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"A Century Sermon Preached at Deerfield, Feb. 29, 1804: In Commemoration of the Destruction of the Town by French and Indians"

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In this 100th-anniversary sermon about the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, during Queen Anne's War, Reverend John Taylor first compared the attack with the destruction of Jerusalem and then went on to illustrate how no town in the Commonwealth suffered "from the depredations of the natives equally with Deerfield." Taylor focused more, though, on condemning the French rather than the Native participants, perhaps because he was a staunch Federalist who mistrusted the motives and policies of the French government in his own time. The first to describe the 1704 attack as a "massacre," Taylor revealed in his Century Sermon the still powerful psychological influence of that event.

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