America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback by Kenneth C. Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

leader Oliver Cromwell and escapes to France.
    1653 Oliver Cromwell takes on dictatorial powers as “Lord Protector” and holds power until 1658.
    1660 The Restoration brings King Charles II, a Roman Catholic, back to claim the British throne.
    1664 English seize Dutch New Amsterdam and rename it New York.
    June-August 1676
    King Philip’s War devastates New England.
    1682 The Frenchman La Salle descends Mississippi River to its mouth and claims the Louisiana Territory for France.
    1685 King James II becomes England’s last Roman Catholic ruler.
    1688 In the Glorious Revolution, King James II flees to France; the constitutional monarchy is restored under William and Mary, James’
    daughter.
    1689–1697 The Second Indian War, or King William’s War.
    1692 Salem witchcraft trials.
    1702–1711
    Queen Anne’s War (known as the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe). In 1704, French and Indians massacre English settlers at Deerfield, Massachusetts; English forces massacre Apalachee Indians at Spanish missions in Florida.
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    Mrs. Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here; . . . you have spoken divers things as we have been informed very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof, and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.
    —Governor John Winthrop during the trial of Anne Hutchinson (1643) The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those which were once the Devil’s Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here.
    —Cotton Mather,
    T he Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) There was a type of man whom the Puritan never tired of denouncing. He was a good citizen, a man who obeyed the laws, carried out his social obligations, never injured others.
    The Puritans called him a “civil man,” and admitted that he was “outwardly just, temperate, chaste, carefull to follow his worldly businesse, will not so much as hurt his neighbours dog, payes every man his owne, and lives of his owne; no drunkard, adulterer or quareller; loves to live peacably and | 41 \
    America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory quietly among his neighbours.” This man, this paragon of social virtue, the Puritans said, was on his way to Hell, and their preachers continually reminded him of it.
    —Edmund S. Morgan, T he Puritan Family (1944) Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
    —H. L. Mencken (1949) | 42 \
    a Haverhill, Massachusetts—March 15, 1697
    In the cold darkness of a late winter New England morning, Hannah Emerson Dustin was lying in. Six days earlier, the forty-year-old mother and farmer’s wife had given birth to a girl, her eighth child. The infant, named Martha, was being tended by Mary Neff, a widow who served the frontier village of Haverhill as nurse and midwife.
    As winter’s grip lingered on this bleak Ides of March, spring’s promise must have seemed very remote in Haverhill. Situated near the New Hampshire border, the small town still shuddered from a brush with witchcraft a few years earlier. Accusations of sorcery and spectral doings had sent a chill of fear through Haverhill, although the town had escaped the notorious trials and mass executions that had shattered nearby Salem village during its witchcraft crisis at about the same time.
    Adding to Haverhill’s unease, the town bordered Indian country, and with war in the air, that was no small threat. Overwhelmed by the English influx, the Algonquian-speaking “people of the dawnland”— the Abenaki, who were spread across northern New England—had been pressing English frontier settlements with growing ferocity for nearly ten years. Just two years earlier, Haverhill had barely fended off an attack by eighty