Sep 17, 2015 - Sale 2391

Sale 2391 - Lot 133

Price Realized: $ 1,125
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
(COLONIAL WARS.) Hawks, John. "Journal of the Capitulation of Fort Massachusetts, Aug. 1745." Manuscript transcript included in the body of a letter from Stephen W. Williams to Colonel William L. Stone of New York. 4 pages, 16 x 10 1/2 inches, on one folding sheet, including address panel as part of final page; separations at folds, no postal markings. Deerfield, MA, 22 September 1842
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Fort Massachusetts was built in North Adams, MA to defend English settlers in King George's War. On 19 August 1745, a force of 965 French and Indians laid siege to the fort, manned by a garrison of 22 soldiers, half of them incapacitated by illness, plus three women and six children. The garrison was soon captured, and the survivors brought as captives to Canada. Sergeant John Hawks, acting commander of the garrison, left an unpublished manuscript memoir of the attack; a transcript fills the first two-plus pages of this letter. "That night they surrounded the fort & kept a shout, Indians & singers & all sorts of noises, until the morning & then as soon as that daylight they renewed their attack, which continued until 12 o'clock, then an Indian called to us & told us that the General had a mind to talk with us. . . . Having but eight well men in the fort, I told the Indian that we would parley." Hawks continues with a long account of the march north, including the birth of a child to one of the women on the first night. Hawks found little cause for complaint at the hands of his captors: "The French & Indians were very careful of the sick & wounded & kind to all of us. The gentleman that I went with was as kind to me as if I had been his brother." The narrative concludes on 26 September, shortly after the party's arrival in Quebec.
The transcript was made by early Deerfield historian Stephen West Williams (1790-1855), who appended a biographical note on Hawks "from my history of the town of Deerfield which has never been published." The letter was sent to historian William Leete Stone, editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser, but we can find no record of its publication.