In "The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity", Jill Lepore argues, “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” (pg. x). She continues, “King Philip’s War was not, as some historians have suggested, the foundational American frontier experience or even the archetypal Indian war. 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” (pg. xiii). Finally, “out of the chaos of war, English colonists constructed a language that proclaimed themselves to be neither cruel colonizers like the Spaniards nor savage natives like the Indians” (pg. xiv). In this way, identity plays a key role in Lepore’s study.
Lepore writes, “Perhaps, the English New Englanders worried, they themselves were becoming Indianized, contaminated by the influence of America’s wilderness and its wild people. Meanwhile, many Algonquians had come to suspect the reverse, worrying that they themselves had become too much like their new European neighbors” (pg. 7). While Indians may have waged war to preserve their identity, the conflict also left those natives who could write among the first casualties. Lepore writes, “War is a contest of words as much as it is a contest of wounds. This connection, between waging war and writing about it, was not lost on New England’s colonists” (pg. 47). Further discussing identity, Lepore writes, “During the war it seemed to many colonists that all that had made them English and all that had made the land their own – their clothes, houses, barns, churches, cattle, and crops – were being threatened. For most colonists, the loss of habitations became the central crisis of the war” (pg. 77). She continues, “In the context of King Philip’s War, concerns about the boundaries of the body became overlaid onto concerns not only about the boundaries of English property but also about the cultural boundaries separating English from Indian” (pg. 82).
Lepore continues, “In every measurable way King Philip’s War was a harsher conflict than any Indian-English conflict that preceded it. It took place on a grander scale; it lasted longer; the methods both sides employed were more severe; and the language the English adopted to justify and document it was more dismissive of Indian culture – Indian religious beliefs; Indian warfare; Indian’s use of the land; and, ultimately, Indian sovereignty – than it had ever been before. In some important way King Philip’s War was a defining moment, when any lingering, though slight, possibility for Algonquian political and cultural autonomy was lost and when the English moved one giant step closer to the worldview that would create, a century and a half later, the Indian removal policy adopted by Andrew Jackson” (pg. 166-167). Further examining the legacy, Lepore writes, “For Cotton Mather, as for his father, King Philip’s War was a holy war, a war against barbarism, and a war that never really ended” (pg. 175). Lepore concludes, “No matter how much the colonists wrote about the war, no matter how much or how eloquently they justified their cause and conduct or vilified Philip, New England’s colonists could never succeed at reconstructing themselves as ‘true Englishmen.’ The danger of degenerating into Indians continued to haunt them” (pg. 175). Later, “clothed in revolutionary rhetoric, the memory of King Philip’s War was invoked to urge the colonists to free themselves from the ‘captivity’ they now suffered under British tyranny” (pg. 188).
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