Removal to Castle Hill
Okemesw8’s husband and her son (the father of her grandsons) had been killed in a battle with the Haudenosaunee (known by the settlers as “Iroquois”) most likely at Caughnawaga, a Kanien’kehaka (“Mohawk”) fort about 200 miles west of Agawam. The mother of the boys was badly injured when she arrived in Agawam. It is possible, although speculative, that she may have been one of a handful of women who fought in this battle.
Daniel Epps, addressing a jury in Salem fifteen years later, described how the dying mother pleaded with him to accept her boys into his household. As the head of a colonial household, Epps assumed responsibility for indoctrinating the boys into the stages of Christian conversion.
Epps began by giving each boy a Christian name. He named Okemesw8’s three-year-old grandson Daniel, after himself, and her infant grandson Lyonell, after his own son. By erasing their original names and replacing them with names drawn directly from the Epps family, he began to bring the boys under the authority of his family government.
Although the boys’ primary value for Daniel and Elizabeth Epps would be laboring on their farm, Daniel and Elizabeth recognized their responsibility to educate their young servants in much the same way they educated their own children. Even very young children were expected to learn to read from the bible and repeat Puritan catechism.
Family Duties
“Indians in English households faced many new cultural pressures, but one of the most powerful was Christianization. Generally the new owners gave captives English names to symbolize their new identities. Most education of captives initially took place within the household, as it did for English children. Even very young children and servants were expected to attend ‘the [holy] word read and expounded in our Families’. Bible and catechism centered, these home reading and recitation sessions also reinforced English language skills that formed part of the captive’s daily work life.”
“Fathers held responsibility for religious instruction, but mothers and mistresses led these weekly or nightly ‘family duties’. Thoughtful hearing and repeating of sermons and scriptures remained central to progressing through the stages of conversion that all Puritans hoped to experience: conviction of one’s own sinfulness, an affective and terrifying ‘sense of Gods Displeasure,’ and feelings of hopelessness and despair that prepared the soul for acceptance of divine grace.”
“By converting to Christianity, Indian converts gave up membership in other communities—communities that focused more on maintaining their native cultures. Some Indians merely added the Christian god to existing systems, and continued to maintain other spiritual beliefs and ceremonials. For them, Christianization was an outer layer they could abandon in other contexts. For Indians brought into households as young children, the pressure to convert and the consequences of not at least appearing to accept Christianity must have been grave.”
Margaret Ellen Newell “Brethren by Nature”
It would be another six years before the settlers declared war on the Wampanoag Sachem Pometacomet (known by the settlers as “King Philip”) in 1675 and resumed killing indigenous men and enslaving women and children on a scale that exceeded the Pequot War.
Even so, it was clear to Daniel and Elizabeth Epps that their duty was to bring this widow’s children under the authority of their family governmenent, even as if they had killed the men themselves.
Harvard President Benjamin Wadsworth explained in The Well Ordered Family that a truly converted servant would not run away and would prove more profitable. The practical effect of this conversion would be obediance to family government.
In the minds of the settlers colonizing Okemesw8’s homeland, conversion and exploitation fit hand in glove. By removing Okemesw8’s grandson Daniel at a very early age, Daniel and Elizabeth Epps fulfilled their Puritan duty.
Benjamin Wadsworth
“Remember that as you should bring up your Children, so you should your Servants too; in the Fear and Service of God. Servants as well as Children should be taught and charged to know and serve God. I mention these things about Servants that none may think that if they instruct their Children well, they are excused tho’ they neglect their Servants. Let none think so, for this is a great mistake.”
“We have a Master as well as they, even God in heaven, and we are accountable to him how we carry it to our Servants. Should not Masters take care of the Soul of the Servants, and teach them the Truth and Duties of Religion? Yes, indeed they should, tis their indispensible duty so to do.”
Benjamin Wadworth “The Well Ordered Family”
At the core of Puritan values was the concept of family government. Anyone “living from under family government” (i.e. outside a properly ordered Christian household) had strayed from the social order and must be brought under control.
Daniel was removed from his family and his culture and brought into the submission so central to the Puritan worldview. Lyonell was allowed to slip out from under the family government at Castle Hill. This was a violation of the social contract that bound servant to master.
When Daniel and Elizabeth later sued to have Lyonell removed to Castle Hill, they would not claim that they had converted Lyonell to Puritan values. Rather, they believed that Lyonell was owed to them. This shift away from family government did not succeed.
The jury likely recognized that, unlike his brother Daniel, Lyonell never submitted to Daniel Epps’ authority as the head of household at Castle Hill. This was a failure of family governance. Lyonell was therefore free to work for a different master to whom he owed a greater debt.
A Good Master
“The family rather than the individual was considered not only the basic unit of the state, but also the fundamental and requisite means of social and religious control. Living outside this unit—not subject to its salutary religious, moral, and economic discipline—was unthinkable in the seventeenth century.”
“[In] 1636, Massachusetts ordered that each town should dispose into service all single persons within their jurisdiction, and at the same time prohibited the setting of servants free until they had served out the time covenanted.”
“A proper family would have at its head a mature person, well founded in the religious principles of his community, working diligently to improve his estate, God-fearing, respectful of authority, sober, married, and conscious of his obligation to maintain discipline for those under his authority—his children and his servants. Early Massachusetts law required that he take care to see his children and servants properly taught in the catechism, reading, so as to be able to read the Bible and the capital laws.”
“If the head of the family proved to be neglectful, the selectmen, after admonition to reform, and finding him still negligent, could take his children or servants from him, and put them out as servants, the girls to age eighteen, the boys to twenty-one.”
Lawrence William Towner “A Good Mater Well Served”
