48 pages • 1 hour read
Jill LeporeThe Name of War
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Habitations of Cruelty”
The Indians kill hundreds of colonists—many of them with grisly torture—mutilate cattle, burn entire towns, and leave “a landscape of ashes, of farms laid waste, of corpses without heads" (72). Many settlers perish defending their homes. The destruction removes much of the Englishness of the landscape along with the colonists’ sense of themselves as English.
The European belief in property and ownership contrasts with the Indian nomadic approach. Settlers develop the acres on which they live and farm—chopping down trees, planting crops, and building fences and buildings—while the Indians simply visit these regions, tapping the resources and moving on. Thus, colonists believe the Indians forfeit the land to the settlers who build on it.
The sudden destruction of so much of their property stuns the settlers, as these possessions form a part of their identity. In reckoning the losses, many reports make careful lists of the number of structures lost and then a quick estimate of the dead. Some accounts include the Indian dead as losses since they can no longer be employed as labor.
Stripped of its buildings, the land appears naked to the colonists, while they, too, feel naked, with their settlements torn away like clothing. Once more, the colonies feel like wilderness; the colonists are as bare of proper civilization as the Indians. Survivors who lose their homes often feel they’ve lost their identity.
The Algonquians, clad during cold months in leggings and cloaks, wear very little in warm weather beyond breechcloths. This, to the English, is a sign of barbarity. Indians add European clothing and textiles to their wardrobes, and during King Philip’s War they strip settlers’ bodies of clothing to use or trade. Beyond this partial adoption of colonial garb, Indians who wear full European outfits are regarded by both sides as “confusing and dangerous" (80).
During the war, captured settlers are often stripped naked and sometimes flayed. English bodies are left to rot in the open; Indians display the dead settlers’ clothing as signs of victory. The only real safety for colonists lies within fortified garrison houses. Even then, to peer out a window can prove lethal.
One map of the region depicts settled areas as buildings and church steeples, while trees illustrate Indian areas. Indians are considered part of nature—able to blend in with the foliage, making every bush and tree a source of danger during war—while the Europeans stand apart from the wilderness. New England’s swamps are a frightening novelty to the settlers, who have trouble traveling through them, while the Indians easily hide in, and shoot from, swamps during war.
Algonquians tend to live in small villages, in summer next to their plantings and in winter near hunting grounds. They live in portable, woven-mat wigwams that, after the English arrive, begin to include door frames, windows, and some furniture. Still, the mobile nature of Indian life distinguishes it from the European way, and, despite the settlers’ scorn, Indians are largely unwilling to settle into permanent houses.
During the war, Indians move into the swamps, where the English—when they can find them—burn the villages, considering them not to fall under the definition of “houses” and “towns” that their rules of war would otherwise prohibit them from destroying. In December 1675, English troops attack and burn a large, fortified village of more than 3,000 Narragansett Indians during the battle of the Great Swamp; hundreds die.
Indians often attack a colonial town from all sides, peppering it with gunshot and arrows, and finally setting fire to the buildings, killing all who emerge, sometimes entire families at a time. Many victims are scalped; others have their heads cut off, hands removed, and skin flayed from the face. This is especially offensive to the English, who consider themselves physically the most perfect members of humanity.
The settlers, having lost their homes, family members, and even their English moral code during brutal battles with the Indians, find that writing about the war “could reclaim civility, could clothe their naked war with words. The writing itself would ‘dress’ the English back up" (94).
One of the few written commentaries on the war from the Indian side is a note tacked to a tree, possibly written by Christianized Indian James Printer, following a Nipmuck attack on a town. The note condemns the colonists, saying, “Thou English man hath provoked us to anger & wrath" (94), and that the Indians are willing to fight for 20 years and have nothing to lose, whereas the settlers have much at stake, including their houses and farms.
This declaration flies in the face of the colonists’ belief that Indians make war because they are wantonly cruel. The local Algonquians have, in fact, resented the slow takeover of their lands by the settlers. Indians are troubled by the colonial penchant for landowning, which undermines the Natives’ culture and way of life. They especially dislike cattle, which overrun Indian cornfields and inspire settlers to acquire even more acreage. During the war, Indians drive off or kill 8,000 cows and oxen.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Where Is Your O God?”
Indians prepare for war ceremonially, acting out their hesitation about doing battle and their final resolve to fight. For their part, the colonists declare days of fasting and humiliation, during which they pray to God to forgive them for transgressions that have caused Him to punish them with Indian attacks. During battle, Indians often taunt settlers before killing them, asking sarcastically why their God doesn’t save them.
For the English, blood loss, as with menstruation, is considered shameful. Too much loss, and a person becomes dried up and of bad temper. This, colonists believe, afflicts the Indians, whom settlers fear they will come to resemble. Bloody injuries are God’s words written on the body; wounds are called “lips.” Settlers struggle, though, to interpret these signs, to know what sins they have committed that cause such punishments.
Indians also seek war signs and portents, advancing or retreating in response to the visions of their “powwaws” or shamans. Colonists consider the Indians to be devil worshipers, and that the powwaws take their marching orders directly from Satan. God, they believe, uses Indian attacks as a rod of punishment to warn the English against their sinful ways. Religious dissidents, such as the Quakers, see the war as God’s punishment of the Puritans for their religious intolerance.
Natives, by now well acquainted with English religious beliefs, use that knowledge against the colonists, calling out that their God is punishing them. Indians enter churches and caterwaul to lure offended parishioners and kill them or else they slay families on their way to worship. They burn buildings, leave torn-up Bibles on the road, and display severed heads and hands on pikes, as if to remind colonists that Indians can destroy farms, faith, and bodies at will. “Where is your O God?” (105) they seem to sneer.
Many settlers have their doubts about the justice of the war, while others insist the colonies have done the Indians no wrong and are mere victims of their cruelty. The English believe that wars are judged by whether they have just cause and whether they are conducted fairly. By fall, with the conflict well under way, most settlers abandon their misgivings and join the defense of their towns.
The war begins in Plymouth Colony; Massachusetts and Connecticut join in, justifying their participation as coming to the aid of their fellow colonists. Doing battle is considered doing God’s will insofar as it attacks enemies of the Church; in that respect, colonists consider their fight against the Indians to be a holy war. Just wars have limits; holy wars are less restrained.
The English think Indians lack codes of conduct and are therefore wanton in battle; thus, the settlers don't owe them consideration. Colonists are especially irked by the Indian tactic of skulking behind trees and bushes, firing quickly on settlers, and running away.
The direct cause of the war, believe the settlers, is the execution of three of Philip’s ranking men for the murder of John Sassamon. Philip is irked that one questionable Native’s testimony is enough for the English to hang three Indians, whereas twenty honest Wampanoags testifying against one settler will leave the colonists unmoved. The English insist they are mystified as to the Indians’ motives for war, yet Philip’s people meet with a colonial delegation and complain publicly of “the colonists’ taking Indian lands, interfering with Indian agriculture, and attempting to convert Indians to Christianity" (115).
Once captured, Indians, fearing for their lives, refrain from criticizing the colonists; thus, settlers persist in believing the Indians have no excuse for battle. Natives do, however, follow rules governing the causes and prosecution of wars. In earlier decades, Indians fighting on the side of colonists refrain from killing women and children, and at one point refuse to partake in a mass burning of them. Captured Indians also argue against being prosecuted as individuals during war, since the rules of conduct are different.
One type of just war among Indians is a reprisal for previous killings, in which captives are taken to replace the dead. Algonquians live together in bands, and this practice helps replenish small populations and limit the destruction caused by war. The Lenape Indians, west of New England, formalize warfare by announcing it ahead of time to give the opponents a chance to remedy the situation.
King Philip’s War can be seen as “a war between a nonstate society and an encroaching state" (118). Despite the widely held notion among settlers, and later anthropologists, that warfare by indigenous groups is either too feeble or too brutal to be called “war,” such battles actually are more common and lethal than European-style state wars.
Algonquian attacks dismissed as wanton cruelty by the settlers are in fact "deliberate and deeply symbolic" (118), intended as communications directed at the colonists. Notes and letters from Indians attest to their frustrations; taunts and cruelties during battle are attempts to address and redress specific grievances. The Natives also want to “disorder” the society that so plagues them and thus restore order to their own world.
A war can only be “just” on one side; for this reason, the colonists must deny the possibility that the Indians have good reasons for fighting. Instead, they blame the war on the Lord's reprisal for their own religious failures. Indian attackers are messengers, not of aggrieved Natives, but of an angry God.
Roger Williams, long a friend to the Indians, becomes enraged when they burn down his house. Confronting them, he demands to know why. They answer that they are forced to it and that their success is a sign that God has abandoned the English. But they also allow that the war has affected them so that they “were in A Strang Way" (120).
Part 2 Analysis
Fundamental to the centuries-long conflict between settlers and Native Americans is the ongoing dispute over land use. Most Indians live nomadically and tap the land’s resources but don’t claim ownership; European Americans settle down on the land, “own” it, and farm it. The settlers’ way eventually erases the Natives’ way.
Colonists effectively invade and take over the Natives’ territory, but because they believe Indians and their culture are inferior and barbaric, settlers don’t feel morally culpable in decimating the Native world. The English are convinced they’re improving the wilderness, even if that involves pushing aside the uncivilized brutes who live there. If the colonies can convert the Indians and make them live like Englishmen, so much the better; otherwise, the heathens are of little value, except perhaps as slaves.
The Algonquians discover that it’s utterly impossible to budge the settlers from their disdain. That attitude derives from deeply ingrained English religious and cultural beliefs. Immigrants continue to pour into the region, exacerbating the situation until the Indians, desperate, finally opt for brutal warfare. This attack outrages the colonists, who can’t understand why the Indians would be so cruel to their betters. The settlers respond in kind. Each side condemns the other as wicked; each side conducts reprisals and then blames the victims. One perceived unfairness quickly leads to another, until both sides behave brutally.
Some Indian groups try to stay out of the fray. In the case of the Narragansetts, however, a few of their rogue warriors test the patience of the colonists, who respond by burning down a large, fortified Narragansett village of 3,000, killing hundreds. Thereafter, the Narragansetts must, by their own lights, make war.
Indians use sneak attacks to slay their victims, then run away when soldiers arrive, which the settlers perceive as cowardly cheating. Today, these would be seen as guerrilla tactics. In fact, the same techniques later are used by colonists during the first days of the American Revolution, when British soldiers are set upon from all sides by attackers who quickly fade back into the woods.
The war is a disaster for both adversaries, but especially for the Indians, who can’t, like the English, call on a vast source of people across the Atlantic that continuously add to their population. Decades earlier, the powwaws are right to warn against doing battle with the English: it’s a hopeless fight.
In nature, baby birds often gang up on the weakest nestling, pushing it up and over the edge of the nest to get rid of it so they can have the weak sibling’s food. Humans flatter themselves that they are above such beastly behavior, yet when a people with superior technology and a growing population desires the land and resources of a smaller group, they will take what they want, usually without guilt, and if necessary, with violence—resistance be damned.
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