We’re so damned stupid.
For the second year in a row progressives in America have taken to retroactively trying historical figures in the 2020-2021 social justice tribunals. All historical context is expunged and those in the dock are judged as if plucked off the streets this year rather than when they lived their lives hundreds of years ago, when a lot of other stuff was going on.
Now it is Hannah Duston who faces justice. There is a statue of her wielding an axe in Haverhill, Massachusetts.
Last year, every self-important progressive did what they could to declare their virtuousness loud and clear.
Judy Matthews took aim at Hannah Duston.
Here is the short version of Hannah Duston as reported by the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune.
On March 15, 1697, Duston — or Dustin — and her nursemaid, Mary Neff, were captured in a raid on Haverhill near the end of King William’s War, a conflict among English colonists, French colonists and their Native American allies.
Duston was taken north to an encampment on an island in the Merrimack River in present-day Boscawen, New Hampshire. Along the way, the captors killed Duston’s 6-day-old daughter, according to historians, by dashing the baby’s head against a tree.
According to some contested accounts, after being told that she and her other captives would be “stripped, scourged and made to run a gauntlet while naked” once they arrived at another camp, Duston led an early morning revolt against her captors as they slept.
Using a small ax, or possibly a club, Duston, Neff and an English boy named Samuel Lennardson killed their captors, taking their scalps as proof of their ordeal. They scuttled the natives’ canoes, except for one, then traveled down the Merrimack River, landing in Haverhill where Merrimack River Park is today along Route 110. A stone marker designates the place of her landing.
It was a horrific excursion and there are several versions of the story of bloody retribution in which Duston and company killed not just their captors, but most of their children, too.
This kind of violence was commonplace during the period.
King William’s War engulfed all of New England. It was a terrifying time to be alive and the conflicts even played a role in the Salem Witch Trials.
But Judy Matthews marched to Haverhill City Hall last year and demanded the statue be moved.
“It’s a racist depiction of what may or may not have actually happened in 1697 to people who were caught up in King William’s War,” Matthews exclaimed. “It’s a bloodthirsty revenge fantasy and it’s inappropriate.”
She noted the “mounting public outrage over historical symbols of the white supremacy and racism that has devastated the lives of Native Americans as well as Black Americans.”
Of course, during that period in which Hannah Duston lived, no one’s continued “supremacy” was established but there were bloody murders, tortures, kidnappings and various other atrocities occurring between tribes, settlers, French and English forces and virtually everybody else who bumped up against each other.
It was a sucky time to be alive. Read about it if you dare.
Chances are, if your ancestors were here during the period you have a connection to some or all of the parties involved and could probably draw a straight line to someone murdered, Indian, settler and maybe both, or someone who did the murdering.
Here is a snapshot of my own ancestors’ experience:
On the 13th of September, 1692, Mrs. Shattuck’s father, James Blood, was killed by the Indians, as were also her uncle, William Longley, his wife and five children, while three of the children were carried off into captivity. A relative of Mrs. Shattuck, James Parker, Jr., and his wife, were also killed at the time of the Longley massacre, and their children were also taken prisoners, the Indians having learned by that time that if they could bear the hardship and exposure of the march, children had a certain commercial value with the French settlers in Canada. Mrs. Shattuck’s stepfather, Enoch Lawrence, was wounded in an engagement with the Indians, and was disabled for life. John Shattuck, her husband, and John Shattuck, Jr., her son, the latter a young man about 19 years of age, were shot and killed by the Indians while they were returning from the west side of the Nashua River near where the Hollingsworth paper mills now stand. The three Tarbell children, cousins of Mrs. Shattuck, were carried off by the Indians on the 20th of June, 1707. John Ames, who was shot by the Indians at the gate of his own garrison, July 9, 1724, was the father of Jacob, who married Mrs. Shattuck’s niece, Ruth Shattuck, and lastly her son‑in‑law, Isaac Lakin, the husband of her daughter Elizabeth, was wounded at Lovewell’s fight at Pequawket, May 8, 1725, all of these casualties occurring in one generation.
That’s just a piece of it. Shattucks were dropping like flies during the early years. We weren’t supreme-ing very well.
I have no doubt that this history was written about the Shattucks in a favorable light, and they certainly were no strangers to violence themselves in that volatile period. There have been few if any true innocents in history, and our largely peaceful and oblivious existence today is the exception, not the rule.
Obviously I hold no grudge and am a proponent of telling the stories of indigenous Americans and all Americans, but we do owe it to those who played a role in the history of this country to preserve the memorials to them.
We live in a time when a screwed up Starbucks order will ruin our entire day so maybe we don’t make moral judgments on those whose days were filled with actual violence and death.
But Judy Matthews and other like-minded progressives got the hatchet removed from Hannah’s hand and the word “savage” removed from the monument.
Perhaps to her, these were merely aesthetic accessories of the people “caught up in King William’s War,” as though they were some kind of hobbyists, but in fact they are crucial elements in a raw and complicated story that should be told. Every part of it.
That statue is a history lesson. The hatchet and the language as well. Even its erection in the spirit of a strong woman tells a story, whether as a nod to Western expansion, or maybe as propaganda. There is a hell of a lot that can be learned from that statue in Haverhill.
We should unequivocally reject anyone who does not want us to learn it.