The Name of War

by Jill Lepore

  Acclaim for JILLLEPORE’S

  The Name of War

  “Lepore captures the experience of the war, for whites and Indians alike, in prose that is worthy of the tormented writing that emerged from the Civil War, World War I and Vietnam.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Valuable and provocative…. Lepore writes with flair and intelligence.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Lepore displays remarkable gifts as a storyteller. … She possesses the special gift of our most enduring historians: a flair for finding strange and ironic episodes whose details reveal the past’s most fundamental and painful contradictions. More than a sequential narration of events, The Name of War offers a history of history-making.”

  —The New Republic

  “An eminently readable and important book. The Name of War ought to be required reading for anyone who has difficulty understanding why, over the centuries, Native Americans have been treated so brutally.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Impressive … closely reasoned analysis.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Remarkable…. The delights of Jill Lepore’s prose are enough by themselves to make this a book for anyone who loves good writing.”

  —The Boston Globe

  JILL LEPORE

  The Name of War

  Jill Lepore was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1966. She received her B.A. from Tufts University, M.A. from the University of Michigan, and Ph.D. from Yale University. She was Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, from 1995 to 1996, and a fellow at the Charles Warren Center, Harvard University, from 1996 to 1997. Since 1996 she has been Assistant Professor of History, Boston University. Her Ph.D. dissertation won the Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize of the American Studies Association and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship.

  To my parents

  MARJORIE AND FRANK LEPORE

  Contents

  What’s in a Name?

  A Brief Chronology of King Philip’s War

  Prologue The Circle

  PART ONE • LANGUAGE

  Chapter 1 Beware of Any Linguist

  Chapter 2 The Story of It Printed

  PART TWO • WAR

  Chapter 3 Habitations of Cruelty

  Chapter 4 Where is Your O God?

  PART THREE • BONDAGE

  Chapter 5 Come Go Along with Us

  Chapter 6 A Dangerous Merchandise

  PART FOUR • MEMORY

  Chapter 7 That Blasphemous Leviathan

  Chapter 8 The Curse of Metamora

  Epilogue The Rock

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  What’s in a Name?

  Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.

  I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

  —JEANETTE WINTERSON,

  The Passion

  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. The words used to describe war have a great deal of work to do: they must communicate war’s intensity, its traumas, fears, and glories; they must make clear who is right and who is wrong, rally support, and recruit allies; and they must document the pain of war, and in so doing, help to alleviate it. Not all words about war do all these things, but most of them do some. The words used to describe and define war are among the tiredest in any language. “Bloody,” “brutal,” “cruel,” “savage,” “atrocious”—all are overused and imprecise. And yet they remain shocking, perhaps because of their very vagueness. How does someone far from the scene of battle imagine “savage cruelty” except by thinking the worst?

  Words about war are often lies. False reports, rumors, deceptions. One nations propaganda may be its enemy’s profanity: truth in war is relative (which is not to say that some kinds of killing aren’t worse than others). “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice,” Montaigne observed. Or, to paraphrase Hobbes, one man calls cruelty what another calls justice.1 Such words about war, truths, lies, or fine distinctions, constitute what political scientist Michael Walzer has called a “moral vocabulary of warfare,” the language by which combatants justify their own actions while vilifying their opponents.2 I call your attack a massacre, you call my resistance treachery. One of us may be lying, but one of us may lie dying. If I die, your word, “treachery,” is almost as important as my wound, since you alone survive to make meaning of my death. War is a contest of injuries and of interpretation. As the literary critic Elaine Scarry has argued, war “differs from all other contests in that its outcome carries the power of its own enforcement.”3 My death gives you the power to claim the victory. And, even if I survive, you can force me to confess to “treachery.”

  Words about war are slippery, and “war” itself may be the slipperiest of all. War is hell, we say, and war’s a game. War is a contagion, the universal perversion. War is politics by other means, at best barbarism, a mean, contemptible thing. We say many things about war, not all of them profound, and few as pithy as these.4 Eminently quotable remarks aside, war is perhaps best understood as a violent contest for territory, resources, and political allegiances, and, no less fiercely, a contest for meaning. At first, the pain and violence of war are so extraordinary that language fails us: we cannot name our suffering and, without words to describe it, reality itself becomes confused, even unreal.5 But we do not remain at a loss for words for long. Out of the chaos we soon make new meanings of our world, finding words to make reality real again, usually words like “atrocity” and “betrayal.” War twice cultivates language: it requires justification, it demands description.

  To say that war cultivates language is not to ignore what else war does: war kills. Indeed, it is the central claim of this book that wounds and words—the injuries and their interpretation—cannot be separated, that acts of war generate acts of narration, and that both types of acts are often joined in a common purpose: defining the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples. If you kill me and call my resistance “treachery,” you have succeeded not only in killing me (and in so doing, ensuring that I will not be able to call your attack a “massacre”), but you have also succeeded in calling me and my kind a treacherous people. In attacking me, you have kept me out of your territory; in calling my resistance “treachery,” you make clear that I was not worthy to be your neighbor. Your success, however, may be short-lived. Future generations and future historians, certainly my descendants and perhaps even yours, may tell the story of our battle differently. They may even declare it a “massacre.” How wars are remembered can be just as important as how they were fought and first described. If future generations call your attack a “massacre,” new ideas about themselves, rather than any new evidence about you or me, may propel them to do it. Waging, writing, and remembering a war all shape its legacy, all draw boundaries.

  How this all works, of course, is rather more complicated than this crude example suggests. War is rarely so straightforward, and most wars require more than a bit of unraveling. Today, one way we unravel wars is with pictures. Since words about war can be easily exhausted of meaning and their truth easily questioned, pictures can sometimes mean more to us. When we hear “atrocity,” it is almost impossible not to see stock images: smoking furnaces at Auschwitz, the bloody killing fields of Cambodia, lifeless Bosnian bodies lining a Sarajevo street. Newsreels, photographs, satellite videos. The pictures haunt us. Yet such images were not always so abundant, not bec
ause there were fewer atrocities but because they could not be so skillfully captured. Except with words.

  This, then, is a study of a war before television, before film, before photography. It is a study of a war in an age and in a place where even crude wood engravings were rare and printed books an uncommon commodity. When the English and Algonquian peoples of seventeenth-century New England went to war in 1675, they devastated one another. In proportion to population, their short, vicious war inflicted greater casualties than any other war in American history.6 Yet just a single image of the fighting survives: half a dozen tiny, crouching figures shooting at one another along the creases of John Seller’s map of New England printed in an English atlas in 1675. It tells us precious little.

  The fighting shown on Sellers map began in June 1675, when three men were hanged by the neck not far from Plymouth Rock. They had been convicted of murdering a man named John Sassamon, who, weeks before his death, had warned the governor of Plymouth Colony that Philip, a Wampanoag Indian leader, was planning to wage war against the English settlers. The three convicted men, all Wampanoags loyal to Philip, were suspected of killing Sassamon, a Christian Indian minister, as punishment for his betrayal. On the gallows, two died the slow, jerky death of strangulation; the third was saved when his rope frayed as he dangled and, finally, dropped him to the ground. But two deaths were more than enough to start a war. Whatever his original intentions, Philip began attacking English towns on June 24, just days after his men were hanged. Over the next fourteen months, one English town after another was laid waste. In July, Middleborough, Dartmouth, Plymouth, and Mendon were attacked. Brookfield in August. Springfield, Hatfield, and Northampton in October. Then, in the winter, Pawtuxet, Lancaster, Medfield, Groton, Longmeadow, Marlborough, Simsbury, and Providence. Still more the following summer. It seemed to the colonists as if the Indians had “risen almost round the countrey.”7 And indeed, as the war progressed, other northeastern Algonquians—Nipmucks and Pocumtucks in central and western Massachusetts, Narragansetts in Rhode Island, and Abenakis in Maine—joined Philip’s campaign or fought the English for reasons of their own.8 By August 1676, when Philip was shot to death near his home in Mount Hope, twenty-five English towns, more than half of all the colonists’ settlements in New England, had been ruined and the line of English habitation had been pushed back almost to the coast. The struggling colonists had nearly been forced to abandon New England entirely, and their losses left them desperately dependent on England for support.9

  Detail from John Seller, “A Mapp of New England, 1675.” Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

  Yet Indian losses were far, far greater. Colonial armies, with their Pequot and Mohegan allies, pursued enemy Indians from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley, killing warriors in the field and families in their homes. Those Algonquians who fought the English saw their communities decimated: thousands were killed in the fighting while thousands more died of disease or starvation or were shipped out of the colonies as slaves. Those who retreated beyond the Connecticut River found themselves fighting on two fronts: with their traditional Iroquois enemies, the Mohawks, to the west, and with the English to the east. Closer to the Atlantic, not even Christian Indians loyal to the English were spared; in the fall of 1675 most were removed from their towns and imprisoned on barren islands, where many died of cold or hunger during the long winter. Always brutal and everywhere fierce, King Philip’s War, as it came to be called, proved to be not only the most fatal war in all of American history but also one of the most merciless.

  However remarkable for the magnitude of its destruction and the depth of its cruelties, King Philip’s War is almost as remarkable for how much the colonists wrote about it: more than four hundred letters written during the war survive in New England archives alone, along with more than thirty editions of twenty different printed accounts. In letters, diaries, and chronicles, Englishmen and-women in New England expressed their agonies, mourned their losses, and, most of all, defended their conduct.10 Not all colonists agreed about the causes of the war, or about how it should be waged, but most agreed about what was at stake: their lives, their land, and their sense of themselves. And, in the end, their writings proved to be pivotal to their victory, a victory that drew new, firmer boundaries between English and Indian people, between English and Indian land, and between what it meant to be “English” and what it mean to be “Indian.”11

  Yet those boundaries were never stable, either before or after the war. Seventeenth-century New England was, after all, a frontier, at once a dividing line and a middle ground between at least two cultures.12 Boundary setting, as frontier historians have pointed out, is “the very essence of frontier life.”13 And it has been the fate of the American frontier to endlessly repeat itself. (And, perhaps, to echo across the continent: not long after King Philip’s War ended, unrelated hostilities erupted in New Mexico when Pueblo Indians revolted to free themselves of Spanish rule.14) The same cultural anxieties and land conflicts that drove Indians and colonists to war in 1675 would continue to haunt them after the war had ended. Not only that, but their descendants, and their distant relatives, peoples from other parts of Europe and from more western parts of America, would fight uncannily similar wars over and over again.15 King Philip’s War was not, as some historians have suggested, the foundational American frontier experience or even the archetypal Indian war.16 Wars like it had been fought before, and every war brings its own stories, its own miseries. Yet there remains something about King Philip’s War that hints of allegory. In a sense, King Philip’s War never ended. In other times, in other places, its painful wounds would be reopened, its vicious words spoken again.

  War cultivates language, but frontier wars cultivate language in a very particular way. As Patricia Nelson Limerick has written, “the process of invasion, conquest, and colonization was the kind of activity that provoked shiftiness in verbal behavior.”17 Much of that shiftiness has its roots in European ideas about nature, God, and man, ideas that can be traced to the earliest New World encounters and to questions about the humanity of the indigenous peoples of America. And words are at the center of the encounter between the Old World and the New, between the European “self” and the native American “other.”18 As the bishop of Avila famously remarked when presenting Queen Isabella with the first Spanish grammar book in 1492, “Language is the perfect instrument of empire.”19 Yet seventeenth-century English colonists in New England were plagued with anxieties of identity, not of self and other but of a more complicated, triangulated self, other, and another.20 At least as far back as the Reformation, the English had measured themselves—their civility, their piety, their humanity—against other Europeans, especially the Spanish, whom they condemned for their cruelty to Protestants during the Spanish Inquisition. And, after the first European ventures to the New World, the English continued to measure themselves against the Spanish, whom they again condemned for cruelty, now against Indians during the conquest of Mexico.21If papistry was a defining element of infidelity, cruelty was a defining element of savagery. Yet a cruel European, from the perspective of the English, was still better than a savage, just as a papist was clearly more pious than a pagan.

  Distinctions such as these lay behind much of the Puritans’ moral posturing in their writing about King Philip’s War. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, “Language is, after all, one of the crucial ways of distinguishing between men and beasts,” and, as I argue, the language of cruelty and savagery was the vocabulary Puritans adapted to this end.22 English colonists in New England defined themselves against both the Indians’ savagery and the Spaniards’ cruelty: between these two similar yet distinct “others,” one considered inhuman and one human, the English in New England attempted to carve out for themselves a narrow path of virtue, piety, and mercy. Out of the chaos of war, English colonists constructed a language that proclaimed themselves to be neither cruel colonizers like the Spaniards nor savage nat
ives like the Indians. Later on, after nearly a century of repetition on successive American frontiers, this triangulated conception of identity would form the basis of American nationalism as it emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But by that time, the British had come to replace the Spanish as the third element of the triangle.23 Meanwhile, Algonquians in New England, who, in the seventeenth century, had defined themselves in opposition to their English and Iroquois neighbors, created a new ethnic identity two centuries later. And, in the twentieth century, they would come to define their own, Indian, nationalism.

  WORDS ABOUT WAR—even the names of wars—can be contentious indeed. Historians, admittedly a contentious lot, have failed even to agree on what to call King Philip’s War. Its very name, each word in its title—“King,” “Philip’s,” “War”—has been passionately disputed. Philip is said to have been neither a “king” nor, truly, “Philip,” and not only historians but contemporaries, too, have insisted that what took place in New England in 1675 and 1676 was simply too nasty to “deserve the Name of a War.”24

  Can what happened in New England in 1675 and 1676 rightly be called “King Philip’s War”? Alas, three impassioned arguments say no. The first condemns the colonists’ aggression and suggests that the conflict be called a “Puritan Conquest.” The second celebrates Indian resistance and proposes “Metacom’s Rebellion,” insisting that Philip is more accurately referred to by his Algonquian name, Metacom (sometimes rendered as “Metacomet” or “Pometacom”), and that calling him a “king” is derisive. A third argument takes the view that the fighting is better understood as an Indian civil war, since many Mohegans and Pequots, as well as Christian Indians, fought alongside the English against the Wampanoags, Pocumtucks, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts.25 But what really happened? Did the Puritans conquer? Did Metacom rebel? Did one Indian brother fight another? Did King Philip wage a war? Yes, yes, yes, and yes again.