Note 455 — Chapter II · (continued 3)

The original edition is called The Redeemed Captive, returning to Zion. A faithful history of remarkable occurrences in the captivity and deliverance of Mr. John Williams, minister of the gospel in Deerfield, who, in the desolation which befel that plantation, by an incursion of the French and Indians, was by them carried away with his family into Canada, [with] a sermon preached by him on his return at Boston, Dec. 5, 1706. Boston, 1707. (Harv. Col. lib., 4375.12; Brinley, i. no. 494; Carter-Brown, iii. no. 103.) A second edition was issued at Boston in 1720; a third in 1738, with an appendix of details by Stephen Williams and Thomas Prince; a fourth without date [1773]; a fifth in 1774; another at New London without date [1780?]; one at Greenfield in 1793, with an additional appendix by John Taylor,—the same who delivered a Century Sermon in Deerfield, Feb. 29, 1804, printed at Greenfield the same year; what was called a fifth edition at Boston in 1795; sixth at Greenfield, with additions, in 1800; again at New Haven in 1802, following apparently the fifth edition, and containing Taylor’s appendix. United with the narrative of Mrs. Rowlandson’s captivity, it made part of a volume issued at Brookfield in 1811, as Captivity and Deliverance of Mr. John Williams and of Mrs. Rowlandson, written by themselves. The latest edition is one published at Northampton in 1853, to which is added a biographical memoir [of John Williams] with appendix and notes by Stephen W. Williams. (Brinley, i. nos. 495-505; Cooke, 2,735-37; Field, Indian Bibliog., 1672-75.) The memoir thus mentioned appeared originally as A Biographical Memoir of the Rev. John Williams, first minister of Deerfield, with papers relating to the early Indian wars in Deerfield, Greenfield, 1837. The author, Stephen W. Williams, was a son of the captive, and he gives more details of the attack and massacre than his father did. Jeremiah Colburn (Bibliog. of Mass.) notes an edition dated 1845. This book has an appendix presenting the names of the slain and captured, and Captain Stoddard’s journal of a scout from Deerfield to Onion or French River in 1707. (Field, no. 1,674.) John Williams died in 1729, and a notice of him from the N. E. Weekly Journal is copied in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1854, p. 174; and Isaac Chauncey’s Sermon at his funeral was printed in Boston in 1729. (Brinley, no. 508.) The house in Deerfield in which Williams lived, showing the marks of the tomahawk which beat in the door, stood till near the middle of this century. An unsuccessful effort was made in 1847 to prevent its destruction. (N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., ii. 110.) There are views of it in Hoyt’s Antiquarian Researches, and in Gay’s Pop. Hist. United States, iii. 122. Eleazer Williams, the missionary to the Indians at the west, was supposed to be a great grandson of the captive, through Eunice Williams, one of the captive’s daughters, who adopted the Indian life during her detention in Canada, and married, refusing afterwards to return to her kindred. A claim was set up late in Eleazer Williams’ life that the was the lost dauphin, Louis XVII., and he is said to have told stories to confirm it, some of which gave him a name for questionable veracity. In 1853, a paper in Putnam’s Magazine (vol. i. 194), called “Have we a Bourbon among us?” followed by a longer presentation of the claim by the same writer, the Rev. J. H. Hanson, in a book, The Lost Prince, attracted much attention to Williams, who died a few years later in 1858, aged about 73. There is a memoir of Mr. Williams in vol. iii. of the Memorial Biographies of the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Society. The question of his descent produced a number of magazine articles (cf. Poole’s Index, p. 1411, and appendix to the Longmeadow Centennial Celebration), the outcome of which was not favorable to Williams’ pretension, whose truthfulness in other matters has been seriously questioned. Hoyt, the author of the Antiquarian Researches, represented on the authority of Williams that there were documents in the convents of Canada showing that the French, in their attack on Deerfield, had secured and had taken to Canada a bell which hung in the belfry of the Deerfield meeting-house, and that this identical bell was placed upon the chapel of St. Regis. Benjamin F. De Costa (Galaxy, Jan., 1870, vol. ix. 124) and others have showed that the St. Regis settlement did not exist till long after. This turned the allegation into an attempt to prove that the place of the bell was St. Louis instead, the present Caughnawaga. Geo. T. Davis, who examines this story, and gives some additional details about the attack on the town, has reached the conclusion, in his “Bell of St. Regis,” that Williams deceived Hoyt by a fabrication. (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. (1870), xi. 311; Hough’s St. Lawrence and Franklin Counties, ch. 2.)