One day an Indian who came to the house, observing her cap, promised to give her one; and inviting her to his cabin, pulled from behind a beam a cap of a smoky color, and handed it to her, saying he had taken it from the head of a woman at Cherry Valley. Mrs. Campbell recognized it as having belonged to the unfortunate Jane Wells. It had a cut in the crown made by the tomahawk, and was spotted with blood. She shrank with horror from the murderer of her friend. Returning to her cabin, she tore off the lace border, from which, however, she could not wash the stains of blood, and laid it away, to give to the friends of the murdered girl, should any have escaped the massacre. In the midst of her own sorrows she lost not her sympathy with the woes of others.
The proposed exchange of Mrs. Campbell and her children for the wife and sons of Colonel John Butler—the noted partisan leader—being agreed upon by Governor Clinton and General Schuyler, early in the spring Colonel Campbell dispatched an Indian messenger to Colonel Butler at Fort Niagara. Butler came soon after to the village of Canadaseago, to confer with the Indian council on the subject of giving up their prisoners. The families who adopted captives in the place of deceased relatives were always unwilling to part with them; and Butler had some difficulty in obtaining their assent. It was necessary also to procure the consent of a family in the Genesee village, with whom Mrs. Campbell was to have been placed in the spring. They were kinsfolk of the king of the Senecas; and it is no small evidence of the esteem Mrs. Campbell had won from the Indians, that he volunteered to go himself, and persuade them to yield their claim. Though aged, the kind-hearted savage performed the journey on foot; and returning, informed Mrs. Campbell that she was free, bade her farewell, and promised to come and visit her when the war was over. In June, 1799, she was sent to Fort Niagara, where many persons took refuge—preparation being made for an expected attack by General Sullivan. Among them came Katrine Montour, a fury who had figured in the horrors of Wyoming. One of her sons having taken prisoner in Cherry Valley the father of Mrs. Campbell, and brought him to the Indian country, it may be conceived what were the feelings of the captive on hearing her reproach the savage for not having killed him at once, to avoid the incumbrance of an old and feeble man!
Mrs. Campbell was detained a year as a prisoner in the fort; but had the solace of her children, all except one of whom Butler obtained from the Indians and restored to her. She associated freely, too, with the wives of the officers of the garrison. In the summer of 1780 she received the first letter from her husband, sent by a friendly Oneida Indian. In June, she was sent to Montreal, where she recovered her missing child—a boy seven years old, whom she had not seen since the day after the massacre at Cherry Valley. He had been with a branch of the Mohawk tribe, and had forgotten his native tongue, though he remembered his mother, whom, in the joy of seeing her, he addressed in the Indian language.
At Montreal the exchange of prisoners was effected. In the fall, Mrs. Campbell and her children reached Albany, escorted into that city by a detachment of troops under the command of Colonel Ethan Allen. Here Colonel Campbell awaited their arrival, and the trials of a two years' captivity were almost forgotten in the joy of restoration. They remained there till the close of the war, and in 1783, returned to Cherry Valley, and literally began the world anew. Their lands had gone to waste, and were overgrown with underbrush; all besides was destroyed; and with no shelter save a small log-cabin hastily put up—they felt for a time that their lot had been a hard one. But the consciousness of having performed the duty of patriots, sustained them under misfortune. By the close of the following summer a more comfortable log-house was erected on the ruins of their former residence, and the farm began to assume the aspect of cultivation. Here General Washington was received and entertained on his visit to Cherry Valley, accompanied by Governor George Clinton and other distinguished officers. It was on this occasion that Mrs. Campbell presented her sons to Washington, and told him she would train them up to the service of their country, should that country ever need their services.
From this time Mrs. Campbell was eminently blessed in all things temporal; being permitted in old age to see around her a large and prosperous family. Her oldest son was the Hon. William Campbell, late Surveyor general of the State of New York. Her second son, James S. Campbell, though educated as a farmer—inheriting the "old homestead"—was for many years a magistrate, and one of the judges of the Court of Common Pleas in Otsego; while the youngest son, the late Robert Campbell, of Cooperstown, an able and eminent lawyer, enjoyed in a high degree the confidence of the people of that county. Colonel Campbell, after an active life, died in 1824, at the age of eighty-six. His wife lived, in the enjoyment of almost uninterrupted health, to the age of ninety-three, and died in 1836—the last survivor of the Revolutionary women in the region of the head waters of the Susquehanna. All her children but two have followed her to the grave.
Mrs. Campbell's latter days—to the close of a life marked with so much of action, enterprise and stirring incident—were days of industry. Like the Roman matron, she bore the distaff in her hand, and sat with her maidens around her; and her characteristic energy was infused into every thing she did. Yet she was in every sense of the term a lady: scrupulously neat in her apparel, combining dignity with affable and pleasing manners—the expression of real kindness of heart; and with a mind naturally vigorous and clear improved by reading, and still more by observation and society—and conversation enriched by the stores she had gathered in her experience, she was well fitted to shine in any sphere of life. For many years before her death she was designated throughout the country, as "old Lady Campbell." Her memory unimpaired, she was a living chronicler of days gone by; the peculiar circumstances in which she was placed during the war having brought her into personal acquaintance with almost all the prominent men engaged on both sides.
The feminine and domestic virtues that adorned her character, rendering her beloved in every relation—especially by those towards whom she so faithfully discharged her duties—were brightened by her unaffected piety. It was the power of Christian principle that sustained her through all her wanderings and trials, and in her lonely captivity among a barbarous people. It was this which cheered her closing days of existence, and supported her when, almost on the verge of a century—having survived the companions who had commenced life with her, surrounded by her children, and her descendants to the fourth generation—she passed calmly to her rest.