Eben Sullivan, youngest son of Master John of Berwick, Maine, is held as a hostage by Indians for the fulfillment of a treaty. One evening Sullivan, having been dealt with in an insulting manner by some young Indians, throws a ladle of boiling soup in the face of his captors. Sullivan is saved from the angry braves only by intervention of his fellow prisoners.
Eben was a lawyer like his brothers John and James. Like the rest of his family and descendants he considered himself an assimilated American, marrying Abigail Cotton in 1772. Eben went on to be a major in the Army during the revolutionary wars and, once again captured by the Indians,was required to live a wandering life with the tribe under difficult circumstances, witnessing on one occasion the building of a large fire on which he was scheduled to be burned to death. He escaped captivity during a drunken celebration by jumping into a river, drowning a savage dog whose barking threatened to expose him. In his later life Sullivan maintained a law practice in Berwick, Maine.
According to Eben's great nephew, Judge John Sullivan of Exeter, NY, writing in the 1850s, "Dangers had no terrors" for Eben. "He was a man of pleasure, gay, hospitable, generous to a fault." An elderly lady remembered him as "very mild gentlemanly man, one of the kindest and most indulgent men she ever knew. She never saw him excited but once, and then his voice and manner were terrific."