Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.
Hannah Swanton, The Casco Captive; or the Catholic Religion in Canada and Its Influence on the Indians of Maine.
Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1837. 24mo (5.875” x 3.75”), gold-stamped tan cloth over boards. 63 pp. Ownership inscription in ink at front pastedown: “Helen O. Patten[?] South Sandisfield, Mass. 1946.” CONDITION: Good, wear and soiling to covers, paper cracked at inner back hinge and between a few pp., contents very good with some light soiling, .75” tear to right margin of p. 47. Scarce first edition of this Massachusetts Sabbath School Society publication—an edited selection of Cotton Mather’s Ecclesiastical History of New England centering a Maine woman’s captivity narrative and impressing upon readers the importance of maintaining their Puritan standing and spreading “the true religion” among the Wabanaki in Maine. The narrative of Hannah Swanton (also “Swarton”) lies at the heart of this volume. Swanton was captured by members of the Wabanaki Confederacy during the 1690 attack on Fort Casco during King William’s War (1688–97). Her husband was killed, and she and several of her children were forced to make the difficult winter trek to Canada, where she spent five years among the French before being returned to Boston. Her account of loss, privation, and resistance to Catholicism underscores the physical and spiritual dangers that were the consequences of her sins (“I had left the public worship and ordinances of God…”). Cotton Mather’s commentary on Swanton’s experience, as well as additional accounts of the people and landscape around what is now Portland, impress on readers the importance of staying close to their faith and spreading Protestantism among the Indigenous people: “If men do not adopt the true religion, they will adopt a corrupt or false religion; and such a religion will curse rather than bless a people, and will make them intolerant, cruel and vicious, instead of reforming them and making them holy. Such was the religion of the French of Canada…” The Massachusetts Sabbath School Society was founded in 1832 by Congregationalist members of the recently-dissolved Massachusetts Sabbath School Union, and published the monthly Sabbath School Visiter (followed by the weekly Well-Spring and monthly Congregational Visiter), as well as numerous juvenile volumes and series. OCLC records five holdings, at NYPL, AAS, Yale, the Missouri History Museum, and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. Rare Book Hub records no copies of the first edition at auction since 1931. REFERENCES: Checklist of American imprints 44661; Howes 1173.
Item #9953
On Hold
Price: $475.00
Add to Wish List