King William's War (1689-1697)

King William’s War was the American equivalent of the War of the League of Augsburg in Europe, which began when King James II (1685-88) of England was overthrown by his son-in-law William III, stadtholder (chief executive officer) of the Netherlands, at the invitation of Parliament. James fled to the court of a fellow Catholic, Louis XIV of France, and warfare between French and English possessions began wherever common boundaries made it possible. In North America the English colonies failed to cooperate against the French. They were severely divided among themselves over the legitimacy of Jacob Leisler’s Rebellion in New York and the ability of William Phips of Massachusetts to direct an intercolonial effort. As a result, for most of the war the mobile Native Americans allied with the French Canadians to raid upstate New York and the Maine (then part of Massachusetts) frontier, more or less at will. The pro-English Iroquois in New York and Massachusetts’s settlements in Maine, of which only three survived, endured most of the fighting.

The war’s major effort was an expedition to conquer Canada undertaken in 1690 by Massachusetts. Commanded by Phips, it succeeded in capturing Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia), but after reaching the walls of Quebec was forced to withdraw on October 25 as winter and a frozen St. Lawrence River loomed. Although only 30 of 1,300 Massachusetts men died in combat, perhaps 500 others perished from disease and shipwrecks as the fleet of 32 ships was scattered by storms from Canada to the Caribbean. The expedition put Massachusetts some 40,000 pounds in debt, forced it to adopt a depreciated paper currency, and led to the abandonment of many frontier towns. The early disastrous years of the war were undoubtedly one cause of the Salem WITCHCRAET episode of 1692, because important people throughout Massachusetts believed Satan was the cause of their troubles. The only positive result of the Quebec Campaign was that it showed the loyalty of the province to Britain and may have won a more liberal royal charter for Massachusetts, with Phips as governor. The Peace of Ryswyck, signed in 1697, settled nothing in North America.

Further reading: Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675-1715 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981).

—William Pencak

Knight, Sarah Kemble (1666-1727) innkeeper, businessperson, diarist

Madam Knight, as she is often called, made a journey in the fall of 1704 from Boston to New Haven and New York City. Along the way she kept a journal that recorded not only the progress of her trip, but also her thoughts and observations, providing a detailed glimpse of daily life in colonial New England. Sarah Kemble was raised in Boston, where she married Richard Knight by 1689. She kept a writing school, hence her title of “Madam,” supposedly with young Benjamin Franklin as a pupil. She also possibly kept a stationery store in her large house. Several boarders lodged in her house, and, unusually for a woman, she involved herself in a variety of legal matters on their behalf and her own.

Madam Knight made her 1704 trip to settle the estate of her cousin Caleb Trowbridge on behalf of his young widow. Filled with an urbane Bostonian snobbishness, Knight’s journal presents the rustic, rural, and difficult nature of people and travel. Sarah Knight’s personal journal was left in manuscript form until 1825 when it was published under the title The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr Buckingham. Her journal distinguishes her as one of the rare women, and also one of the few secular, authors of the colonial period. Her journal is a travelogue liberally sprinkled with occasional verses and filled with picaresque characters like the country “bumpkin,” chewing tobacco, spitting, and staring around “like a Catt let out of a Baskett.” She viewed local Native “Indians of the Country” as “savages” because of their failure to become more like the English settlers. She describes the dark and hazardous roads of the time, the fording of streams, and the rustic lodgings along the way. One amusing episode finds Madam Knight being kept awake all night by several other lodgers loudly drinking rum in the room next to hers.

Madam Knight left no other writings. She followed her daughter to the New London/Norwich area of Connecticut, where she continued her small business dealings until her death, leaving a sizable estate of ?1,800.

Further reading: Malcolm Freiberg, ed., The Journal of Madam Knight (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1972).

—Stephen C. O’Neill

Kuhn, Justus Engelhardt (d. 1717) artist A German emigre, Kuhn arrived in Maryland in 1706 and painted for a time in Annapolis, where he specialized in portraits of several interrelated Catholic families, the Carrolls, the Digges, and the Darnalls. Rather than focusing on the personal character or physical attributes of his subjects, Kuhn’s work illustrated the abundance of their estates. His portrait Eleanor Darnall, painted about 1710, is remarkable for its depiction of a vast plantation of large gardens replete with multiple buildings, fountains, and colonnades. In this portrait the sitter Eleanor, daughter of Maryland aristocrats, stands before an elegant balustrade in diminished proportion to an elaborately decorated vase nearby. Framing her are heavy draperies and flowers, and beyond the balustrade, a seemingly unattenuated formal landscape. Kuhn also painted a portrait of Eleanor’s brother. The setting for Henry Darnall III was similar and contains what is thought to be the first American depiction of a black person, one of the family servants. Undoubtedly, Kuhn’s patrons appreciated the artistic magnification of their assets. According to his contemporaries, Kuhn held aristocratic pretensions. It was noted that his accouterments were so fine that one would not suspect he was a painter.

Kuhn is the earliest documented portrait painter in the American South. Only one of his 10 known works was signed, his portrait Ignatius Digges in 1710. Kuhn was buried in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

—Catherine Goetz