Captivity and release
While captive, Williams recorded his impressions of French colonial life in New France. Private families treated him courteously; Jesuit missionaries included him at their table for meals, and he was often given comfortable lodgings, including a feather bed. Upon Pierre Maisonnat's release by Boston authorities, Williams was released by Quebec Governor Philippe de Rigaud Vaudreuil and returned to Boston on 21 November 1706, along with about 60 other captives. Among them were four of his children. This was the second large group of captives to be released by the French.
When his exchange was finally arranged in late 1706, Williams was forced to leave in Quebec his daughter Eunice, then ten years old, who had been adopted by a Mohawk family in Kahnawake, a Jesuit mission village south of Montreal. She took the place of their child who had died from smallpox. Eunice became thoroughly assimilated, learning the Mohawk language and ways. Because the French colonial government depended on their alliance with the Mohawk, they would not take children away by force whom the Indians had adopted. Eunice was baptized as a Catholic in 1710, when she took the name Marguerite. She was also given a Mohawk name as a child. When she became an adult, she was given the Mohawk name Kanenstenhawi to mark the passage. At age 16, Kanenstenhawi married François-Xavier Arosen, a Mohawk man of 25. They had three children together.
After celebrations in Boston and giving a sermon there in December 1706, Williams returned to Deerfield. While four of his children had also been freed from captivity, for a time he continued arrangements for having them live with family until the new family house was completed by the community. Stephen lived with an uncle in Roxbury, where he attended school; Samuel lived with another uncle in Charlestown; and Esther lived with Stoddard relatives in Northampton.
In the winter of 1706/1707, Williams wrote a narrative of his captivity called The Redeemed Captive (Boston, spring 1707). It was extremely popular because of his standing in the colony and the widely known account of the numerous captives having been taken from Deerfield. Being printed in several editions, Williams's account was one of the more well-known of the numerous Indian captivity narratives published during the colonial period. The 19th-century author James Fenimore Cooper drew on this account as inspiration for his novel, The Last of the Mohicans (1826).
In summer 1707 Williams's new house was completed. In September of that year, he remarried to Abigail Bissell, a widow from Connecticut and first cousin to his late wife through the Stoddard family. At that time, he collected his children from varied locations in Massachusetts and had them return to Deerfield.
Williams lived and worked in Deerfield until his death in 1729. He made efforts to keep in touch with Eunice and continued to try to persuade her to return to Massachusetts, as did her brother Stephen, who followed his father into the ministry. She did not return until after her father's death.
Williams was a minister of the favored New England Puritans in the same era as Samuel Willard, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, and Solomon Stoddard. He died shortly before the rise of the Great Awakening. He published several sermons.
