). Haverhill tradition, recorded in Mirick's History of Haverhill (1832), adds the details that Hannah was wearing only one shoe when she was captured, that her daughter was thrown against an apple tree from which local people remembered eating fruit, and that the captives had already started down the river when Hannah insisted that they return to take the Indian scalps.
There are eight memorials that were or are dedicated to Hannah Duston and the other captives that were with her.
The campaign to build the first monument in Haverhill, Massachusetts, began in 1852, at a time when building public monuments was still a somewhat rare occurrence. The monument chosen was a simple marble column that would cost about $1,350, and by 1861 the necessary funds had been raised. On its base was a shield, surrounded by a musket, bow, arrows, tomahawk, and scalping knife. Engravings on its sides told the story of the "barbarous" murder of Duston's baby and her "remarkable exploit;" the column was topped by an eagle. The monument was erected on June 1, 1861, at the site of Duston's capture, but it was never fully paid for. Some subscribers were upset that the monument was in the middle of farmland on the outskirts of town instead of Haverhill Common. After successfully suing the association, the builders quietly removed the monument in August 1865, erased the inscription, engraved a new one, and resold it to the town of Barre, Massachusetts, where it stands to this day as a memorial to that town's Civil War soldiers.
Now known as the Hannah Duston Memorial State Historic Site, the first Duston memorial actually executed was sculpted by William Andrews (1836–1927), a marble worker from Lowell, Massachusetts. An attorney named Robert Boody Caverly, author of The Heroism of Hannah Duston, Together with the Indian Wars of New England (1875), raised $6,000 from 450 subscribers to erect the 35-foot-tall statue depicting Hannah with a hatchet in one hand and ten scalps in the other. It was dedicated on June 17, 1874, on the island in Boscawen, New Hampshire, where Duston killed her captors. An inscription on the east side reads:
A crowd of almost five thousand people overwhelmed the island on the day of its dedication, with speeches presented all day long, culminating with a dedication by New Hampshire Governor James A. Weston. It was the first publicly funded statue in New Hampshire and the first statue in the US to honor an American woman.
Local members of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook Abenaki People have proposed adding another statue to the island park to honor fallen Abenaki, in order to "tell a more complete story about New England's indigenous peoples." They also want to erect plaques with historical information on the Merrimack and Contoocook rivers and the old railroad track that runs across to the island.
In 1879, a bronze statue of Hannah Duston grasping a hatchet was created by Calvin H. Weeks (1834–1907) in Haverhill town square (now Grand Army Park), where it still stands on the site of the Haverhill Center Congregational Church, of which Hannah Duston became a member in 1724. It depicts Hannah wearing only one shoe, per Haverhill tradition.
Over the years, the statue has been repeatedly vandalized, including twice by gunshots to the face. On October 31, 1934, the statue's hatchet was stolen, but it was later recovered and welded back into place. On May 6, 2020, the monument was defaced with splashes of red paint. On July 10, 2020, the words "Haverhill's own monument to genocide" were found written on the statue's base in pink chalk. The statue was vandalized again on August 28, 2020, with splashes of red paint. On Thanksgiving Day, 2021, the statue was again vandalized with either red spray-paint or with splashes of red paint. To prevent further vandalism, city workers draped the statue in a blue plastic tarp, pending cleaning by the highway department.
Some local residents have proposed that the statue should be removed because it promotes harmful stereotypes of warlike Indians. A city council subcommittee was assigned to consider the possibility of moving the statue to another location after a period of public discussion. It has been suggested that the statue be moved to the Buttonwoods Museum or to the Dustin Garrison house, but these institutions indicated they were afraid that this would attract even more vandalism. In April, after several public meetings to consider moving the statue to a less conspicuous site, the City Council voted unanimously not to move it, and to provide space for a memorial honoring Indigenous peoples. Haverhill mayor James Fiorentini subsequently established the Native American Commemorative Task Force to examine the history and culture of the Native peoples of the Haverhill region, and to recommend ways in which the community might honor them.
In May, 2021, the city decided to keep the statue but alter some of the offensive language on the base, remove the hatchet and provide space in the park for a Native American monument, including a memorial to Duston's victims and information about Abenaki history. An additional debate is ongoing, over whether the name of the park should be changed. One proposal calls for renaming the New Hampshire site "Unity Park N'dakinna," which means "our land" in Abenaki.
In 1902 a third memorial was placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution on a small plot of land at Allds and Fifield streets in Nashua, New Hampshire, at the site of John Lovewell's home (part of Dunstable, New Hampshire, in Lovewell's time), where Hannah, Mary, and Samuel spent the night on their way home from captivity. The stone marker's inscription reads:
In December 1902 a millstone was placed on the shores of the Merrimack River where Hannah, Mary, and Samuel beached their canoe upon their return to Haverhill.
The fifth memorial was created in 1908, when an inscription was placed on a boulder in memorial to both Hannah and Martha. The 30-ton glacial erratic rock was pulled out of Bradley Brook where it emptied into the Merrimack, near where Hannah landed her canoe after her escape, and placed on the site of Hannah's son Jonathan's home in Haverhill, where Hannah had lived during her final years. Hannah Duston died at this location circa 1736, 1737 or 1738 and is believed to have been buried nearby. Haverhill public library records say it took 30 horses with 14 drivers to haul the boulder to its present location.
The Worcester Society of Antiquity sponsored the bronze "Lenorson" tablet (using the spelling they considered correct) and dedicated it on October 22, 1910. The Worcester Sunday Telegram reported it was hung on the 42-foot (13 m) Davis Tower at Lake Park in Worcester, at the site of the Lenorson boyhood home on the shore of Lake Quinsigamond. It was reported stolen in 1969, just before the tower was demolished, and has not been recovered.
Mount Dustan in Wentworth Location, New Hampshire, was named after Hannah Duston sometime before 1870, using an alternate spelling of her last name.
The original small axe or hatchet held by Hannah Duston can be found today in the Buttonwoods Museum. The Duston hatchet is not a tomahawk; it is usually called a Biscayan or biscayenne, a common trade item of the late 17th-century New England frontier. It is on display with the knife she allegedly used to scalp her captors, along with her letter of confession petitioning to join the Center Congregational Church of Haverhill.
Other commemorations, all in the city of Haverhill, include: