Christopher L. Bennett
Introduction to Historical Thinking
Tongue-tied by The Name of War
A century before the American Revolution, Algonquians and English colonists in New England fought what became known as King Philip=s War, after the Wampanoag leader whom the English chroniclers blamed for starting the conflict. Jill Lepore, an assistant professor of history at Boston University, examines this conflict in her debut book, The Name of War: King Philip=s War and the Origins of American Identity. Lepore asserts that the war played a key role in shaping Americans= perceptions of themselves and of the divide between European and Native Americans. On a deeper level, she uses the conflict to reflect on the ways that people write and think about war, on the ways that language can shape historical and cultural perceptions, and on the problems which even the most primary of sources present to the historian.
Primary sources on King Philip=s war are not lacking. Lepore lists twenty-nine extant contemporary narratives of the war and makes use of nearly all of them, along with a wealth of archival materials, diaries and the like[1]. The fundamental limitation of these sources, of course, is that they are almost totally one-sided, for there are virtually no written records presenting the Algonquian peoples= perspectives on the conflict. Confronting this limitation and exploring its causes and consequences are among Lepore=s principal goals in producing this narrative.
Lepore challenges a view commonly held among historians, namely that the lack of Algonquian commentary on the war resulted purely from their illiteracy, and more generally that non-literate peoples Alack historical awareness,@ thinking more in terms of timeless myth than fixed history[2]. She demonstrates that a number of Algonquians did learn to read and write English, and that the missionary John Eliot published a number of religious texts in the Massachusett language for the purpose of teaching literacy and Christianity to the indigenous peoples.[3] She points out, though, that literacy was Aamong the very last steps on the path to cultural conversion.@[4] Those Algonquians who had studied with the English long enough to reach that stage had already been heavily assimilated, so that even if they retained the ability to identify with their native people, they had lost their people=s trust (and never truly earned the colonists= trust), so that they were not in a position to express the Algonquian viewpoint on the war. Indeed, Lepore stresses that the war was precipitated by the death of Wampanoag interpreter John Sassamon, who was presumed murdered by three of King Philip=s associates, the execution of whom triggered Philip=s assault. Lepore finds it probable that he was murdered, and uses this conclusion to underline the literate Algonquian=s separation from his people, and more basically the culturally charged nature of literacy itself.[5] Although she does demonstrate that literacy does not automatically produce history, she falls short of proving the other half of her point, that non-literacy need not imply an ahistorical worldview.
Lepore also illustrates how the literacy of the English chroniclers was used to serve the cause of cultural definition. The religious idealists who settled New England sought to achieve spiritual purity away from the corruptions of Europe, but found that purity even more threatened by the perceived savagery of New England and its inhabitants.[6] Their fear of contamination produced hostility toward the Algonquians (who conversely felt threatened by the cultural and territorial impositions of the English[7]), and informed their rhetoric about the war. They claimed the Algonquians= assaults lacked any meaningful political or military motivation, seeing them merely Aas expressions of mindless savagery or as divine retribution@ for the colonists= impiety, initiated by God rather than by the attackers themselves[8]. Tactics such as the burning of homes and the slaughter of women and children were condemned in the strongest terms when committed by Algonquians, but glossed over or justified in defensive terms when committed by colonists.[9] To reassure themselves that they were morally pure, the colonists constructed the narrative in terms of a fundamental difference between themselves, the civilized defenders, and the Algonquians, the murderous barbarians. To Lepore, this attitude fundamentally altered the nature of European/Native American relations and brought the Europeans Aone giant step closer to the worldview@ which drove the later United States= policies of conquest, removal and dismissal of the Native Americans.[10]
Lepore concludes by examining this changing worldview and the role King Philip=s War has played in it, demonstrating that interpretive gulfs exist across time as well as across cultural divides. During the Revolutionary War, she asserts, the struggle against the Asavages@ who threatened the colonists= way of life was invoked to inspire the Americans= struggle against the allegedly similar threat posed by the British; the fact that many descendants of those Asavages@ were fighting on the rebels= side was overlooked. Reprints of Mary Rowlandson=s captivity narrative bore illustrations recasting the stoic, submissive Rowlandson as a gun-toting American heroine.[11] By the mid-eighteenth century, though, Philip himself had become a heroic figure of drama, most notably in John Augustus= Stone=s 1829 tragedy Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, commissioned by its star, Edwin Forrest. Considered an archetypal American actor, Forrest embraced the role of an Aaboriginal of this country@ as a vehicle for asserting an American cultural identity distinct from England.[12] Thus, Philip, whom the Puritans had feared as a threat to their way of life, was now celebrated by their cultural and political heirs as a symbol for their own way of life. While the Puritans had seen animal savagery as Philip=s only motive, he was now portrayed as a noble leader defending his home and his people from an aggressor -- a view no doubt closer to Philip=s own, despite the massive poetic license taken by the playwright. His popularity depended on seeming a harmless ghost of the past, however, as the play=s subtitle illustrates. Philip was hardly the ALast of the Wampanoags,@ but Lepore argues that Americans needed to believe his people were gone, and that they could only admire AIndians@ from a safe distance. The play=s popularity, and Philip=s, thus waned when the next generation faced renewed conflict with Native Americans in its attempts to conquer the West.[13] Through these examples, Lepore effectively illustrates how a story which was distorted from the start became further detached from its historical groundings and further remade in service to Americans= changing definitions of their cultural identity.
Lepore=s research is exceedingly thorough, but her citation of it borders on being simply excessive. In attempting to support her arguments, she inundates the reader with primary source materials, cross-references to the works of numerous historians, anthropologists and philosophers, and assorted historical trivia. Though she does not always agree with her secondary sources[14], she seems overall to depend too heavily on their authority rather than establishing her own. There is no question that The Name of War represents a massive, devoted research project. Moreover, Lepore=s encyclopedic command of her sources is supplemented by her refusal to take them at face value, a skepticism which drives the entire narrative and provides valuable insights into the materials and the events surrounding them. Yet Lepore=s insistence on interrogating her sources, on extracting all possible data from unreliable witnesses, sometimes crosses the line into browbeating. When the evidence fails to satisfy her, she turns to speculation. Lepore attempts more than once to identify anonymous Algonquian figures in some sources with named ones in other sources, for instance guessing that a Narragansett man tortured to death by the colonists= Mohegan allies was an English-trained mason named Stonewall John,[15] or that the ill-fated interpreter Sassamon may have been the same as a mischievous youth Amentioned in an early Puritan tract.@[16] She does not (and cannot) assert these identifications to be definite, but even the speculations seem irresponsible, an attempt to shape the reader=s image of events in ways unsupported by the evidence. Lepore engages in other, grosser speculations as well, particularly about the motives of various persons in her narrative. She guesses that young Cotton Mather stole the jawbone of Philip=s publicly displayed skull in a symbolic effort to silence his memory,[17] and offers an unverifiable reference to a diarist making an entry Awith a bitter sigh.@[18] At times she ascribes more damning motivations to her subjects, speculating that Samuel Sewall Amight have laughed at the wittiness@ of a cruel joke at the expense of an Algonquian=s dissected corpse,[19] or stating that English witnesses to the aforementioned Mohegan torture rite Aclearly@ felt pleasure at the sight, although she stresses that their record of the event expressly denies such feelings.[20] In these instances, Lepore takes her skepticism too far.
Overall, Lepore seems to be trying too hard to construct a vivid narrative, to the detriment of her credibility. When the evidence falls short, she begins to fictionalize, putting thoughts in her subjects= heads, or fusing fragmentary references together into more interesting Acomposite characters.@ She seems unclear on the line between historical narrative and historical fiction. She does convincingly illustrate the subjective nature of war narratives and the pervasiveness of cultural or personal assumptions in any historical source, but she fails to apply the same degree of interrogation to her own text and her own assumptions. The book could have used more editing; it tends to be overly wordy, cluttered with detail, and sometimes repetitive.[21] It branches off to examine so many subtopics pertaining to King Philip=s War and the perceptions thereof that it seems to lack an overall direction or thesis. While The Name of War is an admirably thorough investigation of a seminal event in American history, and indeed of the very process of writing and analyzing history, it displays both the excesses and shortfalls of inexperience.
[1]Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip=s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 50-51.
[2]Ibid., pp. 26-7, 46-7.
[3]Ibid., 29-41.
[4]Ibid., 42.
[5]Ibid., 41-47.
[6]Ibid., 5-7.
[7]Ibid., 7.
[8]Ibid., 96.
[9]Ibid., 87-88.
[10]Ibid., 166-67.
[11]Ibid., 187-89.
[12]Ibid., 191-99 passim.
[13]Ibid., 224-25.
[14]See for instance ibid., 247n5, 253n4.
[15]Ibid., 14.
[16]Ibid., 31.
[17]Ibid., 175.
[18]Ibid., 89.
[19]Ibid., 178.
[20]Ibid., 12-13.
[21]An amusing illustration of Lepore=s failure to apply her own principles to her own work is found on p. 52: AAdmittedly, Bradstreet was a laconic man. If more widely read, his pithy diary entries would humble wordy writers everywhere.@ Brevity is the soul of wit, indeed.