Schenectady massacre

On February 8, 1690, the English Province of New York saw its Schenectady settlement fall victim to a violent assault now remembered as the Schenectady massacre. A combined force of 114 French soldiers and militiamen, joined by 96 Mohawk and Algonquin warriors allied with them, descended upon the defenseless town, razing the majority of its dwellings and killing or seizing most of the people who lived there. The death toll reached sixty residents, among them 11 Black slaves. Roughly 60 townspeople escaped harm, twenty of whom were Mohawk.

Among the survivors who were not Mohawk, 27 were led away as captives, five of them Africans. Three of these prisoners eventually gained their freedom through ransom, while two others made their way back to the village after living among the Mohawk for three and eleven years respectively. As for the rest, they endured a brutal journey, dragged across the snow and bound to horses, going without adequate food for weeks until reaching a Mohawk settlement situated north of Montreal. Those who made it through this ordeal found care, nourishment, and clothing among Mohawk families and went on to build new lives within the Mohawk nation.

This assault by the French was launched as payback for the Lachine massacre, in which Haudenosaunee forces had struck a settlement in New France. Such violent exchanges stemmed from tensions tied to the Beaver Wars and to the broader contest between France and England over dominance of the North American fur trade, as well as to King William's War then raging between the two powers. At that point, the French viewed most of the Haudenosaunee as partners of the English colony of New York, and they sought to pull them away from that alliance while curbing English sway across the continent.

Attack

Tradition holds that only two snowmen stood watch that night, and with the gate left unlatched, the invaders slipped into Schenectady undetected two hours before sunrise to begin their assault. Houses and barns went up in flames while men, women, and children were slaughtered where they stood. Caught mostly in their nightclothes, the townspeople had no chance to reach for weapons. When dawn broke on February 9, what remained of the settlement was rubble, with over sixty structures reduced to ashes. Death claimed sixty residents in total, among them eleven enslaved Black people, listed in period records under the term "negroes." According to French accounts, somewhere between fifty and sixty townspeople lived through the ordeal, and twenty Mohawks were deliberately spared so that other Natives would understand the assault targeted the English rather than themselves. Of the sixty who perished, thirty-eight were men, ten were women, and twelve were children.

Dominie Petrus Tessemacher numbered among the fallen. He held the distinction of being the first Dutch Reformed Church minister ordained anywhere in the Americas and led the congregation that later became Schenectady's First Reformed Church. Though the French had hoped to capture him alive for interrogation, he met his death inside his own home. Reynier Schaets perished alongside one of his sons. Reynier was himself the son of Gideon Schaets, minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany, and worked as a surgeon before Leisler named him Justice at Schenectady on December 28, 1689. His widow, Catharina Bensing, survived along with three of their children, Gideon, Bartholomew, and Agnietje. For those who managed to flee the burning town, the ordeal was far from over, as many succumbed to the brutal cold before reaching any refuge.

When the attackers withdr

Aftermath

The raid pushed New York's rival political camps to set aside their quarrels and unite against a shared foe in New France. One consequence was that the Albany Convention, which had until then refused to recognize Jacob Leisler's authority over the colony's southern reaches, now accepted his leadership. Connecticut officials lent their support as Leisler put together a retaliatory campaign the following summer, aiming to strike Montreal from a base in Albany. Fitz-John Winthrop, a militia general from Connecticut, commanded this venture, but by August of 1690 it had collapsed and turned back, undone by illness among the men, dwindling supplies, and too few boats to manage the waters of Lake Champlain.

Three centuries later, in 1990, Schenectady's city government asked composer Maria Riccio Bryce to write a piece marking the tricentennial of the tragedy. She produced Hearts of Fire, a work tracing the townspeople of Schenectady across the seasons of 1689 while the French forces advanced from Montreal toward Albany in the background. Even though the community had suffered heavily, both in lives lost and in residents carried off as captives, its people chose not to abandon the settlement but to rebuild it, keeping alive the memory of those they had lost.