HASTINGS, Susannah (Willard) Johnson

Born 13 July 1730, Harvard, Massachusetts; died 1810

Daughter of Josiah and Hannah Willard; married James Johnson, 1747; Mr. Hastings, n.d; children: four

With her first husband, Susannah Johnson Hastings had four children, a son and two daughters and a fourth, unnamed child, who was born and died during her captivity among the Native Americans. The Johnsons were a farming family; in 1750, they moved to the backwoods of New Hampshire, to a sparsely inhabited pioneering settlement near the Connecticut River, in order to increase their land holdings. In 1754, during one phase of the French and Indian War, Hastings (along with her sister, Miriam, and her children) was captured in a Native American raid on the poorly secured settlement. She spent about five months in captivity, traveling north as far as Quebec, before she was ransomed. Hastings became a widow when her husband was killed at the battle of Fort Ticonderoga and later married an unidentified Mr. Hastings. Beyond these scant personal details, no facts are available about the life of Hastings, her education, or her domestic circumstances.

Hastings' only extant work is A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson (1796). Although the style, organization, and prefatory material indicate the heavy hand of an editor, the narrative contains attitudes and ideas central to late 18th-century American women's writing, thus deserving consideration, if only for its historical and cultural value.

Lacking either the religious or propagandistic purposes of earlier captivity narratives, Hastings' reads like an adventure story, evidencing a conscious desire to entertain through recounting hardships and unusual occurrences among Native American and French captors in New Hampshire, Quebec, and Montreal. Eighteenth-century American preoccupations with sentimentality, sensibility, the noble savage, and national history provide the ideological foundations for her reconstruction of experiences in New England forests, Native American camps, French-Canadian homes, and prisons. With its neat chapter divisions and carefully salted moments of suspense, the narrative becomes in part a late 18th-century sentimental romance.

Notable among the attitudes Hastings emphasizes are her belief in the natural benevolence of the Native Americans (she shows how a Native American family of the royal blood adopts her and treats her as a true member of their group) and her strong feelings of patriotism for the young American republic. Her criticism of the causes and events of the French and Indian War serve as oblique criticism of the British in general and of British rule in America.

To enhance her nationalistic themes, Hastings uses a historical perspective to show that the courage and perseverance of the American forefathers, as they faced the perils of settling the wilderness frontier, ensured a progressive culture in America. Through an artfully worded conclusion, she depicts the prerevolutionary period as the dark, uncivilized past moving inevitably into the sunshine of a civilized republic because of the moral strengths of the American colonists. Thus in her narrative Hastings carefully combines the personal and the national to create a simplistic presentation of a currently popular historical theory. Ultimately, her work becomes a vehicle to exhibit civilization thriving under the care of independent Americans, and a further example of the often ambitious nature of American women's writing in the 1790s.

Bibliography:

Davis, W. A., Records of the Town of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, 1719-1764 (1896). Nourse, H. S., History of the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, 1732-1893 (1894).

—JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN