The Raid on Haverhill was a military engagement that took place on March 15, 1697 during King William's War. Ordered by Louis de Buade de Frontenac, Governor General of New France, French, Algonquin, and Abenaki warriors descended on Haverhill, then a small frontier community in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. In the surprise attack, the Abenaki killed 27 colonists and took 13 captive. The natives burned six homes. The raid became famous in the nineteenth century because of Hannah Dustin's captivity narrative as a result of the raid.
The last battle of the war was on September 9, the Battle of Damariscotta, in which Captain John March killed 25 native men.
Even after the war was officially ended, Abenaki raids on the English colonists continued. On March 4, 1698 Pigwacket Abenaki Chief, Escumbuit led a group of 30 Indians in a raid on Andover, Massachusetts, the last and most severe Indian raid on this town. There was also another raid by the Natives of Acadia on Hatfield, Massachusetts in 1688, where they killed two settlers.
Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
Nathaniel Hawthorne "The Duston Family." The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, (1836)
John Greenleaf Whittier in his short story "The Mother’s Revenge" (1831)
Cotton Mather Magnalia Christi Americana (orig. pub. 1702).
Caverly, Robert B. Heroism of Hannah Duston: Together With the Indian Wars of New England (orig. pub. 1875). Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1990. ISBN 1-55613-301-4
Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana (orig. pub. 1702). New York: Russell & Russell (Atheneum House), 1967. ASIN B0007DLZGI
Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8078-4408-X
Sayre, Gordon M., ed. American Captivity Narratives. Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ISBN 0-395-98073-9
European colonization of North America accelerated after 1600, with England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands establishing competing settlements along the Atlantic coast, the St. Lawrence River, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi Valley. The first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia (1607) struggled with starvation and conflict; the Plymouth colony (1620) and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630) followed. By the mid-1700s, thirteen English colonies stretched along the Atlantic seaboard, governed through a mix of royal charters, proprietary grants, and elected assemblies. The colonial economy depended on tobacco in Virginia and Maryland, rice and indigo in the Carolinas, and maritime trade in New England — all increasingly reliant on enslaved African labor after 1619. Conflict with Indigenous peoples over land was continuous, punctuated by major wars including King Philip's War (1675–1676) in New England and the Yamasee War (1715–1717) in the South. The French and Indian War (1754–1763), part of the global Seven Years' War, ended French power in North America and left Britain deeply in debt — triggering the taxation disputes that would lead to revolution.
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