Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian Warfare Transformed Early America (review)

With few interruptions, the British and American borderlands experienced consistent warfare with Native Americans from the midpoint of the eighteenth-century onwards. While warfare certainly transformed indigenous cultures, the persistent presence of native groups near European settlements drastically altered the complexion of British North America as well. Peter Silver attempts to address these changes in Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. By focusing primarily on the mid-Atlantic region, the author argues that continuous warfare between natives and Europeans ultimately led to disparate groups of colonists recognizing their similarities over their differences. By doing so, they managed to forge a unified identity previously absent in the British colonies.

Silver's North America teems with diversity. Culturally different groups from the British Isles and various German principalities inhabited the colonies. From Europe, these groups brought a variety of religious faiths that frequently provoked distrust. With attention to detail so often ignored by colonial historians, the author further indicates the presence of numerous Native American peoples living very much within the confines of European settlement. Avoiding a homogenized view of North America with Anglos on one side of the 'frontier' and Indians on the other, Silver instead describes a land where conflict might just as easily erupt between competing European groups than between natives and Europeans.

The Seven Years' War and successive conflicts changed this dynamic. The unprecedented violence of the Seven Years' War led many settlers, be they German or Irish, Presbyterian or Lutheran, to seek support from their provincial governments. In places such as Pennsylvania, the perceived ambivalence of colonial authorities led initially to the development of a rhetoric of violence meant to pressure these authorities into assisting settlers. Politically ambitious colonists, more interested in power than helping their western brethren, soon adopted this rhetoric to attack Quaker power in Pennsylvania. This proliferation of anti-Indian imagery seems to have quickly ingrained itself in the colonial psyche, leading eventually to the prevalence of strong anti-Indian sentiment called by the author the "anti-Indian sublime." Silver demonstrates this attitude most shockingly with descriptions of the actions of the Paxton Boys in the 1760s and the massacre at Gnadenhutten in 1782. The author believes that this growth in anti-Indian sentiment drove ethnically and religiously diverse colonists into each other's arms.

Significantly, Silver manages to project his thesis onto the American Revolution as well. By connecting British military efforts to its alliance with natives, the author argues that Americans managed to convince themselves of British barbarity. By doing so, they successfully transitioned American perception of Britain as the glorious empire they had fought to defend a generation before to a nation lacking in humanity. No longer rebelling against their lawful government, they now represented beleaguered citizens defending hearth and home.

In a general sense, Silver's arguments seem convincing. The colonies did represent a diverse set of interests. Relative unity did increase as the eighteenth century came to a close. His voluminous evidence does, moreover, suggest that anti-Indian sentiment played a significant role in this transformation. What readers will not find, however, is a chronological narrative, strong protagonists or discussion of many areas of British North America.

While attempting to prove that Indian warfare and its subsequent anti Indian sentiment drove European populations in British North American into each other's arms, the author allows nearly a half century for the developments to fully mature. He attempts to maintain a chronological approach, roughly transporting his reader through the Seven Years' War, Pontiac's Uprising, and finally the American Revolution and the early national period. Yet, within any given topic, the reader is presented with evidence from greatly divergent eras. Most remarkable, Silver at one point provides data from the War of 1812 to support an argument pertaining to the 1760s. While this certainly represents an especially stark example of the author's use of evidence, the reader might...