Our Savage Ancestors

There were savages among the peoples wandering the hinterland of English mainland North America. They could be found soon after colonists arrived at Jamestown. They possessed elaborate schemes for punishing those they deemed their enemies, and at times assaulted members of their own communities who failed to live up to the capricious desires of leaders. They often lived in squalor. In times of dearth they became cannibals who consumed the flesh of dead relatives. These people were English and their behavior, which they described in their own accounts, might even shock modern audiences inured to violence by the horrors of modern times.¹

Peter Silver's Our Savage Neighbors has in mind a different population of "savages." His book, which won the Bancroft Prize, is an articulate and lyrical meditation on a population half real and half-imagined: the Native peoples of the middle colonies as they appeared in the writings of British and Anglo American observers from the last decades of the seventeenth century through the American Revolution. No historian to date has managed to accomplish what Silver has here. He does more than identify the various literary tropes about Indians that can be found in written sources. He shows how one intellectual construction of indigenous peoples took hold among a widely divergent set of colonial observers, who used letters, newspapers, woodcuts, and pamphlets to create menacing figures who roamed, tomahawk in hand, ready to despoil the poor innocent colonists caught in their fury. The book could have been entitled "The Ideological Origins of John Vanderlyn's Death of Miss McCrea," the 1804 painting of two bare-chested Natives about to scalp a white woman that epitomized Indian violence against defenseless Euro-Americans. Like other books of this genre, notably Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967; rev. ed. 1992) and David Armitage's Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), Silver explains not only the intellectual context of a specific phenomenon but also how ideas spread. His book joins other vital works on the origins of European and Euro-American violence towards Native Americans, such as Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence (1973) and Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-hating and Empire-building (1980). Even more significant, Silver shows how the logic and grammar of hatred worked in Pennsylvania, the province that William Penn and many of the Quakers who lived there hoped would be different from other colonies where residents too quickly resorted to horrific violence against Native Americans.

In some ways, Silver's book might remind readers of Jill Lepore's The Name of War (1998), another manuscript that began as a Yale Ph.D. thesis, went to a major New York trade publisher, and then won the Bancroft. Like Lepore's study, Silver's is interested less in Native American populations per se than the ways in which colonists used certain encounters with them—in her case the horrors of Metacom's or King Philip's War of 1675–1677—to construct ideas about themselves and those with whom they shared North America. It is crucial for the reader—and for those who will teach the book—to recognize that Silver is not writing a book about Indians or characterizing them as "savages," as his title implies. After all, it is unlikely that a book about Native Americans would be subtitled "How Indian War Transformed Early America." Presumably indigenous peoples would refer to their bloody conflicts with violent newcomers as "Colonial War(s)," a title to emphasize the emotional and psychological burden of warfare that defined their lives. Situating the book as a work about colonial mentalité also explains why Silver does not go into depth about the reasons why Native peoples engaged in the mutilation of bodies (though he does refer readers to classic accounts such as James Ax-tell's crucial work on the history of scalping). Many indigenous peoples did engage in acts of torture for culturally sanctioned...