Photo courtesy of James E. Arsenault & Company O blessed Captivity! no other perfect liberty. Such truly walk at liberty, who have no will of their own, but resign themselves to the commanding and dispossessing will of the only wise God.
— Reverend Samuel Phillips, A Word in Season. Or, The Duty of People to Take and Keep the Oath of Allegiance to the Glorious God (Boston: Samuel Kneeland & Timothy Green, printers, 1726)
The short-lived partnership of Ames & Parker produced Andover's first imprints in 1798-1799. There are just two of them known to exist. One is a pair of captivity tales; the other is a Thanksgiving sermon delivered to the parishioners of South Church by Reverend Jonathan French. In other words, one is about perceived darkness; the other, perceived light.
The Narrative of a Late Expedition against the Indians, first published in 1783, tells the stories of Dr. John Knight, who escapes his capture; Colonel Crawford, an "old warrior among the savages” (he had served under Washington in the Continental Army), who is killed; and another escapee, John Slover, who supplies myriad gory details. The editor of the tales, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, deleted all mention of the fact that Colonel Crawford was executed in retaliation for the infamous Gnadenhütten massacre of some ninety unarmed Christian Delawares converted by the Moravians in Ohio. A Remarkable Narrative of the Captivity & Escape of Mrs. Frances Scott, which was appended to the men's stories, was initially published in 1785. Exactly six months earlier, on June 29, 1785, “painted savages” had killed Mrs. Scott’s husband and their four children, and taken her captive. The chief of the tribe, an “old man” who no longer went out hunting with the younger men, was assigned to guard her. A month into her captivity, while he was preoccupied with graining a deer skin — traditionally, women’s work — she was able to escape. She spent another month wandering in the wilderness, engaged in “serious meditation” and “devout exercises,” and surviving on “no other subsistance but chewing and swallowing the juice of young cane-stalks, Sassafras leaves, and some other plants she did not know the names of.” Finally, guided by a “beautiful bird” and then another just like it, she chose one path over another, and came upon a white settlement appropriately called New Garden. “Thus, in the third month of her captivity, she was unexpectedly though joyfully relieved from the dreadful impending death by famine,” a third-person narrator tells us. “[H]ad she taken the other valley, she never could have returned.” And so she was home again, albeit suffering from residual effects, the epilogue concludes: “Mrs. Scott continues in a low state of health, and remains inconsolable for the loss of her family, particularly bewailing the cruel death of her little daughter,” an eight-year-old who was “tomahawked and stabbed” while in her mother’s arms.
Writers of our earliest American captivity narratives were focussed on portraying themselves as having been saved by their belief in God. They also regularly presented to their readers the kind of concrete, socio-anthropological details about their captors that Mary Rowlandson, for example, had provided hers. (“I laid down my load, and went into the wigwam, and there sat an Indian boiling horse-feet [they being wont to eat the flesh first, and when the feet were old and dried, and they had nothing else, they would cut off the feet and used them]…”) But what came to matter just as much during this period was a narrative’s propagandistic qualities. The United States was expanding rapidly, and many of the most popular titles, the ones that citizens clamored for, were those that seemed to justify dispossessing or simply destroying those who got in the way.
As for Reverend French's thirty-one page Thanksgiving sermon, it wasn’t connected to the Pilgrim feast or Thanksgiving celebrations as we know them; those didn't begin until the Victorian era. Rather, it was one of those typical, topical sermons usually delivered on Thursday, not Sunday, as indeed this sermon was, on November 29, 1798.
Which sold more copies? And where were they sold? Church members customarily paid to have a sermon printed and distributed among themselves in the parish. This one may also have been distributed at P.A., where in 1796 Reverend French had begun to act as a provisional professor of divinity. The captivity narratives may have been sold at a local tavern. The one in Andover known as the “Ye Ames Tavern” was built between 1794 and 1800 on what is now Elm Street, at a point between North Parish and South Parish. [1] Was the tavern keeper the "Ames" of the Ames & Parker partnership? The Andover Center for History and Culture website mentions a Parker in connection with an Ames. He is James Parker Jr., who gave the land for the tavern to "to Benjamin Ames, gentleman, and Joshua Lovejoy Jr., yeoman, on Christmas Day in 1773." [2] The same lot was "transferred to Benj. Ames senior to his son Benjamin Ames Jr. on August 8, 1800." [3] If Ames was one part of the partnership, was a member of the Parker family the other part? Like most ephemeral printing-partnerships, Ames & Parker left no records. So no one can say.
What we do know is that, along with sermons, captivity narratives were at the time being cheaply printed everywhere as printers’ attempted to satisfy the public’s ravenous appetite for “the eighteenth-century equivalent of the dime novel.” [4] Of the period when The Narrative of a Late Expedition was packaged and sold along with Mrs. Scott’s story by Ames & Parker, the tales “of barbarity and bloodshed. . . were everywhere the thing.” [5]
___________
1. https://preservation.mhl.org/21-elm-street Retrieved May 6, 2022.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Roy Henry Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1, Mar. 1947, 12. Dr. Pearce’s first book, Savagism and Civilization, published in 1953, was one of the academia’s earliest explorations of ideological representations of Native Americans in Western thought and in American literature.
5. Pearce, 10.
— Reverend Samuel Phillips, A Word in Season. Or, The Duty of People to Take and Keep the Oath of Allegiance to the Glorious God (Boston: Samuel Kneeland & Timothy Green, printers, 1726)
The short-lived partnership of Ames & Parker produced Andover's first imprints in 1798-1799. There are just two of them known to exist. One is a pair of captivity tales; the other is a Thanksgiving sermon delivered to the parishioners of South Church by Reverend Jonathan French. In other words, one is about perceived darkness; the other, perceived light.
The Narrative of a Late Expedition against the Indians, first published in 1783, tells the stories of Dr. John Knight, who escapes his capture; Colonel Crawford, an "old warrior among the savages” (he had served under Washington in the Continental Army), who is killed; and another escapee, John Slover, who supplies myriad gory details. The editor of the tales, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, deleted all mention of the fact that Colonel Crawford was executed in retaliation for the infamous Gnadenhütten massacre of some ninety unarmed Christian Delawares converted by the Moravians in Ohio. A Remarkable Narrative of the Captivity & Escape of Mrs. Frances Scott, which was appended to the men's stories, was initially published in 1785. Exactly six months earlier, on June 29, 1785, “painted savages” had killed Mrs. Scott’s husband and their four children, and taken her captive. The chief of the tribe, an “old man” who no longer went out hunting with the younger men, was assigned to guard her. A month into her captivity, while he was preoccupied with graining a deer skin — traditionally, women’s work — she was able to escape. She spent another month wandering in the wilderness, engaged in “serious meditation” and “devout exercises,” and surviving on “no other subsistance but chewing and swallowing the juice of young cane-stalks, Sassafras leaves, and some other plants she did not know the names of.” Finally, guided by a “beautiful bird” and then another just like it, she chose one path over another, and came upon a white settlement appropriately called New Garden. “Thus, in the third month of her captivity, she was unexpectedly though joyfully relieved from the dreadful impending death by famine,” a third-person narrator tells us. “[H]ad she taken the other valley, she never could have returned.” And so she was home again, albeit suffering from residual effects, the epilogue concludes: “Mrs. Scott continues in a low state of health, and remains inconsolable for the loss of her family, particularly bewailing the cruel death of her little daughter,” an eight-year-old who was “tomahawked and stabbed” while in her mother’s arms.
Writers of our earliest American captivity narratives were focussed on portraying themselves as having been saved by their belief in God. They also regularly presented to their readers the kind of concrete, socio-anthropological details about their captors that Mary Rowlandson, for example, had provided hers. (“I laid down my load, and went into the wigwam, and there sat an Indian boiling horse-feet [they being wont to eat the flesh first, and when the feet were old and dried, and they had nothing else, they would cut off the feet and used them]…”) But what came to matter just as much during this period was a narrative’s propagandistic qualities. The United States was expanding rapidly, and many of the most popular titles, the ones that citizens clamored for, were those that seemed to justify dispossessing or simply destroying those who got in the way.
As for Reverend French's thirty-one page Thanksgiving sermon, it wasn’t connected to the Pilgrim feast or Thanksgiving celebrations as we know them; those didn't begin until the Victorian era. Rather, it was one of those typical, topical sermons usually delivered on Thursday, not Sunday, as indeed this sermon was, on November 29, 1798.
Which sold more copies? And where were they sold? Church members customarily paid to have a sermon printed and distributed among themselves in the parish. This one may also have been distributed at P.A., where in 1796 Reverend French had begun to act as a provisional professor of divinity. The captivity narratives may have been sold at a local tavern. The one in Andover known as the “Ye Ames Tavern” was built between 1794 and 1800 on what is now Elm Street, at a point between North Parish and South Parish. [1] Was the tavern keeper the "Ames" of the Ames & Parker partnership? The Andover Center for History and Culture website mentions a Parker in connection with an Ames. He is James Parker Jr., who gave the land for the tavern to "to Benjamin Ames, gentleman, and Joshua Lovejoy Jr., yeoman, on Christmas Day in 1773." [2] The same lot was "transferred to Benj. Ames senior to his son Benjamin Ames Jr. on August 8, 1800." [3] If Ames was one part of the partnership, was a member of the Parker family the other part? Like most ephemeral printing-partnerships, Ames & Parker left no records. So no one can say.
What we do know is that, along with sermons, captivity narratives were at the time being cheaply printed everywhere as printers’ attempted to satisfy the public’s ravenous appetite for “the eighteenth-century equivalent of the dime novel.” [4] Of the period when The Narrative of a Late Expedition was packaged and sold along with Mrs. Scott’s story by Ames & Parker, the tales “of barbarity and bloodshed. . . were everywhere the thing.” [5]
___________
1. https://preservation.mhl.org/21-elm-street Retrieved May 6, 2022.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Roy Henry Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1, Mar. 1947, 12. Dr. Pearce’s first book, Savagism and Civilization, published in 1953, was one of the academia’s earliest explorations of ideological representations of Native Americans in Western thought and in American literature.
5. Pearce, 10.
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