John Williams (New England minister)
John Williams (10 December 1664 – 12 June 1729)[citation needed] was a New England Puritan minister who was the noted pastor of Deerfield from 1688 to his death.
The frontier town in western Massachusetts was one of several on the upper Connecticut River; they were vulnerable to the attacks of French forces and their Native American allies from New France and northern New England.
In 1702, with the outbreak of Queen Anne's War, New England colonists had taken prisoner a successful French pirate, Pierre Maisonnat dit Baptiste.
To gain his return, the French governor of Canada planned to raid Deerfield and capture a prisoner of equal value to exchange.
The French depended on their First Nations allies in this raid: Mohawk of the Iroquois, many from Kahnawake; Wyandot (Huron) from the mission village of Lorette, also in Quebec; Abenaki from northeast New England, and some Pocumtuc.
The raiders captured Williams, minister of the village, and a prominent leader in the community and colony, and more than 100 other English settlers.
The raiding party led the Williams' and other families on a march and water travel over 300 miles (480 km) of winter landscape to Canada.
En route to Quebec, a Mohawk killed Williams' wife Eunice after she fell while trying to cross a creek, and Frank, another African slave.
But they also showed compassion; in his memoir, Williams noted that an Indian had carried his young daughter Eunice when she got tired.
When his exchange was finally arranged in late 1706, Williams was forced to leave in Quebec his daughter Eunice, then ten years old, who had been adopted by a Mohawk family in Kahnawake, a Jesuit mission village south of Montreal.
Being printed in several editions, Williams's account was one of the more well-known of the numerous Indian captivity narratives published during the colonial period.
In September of that year, he remarried to Abigail Bissell, a widow from Connecticut and first cousin to his late wife through the Stoddard family.
He made efforts to keep in touch with Eunice and continued to try to persuade her to return to Massachusetts, as did her brother Stephen, who followed his father into the ministry.
Williams emerged as one of their strongest opponents, publishing, with James Franklin (Benjamin's brother), a treatise against the Mathers entitled "Several arguments proving, that inoculating the small pox is not contained in the law of physick, either natural or divine, and therefore unlawful".
[1] The last known survivor of the raid, Eunice Williams, also known by her Mohawk and married name as Marguerite Kanenstenhawi Arosen, died on 26 November 1785.
