DODGING ARMAGEDDON
Years later, reflecting on the weeks he spent in the summer of 1704 travelling through New England to visit and worship with his coreligionists, Quaker Thomas Story remembered, “it was a dismal time in those parts; for no man knew, in an ordinary way, on his lying down to sleep, but that he might lose his life before the morning, by the hands of a merciless savage.” The passing of time had not clouded his recollections of strife. When Story made his tour of the communities north of Boston, he found their inhabitants, only four years removed from a horrific war with the French in Canada and their American Indian allies, mired in another ghastly conflict. This war—Queen Anne’s War—had become far worse than anything they could recall or conceive. Although Boston stood in no real danger of falling to the Indians or French, the Puritans’ “City upon a Hill,” their model of an exemplary Protestant society that would draw the eyes of the world, faced its greatest existential crisis.
Most New Englanders had wanted no part of another war in 1702, but as in 1689, when the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697) came to North America where it was known as King William’s War, the pull of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1715) proved too powerful to escape. Throughout the 1690s, the theocrats who dominated Massachusetts had shown that, while they could offer jeremiads that prophesized the imminent fall of their Christian experiment in the New World, they could not lead the defense of New England. Prayer meetings and fast days had not stopped Indians and Frenchmen from penetrating the northern frontier, and multiple attempts to take the war to New France had ended in whimpers of pathos. Some satisfaction came with the death of the savior of New France in King William’s War, Louis de Buade, de Frontenac, but his replacements as governor-general, first Louis-Hector de Callière and then Philippe de Rigaud, de Vaudreuil, could still call on Canada’s professional soldiers in the . Moreover, the mission Indians who lived in Catholic mission towns in the Saint Lawrence River Valley and the multitude of warriors of the Wabenaki Confederacy (the Abenakis, Maliseets, and Mi’kmaq) on the Maine and Acadia frontiers also offered their services. More worrisome for Boston’s
