Deerfield was attacked dozens of times during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The most devastating was a pre-dawn raid on the town by a group of 250-300 French soldiers, Abenaki, Kanienkehaka (Mohawk), and Wendat (Huron) warriors in February, 1704. Almost half of the town’s population was killed or captured and much of the settlement was burned. Years would pass before those who survived the grueling 300-mile trek with their captors to New France (Quebec, Canada) returned; about one third remained in Canada. Some, like the Reverend John Williams’s seven-year-old daughter Eunice, assimilated into Native communities while the majority embarked on new lives as French colonists.  

Survivors of the 1704 raid, including those who returned from captivity, faced a decision: to stay and rebuild the community or leave a place associated with tragedy and persistent peril. Those who chose to stay were joined by newcomers as well as returning captives. Deerfield remained an extremely dangerous place to live. However, newly-settled towns to the north and a line of forts along the colony’s northwest boundary in the 1740s prevented further raids on the scale of the 1704 attack. The last one occurred in August 1746, when Indigenous warriors ambushed two families haying, capturing eight-year-old Samuel Allen and killing several others. Lucy Terry, a young African woman enslaved in Deerfield, composed a poem about the event. Her “Bars Fight” is the first known literary work composed by an African American in North America.

Deerfield was a crossroads of international diplomacy as well as conflict in the early 1700s. In August 1735, the town hosted a conference attended by Massachusetts Governor Jonathan Belcher and a large delegation of over 150 Native people from multiple locales and nations. Over several days, delegates discussed and renegotiated shared space, alliance, and trade. Captain Joseph Kellogg of Deerfield, captured by the Abenaki as a boy in 1704, served as a translator. Participants departed satisfied that they had come to a mutual understanding that would enable all people to live peacefully and trade in a safe and beneficial environment.

The optimism of the 1735 Conference quickly faded, however. Life on the edge of empire remained precarious as English incursions and expansion into Native territory accelerated in the 1740s and 1750s. Abenaki and other Indigenous people continued to resist English colonization and settlement in their homelands. These conflicts fed into English and French struggles for control of the North American continent. During King George’s War (1744-1748) and the French and Indian War (1754-1763), Deerfield became an important staging area for defensive operations to the north and west. Despite frequent colonial wars, building, supplying, and maintaining the new forts helped Deerfield farmers to prosper through the sales of wheat, rye, and livestock. Residents built new houses, added to or remodeled others, erected farm buildings, improved fields and orchards, and intensified their use of the land. The number and variety of craftspeople and professionals grew as Deerfield’s population increased to more than 700 residents by the 1760s. A group of seven powerful intermarried families in the Connecticut River Valley known as “Mansion People” grew in wealth and status during these years.

At the same time, the number of enslaved people living and working in Deerfield steadily increased in conjunction with the growing wealth of the town’s residents. References in Deerfield records to African Americans jumped from a tiny handful at the turn of the 18^th century to nine individuals in 1730, and almost doubled by 1740. By the 1760s, known sources document 25 men, women, and children of color living and working in Deerfield, virtually all of whom were enslaved. Surviving account books reveal a consistent pattern of agricultural labor, including plowing, harvesting and processing grain, in addition to cutting and hauling wood and other tasks. Not until the 1780s would Massachusetts begin outlawing slavery through a series of court decisions declaring it to be unconstitutional.

In 1763, the British captured Canada from France in the final French and Indian War (1754-1763), ending the threat of attack from the French and their Native allies. The end of the colonial wars diminished the patronage and influence of the “Mansion People” who had dominated the economic, social, and political scene throughout the Connecticut Valley. Different families moved into leadership positions, gaining in wealth and status. Over the next 15 years, Deerfield split between Whigs (Patriots) and Loyalists (Tories) as the relationship between Britain and her colonies deteriorated before war broke out in 1775.

The American Revolution was a radical grass-roots rebellion that brought a new nation into being. It also caused instability, hardship, and loss of life. Although Deerfield farmers sold agricultural products to the Continental Army and militias during the war, economic challenges and social upheaval persisted throughout the conflict. After the war, Americans struggled to pay crippling state and national war debts in the midst of a severe post-war depression. Massachusetts taxed its citizens at unprecedented levels to pay the state’s debts; many families lost their farms and failed financially.

In the fall of 1786, desperate and angry inhabitants in western and central Massachusetts towns vigorously protested government policies. Thousands took up arms in what became known as “Shays’s Rebellion”, named for Captain Daniel Shays of Pelham. Most, although not all, Deerfield residents remained loyal to the Massachusetts government. Deerfield men traveled to defend the United States Arsenal at Springfield in January, 1786, from an assault by Shays’s troops that included residents of neighboring towns. David Hoyt Jr. wrote to his father, “Their numbers we do not regard-our Genll [William Shepard] has orders to Defend the public Stores on y^e hill at all hazards.” Hoyt rejoiced that “the mob party” retreated “in great disorder” when the militia fired upon them with the arsenal cannon. Shocked and outraged, cries of “Murderers!” rose from the din of the confused and panicky retreat. Shays and his army were pursued by General Benjamin Lincoln and taken by surprise and dispersed at Petersham on February 4. As the movement collapsed, some, including Daniel Shays, went into hiding in nearby Vermont.

Horrified by events in Massachusetts and unrest in other states, delegates gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to build a blueprint for a new, stronger national government. In January, 1789, Massachusetts towns sent representatives to Boston to vote on whether or not their state would support the new federal Constitution. The vote to ratify the Constitution passed by only 19 votes–187-168. Deerfield was among a majority of Massachusetts towns that rejected the Constitution, believing it lacked essential safeguards of individual liberties such as a bill of rights. Once the Constitution was ratified, however, most decided to support the new United States government. As economic conditions improved in the 1790s, and their town became more prosperous once again, Deerfielders like Justin Hitchcock (1752-1822) looked forward to the new century with great optimism. Hitchcock recalled the remarkably positive “effect our National Government had upon all classes of people. Confidence was restored in the Government And a new spring to all kinds of business was the effect.”