The name of war: Jill Lepore's historical analysis

Lepore

Historian and author of the book In the Name of War, Jill Lepore makes it clear that it was after the war -- and because of it -that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, and turned into rigid ones. She argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indians and Anglos. How did feelings, and boundaries develop between the cultures as a result of the war?

According to the historian Jill Lepore, before the war between the Anglo and Indian population known as "King Phillip's War," cultural and linguistic barriers between these two dominant populations of the Eastern half of the Americas were fluid rather than fixed. However, the aftermath of this war in 1675, when tensions between Native Americans and colonists residing in New England erupted into brutal conflict a sharp cultural division was incurred. This cultural division has never again been broached as it had been before the war transpired. Although the title of Lepore's book refers to the name of war, it could very well refer to the mutual language of war between the Anglo and Indian nations, and the differing languages of cultural discourse.

The preface of this book, significantly, is entitled "What's in a Name?" The detail Lepore devotes to language, involving analyzing many primary source excerpts of the period, tracts, dime store novels and religious broadsides is impressive. While before the war there was a tolerance and respect for Indian culture in these largely White publications, increasingly after the war the Indian's savageness and lack of compassion is stressed. Lepore stresses that the so-called King Philip's War, was really the beginning of a racial polarization of colonists against Indians, of massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to deserve the name of a fully declared war, but more on the lines of mutual racial terrorism.

How did such a divide occur? The conflict between the two groups began when Metacom, significantly called 'Phillip' by the Anglo people of the land, who was the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. Yet the reasons for this attack to this day remain shadowy, revolving around disputed rumors, an unsolved murder, and pent-up but vague allegations of brutal practices between Indians and Anglos, although both groups had adopted many of one another's customs. Yet both peoples still retained very different conceptions of property and proper forms of clan and familial justice. This tension between adoption and alienation could not be sustained.

Although conflicts had erupted on a small scale before, this war was pursued without previous restraint. It was a total war. Women and children were killed as well as combatants. Captives were tortured rather than merely used as military bargaining chips as they had been before. The dead were ritualistically mutilated, signifying a lack of cultural respect that had implications far beyond victory or defeat. Long after the issues of the war had died, the memory of the treatment of the dead and the symbolic fashion of the deaths remained ingrained in both groups' different cultural memories. The brutality of these acts would grow in the cultural imagination, fueled by the distance of history.

One reason for this brutality and escalation of disrespect for the enemy was that the war had spread so quickly. Also, unlike previous conflicts it was unusually divided along racial lines, almost exclusively being fought by the southeastern Algonquian tribes vs. A coalition of English colonists. There was no miscegenation of white and Indian alliances. Also, properties as well as people were fair game, another aspect of the war that heightens the divided nature of cultural attitudes between both peoples. The Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley, reflecting, according to Lepore, the different groups' views on house, property, livestock and the overall environment. The Indians favored communal ownership of property, and general use of the land, while the English retained European attitudes that stressed private land ownership and private control of livestock and titles to land tracts and farms. Although these privacy concerns had been at issue before, never had the two sides been so schematically divided. Simmering tensions came to the forefront, and the fighting only ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in ritual and retributive fashion in August 1676.

The depth of both groups' animosity towards one another may also have been rooted, ironically, in the increasing closeness between the two groups, as well as their contrasts. Many of the English settlers had adopted Native American customs and out of necessity, Native cuisine. Some had even stopped attending their European churches of choice and had married Indians. Some Indians, as a result of trading with Europeans, for wore Western clothes, lived in houses to better shield themselves against harsh winters, incorporated European crops into their own diets and lifestyles, and took an interest in the Christian religion, even going so far as to read the Bible.

With identities thus confused, each side waged a war in terms of the language of 'savages' -- the Indians regarded the Whites as savages whom had betrayed the trust of the native peoples, and the Whites saw the Indians as savages whom had reverted to backward customs. Lepore places such a strong emphasis on words, because she argues that the words used to define the conflict between these increasingly alike peoples, ultimately, when the two groups came into conflict, resulted in a strengthening and a hardening of acrimonious sentiments, ultimately resulting in the new sense of division enmity between Indians and Anglos.