Wars Within Wars - Left to Themselves

American Political History · Jul 17, 2022 · 22m

On a frozen leap-day morning in 1704, a French and Native war party came over the palisade of a sleeping Massachusetts town, and New England’s most famous minister woke to find warriors in his house and his pistol misfiring in his hand. This is the raid on Deerfield — the burning, the three-hundred-mile march to Canada where Reverend John Williams watched his world taken apart one person at a time, and then spent two years fighting off the Jesuits who wanted his soul and the souls of his children. It opens a season about wars within wars: a war declared in Europe over a Spanish throne but…