Reverend Joseph Rowlandson is a son of Thomas Rowlandson, an English emigrant ancestor. Joseph was born about 1635 in Lancaster, Worcester, Massachusetts. He was ordained as a Puritan minister in 1660.
Of Mary White's origins, we can be certain only that she was born into a farming family somewhere in Somerset county in the south of England about 1637. Her father, John White, and her mother, whose maiden name was Joan West, had been married in 1627. Mary was the fifth of eight children born to John and Joan White.
Although Mary White's personal life in England is largely hidden from us, we know a great deal about the world into which she was born. England in the 1630s was being swept by economic, social, and religious upheavals. A shift toward specialized, commercial agriculture led many wealthy landowners to "enclose" tracts customarily cultivated by the rural poor, forcing the latter to move from one locale to another in search of work and food. Many "middling" (neither rich nor poor) landowners also tried to profit from raising crops or livestock; while some succeeded, others faltered because their holdings were too small. Like their poorer counterparts, many of the "middling sort" moved elsewhere within England in order to improve their prospects. Prior to and apart from its North American colonies, then, England was a country where people commonly moved from one place to another.
Arriving in Salem, Essex County, Massachusetts, in 1639, Mary White and her family found themselves in a society that was young but already heavily populated. By then newcomers to the crowded maritime port and farming community were being granted land far from the town center. In 1653, fourteen years after arriving in Massachusetts Bay, John White and family moved again. The Whites moved fifty miles west to another new town, Lancaster. Lancaster was a study in contrasts to Wenham. Besides being known for its disreputable inhabitants, the town's nearest neighbors were Native Americans. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, the native peoples of southern New England (the area of the present states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) probably numbered more than one hundred thousand. But first visiting explorers and then colonists soon brought devastating epidemics of smallpox and other diseases to which Indians lacked sufficient immunity, reducing the population in some areas by as much as 90 percent. Hardest hit were the Indians of the eastern coast, where communities formerly numbering in the hundreds now held only a few dozen." One English visitor, arriving in 1622, remarked that the "bones and skulls" of the unburied dead "made such a spectacle ... it seemed to me a new found Golgatha." " While living in Wenham, Mary White might have seen an Indian or two from time to time along a road or in the larger towns of Salem or Ipswich. Lancaster was another story. The neighboring Nipmuc people of Nashaway had helped the town get started and continued to contribute to its economic well-being.
The Whites were among a large number of new families moving to Lancaster as its prospects seemed to be improving. After a decade in which the number of families was never more than about a dozen, it suddenly boasted thirty-five households by 1654. Lancaster had finally recruited a minister, Joseph Rowlandson. Mary White and Joseph Rowlandson were married in about 1656.
Like his new wife, Joseph Rowlandson was born in England, accompanied his family in the Great Migration to New England, and settled in Essex County before moving to Lancaster. But while the Whites were pillars of the community in Wenham, the Rowlandsons were near the bottom of Ipswich society in wealth, social status, and reputation. Rowlandson's father appeared frequently in court, most often for failing to pay assessments, and his brother became an object of public derision after his wife won a divorce, charging he was impotent. Though studying for the ministry, Joseph had his own brush with the law. In 1651 he posted on the door of the Ipswich meetinghouse — the town's bulletin board — an anonymous broadside ridiculing New England as a region where envy had triumphed over truth in the administration of justice. Specific references in the text indicate that he was lashing out at those who had harassed his family by collecting fines and initiating lawsuits. His identity was quickly discovered and Joseph Rowlandson was charged with "scandelous lybell," for which he was fined and forced to make an abject, lengthy apology. Nevertheless, he went on to graduate from Harvard College in 1652 and, after waiting more than a year, accepted an invitation from Lancaster to become its first minister.
Whereas John White had left a son in Wenham to manage the family's holdings there, Rowlandson brought his destitute parents with him to Lancaster. Whereas all the Whites knew how to read and write, only Joseph among the Rowlandsons could sign his name. Nevertheless, as a minister, Rowlandson made up for his family's deficiencies not only because he was entitled to a generous allotment of land but because he had earned the right to be addressed as "mister." In status-conscious England and its colonies, "mister" was reserved for men of authority and learning, such as ministers, magistrates, and military officers, and was also applied to very wealthy merchants. But landowners who lacked the inherited status of either aristocrats or gentry, no matter how large their holdings, were addressed simply as "goodman." Through maintaining diligence in his studies and by overcoming considerable social and legal obstacles, Joseph Rowlandson enjoyed a privilege denied John White and every other man in Lancaster. Because the status of wives in English society followed that of their husbands, Mary Rowlandson became the only woman in town to be addressed as "mistress"; had she married anyone else, she would have been known, like all the other women, as "goodwife." Besides satisfying both families' ambitions, the marriage of the once penniless and despised minister to the daughter of the largest landowner made them by far the most prominent couple among the town's generation of younger adults.
The White-Rowlanclson marriage ought to have brought Lancaster the respectability in the eyes of eastern colonists that kept eluding the town. But the combination of Lancaster and Joseph Rowlandson, with their respective histories of contentiousness, proved too explosive. At around the time the Rowlandsons were married, a female church member, Mary Gates, was charged with "making bold and unbeseeming speeches in the public assembly on the Lord's day against the minister. Apparently Rowlandson had disputed Gates's mother's contention that she had given him satisfaction for some grievance, the nature of which has not been preserved in the town records. While it may be tempting to think of Mary Gates as another Anne Hutchinson, the feud appears to have been a more personal one of the sort that Rowlandson was embroiled in with other Lancaster residents. Most of the disputes arose when townspeople questioned the extent of Rowlandson's landholdings and the validity of his titles to some of them. In addition, many disliked the minister's threat to accept an offer from a church in Billerica, Massachusetts, unless Lancaster enhanced his income. Meanwhile, the General Court responded to the renewed feuding by appointing a three-man commission to monitor the town. Partial to Rowlandson, the commission in 1657 ordered the selectmen to build a meetinghouse and raise his salary, which they grudgingly did.
The surviving records are fragmentary, but something of a pattern emerges in these disputes. On one side were the town's early settlers, the wealthiest of whom traded regularly with the Nipmucs of Nashaway and all of whom chafed under efforts by the General Court to regulate their affairs. Pitted against them were newer arrivals, some of whom, like the Rowlandsons and Whites, owned more land than any of the old-timers and who readily looked to the Court for support. Unlike their rivals, the newcomers had no economic stake in relations with Indians. Whereas trader Stephen Day could tell the General Court he had entertained "both English and Indians at my house from day to day for some years together," Joseph Rowlandson appears to have contributed nothing to the lagging missionary effort at Nashaway except by taking a Christian Indian youth into his home as a servant. The fault line running through frontier Lancaster had economic and even cultural dimensions.
In the end, however, the fault line proved transitory. By the early 1660s, as the townspeople fought yet another battle over Rowlandson's landholdings, relations between Lancaster and Nashaway were beginning to change. While Indians had once hunted beaver and other fur-bearing animals solely to satisfy their own needs, the onset earlier in the century of the English demand for furs and the Indian demand for European goods had led native hunters to procure as many pelts as they could. As a result, beaver, otter, marten, mink, and other fur-bearing mammals had become virtually extinct in southern New England. But English traders at Lancaster and elsewhere customarily provided their native clients with trade goods in advance of each hunting season, with the understanding that the Indians would satisfy their debt with furs. The sudden decline in furs left many Indians indebted to the traders. Therefore, some Lancaster traders pressured their Nashaway creditors to satisfy their debts with land in lieu of furs. Thus Stephen Day obtained 150 acres of upland from the Nashaway sachem, Matthew, while John Prescott obtained a tract from another Nashaway Christian, James Quanapohit. Other traders, like John Tinker, sold their interest to Simon Willard, the wealthiest trader in central and eastern Massachusetts, and moved elsewhere. By the end of the 1660s, the end of the fur trade and the transformation of the remaining traders into major landowners had closed the social and factional divide in Lancaster.
By the early 1670s, Lancaster was finally acquiring respectability in English eyes. A sure sign of the change came in 1672 when Joseph Rowlandson, once known for precipitating conflicts, was called to Boston's bitterly divided First Church to help resolve a conflict. In the following year, three decades after the establishment of English Nashaway, the General Court's special commission submitted its final report. It found that the people of Lancaster were now living in harmony and capable of handling their own affairs. Accepting this judgment, the Court at long last granted the town its full autonomy.
But the very changes that had brought stability to Lancaster undermined its ties with its Nashaway neighbors. Indeed, the early 1670s brought a deterioration in Indian-English relations throughout the colonies. The decline of the fur trade was only a part of a larger process by which the Indians' lives were being transformed. Throughout the nearly half century of English colonization, the native population continued to decrease from the effects of European-derived diseases, while the newcomers were multiplying more rapidly than almost any other group of people in the world at the time. Compared to Lancaster with its thirty-five households in 1654, Nashaway numbered only fifteen or sixteen twenty years later. Not only traders but also colonial authorities were now pressuring Indians to sell land in order to make room for the younger generation of colonists coming of age. Even on the land remaining, life was becoming more constricted. English livestock invaded Indians' cornfields and, along with English plows, devoured the grasses that attracted deer and other animals on which the natives depended for meat. As a result, Indians throughout the region were reassessing their relationship with the colonies. Some turned to Christianity, others turned away from it, and still others were so confused by the rapid changes that they could not make up their minds. For some of these, the wares of another kind of English trader — the liquor dealer — became an illusory source of respite. Tensions were compounded in Nashaway when the Christian sachem, Matthew, died and was succeeded by Shoshanim, the "debauched and drunken fellow" who had been passed over in 1658. His rise to power makes clear the transformation occurring among Lancaster's once-friendly neighbors.
The deterioration of Indian-English relations at Nashaway and Lancaster was but a variation on a theme being played out in much of southern New England. An Indian perspective on these changes was provided by the Wampanoag sachem, Metacom, in June 1675. He told Rhode Island Governor John Eaton how English cheating, discrimination, and pressures to sell land, submit to Plymouth colony's authority, convert to Christianity, and consume alcohol had undermined a half-century of friendship and driven the Wampanoags of Pokanoket to the point of war. Natives in the Massachusetts portion of the Connecticut River valley and among the Narragansetts and Niantics in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut were also expressing anti-English sentiments.
Of special concern to the English as tensions mounted were the Nipmucs, who occupied the southern New England heartland linking the colonies' potential Indian enemies. Anxious to ensure their loyalty, Daniel Gookin, Massachusetts Bay's superintendent of Christian Indians, toured the Nipmucs' villages in July 1673. As missionary John Eliot had done three decades earlier among the Massachusett Indians to the east, Gookin hastily sought to organize the Nipmuc villages into Christian communities, called "praying towns," by appointing "praying Indians" as ministers and magistrates to govern them. At Nashaway, he introduced Jethro, a Christian Nipmuc from another town, as its new minister and exhorted Shoshanim and his people to "abstain from drunkenness, whoredom, and powwowing [traditional religious ceremonies and healing practices], and all other evils" in order to be assured of "eternal and temporal happiness." But whereas Gookin's seven other stops resulted in the establishment of new praying towns, neither Nashaway nor Weshakim, a smaller village nearby, were recognized as such. Having experienced English meddling in their politics as well as the other kinds of transformation listed by Metacom, the people of Nashaway had learned to distrust the intentions of the english, particularly their missionaries.
The event that finally triggered open war was the death of another native who had struggled to reconcile the growing chasm between the Indians and the English. John Sassamon was a Christian Massachusett Indian who had lived in John Eliot's first praying town of Natick, where he had learned to read and write English. He went on to attend Harvard College, but at some point he left his life among the English to become an interpreter, English-language scribe, and counselor for the Pokanoket Wampanoags and their sachem, Metacom, or "King Philip." Sassamon served Metacom for more than a decade, even as Plymouth-Wampanoag relations grew increasingly bitter. But in March 1675, with tensions at fever pitch, Sassamon informed Governor Josiah Winslow that Metacom was conspiring with other Indians to launch an all-out war against the English. Whether Sassamon was telling the truth or had invented his tale in order to ingratiate himself once again with the English was never determined, for a week later he was dead. Three associates of Metacom were accused by a Christian Indian who testified that he had seen them beat Sassamon to death and throw his body in a pond. Plymouth selected a jury of twelve Englishmen plus six Christian Indians, especially appointed to give the trial an appearance of evenhandedness. The jury found the three guilty and, on June 8, 1675, they were hanged. Having already expressed his distrust of the English system of justice as it concerned Indians, Metacom and his followers were mobilizing for war even as the trial progressed . Fighting broke out later that month when Pokanokets began attacking colonists in the Plymouth town of Swansea.
Fears and rumors abounded at Lancaster, leading the town to dispatch several men, including Joseph Rowlandson, to Boston to plead for troops to defend the town. The Lancaster men were still in Boston when the first soldiers arrived and found the Rowlandsons’ garrison house in flames and at least fourteen of the town’s inhabitants dead and twenty-three captured.
Mary and three of her children were among the captives. Mary had been shot in the attack and her daughter Sarah had also been wounded. Mary and her children were taken to a Nipmuc town named Menameset about twenty-five miles southwest of Lancaster. Mary was transformed from English mother and wife to Indian captive. During that time, her daughter Sarah died in her arms; she could not remain with her tow other children, Mary and Joseph, Jr. She was sold by her Narragansett captor to his sachem, Quinnapin. Quinnapin became her “master” and his three wives her “mistresses.”
Joseph remained in Boston, appearing frequently as a guest preacher in area churches. Less than two weeks after his family’s capture, he told worshipers at Boston’s Old South Church that “god is true to himselfe and to all that put their trust in him...god is too wise to be deceived by any and too faithfull to deceive any that trust in him.” These thoughts were undoubtedly a powerful consolation for him as he pondered his family’s fate. At about the same time, he declined an offer from the colony of a position as army chaplain, presumably so he could devote his time to securing his family’s release.
After eleven weeks, Mary was ransomed for twenty pounds on May 2, 1676. After her release, Mary spent a night near abandoned Lancaster and on the following day joined her husband in Boston. The two surviving Rowlandson children were reunited with their parents by the end of June. After three months in the home of another minister and his family in nearby Charlestown, the Rowlandsons moved to a house in Boston that was rented for them by a local congregation. They finally ended their dependence on the charity of their fellow colonists in the spring of 1677 when Joseph accepted an offer to become the minister at Wethersfield, Connecticut. Capitalizing on Mary’s fame, he was able to command a starting annual salary of one hundred pounds with annual twenty-pound increments over the ensuing five years, making him one of the highest paid clergymen in New England. When he died a year and a half later, his library of books – all of which would have to have been acquired after the destruction of his home in Lancaster – was worth eighty-two pounds.
After Joseph’s death in November 1678 at the age of forty-seven, the Wethersfield town meeting voted that she should receive Joseph’s current compensation of 120 pounds for the rest of that year and thereafter a stipend of 30 pounds annually “so long as she shall remain a widow among us.” Like most other widows in the English colonies, she did not remain one for long. Nine moths later she married Samuel Talcott, also of Wethersfield, who own wife had recently died. Talcott had attended Harvard but, unlike Joseph did not enter the ministry. Instead, he became a wealthy landowner who represented Wethersfield in Connecticut’s General Court and, during Metacom’s War, sat on the colony’s war council. But like Joseph, Samuel Talcott was addressed as “mister. Thus before she published her narrative, Mistress Mary Rowlandson had become Mistress Mary Talcott.
Mary’s narrative entitled, “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God” was published with Joseph’s final sermon entitled, “The Possibility of God’s Forsaking a People that have been Visibly Near and Dear to him, together withe Misery of a People thus Forsaken” in 1682. This sermon was a standard jeremiad which echoed a theme that his wife’s experience must have driven home with particular intensity. Four editions of her narrative were published in the first year and became very popular.
Mary lived out her days as Samuel Talcott’s wife and after he died in 1691, as his widow. Her one appearance in the historical record as Mary Talcott came late in her life and constituted a strange postscript to her captivity. In 1707 she posted bond following the arrest of her son, Joseph Rowlandson, Jr., the pious boy of the narrative who was now a prosperous Wethersfield landowner and merchant. A man claiming to be the long-vanished brother of Rowlandson, Jr.’s wife suddenly appeared and charged that, five years earlier, Rowlandson and another brother-in-law had gotten him drunk and sold him as an indentured servant to a shipowner bound for Virginia. The court, apparently not trusting either party, postponed making its decision for thirteen years before finally ruling in favor of Rowlandson’s accuser. By then the verdict was moot, for Rowlandson, Jr., and his accuser had both died. But the incident brought the theme of forced captivity back into the life of Mary Rowlandson when, as the widow Talcott, her former good name could not dispel the suspicions directed against her son. Like her son, she was spared the ignominy that would have followed the court’s finding, having died in January 1711 at about seventy-three years of age.
Edited and written by Ruth H. Barker
Source: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Related Documents, edited by Neal Salisbury, Boston, 1997.