Though she’s all but forgotten today, Hannah Duston was probably the first American woman to be memorialized in a public monument, and this statue is one of three built in her honor between 1861 and 1879. The mystery of why Americans came to see patriotic “heroism” in Duston’s extreme—even gruesome—violence, and why she became popular more than 100 years after her death, helps explain how the United States sees itself in world conflicts today.

Born in 1657, Hannah Emerson Duston lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts, at a time when disputes among English colonists, the French in Canada, and various Native American nations resulted in a series of wars in the region. King Philip’s War (1675-1676), for example, decimated southern New England Indian nations, which lost between 60 and 80 percent of their population as well as their political independence. Many were sold into slavery. By the late 1680s and the start of King William’s War, fragments of those southern tribes had joined the Abenaki and other northern New England Indian nations allied with the French to fight the continuing expansion of the English colonists to the north and west. Native men conducted raids on frontier English settlements, burning property, killing or injuring some colonists, and taking others captive, either to ransom them back to their families, or to adopt them as replacements for their own lost family members.

Such was the context in which one group, most of whom were likely Abenaki, attacked the town of Haverhill on March 15, 1697—and encountered 40-year-old Hannah Duston at home with her neighbor Mary Neff. The Indians captured the women, along with some of their neighbors, and started on foot toward Canada. Duston had given birth about a week before. The captors are said to have killed her child early in the journey.

The group traveled for about two weeks, and then left Duston and Neff with a Native American family—two men, three women, and seven children—and another English captive, a boy who had been abducted a year and a half earlier from Worcester, Massachusetts. 14-year-old Samuel Leonardson may have been adopted by the family; he certainly had their trust. At Duston’s request, he asked one of the men the proper way to kill someone with a tomahawk, and was promptly shown how.

One night when the Indian family was sleeping, Duston, Neff, and Leonardson—who were not guarded or locked up—armed themselves with tomahawks and killed and scalped 10 of the Indians, including six children. They wounded an older woman, who escaped. A small boy managed to run away. Duston and her fellow captives then left in a canoe, taking themselves and the scalps down the Merrimack River to Massachusetts, where they presented them to the General Assembly of Massachusetts and received a reward of 50 pounds.

This statue of Hannah Duston was the second one erected in Haverhill, Massachusetts. In other statues she holds scalps, but here she points her finger accusingly. Photo courtesy of Gregory Rodriguez.

Hannah Duston never wrote down her story. Most of what we know about her comes from the influential Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who published three versions of her tale between 1697 and 1702, embedded in his larger works on New England history. Mather frequently portrayed Indian people as instruments used by the devil to thwart the Puritan mission. He described Duston as a righteous ringleader who had every reason to convince the other captives to act. He stressed the “savagery” of her Indian captors, providing a horrific description of the murder of her child (“they dash’d out the Brains of the Infant, against a Tree.”). We will never know the full truth of Duston’s ordeal—was her baby murdered or did it die?—but Mather’s version of the death highlighted Indian violence to justify Duston’s gruesome vengeance.

Mather asserted that Duston and Neff never meant to kill the small boy who escaped; he was “designedly spared” so they could bring him home with them, if he hadn’t run away. At the same time, Mather was apparently unconcerned that six of the “wretches” the captives scalped were children. He compared Duston to the biblical heroine Jael, who saved her people by driving a spike through Sisera’s head while he slept. Cotton Mather understood the wars between New England Puritans and Indians as battles between good and evil and this clearly shaped the way he told Duston’s story. She was a heroine saving her people from “savage” outsiders, fighting a justified war.

After 1702, Americans forgot about Hannah Duston until the 1820s, when there was a half-century-long revival of interest in her story, stoked by the nation’s expansion westward into Indian lands. The nation’s foremost literary figures, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and John Greenleaf Whittier, all wrote about her. Virtually all histories of the United States from that time contained a version of the story, as did numerous magazines, children’s books, biographies of famous Americans, and guidebooks. A mountain in northern New Hampshire was named “Mt. Dustan” in her honor—and of course, communities erected the three monuments.

It is no coincidence that Americans renewed their interest in the Duston story during this time. From the 1820s, when Georgia began pressing for the forced removal of native people, through the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, the so-called “Indian problem” was almost always in the news. 19th-century white Americans were well aware of the moral issues that Indian removal raised, and engaged in heated national debates. As an 1829 “Circular: Addressed to Benevolent Ladies of the United States” put it, “The present crisis in the affairs of Indian Nations in the United States, demands the immediate and interested attention of all who make any claims to benevolence or humanity.” The circular described Indians as “free and noble” yet “helpless,” and “prey of the avaricious and the unprincipled” who wanted to steal their land, not caring that Indians would “perish” if removed.

Women, excluded from formal politics at this time, were active in the anti-removal campaign. They justified their involvement in a political issue by framing Indian removal as a moral question. In the 1820s, virtue was central to American national identity, and embodied in women. This is why Columbia became such a popular symbol of the nation—and why some turned to the story of Hannah Duston as ammunition in the debate over Indian removal.

How could a virtuous democratic nation evict Native Americans from their homelands, and wage war against them when they refused to give up those lands? It was possible only if those Indians were “bloodthirsty savages” who attacked innocent white Americans. Because female virtue was linked to the nation’s virtue, what violent act could be more innocent than that of a grief-stricken mother who had just witnessed the murder of her newborn child?

Accordingly, like Cotton Mather’s accounts, 19th-century versions of the Duston story depicted Native Americans as excessively violent. In a popular 1823 history textbook by Charles Goodrich, the Indians who took Duston captive burned “with savage animosity” and “delighted” “in the infliction of torment.” Goodrich claimed that “[w]omen, soon expecting to become mothers, were generally ripped up” by Indian captors and that some captives were even “roasted alive.”

But one problem remained: How could an “innocent” wronged mother murder someone else’s children herself? Tellingly, the fact that the “innocent” Duston killed six children was increasingly erased from accounts of her actions from the 1830s on. She thus became an American heroine.

Efforts to commemorate Duston began in earnest with the acceleration of western expansion in the 1850s. The first monument, built in Haverhill in 1861, was a marble column. On its base was a shield, surrounded by a musket, bow, arrows, tomahawk, and scalping knife. Engravings on its sides told the story of the “barbarous” murder of Duston’s baby and her “remarkable exploit;” the column was topped by an eagle, symbol of the American nation. The monument’s builders, however, never fully paid for it, and in August 1865 it was stripped and resold to another town as a Civil War memorial.

The second monument was the 1874 New Hampshire scalp-wielding statue. Located on the island where it was thought Duston had killed the Native American family, it was unveiled on June 17th, the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, making the link between Duston, her violent acts, and American patriotism explicit. Haverhill built the last monument in 1879, as a replacement for the repossessed column. This time around, Duston, in long flowing hair and a gown, held a tomahawk in one hand and pointed the other outward in accusation, both highlighting her violence and suggesting that responsibility for it lay elsewhere. The scalps were gone. At its installation, the philanthropist who donated money for the statue emphasized its patriotism, stating that the purpose of the monument was to remember Duston’s “valor” and to “animate our hearts with noble ideas and patriotic feelings.”

As long as the so-called “Indian problem” continued, Duston remained an important historical figure, her story presented as moral justification for American expansionism onto Indian lands and into Mexico. But by 1890 officials had pronounced the “frontier” closed. The Indian population had reached a historic low, and the U.S. government confined virtually all Natives who remained in the West to reservations; the “Indian problem” was over. The nation reassessed its attitudes toward Native Americans, and public interest in Duston’s story plummeted correspondingly. The tale disappeared from textbooks and popular culture.

Still, the powerful dynamic the story helped to establish remains with us today. The idea of a feminized, always-innocent America has become the principle by which the United States has structured many interactions with enemy others. In international wars as on frontiers past, it has portrayed itself as the righteous, innocent, mother-goddess-of-liberty patriotically defending herself against its “savage” enemies.

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Before that, the South was Indian country.

The South’s long and rich Indigenous history is unknown to many Americans. But once you look, the signs are everywhere: in Native place names (Alabama, Arkansas, Chattahoochee, Tallahassee, Tennessee); in hundreds of earthen mounds—some half-destroyed, others still towering; and in the Native communities that remain in or near their homelands.

Native people and their pasts have been marginalized in Southern history because Indian Removal, the cornerstone of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, sought to erase Southern Indians—from the land and from historical memory.

Uncovering the history of Southern Indians reveals that the Old South was more than the Confederacy and Lost Cause mythology. Before the European invasion and even into the colonial period, the South had the highest Native population density north of Mexico. And long before secessionists tried to distinguish themselves from other Americans, Native peoples of the South recognized cultural commonalities, and distinguished themselves from their Iroquoian rivals to the north by calling themselves “Southern nations.”

Southern Native women, who managed agriculture, developed specialized regional varieties of corn. Thanks to the region’s subtropical climate, they produced two crops per year. Women’s leading role in farming is probably related to the region’s matrilineal kinship system, wherein families reckoned descent through the mother and passed property and titles through the maternal line.

In time, the region’s large population, agricultural productivity, and booming trade networks gave rise to chiefdoms, nations, and even cities. The largest city was Cahokia, just east of modern-day St. Louis, which was bigger than London when it boomed around 1050 A.D. Cahokia boasted almost 20,000 residents in town and another 20,000 in the surrounding areas. It took centuries of North American colonialism for European settlers to surpass it, when Philadelphia did so in the 1760s.

Although most Americans associate the Trail of Tears exclusively with the Cherokee Nation, Indian Removal was a blanket policy aimed at “removing” all Eastern Indians west of the Mississippi River. In total, 100,000 Indians were forced to leave. Most came from the South, where settlers coveted the rich lands—potential cotton fields—still controlled by large Indian nations.

There had been removals before. Beginning in the 17th century, colonists forced some Indian nations onto small reservations after devastating wars. After the Revolution, the United States aggressively sought Indian land through warfare and treaties.

The Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, was different. For the first time, Congress and the president used the power of the federal government to undertake removal on a massive scale. Despite objections from many corners—the U.S. Supreme Court, Indian leaders, and activists—Jackson pushed ahead, exceeding the letter of the law to achieve removal by any means.

Many U.S. citizens championed Jackson’s resolve, especially the newly empowered middle-income and poor white men eager to claim the spoils of Indian country. In addition to economic demand, Jackson and his allies seized on a new racial ideology.

Formerly, most U.S. policymakers, influenced by the Enlightenment, argued that environment—culture, language, food, and education—accounted for human differences. Beginning in the 1820s, however, the new pseudoscience of phrenology declared that human differences were biological and immutable. Conveniently, white supremacists cited this theory to support Indian Removal and the growth of slavery. Contested at the time, and then firmly discredited, “scientific racism” unleashed monstrous legacies that persist to plague our present.

In addition to stoking racism, Jackson persuaded U.S. citizens that removal would cost them little. He proposed to hire private contractors, awarding each contract to the lowest bidder, with very little oversight. The resulting corruption and negligence, combined with the sheer scale of the endeavor, was what gave the “Trail of Tears” its name. One contractor who received almost $20,000 bragged to a colleague that “he had never issued a single ration.” A Seminole reported that this was typical, explaining that “rations [were] issued irregularly; when due, not delivered; and when delivered but half issued.”

Some women were forced to trade sex for food. Among the starving and poorly clad emigrants, disease ran rampant. Indian Removal coincided with America’s first cholera epidemic—sometimes 40 percent of a camp died overnight. Smallpox, influenza, and yellow fever struck, too. One U.S. official argued that medicine should be issued as a standard provision, but his superiors disagreed.

The tears did not stop once emigrants reached Indian Territory (roughly present-day Oklahoma), where famine, disease, and extreme weather heightened mortality. The suffering was so great that the federal government replaced many private contractors with U.S. Army officers, reasoning that the latter had greater experience with the logistics of mass movement. Still, about 20 percent of those forced to remove died, either on the trail or shortly after arrival in Indian Territory.

Peter Pitchlynn, whose Choctaw people were the first to suffer removal, returned to his homeland—now called Mississippi—15 years later and reflected on the transformation: “This once was a healthy country, but it is now a very sickly one & so changed that I scarcely know any of the places which were once familiar to me.” Gone were the wide-canopied forests teeming with deer, the wild canebreaks where his people had gathered reeds for baskets, and his boyhood camping ground. The only thing that had not changed much was his family home, though it was now occupied by a white family.

The disease that, in Pitchlynn’s view, had sickened and warped the country was the plantation economy. Maddened by what was then called “Alabama Fever,” whites swarmed into newly ceded Indian land—many even jumped the gun—and planted cotton. Initially, most settlers lived in modest cabins or confiscated Indian homes, but in time some grew rich. They built big houses, acquired more land, and pushed small landholders to the economic margins.

And their voracious demand for slave labor led to another massive population shift: African Americans were forced from the Eastern Seaboard and Upper South into the notoriously harsh slavery of the expanding cotton frontier. The plantation economy of the South grew so vast and powerful that it obscured most everything that came before it. Likewise, the memory of that particular South attacks most everything that has tried to replace it.

We should not underestimate the pernicious influence that the cotton curtain still exerts on race, class, and gender relations in the South and beyond. At the same time, we should also remember that the Old South was not really that old. Forged in blood and fire, the plantation economy existed across much of the Deep South for only a generation or two before the Civil War.

The South was and is a diverse place, a meeting ground of cultures, a destination for immigrants, a staging ground for different dreams. And the South is still Indian country. About 10 percent of Native people managed to avoid removal, and their descendants remain in the region.

Each year, some of their exiled kinfolk travel the Trail of Tears in reverse. They remember, and so should we all. The cotton curtain was woven to conceal other pasts and narrow possible futures, but we can push beyond it and gain a broader view.

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