CompleteMartialArts.com - The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN: 9780375702624
ISBN: 0375702628
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 1999-04-27
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1999-04-27
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society
King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war--colonists against Indians--that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."
It all began when Philip (called Metacom by his own people), the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. The war spread quickly, pitting a loose confederation of southeastern Algonquians against a coalition of English colonists. While it raged, colonial armies pursued enemy Indians through the swamps and woods of New England, and Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley. Both sides, in fact, had pursued the war seemingly without restraint, killing women and children, torturing captives, and mutilating the dead. The fighting ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in August 1676.
The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war--and because of it--that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indians and Anglos. She shows how, as late as the nineteenth century, memories of the war were instrumental in justifying Indian removals--and how in our own century that same war has inspired Indian attempts to preserve "Indianness" as fiercely as the early settlers once struggled to preserve their Englishness.
Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Summary: History as Vivisection
Comment: In 1675, the Wampanoag and Nipmuck people, led by a sachem identified as King Philip, went to war against the encroaching settlements of the English in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The war, which lasted just a year, was the bloodiest and most destructive, per capita of the populations on both sides, in American history, not even excluding the Civil War. By the time King Philip was slain and the Wampanoags routed, roughly half the English settlements west of Boston had been devastated. It was arguably the last war in America in which the Indians had a "fighting chance" in terms of matched forces, and it has been seen as the prototype of later efforts by powerful "chiefs" to forge an effective tribal coalition against Anglo-American invasion, notably the efforts of Pontiac, Tecumseh, Red Cloud, and Sitting Bull. As in those later instances, the English colonists gained their victory with the help of Indian allies, whom they promptly treated with more or less the same callous severity as the enemies. King Philip's War was a breaking point in the New Englanders' efforts to live side-by-side with the previous inhabitants of the land, priding themselves on bringing the benefits of mutual trade and Christian salvation. Prior to 1675, Puritan elites had professed the desire for such co-existence and had derided the cruelty of Catholic Spaniards in their conquest and enslavement of Indians. At least some colonists had made strenuous efforts to convert the Indians to Christianity by persuasion. After 1675 and for the long duration of westward expansion, most missionary activities followed conquest.
It's important to remember that in 1675 the English had been permanently residing in Massachusetts for 55 years. A girl child born in Plymouth might well have had a third generation grandchild, or more likely a score of grandchildren, gathered at her knees in 1675. The initial Puritan settlement had occupied lands depopulated by diseases, and had been tolerated or even welcomed by the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit. King Philip, whose childhood name was Metacomet, was the younger son of that very Massasoit.
The Name of War, however, is not an account of King Philip's War. In fact, it takes from granted a considerable previous knowledge of New England historiography. Instead, Jill Lepore has written a speculative meditation on the semiotics of war, especially inter-cultural war, and on the implications of King Philip's War for the self-perception of Americans of later generations. What Lepore attempts is a post-modernist examination of the contemporary accounts of the war - a close reading of such accounts in terms of Derrida's epistomology and Lacan's psychology - with apologies for the futility of trying to recover an "Indian" perspective on the same events. Lepore sees the accounts of "treachery" and the racial rhetoric of the war as being of greater lasting impact on American identity than the destruction and the many acts of cruelty by both sides.
Post-modernist history is an acquired taste, as unappealing to some as raw sea-urchin entrails or heavy metal pop music. The responses of readers who have given this book one- or two-star reviews are revealing; many lovers of traditional narrative history will detest this book. Those who view American history through red-white-and-blue lenses may also find it unpalatable, since it affirms the victimhood of the Indians in an unequal struggle, with only the victors equipped to shape perception for their own advantage. Thus I have to warn you, oh potential reader: if you have no idea who Derrida and Lacan are, if you are annoyed by picking-apart of images and vivisection of ideas, this book is NOT for you. But if you are ready to confront Jill Lepore's formidable knowledge of sources and to practice the art of reading as a two-way dialogue, from which no final interpretation is to be expected, then you'll find this Bancroft-winning book well worth your attention.
A few days later: Thinking about this book and the comments my review elicited, I feel that I may have 'damped' it with faint praise. It's a book that gets better as you read deeper into it, and much better as you reflect on it. There's an excellent chapter on the legality and morality, in pan-European thought, of the selling of Indians to the island colonies as slaves, for that it precisely what happened to hundreds of the Wamapnoags and even larger numbers of supposedly Christianized Indians after the war. Even Philip's nine-year-old son was sold as a slave after months of debate about the justice of hanging him. Also there's a strong exposition of the thoughts of the Spanish writers Francisco Victoria and Bartolome de las Casas, of their possible influence on the thinking of New Englanders including John Eliot, and an analysis of why Eliot's defense of the Indians was whisked aside while Victoria and las Casas were widely studied. I'm afraid I allowed my pique at the postmodernist manner to distract me from the true substance of this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: disappointed
Comment: In the Name of War is a revisionist interpretation of King Philips War. This is not a history of the war and provides an example of how the colonists at the time interpreted various aspects of the war. From seizing of colonists to selling Indians into slavery the effects of the war were traced throughout the war period. The brutality of the war is captured through the narrative that she lays out but in the end you really have to be interested in the time period to get something out of it. Like many things written about Indians there is a general feeling that the author must apologize for not being an Indian writing about Indians and that comes through in this book. In the end it is lackluster and boring with little for those looking for a history of the war.
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Summary: Demonizing Literacy
Comment: Lepore makes much of the fact that the history of King Philip's War was written by the victors. That is not much of an insight -- victors always write the histories. But she goes one step further, it seems to me, by attempting to demonize literacy -- whether it's the literacy of the English or that attained by John Sassamon. This is a curious stance for a writer to take. As for the non-linear nature of her narrative, I didn't find that to be a drawback.
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Summary: how we came to be us
Comment: One of the most interesting, thought-provoking books I have read. The scholarship is impressive, the prose lucid, the presentation of a conflict that has more than two sides is commendably fair. The book is a real eye-opener. And it has the excitement of a detective story, as Lepore tracks changes in white American attitudes toward native Americans through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. I read this alongside Philbrick's recent bestseller Mayflower, which gives a very good running accout of King Philip's War, and look forward to reading other books about this crucial time in the country's history, a time when piety and violence started their enduring relationship.
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Summary: a misleading polemic, not a history
Comment: It's said that the second historian was the first revisionist. In other words, to some extent any and every telling of history reveals as much about the historian as it does the history. But for as much as the telling of history is always interpretive, it is also entirely possible for an historian to confront, recognize, and largely neutralize her own interpretive biases; while she need not abandon or apologize for her point of view, nevertheless it is her responsibility to present all the relevant historical facts -- especially those that might cast doubt upon her interpretations and agendas -- and then argue her case with all of the relevant information on the table. That is the difference between interpretive history and deceptive or misleading polemic.
Lepore accomplishes only polemic here, then, in that she presents as supporting evidence for her biases only her own highly questionable interpretations of the semantics of the colonists' own writings on King Philip's War. She is hermeneutically daft, asserting a self-contained truth within those writings that is simply absurd. Texts (especially in the case of the very personal diary entries, private letters, and firsthand accounts that constitute the overwhelming majority of the colonists' writings on King Phillip's War) do not and cannot contain some absolute, inescapable meaning that imposes itself upon the reader. Texts communicate their real meaning only when referred to the indigenous contexts (social, political, religious, philosophical, linguistic, psychological, etc.) that produced them; when removed from those contexts and read in ignorance of them, the reader must of necessity substitute the contexts and agendas of her own experience for the authentic contexts, so that the texts will appear to have radically different meanings than they really do -- they will seem to mean whatever the interpreter wants them to mean.
And what does Lepore want the Puritans' writings to mean? What is her agenda here? Essentially, it is portray the Puritan colonists of 17th century Massachusetts as despicable hypocrites. Now, as I said, if that's her agenda and her bias, that's fine; but it is acceptable for her to present the conclusions born of that agenda and bias as history only on the condition that they are argued in light of all the evidence that might call them into question. Lepore fails on this count. Again, she confines the supporting evidence she provides for her theses to her own highly speculative interpretations of the colonists' writings; as other reviewers have noted here, then, this book is much closer to deconstructionist literary criticism than it is to history. She misses the forest for the trees: she makes no attempt to check her interpretive biases against the broader historical narrative that is the context of King Phillip's War.
For example, in 1622 the natives around the Jamestown settlements in Virginia attempted to eradicate the presence of the colonists, through a surprise act of genocide that followed eight years of peaceful coexistence. The attack ultimately resulted in the deaths of two-thirds of the roughly 1200 colonists in Virginia at the time, and sent a powerful shock through the other New World colonies and their groups of sponsors across the Atlantic. The natives committed their genocide at Jamestown only two years after the Plymouth colony was founded; it is unquestionable, then, that from the earliest years onward the Massachusetts colonists' attitudes toward their native neighbors would have been colored (and rightly so) by a great deal of suspicion and mistrust in light of the knowledge of what the Virginia natives had done to the Jamestown settlers -- only fifty years before King Phillip attempted essentially the same thing. Yet Lepore never once mentions the genocide in Virginia, and does not recognize its immense significance for the relations of the English and the natives in Massachusetts fifty years later.
To name another example, Lepore offers no analysis whatsoever of the nature of the Puritan faith of the Massachusetts colonists, and how that faith affected their conduct in the war. She does mention their faith in a non-specific way, when it serves to imply a monstrous hypocrisy on the part of the colonists; but never is an astute or sympathetic understanding of their religion presented, and since the early Massachusetts colonies were communities of an almost monastic fervor, devotion, and asceticism, Lepore simply ignores an immensely important factor in their motives and reasoning during King Phillip's War. In its place, she asserts that the colonists fought to preserve their "Englishness;" in support of this idea, she presents some diary entries and editorials of the day in which the colonists wrote of their fear of becoming like the savages, should their common life in the New World continue in the direction they thought it was headed. But it seems perfectly clear to me that Lepore has grossly misinterpreted those writings. The colonists did not actually think that their assimilation into the native culture and way of life was real possibility: the warning that they might "become like the savages" was not a cultural apprehension of theirs, but rather the sort of hyperbole so often used in Christian homilies and catechisms and pastoral essays intended to exhort the faithful. The Massachusetts Puritans were not afraid of becoming Indians. They were afraid of losing their faith, losing the Christian path through life that they had sacrificed so much to preserve. They were afraid of any compromise or waning of the Christian zeal and austerity of their near-monastic lives. After all, it was in order to preserve the Christian life that they had left England in the first place, decades earlier: they had first settled in Holland after the English anathematized them, and then left for the New World when they saw their faith diluted by worldly comforts and distractions while living on the Continent. So to me, the idea that they fought the natives in King Phillip's War to defend their "Englishness" is simply preposterous. Englishness was something they had willingly left behind to purse their religion, and played no more of a role in most of their lives and motives than that of superficial, sentimental cultural orientation. I think it's deceptive for Lepore even to pose the question, "why were the English really fighting?" as though it requires some subtle expert analysis: the colonists fought the natives because the natives were trying to kill them... it's as simple as that.
There are many more examples of Lepore's highly selective consideration of the historical record, and highly questionable reasoning and interpretation. But it is not possible to argue them satisfactorily in a review such as this, of course: to respond adequately I would have to write a book of my own (as I've already made a good beginning of doing), taking Lepore point by point. One thing I'll grant her is that she presents her source material openly, with no attempt to conceal certain passages that might be interpreted any number of other ways than those she has chosen. But again, the biases and misunderstanding that a 21st century American will inevitably bring to any reading of texts produced by 17th century Puritans render any approach to understand their conduct of King Phillip's War solely by a consideration of those documents a myopic, naïve, misguided effort, and doomed to failure.
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