It is now well known that King Philip's War led to the death or enslavement of thousands of Native Americans and hundreds of European colonists, but hardly anyone knows that it also resulted in the liberation of a Taunton, Massachusetts slave named Jethro. On 1 November 1676, a Plymouth Colony clerk documented that Jethro had been captured by Narragansetts during the war; and now, having returned, he was to be liberated. His freedom was not for nothing, but a reward for the vital information that he gathered during his time of captivity and then relayed to the English. In a New England slave society that was intimately connected to the broader Atlantic world, Jethro navigated the complexities of his situation both while enslaved by the English and while captured by the Narragansetts to improve his own situation. As an African, Jethro was legally barred from serving in the Massachusetts militia, and yet his wartime service to the English led to his manumission and eventual property ownership.Footnote ¹

In an era when white New Englanders’ racial views were hardening, many contemporary authors remarkably valorized the African man Jethro; at least seven contemporary documents record information about him. The most prominent of these writings were the historical works of Increase Mather and William Hubbard, who gave Jethro fame in his generation. However, Jethro's appearance in histories of King Philip's War was short-lived as he emerged in more recent secondary literature in a fleeting and partial way. Only a minority of historians who write about race and slavery in colonial New England mention him, and when they do it is solely as he appears in Samuel Sewall's diary and the Plymouth Colony Records. The majority of slavery historians, however, do not mention him at all. Jethro embodies many of the recent trends in the historiography of slavery in New England by giving us a human story of how this region was entangled with and dependent upon the African slave trade and the Atlantic World.Footnote ² Similarly, historians of King Philip's War sometimes refer to him, but only as he appeared in one or both of the histories of the war, written by Increase Mather and William Hubbard.Footnote ³ The full historical record on Jethro has yet to be synthesized, explained, and critically analyzed. In doing so, Jethro's story can contribute to recent efforts to recover the stories of marginalized persons during King Philip's War and link the literary tradition of the captivity narrative to black Africans as early as the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴

The first part of the essay analyzes the life of Jethro and demonstrates how he represented the seventeenth-century Massachusetts charter generation. Jethro, who was probably born in Africa or the Caribbean, was an enslaved Atlantic Creole who used his bilingualism not only to survive capture by Narragansetts but even to ameliorate his condition of unfreedom within English society. He seized an opportunity to relay valuable military information to the English after his captivity among Indians. Using his mediatorial skills, Jethro became perhaps the first documented African to be manumitted from hereditary bondage through military service for the colonial powers in continental North America. That Jethro took these actions and was able to achieve a form of freedom, independence, and property ownership demonstrates how attitudes toward race and slavery were still being formed in the wake of King Philip's War. At this time, racial views were still inchoate, which allowed Jethro certain opportunities that were later denied to enslaved Africans.Footnote ⁵

The second part of this essay examines how Jethro's story was appropriated by Increase Mather, William Hubbard, and Samuel Sewall and made to serve their own political and social ends. Instead of taking these colonial representations of Jethro at face value, this essay foregrounds Jethro's Africanness in his captivity narrative. Jethro did not have control over the telling of his own story, but these colonial elites did. This fact was in stark contrast to his life, in which he demonstrated a significant degree of control over his future. In the person of Jethro, we can see a clear discrepancy between race as an ideology and race as a lived reality. Jethro's life and actions defied the racial views that were developing. Thus foregrounding Africanness in this way allows us to see the process of racialization in real time.

Jethro's captivity narrative began at a turning point in King Philip's War. By July 1676, the English settlers battling the Wampanoag Sachem Metacom (or Philip) and his warriors were in a position of strength, but a frustrating one. After nearly two years of intense struggle, perhaps the most consequential turn toward Philip's defeat was the Mohawk intervention in the conflict just months before Jethro's capture. As a result, divisions arose between tribal sachems who did not like the prospect of facing the fearsome Mohawks. Southern New England Indians had a long and dreaded history of warfare with the Mohawk Indians. They knew that the Mohawk sought to take live captives during the war, “whom they either tortured to death, adopted, or eventually ransomed.” Many Indian groups chose to shelter themselves from this fate by surrendering to the English. James D. Drake explained that the effect of these surrenders “snowballed,” making “surrendering or fleeing New England” more attractive. Moreover, a particularly harsh winter had left regional food shortages that further strained Philip and his warriors. Despite this trajectory, however, the stubborn fact remained that the English had not yet killed or captured Philip. Without his death, the English would not have the symbolic victory that they so desired.Footnote ⁶

The English sought to keep Metacom south of the Taunton river long enough for Captain Benjamin Church and his men to capture him. Captain William Bradford and his troops were vital in this endeavor at stifling Philip's mobility. As one historian of the war put it, “by guarding the line of the Taunton River, Bradford was performing a very important function – that of keeping large numbers of the enemy concentrated in the area south of the river, where they might be more easily disposed of.” Resisting such confinement, Metacom's warriors repeatedly attempted to move north of the Taunton river. Such attempts manifested in a Narragansett attack on the unsuspecting town of Swansea on 1 July. Just southwest of Taunton, this was a startling hit. Swansea ordinarily kept sentinels on the watch to warn of approaching danger, but hostile troops were not seen in the area for a while so “that necessary piece of circumspection was omitted that day.” In the absence of adequate warning and defenses, Swansea was left open to attack. A group of Narragansetts killed twenty-five-year-old Hezekiah Willet, decapitated him, and left his body stripped naked for the whole town to view.Footnote ⁷

In addition to killing Willet, these Narragansetts took his enslaved African, Jethro, as a prisoner. Jethro remained a war captive for less than a week before he escaped back to the English. We do not know precisely how his captors treated him. Based on contemporary English sources, most male captives were mocked or tortured in various ways. One example was Thomas Warner, who after his captivity in 1675 among Indians claimed that they “kill'd one prisoner … cutting a Hole below his Breast out of which they pull'd his Gutts, and then cutt off his Head.” After this, they tortured Warner himself by burning his “Nayles, and put his Feet to scald them agst the Fire, and drove Stake through one of his Feet to pin him to the Ground.” Many other males testified to similar treatment. Female captivity, like that of Mary Rowlandson, did not typically involve physical harm. There was no evidence that Jethro was ever tortured by the Narragansetts. None of the sources mention any injury done to him, and, on the contrary, Sewall seemed to indicate that some “Mount Hope Indians” expressed sympathy to Jethro for the death of his owner Hezekiah Willet. It is difficult to know whether Jethro's race had anything to do with this treatment. It is possible is that the Narragansetts understood Jethro not to be a paterfamilias but a dependent, thus like the women and children whom they did not torture. There is some evidence that Indians believed black to be a particularly beautiful color, but there is no explicit evidence that this attitude was a factor in Jethro's case.Footnote ⁸

After being held for about a week, Jethro broke free. Exactly how he escaped was described differently by the various sources. Mather and Hubbard, for example, both emphasized the actions of Jethro himself. Conversely, Sewall stated that Jethro was “retaken by Captain Bradford,” not that he escaped. He merely “saw the English and ran to them.” In the same vein, the Plymouth records stated that Jethro was “retaken againe by our army.” Despite these differences in language, all agreed and were impressed by Jethro's break from captivity.Footnote ⁹

Soon after absconding, Jethro relayed valuable information about the Indian warriors to the English. Jethro was not idle during his captivity but listened and understood the conversations of his captors in Wôpanâak. He took this information to the English and informed them that there were nearly one thousand Indians of “all sorts” and observed that “they killed twenty head of neat cattle overnight, yet there was not any part of them left the next day at eight o’-clock in the morning.” Though they could eat twenty whole cattle overnight, Jethro also made clear that these warriors were not all healthy. He witnessed three of them die of disease.Footnote ¹⁰

Jethro supplemented this information with detailed knowledge of Metacom's war plans. In the first place, he alerted Captain Bradford that Metacom intended to attack Taunton. With the potential force of one thousand warriors, this would have been a devastating blow to the English. More significantly, this attack could have given Metacom more room to evade the grasp of Captain Church and thus prolong the conflict. Second, Jethro relayed information about how Metacom had ordered his men to lie in ambush for the English in various nearby places. With Jethro's report, the English were able to escape “that danger, which otherwise had attended them.” The impressive detail and amount of information retained by Jethro indicated more than a cursory understanding of the Wôpanâak language.Footnote ¹¹

It is challenging to glean Jethro's motivations for escaping and relaying such information to the English. His experience living in indigenous homelands with English colonizers, and yet being excluded from the material and social benefits of that colonization, presents difficulties in interpreting his actions here. The only explicit reference to Jethro's motivations came from William Hubbard, who claimed that Jethro acted out of faithfulness to “his master's and the country's interest.” Perhaps this statement revealed more about Hubbard than it did Jethro, as will be explored later. Another possibility was that Jethro sought to better his condition and perhaps reshape the terms of his bondage to more fully participate in colonial society. It was even possible that Jethro was able to strike some sort of bargain upon his return. At this time, the English were frantically searching for ways to track Philip, and Jethro certainly would have been aware of the value of the information he had obtained during his captivity. Perhaps Jethro offered to give New England authorities all his information on Metacom in hopes of some reward. Such negotiations were known to occur in later colonial situations.Footnote ¹²

Whatever complex of motivations were operative in Jethro during this situation, we should not lose sight of his humanity. Jethro was not some sort of scheming type devoid of emotions. He had just witnessed the traumatic murder of his master and neighbors. He was captured without any certainty of what that would mean for him. The fears and anxieties of that situation no doubt played a part in Jethro's desire to return to a measure of safety and normalcy. It was possible that his relaying of information to the English was done out of a human desire to prevent harm coming to people whom he had come to know as his neighbors. Jethro may have been led by human emotion to help the English, which then led, perhaps unwittingly, to his manumission.

Regardless of the precise reason why Jethro returned, Captain Bradford was glad to gain such a report from him and acted on it promptly by sending troops to reinforce Taunton. Bradford's action was quite an adjustment, as he had recently pulled all his troops out of that town to continue to patrol the Taunton river. A few days later, on 11 July 1676, a mixed group of Indians attacked Taunton. However, because of Jethro's timely warning, the English troops had fortified the town and were able to repel the attack. The English lost no lives, and only two houses to fire. The exact number of Indian casualties was unclear. What was clear, however, was that Jethro's escape led to the “preservation of many others” in Taunton. When commenting upon Bradford's military adjustments here, the most recent and comprehensive histories of King Philip's War acknowledge that “intelligence reports allowed them to repulse an attack at Taunton on July 11.” However, these histories do not mention that the source of this intelligence was the enslaved Jethro.Footnote ¹³

Jethro's information not only was utilized by Bradford for military ends, but also gained Jethro the acclaim of colonial elites. Puritan historians of King Philip's War lauded Jethro's contribution as a “special providence.” Increase Mather repeatedly wrote that “there was a special providence in that Negroes escape.” Were it not for the Lord's “gracious providence” in Jethro, Taunton would probably have been brought “under the same desolation other places have experienced.” Hubbard likewise saw the hand of God in the actions of Jethro. He exclaimed, “By this special providence the enemy was defeated of their purpose.” Taunton would have been in grave danger if the Indian assault “had not so wonderfully been made known beforehand.” Hubbard went on to note that this victory at Taunton was the beginning of the end for Metacom's uprising: “So after this day we may truly date the time of our deliverance and beginning of revenges upon the enemy.” This claim of the importance of the victory at Taunton was not without grounds.Footnote ¹⁴

Word of Jethro's actions in the war spread throughout the elite ranks of New England. William Bradford wrote to John Cotton Jr. on 18 July 1676 about how Jethro took his troops to “the place where the Negroe left hime,” which allowed for the Massachusetts Bay troops to “cute of many Scouts of the Enimie.” Less than a month later, militia leader Noah Newman wrote John Cotton Jr. about his brother's “earnest desire concerning Jethroe.” Apparently, Newman's brother wanted to own Jethro if he were to continue in slavery and to have Jethro “sent to him” him if he were set free. Newman's letter is indicative of the still-ambiguous nature of African slavery in the minds of Englishmen and -women in the broader Atlantic world; Jethro's slave status was not automatically determined by his skin color. It also speaks to the recognition that Jethro's actions had achieved in his local context.Footnote ¹⁵

While Jethro was significant to such contemporary writers merely because he helped the English war effort, they unwittingly documented the captivity narrative of an African man and how he navigated enslavement and freedom during wartime. Here was an African who knew both English and Wôpanâak well enough to relay detailed war plans between the two languages. At this time, “Few Wamponoag and Narragansett spoke English fluently … [and] few English could speak Wôpanâak or Narragansett,” making Jethro uncommonly talented. Both Increase Mather and William Hubbard noted Jethro's bilingualism. Hubbard, clearly impressed, twice documented Jethro's linguistic ability. First, he simply wrote that Jethro was “a little acquainted with their language.” But in a second passage on Jethro, Hubbard claimed he “understood much of their language.” This second characterization was more accurate. Likewise, Mather wrote that Jethro “understood their Language” and heard them “tell one another their designs.” Beyond these explicit statements, the details and amount of information revealed by Jethro further demonstrated comprehension of Wôpanâak beyond the cursory. Jethro did not relay crude or exclusively visual information to Bradford, but locations, times, strategies, and reports of military well-being. Moreover, these details ended up playing out precisely as he had described.Footnote ¹⁶

How did Jethro acquire his rare language skills? He seems to have learned Wôpanâak facilitating trade for Thomas Willet, Plymouth's chief military officer until 1662 and a prominent merchant with an active trading partnership with New Netherland. More importantly, Willet married the daughter of John Brown, who was a close confidant of Massasoit (sachem of the Wampanoags before Philip). Willet was a leader in negotiations with the Wampanoag sachems of Plymouth and was well acquainted with their language. Thomas Willet died in 1674, just before the start of the war, and ownership of Jethro passed to his son, Hezekiah Willet, who continued fur trading with the Wampanoags. The Willet family, and likely Jethro, had long-standing trading ties with the Mount Hope Indians. It was through these extended interactions that Jethro became bilingual. Moreover, as an Atlantic Creole, Jethro would likely have been familiar with multiple European and African languages. Such a background would have equipped Jethro well to pick up this new language.Footnote ¹⁷

An Englishman who visited the Willet household in 1671 gave some details of the tasks and trading that would have occupied Jethro. The visitor mentioned that the Willet family had many cattle, horses, and sheep. He added that they ate fruit and oysters, and smoked tobacco. Many of these items were acquired via contact with local indigenous peoples. Mather hinted that he knew that Jethro had acquired his knowledge of the Wôpanâak tongue by participating in such exchanges when he wrote of Jethro “having lived many years near the Indians.”Footnote ¹⁸

For Jethro to have acted as a trading representative for the Willet family was a very possible situation in the early modern Atlantic world. In fact, there were many precedents for Africans performing the jobs of ordinary colonizers in the seventeenth century. Most directly, Jethro probably arrived via Bermuda, as this was the most common source of Africans in New England at the time. In seventeenth-century Bermuda, Africans and whites lived in biracial communities and worked side by side. There is even evidence that Africans taught some whites to swim. Elsewhere in the Atlantic, especially in areas without a monoculture plantation system (like New England), Africans did complex trade and organizational work, even to the point where they could be termed “surrogate colonists.” Moreover, the practice of utilizing “transactional go-betweens” who served as linguistic mediators between Europeans and Native Americans was quite prominent in the Portuguese colonization of Brazil. Jethro's role as a linguistic mediator who engaged in trade deals with indigenous peoples on behalf of his English master fit these Atlantic patterns.Footnote ¹⁹

Jethro would have brought these likely Atlantic experiences and familiarity with the English slave system with him into New England. New England slaveholders preferred to purchase Africans who came from the Caribbean, rather than directly from West Africa. Their perception was that enslaved persons who had spent time in the English Caribbean slave system were acclimated to that form of enslavement and had time to learn European languages. Atlantic Creoles like Jethro used this pattern to their advantage. As historian Jared Ross Hardesty has explained, African Creoles “channeled their collective pasts into creating a better life for themselves once they were in Boston.” Jethro embodied this pattern by using his strong mediatorial and linguistic skills to improve his condition under an oppressive Atlantic slave system.Footnote ²⁰

Even the name “Jethro” suggests that Jethro had acquired such mediatorial and managerial skills. In the biblical story whence this name comes, Jethro was Moses’ father-in-law, the man who gave sage advice about delegating judicial responsibility among many elders rather than having Moses himself adjudicate all cases in Israel. Jethro, in English Puritan culture, was held up as a symbol of competence, piety, and wisdom. In a 1627 sermon, Samuel Ward lauded Jethro as “beyond all exception every way qualified; for skill, as a judicious Divine; and for experience as an aged Govenour, to give direction in matters of Magistracy.” While it is impossible to know the precise story behind Jethro's name, it certainly suggested a broad degree of competency. It also showed that Jethro established cultural roots in his New England home, a pattern commonly found among Atlantic Creoles. Such a name only bolsters our understanding of Jethro as deeply embedded in the mixed cultures of the Atlantic world.Footnote ²¹

Jethro used his skills and bilingualism not only to enrich the Willet household, but even to save his own life during the war. When Narragansett warriors killed Hezekiah Willet, Jethro's owner, it was no random act of violence. After he was dead, they proceeded to cut off his head and strip his body. These were calculated moves, meant to exhibit frustration and resistance to encroachment on land that was settled by dubious treaties. Violence throughout King Philip's War contained such a message and a purpose. Jill Lepore has shown that damage done to the English by Indians was always “understood as attacks on bounded systems.” In the same way, we know that taking captives was not arbitrary. Neither Willet's death nor Jethro's capture was done haphazardly; the Narragansetts had a purpose for doing both.Footnote ²²

So why did these Narragansetts kill Willet and capture Jethro? Why not kill them both? There are a few possibilities. First, they may have wanted a ransom for Jethro. This was a common motive for taking captives during the war. It was unlikely here, however, because Hezekiah would have been worth more to the English than Jethro. Second, it could have been because Jethro knew their language, and Hezekiah did not. While Thomas Willet had learned some Wôpanâak to facilitate local trade, it was likely that his son, Hezekiah, never bothered to do so. It was typical of many second-generation Englishmen in Plymouth to distance themselves from local Indians. Jethro could have pleaded or negotiated for his life with success while Hezekiah was killed without communication. A third possibility is that Jethro was perceived as less threatening to them. They would have noticed that he was enslaved and that he was clearly not English. They may have assumed that Jethro would be loyal to them as his liberators.Footnote ²³

While all the above suggestions are possibly part of the explanation, the most important reason may have been that Philip and his warriors needed a translator. After noticing that Jethro was bilingual and perhaps questioning his loyalty to the English, they wanted him to translate for them. The circumstantial evidence supports this possibility. In late June and early July 1676, a multitude of tribes and sachems brokered peace treaties with the English. Massachusetts issued a declaration of mercy on 19 June 1676, and many weary Indians sought terms of peace. Jethro's captors may have been hoping for a translator to help them deal with the English. This would also explain the seemingly curious detail that Jethro was kept close enough to Metacom to hear “how Philip had ordered his men.” Moreover, the fact that Indians merely captured Jethro broke the mold of previous Indian attacks, further reinforcing the idea that Jethro utilized his linguistic skills to save himself. Nathaniel Saltonstall recorded a similar incident that occurred in the fall of 1676. He wrote that Indians robbed the property of a young Andrew Harris and “killed a Negro Servant of his.” Something about Jethro caused the attacking Indians to spare him and bring him near Metacom. A good explanation for Jethro's proximity was their intention to demonstrate his linguistic abilities to Philip in hopes that he may be a useful translator.Footnote ²⁴

After his escape from captivity and the end of the war, Jethro's actions during wartime won him the most surprising recognition yet, his manumission. The Plymouth Colony officials premised gratitude for Jethro's service during the war on their decision that he was to be set free. They documented him as the “negro named Jethro” who was “taken prisoner by the Indians, and retaken againe by our army.” The only reason to record such data about Jethro was that it was the grounds upon which the committee decided to grant his freedom. Moreover, Jethro's emancipation was couched in a list of recompenses made to various soldiers and leaders for their war service. Plymouth officials’ inclination to grant Jethro freedom was suggested by John Saffin, who was Hezekiah Willet's brother-in-law and therefore the administrator of his estate. Saffin was a well-known poet who later became infamous for his racist poetry and opposition to abolitionism. In this episode, however, Saffin was sufficiently grateful for how Jethro served the English during that war that he advocated for his manumission. This route to manumission may not have been the one Jethro expected when he fled captivity (for it seems to have been unique), but it was the use of his linguistic skills that ultimately led to his release from enslavement.Footnote ²⁵

Jethro's gaining manumission was especially provocative in the wake of this war because it was a time in which the English were busily enslaving and selling indigenous war captives. Recent literature on Indian slavery has demonstrated a close link between the enslavement of indigenous peoples and the perpetuation of King Philip's War. Plymouth Colony sanctioned blanket capture, export, and perpetual enslavement against “rebel” Indians. Additionally, Plymouth even used the sale of captured Indians to finance their soldiers and officers during the war. So extensive was English exporting of indigenous peoples that Barbados passed a law against the importation of New England Indians, out of fear of rebellion. Even runaway Africans in New England were being re-enslaved by whites during this time. In 1683, minister Peter Thacher recorded in his diary that “ys morning my Negro Ebed ran away.” Thacher sent his “neighbour Man” after him and eventually caught him again in Concord. Laws quickly developed in New England that buttressed this practice of capturing and returning runaway slaves. While Jethro's case seemed unique, it left open the possibility that others could have found a way out of hereditary slavery through service in war.Footnote ²⁶

Jethro's story represents the Massachusetts charter generation of enslaved persons and is among the earliest examples of an African captivity narrative. He found an avenue to a degree of freedom and independence despite the developing racial views of the time that denied him both. However, contrary to English authors who enjoyed access to literacy and channels of publishing, Jethro's captivity narrative has remained in the hands of elites. This reality has prevented the foregrounding of Africanness in his narrative. Jethro was among the first in a long list of Africans in North America who were manumitted by military assistance to the English; in historical estimation he ought to join the ranks of African American soldiers in the Revolutionary War and Civil War that ameliorated their bonded condition through military service.

The colonial elites who documented Jethro's story did so in a way that eclipsed his experiences in favor of their own narratives. Denied control over the written meaning of his actions, that meaning was appropriated by colonial elites for their own political and ecclesiastical purposes. The three prominent Englishmen who did so (Increase Mather, William Hubbard, and Samuel Sewall) were not attempting to tell of the complex ways in which an African man navigated enslavement and freedom during wartime. Instead, they used Jethro's captivity narrative for their own ends. Detailed analysis of how Jethro appeared in contemporary writings of King Philip's War demonstrates how these authors used Jethro's story variously as a “wonder” to support a program for social reform, as a model for English military behavior, and as part of a lament on the death of a friend. In the process of appropriating Jethro's narrative, they buried his experiences underneath their own goals.

Exploring how Puritan authors used his story for their own purposes demonstrates how Jethro's Africanness determined his inability to control his captivity narrative. Take as a foil the white Englishwoman Mary Rowlandson and the control she had to tell of her capture by the Indians. Rowlandson opened her captivity narrative with the stated purpose that she wrote that she “may the better declare what happened to me during that dangerous captivity.” She took full advantage of her access to publishing and the control she had over framing her experiences. She was able to define herself as an ideal “Puritan Goodwife” who used the captivity as a time to demonstrate her virtue and endure an arduous spiritual journey. Rowlandson was even able to situate herself as deferential in relation to male authority in Puritan culture and to critique indigenous women for not doing so. While her narrative may have later been used for other political ends, the content and “self-fashioning” were initially her own. No such opportunity was available to Jethro, an enslaved African. Detailing the divergent ways that each of these texts used the Jethro story highlights how they glossed the meaning of Jethro's captivity narrative to support their respective colonial projects. By foregrounding Africanness in Jethro's captivity narrative, we can see the contrast between the lived experience of race and the ideology of race.Footnote ²⁷

Increase Mather's appropriation of Jethro's story was perhaps the most transparent. Fashioning his narrative after the biblical Book of Chronicles and the Book of Kings, Mather used Jethro's story as a “wonder” to support his cultural agenda for theocratic moral reform in New England. A wonder, for Mather, was not always miraculous, but could simply be some extraordinary occurrence that manifested God acting in the world. Such wonders ranged from peculiar cloud formations to Sabbath-breakers falling through the ice of a pond. Instances like these were exhaustively recorded by Mather and wielded against his political and social enemies. Mather used the story of Jethro as a wonder in precisely this way. For him, Jethro's story revealed the hand of God favoring New England and was, therefore, ammunition against Mather's political and ecclesiastical enemies. Through Mather, Jethro broke into New England politics at the highest level.Footnote ²⁸

Mather highlighted the true wonder of Jethro's story by clearly exaggerating the military threat faced by Taunton in July 1676. He claimed that there were around “two hundred” Indians ready to attack Taunton. This number was a gross overestimate; the real number was closer to thirty. Mather likewise dramatized the threat by depicting the English being informed “speedily” of Indian intent to “destroy” Taunton. The language stands out when compared to Hubbard's more subtle description of the threat as Indians merely trying to “seize” Taunton. In contrast to the reality, Mather painted a vivid word picture of impending doom, setting the stage for a “wonder” of an intervention.Footnote ²⁹

Mather continued to explicitly accent the role of Providence in his description of Jethro's escape. He made sure the reader appreciated that it was “the Lord in his gracious providence” that was really behind Jethro's flight from captivity. He mentioned it both to begin and to close his narrative. Importantly, however, Mather stressed Jethro's initiative. He was sure to highlight that it was Jethro himself who “escaped” and “informed” the English of Philip's war plans.Footnote ³⁰ In Mather's telling, Jethro's agency underscored his actions as an act of Providence, for there was nothing remarkable in Captain Bradford and his English troops taking back a helpless captive, which happened routinely during the war. The fact that this enslaved African, on his own initiative, was able to “escape” and “inform” was, to Mather, a wonder to behold. Such expectations on Mather's part not only betray his lesser view of Africans but functioned for him as evidence of God's hand in preserving Taunton.Footnote ³¹

Since Mather saw Jethro's story as a wonder, what was its use to him? Why include it? What broader agenda did the Jethro anecdote support? The answer was threefold: to push moral reform within New England, to serve as a polemic against Quaker interpretations of the war, and to show English Royalists that God had not abandoned the Massachusetts Colony. In these ways, we see how Jethro's escape became for Mather political and ecclesiastical fodder at the highest levels, without regard to Jethro's experience, emotions, or motivations.

Mather wielded Jethro's story as a wonder that supported the New England clergy's case for political and moral reform. Shortly after the war, there was sharp disagreement on how New England should move forward with social changes. William Hubbard represented a moderate camp that sought to police behavior in New England through a policy of “limited toleration and the pragmatic exercise of social reforms.” Mather represented the traditional Puritan route of “intolerance and strict punishment for targeted social sin.” Collections of wonders were Mather's primary means of marshaling evidence in favor of his traditional social views. These wonders demonstrated that God was not finished with New England. God still marvelously and discernibly intervened in the colony's history. Because of this, New Englanders had to be called back to strict standards of moral purity. Mather began such arguments before the war in his double sermon The Day of Trouble Is Near preached in 1674. He continued them during the war through his history and certainly afterward in his 1677 Election Day sermon The Danger of Apostasy. In these jeremiads, he mainly targeted Boston magistrates and Hubbard for lack of zeal in reform. Jethro's story, for Mather, was one such clear instance of divine intervention and therefore proved that God was calling New England back to reaffirm their commitment to the New England Way.Footnote ³²

Mather also used Jethro as a wonder to combat Quaker interpretations of the war. Most directly, Mather's history was responding to Quaker Edward Wharton's analysis of the war in his New-England's Present Sufferings published in 1675, which “pretends to know the truth of things.” Quakers had recently been given leeway in New England and used the war as an occasion to turn the jeremiad back on New England leadership for how they had persecuted them. Wharton characterized the conflict as God judging New Englanders for their harsh treatment of the Indians and Quakers. Moreover, he claimed that God had abandoned New England. Mather used Jethro's narrative, in part, to counter such interpretations of the war. In Mather's telling, Jethro preferred being with the English to being captive to the Indians. Mather was quick to note Jethro's “captivity” among the Indians but neglected to mention his captivity among the English. This gloss served, in part, to invalidate Wharton's claim of the cruelty of the English. While Mather certainly saw the war as punishment for sin, it was for the crime of coldness in religion and its attendant duties, not for English behavior against the Indians. He marshaled wonders that showed God's enduring commitment to the New England Way in the face of competing interpretations of the war from other Christian groups.Footnote ³³

Jethro's narrative was not merely moral and ecclesiastical, but Mather used it for an imperial purpose as well. During July of 1676, Massachusetts Colony was plagued by the presence of royal official Edmund Randolph. Randolph was charged with evaluating the colony's conduct to ensure compliance with British imperial policy. Randolph accused the Massachusetts colonists of provoking the war by repeatedly calling Metacom before English courts. Given that the Royalists were back in power in England, New England ministers had to go to great lengths to justify their colonial project. For Mather, it was wonders that provided a visible means of knowing that the New England mission had not failed. Jethro was a prime example in Mather's imperial case to preserve the Massachusetts Bay charter. In this way, the Jethro story ventured into imperial politics. In Mather's hands, Jethro's captivity narrative was relevant to just about every cause except his own.Footnote ³⁴

While Mather used Jethro for his moral and ecclesiastical debates, William Hubbard coopted Jethro's story to bolster the military and nationalistic aims of his own history of the war. Hubbard did not want to follow Mather in commenting upon the intentions of God behind every battle or phenomenon. While still using some providential rhetoric and drawing out moral lessons from events, his was a much more sober and straightforward narrative.Footnote ³⁵ He was more interested in themes of heroism and military strategy than he was in finding the hand of God behind every event. Apparently, some contemporaries thought Hubbard's lauding of certain persons to border on immodesty. So impressed was he with Jethro's actions that he recorded Jethro's story twice in his history, making him the author who wrote the most about him. To Hubbard, Jethro's escape was much more than a notable turn of events that put the English back on top of the war effort. He framed Jethro as a model soldier, one who took proper actions and risks for the English war effort.Footnote ³⁶

Hubbard's primary emphasis in Jethro's story was that he sacrificed for the English cause. Like Mather, Hubbard put the impetus for Jethro's escape on his own decisions and actions. The English did not rescue him; Jethro himself made the heroic break from captivity. Unlike Mather, however, Hubbard further described the act as a risky sacrifice. He wrote that Jethro “ventured his life to make his escape.” To “venture” his life portrayed the incident as Jethro taking great danger upon himself for the greater good of the English colony. Hubbard wanted his reader to understand this as an example of patriotic sacrifice. He made his acclaim known when he described that Jethro had “wonderfully” made known Metacom's military plans.Footnote ³⁷

Hubbard further revealed his appropriation of Jethro's narrative when he defined Jethro's motivations for himself. Hubbard was unique in this; no other writer commented on why Jethro chose to make his escape from Indian captivity. Hubbard, however, highlighted two reasons, namely that Jethro was “faithful to his master's and country's interest.” It was unlikely that Hubbard could have known this information (indeed, he did not even know Jethro's name), but this claim fit neatly with his broader purpose. Ignoring the complexities of Jethro's bondage, Hubbard portrayed Jethro as acting out of loyalty to the English and left any negotiations of slavery and freedom entirely out of the historical record.Footnote ³⁸

The importance of the Jethro story for Hubbard, ultimately, was that his heroic sacrifice gave the English the military advantage. Indeed, the ending portion of Hubbard's writing about Jethro waxed eloquently on the opportunity created by Jethro to begin “revenges upon the enemy.” It was only in this context of revenge that Hubbard employed the language of “special providence.” While Mather put Providence at the beginning of his Jethro story, Hubbard did so only toward the end. The implication was clear. Providence used Jethro to ensure that the Indians’ “own turn [had] come, when it shall be done unto them as they have done unto us.” Thus the significance of the Jethro story was that his example of military courage was instrumental in the English taking revenge upon the Indians. It was significant that Hubbard held up the actions of an African man as a model for his readers and posterity; it was a position he rarely, if ever, afforded to Indian allies. Hubbard's narrative was given official sanction by Massachusetts officials and reprinted at least seven times in the colonial era. As far as the public and posterity were concerned, the meaning of Jethro's captivity had been fixed by Hubbard as an ally of English war interests.Footnote ³⁹

Our third telling of the Jethro story contained essential differences from the first two. To begin, unlike Mather and Hubbard, Samuel Sewall was not a minister. He was a merchant and later became a magistrate in Massachusetts.Footnote ⁴⁰ Additionally, he did not write about Jethro in any comprehensive history of the war; his agenda was not public. Instead, Jethro was found in Sewall's personal diary entry for 1 July 1676. How he told Jethro's story was also unique. It was neither spectacular nor providential. Instead, Sewall's appropriation of Jethro's story took the form of a lamenting ode to a deceased friend. He recorded little of Jethro's experiences, motivations, or desires, but instead made his story the conduit for information about the death of his friend. Sewall's sympathy for Hezekiah Willet (Jethro's master) and emphasis on Jethro's passivity as a slave served only to obscure any documentation of Jethro's captivity narrative.

Many details of Sewall's account revealed his emphasis on Jethro's status as a slave and his concurrent sympathy toward his master, Hezekiah Willet.Footnote ⁴¹ To begin, Sewall was emphatic when he introduced him as “Jethro, his Niger.” Not only did this statement reveal the way in which the specifically African slavery element of the story was important to Sewall, but it also suggested a level of intimacy with both Willet and Jethro. Sewall was the only one of the three authors who documented the name “Jethro.” Mather and Hubbard, who wrote later and would have had more opportunity to learn his name, did not mention it. Moreover, Sewall was the most straightforward about Jethro's status as enslaved by the English. Hubbard used less blunt language than Sewall by describing Jethro as “belonging to” the Willet family; while Mather never mentioned Jethro's enslaved status at all.Footnote ⁴²

When describing Jethro's escape from Indian captivity, Sewall emphasized English initiative and not Jethro's agency. Here, too, Sewall's story was distinct from Mather's and Hubbard's. It was “Captain Bradford” and his men who were given credit for initiating the escape. Sewall stressed the English role in Jethro's rescue when he wrote that he “saw the English and ran to them.”Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, he used passive verbs in relation to Jethro throughout his writing. Jethro did not “escape” or “venture” (as Mather and Hubbard described), but he was “taken” and then “retaken” by Captain Bradford. This unique emphasis on Jethro's passivity pervaded Sewall's writing about the Jethro story.Footnote ⁴⁴

For Sewall, the Jethro episode was not affective because of Jethro's bondage, but because of the death of Sewall's friend, Hezekiah Willet. When Mather and Hubbard reflected on the significance of Jethro, they tied it to the war effort and the military information that he gave. Sewall did not, but instead described the death and mourning details that Jethro observed. He wrote that Jethro relayed that the Indians who knew Willet “were sorry for his death,” and “kombed his head, and hung peag in his hair.” It was as if Sewall cast Jethro as a fellow mourner of Willet's death. While this was certainly possible, it was also possible that Jethro viewed the situation as an opportunity to ameliorate his bonded condition.

The irony of Sewall recording this Jethro episode, and yet failing to relate anything of Jethro's navigations of slavery and freedom, should not be lost. Sewall would go on to be New England's first opponent of chattel slavery. Long before he published his now-famous Selling of Joseph (1700), he had been vexed over the issue.Footnote ⁴⁵ Sewall wrote as much himself, and more than once. On 19 June 1700, he wrote in his diary that he had been “long and much dissatisfied” with enslaved Africans being brought to New England. In the next few lines, he further stated that “he began to be uneasy that I had so long neglected doing anything.” It was an issue that had been long on his mind. What finally gave Sewall the fire to publicly condemn the practice? It was mostly the affecting story that he read from a petition of a “Negro and his wife, who were unjustly held in bondage.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The anecdote of an African and his wife pushed Sewall to break his silence. Tales like those of Jethro frequently moved Sewall, and yet he recorded Jethro's story without any reflection on the morality of slavery.

Each of these three English authors appropriated Jethro's story in unique ways. Through them, Jethro entered political, ecclesiastical, and social debates at the highest level. However, only by foregrounding Africanness in Jethro's narrative do we see the stark contrast between Jethro's experience of race and the ideology of race at the time. He was an African man who was denied control over his captivity narrative and yet in his lived experience he was able to assert a degree of control over his future. These divergent recordings of Jethro's actions all eclipsed and instantiated versions of Jethro's captivity narrative that were not his own. Jethro's use of his rare linguistic skills and his navigation of slavery and freedom during wartime were not mentioned by colonial elites and thus were forgotten about in later historiography. The next person to write about Jethro was the late nineteenth-century historian of Taunton Samuel Emery. Emery approvingly wrote of Jethro for how he helped the town of Taunton during King Philip's War, unaware that his accolades continued to pass on a narrative that had little to do with Jethro personally, but only reaffirmed the previously established colonial representations of him. These representations of Jethro and his actions which began in the seventeenth century continue to this day.Footnote ⁴⁷

The recognition Jethro earned during King Philip's War led to an apparently comfortable postwar life. This life became increasingly difficult to obtain as the charter generation which Jethro represented began to fade. The Willets honored the Plymouth court decision and freed him with sufficient food and clothing as the court had directed. Jethro decided to purchase a prominent house in the north end of Boston from the wealthy widow Susannah Bennet shortly after the war; this area was next door to the property that Increase Mather would buy just one year later. In Samuel C. Clough's Map of the Town of Boston of 1676, Jethro's future property is clearly visible under the name “P. Bennet” (Susannah's late husband), lot twenty-three on the road “Millbridge to Winnisimmet Ferry.” Jethro's land and proximity to the Mathers spoke to some level of esteem he had obtained in the community.Footnote ⁴⁸

Beyond this acquisition of property, it is hard to know how Jethro spent the rest of his days in his Boston home. Perhaps he continued using his mediatorial and trading skills in some capacity around Boston as he had done in Taunton. Maybe he worked in some capacity for Susannah Bennet, who certainly had the money and would have needed the help. Indeed, many freed persons subsequently entered into such subservient conditions to avoid being viewed with suspicion by others. It is even possible that he went to work at one of the nearby wharfs, a popular job for freed persons in Boston. For all his skills as a linguist, there is no evidence that he was or was not literate, so we do not know if he ever had the pleasure of reading what Mather and Hubbard wrote about “Jethro, who saved Taunton.”Footnote ⁴⁹