Controversial legacy?
“According to the story Duston later told Puritan minister Cotton Mather, her captors promptly killed her baby by dashing “the Brains of the Infant, against a Tree.”
I’m part Cherokee and there is no controversy in this story as far as I am concerned. After what they did to her baby all bets were off and she killed and scalped those indians.
Getting one's brains dashed out on a tree or rock was actually quicker and more humane.
There has always been brutality.
History is what it is.
That she killed the children, I guess, is controversial to some. I’m not sure what she was supposed to do. Leave them alive to fend for themselves? Was one old enough to do that? Would that one have gotten him or herself to other Indians soon enough that they could hunt down and go after Hannah and the other two and catch up with them?
Take the kids with them? They would have made noise whereas Hannah and the other two would have wanted to keep as quite as possible when traveling in areas where they thought they could be heard.
Tie the kids up? Maybe they would have been found before they died of thirst but long after Hannah and the other two were far enough away they couldn’t be tracked down. But maybe they would have died a slow death.
History cannot be judged in the rear view mirror.
Sounds like a normal reaction to a situation like that, in my book.
Stories about what happened to captives in those situations makes hers a reasonable response.
God bless her.
I read the story as published by Charles C. Coffin, who wrote a series of books about the settling of North America and the founding of the United States.
That story was in the volume titled, “The Story of Liberty”. It was written for grade school students in the late 1800s. The language and syntax would probably stump most college students today. I’m not sure they would even be able to comprehend the stories, let alone the ultimate gist.
In any event, the Indian “children” were teenage warriors, old enough to butcher settlers without mercy. Hannah testified that her husband and 9 other children were working in the fields after she had just given birth to their 10th child, when the raiding party, supplied and financed by French Jesuits, descended upon them.
The rest of her family were barely able to escape with their lives, the raiding party happy to take Hannah and her midwife to sell into slavery in Canada, after murdering Hannah’s newborn right in front of her.
Charles C. Coffin was also a well known Civil War correspondent.