“So Unstable and Like Mad Men They Were”: Language and Interpretation in Early American Captivity Narratives

Abstract

Abstract In Regeneration through Violence, Richard Slotkin prefaces a chapter on captivity mythology with William Carlos Williams’s comment on the Puritans’ ideological cohesion: “The jargon of God, which they used, was their dialect by which they kept themselves surrounded with a palisade.” 1 But for early Americans language was a flimsy bulwark in anything more than an abstract sense; the palisade of language could always be breached by those physical incursions and confrontations that subjected hundreds of explorers, missionaries, and settlers to Indian captivity during the first three centuries of North American colonization. Perhaps in a fiction like Cooper’s Mohicans a David Gamut might set up a wall of hymns and prayers formidable enough to dismay Mingo and Huron attackers; in reality, neither prayer, threat, nor discourse of reason was of much avail in altering the purposes of Indians who sought to take captives.