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This review was published in the Chicago
Tribune Book Review on December 20, 1998.
Review: Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War
and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1998)
by Tara Fitzpatrick
"Our Indian Wars are not over yet."—Cotton Mather, 1692
Several times every day, a fast ferry
plows the waters between New London, Conn., and the eastern tip
of Long Island's North Fork. One might expect that these ferries
would be filled with day-trippers escaping the gritty old mill towns
of southern New England for eastern Long Island's pristine beaches
and scenic wineries. But no; the boats are nearly empty on the south-bound
trip. All the pilgrims are headed north, to one of two booming tribal
casinos in the Connecticut hills: Foxwoods, run by the Mashantucket
Pequots, and Mohegan Sun, on tribal lands held by the Mohegan nation.
This particular turn of history's wheel will surprise those who
assume New England's native peoples were obliterated in the first
decades of European colonization. To understand the survival and
revival of these two tribes, it helps to know that, during New England's
most bitter Indian conflict, King Philip's War (1675–76), the
Pequots and Mohegans fought alongside the British colonists against
Wampanoags, Nipmucks, Narragansetts, and other northeastern Algonquian
tribes led by the Wampanoag sachem, Philip (originally, Metacom).
King Philip's War was one of the bloodiest ever fought on American
soil, producing more casualties, as a percent of total population,
than any war in our history. In little more than a year, Indian
attacks laid waste to twenty-five English towns, more than half
of all the colonists' settlements, pushing the New England frontier
back to the Atlantic coast. In pursuit, colonial armies with their
Indian allies killed thousands of enemy Indians, decimated their
villages leaving many to starve or die of disease, and shipped hundreds
of survivors into slavery in the West Indies. As Jill Lepore demonstrates
in her fascinating and suggestive study, The Name of War,
King Philip's War was a defining experience for both British colonists
and Native American peoples in New England and would become a template
for the centuries-long contest between Europeans and Indians over
control of the continent and the evolving nature of American identity.
Lepore, an assistant professor of history at Boston University,
tells a complex and layered story--a history of the conflict itself
but, more centrally, a reading of the many accounts King Philip's
War produced: "This is a study of war, and of how people write about
it. Writing about war can be almost as difficult as waging it and,
often enough, is essential to winning it." What interests Lepore
here are twice-told tales: narratives in which the battles for territory,
sovereignty, and cultural domination are fought, again and again,
with words. The Name of War is, in part, a compelling account
of some of the events of the war itself--or at least of what we
think happened, based on written accounts produced by colonial authors
for consumption by readers in old and New England. It is also a
provocative meditation on the words of war and their effects on
authority and memory. Indeed, Lepore draws her title from the semantic
battle waged in the 1670s about what to call the ongoing bloodletting.
War, to William Hubbard, minister of Ipswich, Mass., and one of
the conflict's first chroniclers, involved "Acts of Hostility or
valiant Achievements," while these "Massacres, barbarous inhumane
Outrages . . . no more deserve the Name of a War than the Report
of them the Title of an History".
In telling her version of this story, Lepore constantly reminds
the reader about the nature of storytelling itself, and about the
partial and partisan nature of memory and history. She is remarkably
adept at keeping these layers discrete and writes theoretically
informed cultural history with unusual grace and wit.
Her approach does raise interpretive dilemmas, however, by focusing
less on what we know than how (we think) we know it. Recounting
a conflict in which almost every piece of documentary evidence presents
the British version of the war and its meanings--from a conflict
in which literacy itself signified Englishness--Lepore seeks to
reconstruct what the Indians might have thought from the tantalizing
fragments of information contemporary chroniclers and modern historians
and anthropologists have gathered. She ponders the immediate causes
of these hostilities: the apparent murder of John Sassamon, a Christian
Indian minister who had warned Plymouth's governor of rumors of
war among Philip's Wampanoags; the Plymouth Court's prosecution
of three Wampanoags for Sassamon's murder (two were executed, a
third survived a botched hanging); and Philip's ensuing attacks
on English towns. She questions the Puritan colonists' expressed
bewilderment about the Indians' motives--their tendency to understand
disaster as divinely ordained punishment for their own transgressions:
"If the English had examined the Algonquian actions not as signs
from God but as signs from Indians, they might have seen a great
deal about Algonquian motives." She wonders why the English persisted
in seeing themselves as victims of Indian aggression, though, as
she describes, Philip's Wampanoags and their Nipmuck and Narragansett
allies plainly initiated this offensive: "Much as most colonists
denied it, Algonquian attacks and Algonquian tortures were not random
or arbitrary. On the contrary, they were deliberate and deeply symbolic."
She makes much of the ritual significance for native peoples of
certain acts of warfare--capture, torture and maiming the dead--while
the same acts, when committed by the English, seem simply capricious
and cruel.
Though Lepore acknowledges the risk that such historical reconstruction
poses--that is, the powerful temptation to romanticize the vanquished--she
reads these events and narratives, as anyone writing now must, with
full knowledge of how this story will end. In retrospect, it is
nearly irresistible to see King Philip's War as a struggle in which
Indian victims rose up in futile rebellion against triumphal English
conquerors who only understood the language of blood. But for all
our modern sympathy for the Indians' plight, seeing the British
victory as inevitable blunts the uncertainty and terror on both
sides during this brutal conflict. In 1675, no one knew who would
"[escape] to tell the news" and the difference between words and
wounds was all too evident. Reading backwards, however, what were
once anxious dispatches from the front have become sentimental legends
of the fall.
In a fascinating coda to her main narrative, Lepore describes the
origins of the American romance with the vanishing "noble savage"
during the centuries after King Philip's War, a romance that flourished
even as the conquest of the continent and warfare with native peoples
continued. The astonishing popularity of captivity narratives--first
and most famously, Mary Rowlandson's The Soveraignty & Goodness
of God(1682)--may be the earliest indication we have of this
peculiar marriage of nostalgia and contempt. The English captives
told cautionary tales of their own desolation and deliverance from
their Indian captors. But the throngs of readers who made these
narratives our earliest best sellers discovered sensational accounts
of survival, enlightenment, and redemption in the American wilderness,
the Indians' domain. By the 1830s and 40s, Lepore persuasively shows,
American audiences would cheer famed actor Edwin Forrest's performance
as a heroically dying King Philip in the long-running hit play,
Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags(1829). At the same
moment, most Americans would endorse President Andrew Jackson's
ordered removal of all remaining Indians to lands west of the Mississippi.
What can account for white Americans' ability to sustain two such
contradictory views? And what does this contradiction tell us about
that elusive character, American identity?
To answer these questions, Lepore invokes Crevecoeur's famous query
in 1782, as the thirteen Colonies won their independence from Britain:
"What then is the American, this new man?" If seventeenth Century
Puritan New Englanders had equated the Indians with savagery and
degeneration, eighteenth and nineteenth century Americans could
imagine "distinguishing themselves from Europeans and European culture,
and particularly from all that was English, . . . becom[ing] American
by becoming Indian." In Lepore's account, by the mid-19th Century,
the Indians became a symbol not just for that which was uniquely
American, but also for that which was uniquely natural, virile,
masculine.
As Lepore understands, this absorption of the noble Indian into
the rhetoric of American identity depended on the disappearance
of actual Indians from the local landscape. New Englanders were
especially wont to mourn the Indians' passing while accepting its
tragic inevitability. By the mid-nineteenth Century, they too knew
how this story would turn out. In one sense, these heirs to the
Puritan combatants of King Philip's War had "escaped to tell the
news," and tell it in a way that made their victory seem providential.
In another sense, however, asThe Name of War demonstrates,
we still struggle to escape the web of words in which the Wampanoags,
Narragansetts, and Nipmucks live on as shadowy figures, metaphors
infused with hopes and fears that have less to do with them than
with us. As the tourists line up to buy "personal wampum cards"
to play the slots at Foxwoods--some twenty miles down the coast
from Mt. Hope, where Philip was shot beheaded and quartered in 1676--perhaps
Cotton Mather was right: our Indian wars are not over yet.
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