The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

Eunice Williams is the daughter of the celebrated Puritan minister John Williams and one of the central characters in The Unredeemed Captive, alongside her father. Eunice was born in 1696 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and was abducted during the aftermath of the Deerfield massacre in 1704, when she was seven years old. Eunice never permanently returns to Deerfield. She fully embraces her new life as a member of the Kahnawake: She adopts a Kahnawake name, marries a Mohawk man, and even forgets the English language. Demos provides as many details as possible about Eunice’s life among the Kahnawake, but these details are shadowy, given that we have few written records from the community: “About Eunice Williams inside this strangely positioned community we know only a few, very bare facts” (140). Until both of their deaths, John Williams (her father) and Stephen Williams (her brother) try to convince Eunice to return. Eunice dies at the age of 89 in 1785, in the Canadian Native American community where she lived for the duration of her life. Through Eunice’s story, Demos tells the related stories of race, religion, and cross-cultural forces in colonial America.