Raid on Groton

On July 27, 1694, amid the fighting of King William's War, Groton, Massachusetts became the target of an assault that history remembers as the Raid on Groton. This strike was far from an isolated event; the settlement endured a whole series of such incursions spanning the closing decades of the seventeenth century into the early eighteenth. Years earlier, King Philip's War had already brought devastation to the village, driving a number of families to abandon their homes for a time. The community would face yet another assault in June 1707, this one occurring during Queen Anne's War.

Throughout this long stretch of intermittent warfare, captive-taking became a routine and often lucrative practice for both the French and English sides, along with the various First Nations peoples aligned with each. Prisoners of significant standing were at times swapped in formal exchanges between the warring powers. Beyond such arrangements, individual captives frequently found their freedom purchased through ransom paid by their families or home communities. Others never returned at all, instead being taken in and raised as members of Mohawk families within the mission settlement of Kahnawake, or absorbed in much the same fashion into Huron (Wyandot) or Abenaki communities elsewhere.

Historical context

In 1693, colonial authorities in Boston opened talks aimed at peace and commerce with the Abenaki peoples living in eastern Massachusetts. Frontenac, who governed the French at Quebec, had no wish to see these arrangements succeed, so that fall he dispatched Claude-Sébastien de Villieu into what is now Maine, instructing him to take charge of the Acadian Indians and direct them in action against the English. At the time, England and France found themselves locked in conflict abroad through King William's War.

Villieu wintered at Fort Nashwaak while he waited. Among the native bands of the area, no consensus existed on whether the English should be attacked at all. Only after Villieu pressed his case, backed by Father Louis-Pierre Thury and Father Vincent Bigot at Pentagouet, did the tribes commit themselves to taking up arms.

Raid

Roughly 250 Abenaki fighters, drawn chiefly from Penobscot and Norridgewock bands under their sagamore Bomazeen (also called Bomoseen), joined Villieu in striking the English settlement at Oyster River, the place known today as Durham, New Hampshire. Assacumbuit brought along a contingent of Maliseet warriors from Medoctec to join the assault as well. Most of Fr. Simon-Gérard's own followers stayed home, since he had talked them out of joining the campaign.

Once Oyster River had been struck, the fighters from Pentagoet, led by Taxous and Madockawando, felt dissatisfied with how little plunder and how few prisoners they had gathered there, so they pushed onward toward other targets. A band of about forty warriors made their way to Groton, Massachusetts, descending on the town during the early hours of July 27, 1694. Around twenty residents lost their lives in this action, seven of them members of the Longley household, while roughly thirteen more, among them three Longley children, were carried off as prisoners. Young Betty Longley did not survive the overland journey toward Montreal, and her brother John remained in Abenaki hands afterward.

Lydia Longley, twenty-one and the eldest of the captured children, eventually ended up in Montreal after being handed over to the Pennacook not long after her capture. A wealthy Frenchman devoted to aiding captives paid her ransom once she reached the city, then arranged for her instruction and conversion to Catholicism; she was baptized under the name Lydia-Madeleine in 1696. That same year she joined the Congregation of Notre Dame, an order that did not practice cloistered life. Most of Sister Lydia-Madeleine's religious life unfolded in Montreal, though she went on to head a mission at Sainte-Famille on Île d'Orléans, close to Quebec city. Long afterward, in the middle of the twentieth century, she gained recognition as the First American Nun, a title drawn from a children's book bearing that name, published in 1958.

Consequences

Following the assault on Oyster River and Groton, which ended in success, Claude-Sébastien de Villieu took up a post alongside Acadian Governor de Villebon, serving as commander of Fort Nashwaak, the capital of Acadia.