51 pages • 1 hour read
John Putnam DemosThe Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Eunice Williams
Eunice Williams is the daughter of the celebrated Puritan minister John Williams and one of the central characters in The Unredeemed Captive, alongside her father. Eunice was born in 1696 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and was abducted during the aftermath of the Deerfield massacre in 1704, when she was seven years old. Eunice never permanently returns to Deerfield. She fully embraces her new life as a member of the Kahnawake: She adopts a Kahnawake name, marries a Mohawk man, and even forgets the English language. Demos provides as many details as possible about Eunice’s life among the Kahnawake, but these details are shadowy, given that we have few written records from the community: “About Eunice Williams inside this strangely positioned community we know only a few, very bare facts” (140). Until both of their deaths, John Williams (her father) and Stephen Williams (her brother) try to convince Eunice to return. Eunice dies at the age of 89 in 1785, in the Canadian Native American community where she lived for the duration of her life. Through Eunice’s story, Demos tells the related stories of race, religion, and cross-cultural forces in colonial America.
John Williams
Deerfield’s eminent Puritan minister, Reverend John Williams has a wife and five children. In 1696John Williams is 32 years old and has been in Deerfield for more than a decade.
He was raised in Roxbury (near Boston), as the fourth child (second son) of Samuel and Theoda (Parke) Williams. His father was a farmer, shoemaker, and “ruling elder” in the Roxbury church […] If John Williams’s pedigree seems certifiably Puritan, his wife’s is even more so “(8).
Following the raid on Deerfield, he spends two and a half years in captivity. After he emerges, he devotes the remainder of his life to getting his daughter, Eunice, back from the Kahnawake. He dies on July 11, 1729, after suffering a paralyzing stroke.
The Native Americans
Many Native American tribes populated the area of colonial New England before the European colonists’ arrival. Demos takes care to explain the customs and social practices of the Native Americans in the region, with a particular focus on the Kahnawake, to help better understand the nature of Eunice’s life with the Kahnawake tribe.
The French
The French had great power and influence in Canada during much of the time covered in The Unredeemed Captive, and many French players have great importance to the narrative, including the governor Marquis de Vaudreuil and the notable captain Jean Baptiste Guyon. The French and French Canadians were mostly allied with the Native Americans in their efforts to oust British settlers in New England.
The British
The British Puritans settled in North America in search of religious freedom. John Williams and his daughter Eunice are both Puritans, and although their ancestors are originally from Britain, their family has mostly known life only in New England. Several notable British Puritan figures enter the narrative, including the prolific minister Cotton Mather and all of the Williams clan. The British and the French are at odds with one another, and their turf wars over New England animate much of the broader social and cultural forces that tie into Eunice’s story.
