Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America [Paperback]

Peter Silver (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2009

“With remarkable literary skill, Peter Silver . . . provokes hard thinking about the basic themes of our history.”—Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy

Relying on meticulous original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had rarely intermingled in Europe, and the divisions between them only grew—until, with the arrival of the Seven Years’ War, thousands of country people were forced to flee from Indian attack.

Silver reveals in vivid and often chilling detail how easily a rhetoric of fear can incite entire populations to violence. He shows how it was only through the shared experience of fearing and hating Indians that these Europeans, once irreconcilable, were finally united under the ideal of religious and ethnic tolerance that has since defined the best in American life.

13 illustrations; 2 maps

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The mid-Atlantic colonies of 18th-century America were home to a remarkable diversity of immigrants—Germans, Quakers, Moravians, Englishmen and French, among others. In this exhaustively researched and elegantly written study, Princeton historian Silver asks how all the Europeans lived side by side. The answer, Silver says, is that they were solidified into a single people during the Seven Years' War in the 1750s by the fear of Indian attack. The motley Europeans morphed into white people, defined in opposition to Indians. (An intriguing appendix reveals that colonial newspapers tended to use the adjective white to describe people principally during bouts of Indian war.) But not everyone with pale skin became part of this new people—the most fascinating sections of the book explore why some European settlers, such as Quakers (who were accused of betraying white people's interests), were excluded from the collective. Silver also shows how fears of Indian menace were taken up during the Revolution: patriots shored up a distinctive American identity and claimed that the British were engaging in Indian-like atrocities, such as scalping and cannibalism. Silver's study will change the way scholars think about whiteness and will reshape our understanding of how 13 distinct colonies were knit together into one nation. 13 illus., 2 maps. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Penetrates searchingly into a dark chapter of Colonial history. (Boston Globe )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (August 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393334902
• ISBN-13: 978-0393334906
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #241,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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47 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Completely Believable Theory of How the White Race was Invented in America, February 26, 2008

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (Hardcover)

To the extent that all our history is but a conduit back to our collective national memory, this sophisticated book chips away at the "Rosetta Stone" coiled in the nation's bosom: It uncovers one of the key sources of our obsession with the issue of race, and racism.

But race, in this context has to do, not so much with black and white issues, as with red and white issues. Unlike the familiar tracts on how whiteness evolved, (Such as Winthrop D. Jordan's "White over Black," or Theodore W. Allen's "The Invention of the White Race") that tend to carry the heavy odor of a socialist axe to grind (which is to say most of them), this one has no ideological axe to wield. And the very fact that it took so long to uncover this rather innocent but imminently common sense and believable thesis is itself no small measure of how deep our national denial on the issue of race really is.

What this brilliant author and researcher tells us is that the white race has not been in existence for time immemorial (as the committed racists tell themselves - even claiming Greek and Roman history as part of a common "white heritage," and pedigree), but was invented in the aftermath of the "Seven Year War," by demagogues, and scam-artists, pamphleteers, and other peddlers of the print medium, whose tactics even today would make Madison Avenue "Ad Men" blush.

As the story is told here, during, and in the aftermath of the war between England and France, the disparate tribes on opposing sides of that war, for their own respective existential imperatives, found for the first time, ways to coalesce as groups in order to fight each other in that war. The Indian tribes, who literally had been fighting each other for centuries, came together for the first time to address the emerging and rapidly expanding existential threat of encroaching (rather than invading) hoards of "European Settlers," who the Indians (not Europeans) first gave the name "White men."

On the opposing side, were the European tribes: a disparate collection of Europe's ethnic underbelly. Most were thrown onto the North American shores to sink or swim as a last resort to their lowly European existence. As people, these European tribes were as unalike and as disconnected from each other as any group ever dumped onto the shores of a foreign land. For the most part they disliked and distrusted each other immensely, and did so for all the obvious reasons: They had fought each other on the European continent over customs, traditions, religions, politics, resources, etc. But in Europe they were at least protected from each other by national borders. In the new world even this final barrier was torn way. They were all thrown into the same American mixing bowl, left to their own devices, to sink or swim.

It was in fact these "pockets" of differentiated, unmixable and profoundly isolated ethnic European tribes that were strewn and strung vulnerable across the pre-American frontier. Each tribe it seems had in fact made a conscious effort to get as far away from other European tribes as was humanly possible. This cultural dis-affinity and isolation among the white tribes, which even today remains an enduring fixture of the American cultural and geographic landscape, during the time of Seven Year War, became a decidedly serious military liability.

Both the French and their Indian allies were keenly aware of, and sought to exploit this vulnerability. The Indians used terrorist tactics (such as scalping their victims and leaving them in conspicuous places) to brilliant effect. By "picking off" the settlers one hamlet and fort at a time, the Indian raids raised to the breaking point the ante on fear and terror among the isolated settlers. The disparate white tribes now had no choice but to try to come together to fight a common and very effective and determined enemy. However, this proved easier said than done. The then "powers that be, the landed gentry, secure on their estates, away from the outer perimeter of the frontier, could care less about those poor desperate bastards left isolated and vulnerable "out there" of the nation's periphery.

So, what to do?

The tribes had no choice but to come together, under the shrewd media blitz and demagoguery of the peddlers of a new war propaganda and a new racial ideology of "saving the white men from the terror of the red men;" and in doing so, they made a virtue out of necessity. This book tells how they did this. That is to say, it tells how the demagogues of that day, repackaged the fear and horrors of the frontier wars to create an artificial unity among the European tribes that overtime would endure and would evolve into, not just a unifying racial ideology and worldview, but also into a democratic revolution that dignified ordinary people and gave expression to the fledgling new republic's deepest yearnings. A truly worthy contribution to American history and to historical scholarship.

Five stars.

13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece of American Intellectual history!!, September 8, 2009

By 

Professor Brizz (KCK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (Hardcover)

Peter Silver has achieved something quite extraordinary with this book. It's a brilliant meditation on the formation of an American identity in the violent years of conflict between 1755 and 1789. In these years, Silver argues, colonists were both enraptured and appalled by the spectre of Indian attacks on the frontier of their settlements. By centering his examination on the "Middle Colonies" - really Pennsylvania - he is able to tease out the ways Germans, Scots-Irish, Quakers, Moravians, and the numerous other small ethnic enclaves in the region became bound by the "anti-Indian sublime" - a form of writing and communication that left every man woman and child fearing for their lives.

The great irony, of course, is that Pennsylvania had perhaps the most peaceful and nonviolent Indian population in the American colonies. But that was really beside the point. What these people needed was a way to distinguish themselves from the European brothers as the Revolution became a reality. What better than to focus on the trials and tribulations they had suffered in the savage wilderness of America? The amalgamation of different groups under the mantle of "American" was not a product of some enlightened democratic spirit, but one born out of fear. To be American was to have survived a life on the edge of a howling wilderness that held grave secrets and dangerous animals just waiting to take their children.

There is no mistake that America's first great novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, wrote about such themes. It was what defined the uniquely American experience of the 18th century...it was what made Americans exceptional. There remains much more to be said on the subject, but Silver has set a very high bar indeed. Optimally, I'd encourage readers to pick this one up only after they read James Merrell's equally impressive Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier which covers earlier ground in the same locales.

As a caveat, as impressed as I was with the book, I do concede that chronology is not Silver's strongest point, as he does have a tendency to wander around the 1750s, 60s, and 70s. Thus, this is not a book I would suggest as the first you read on the period...rather, pick up Fred Anderson's Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 or something else on the period to give yourself a good foundation. It is essential to really being able to take advantage of the incredibly detailed, nuanced, and profoundly inspiring exegesis of american pamphleteering and other writing on Indian affairs. In the end, a book this good simply can't be easy...masterpieces never are - and let me be very clear that this is not a label I ascribe to any book lightly. Sheer inquisitive brilliance seeps from every page...and while Silver's prose can at times obscure, in the end the conclusions could not be more clear.

America's founding remains ripe for further exploration in this vein, and Silver's book is hopefully only a start. Intellectual and cultural history of this sort has become less and less common today, but we can only hope his example inspires others to pick up where he leaves off. It is, after all, only our very identity as a people and a nation he seeks to make sense of. Recasting the American melting pot as a cauldron boiling over with Indian war is a great place to start.

12 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poorly written, November 12, 2009

By 

Vivaldi Guy (TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (Paperback)

This book may be of some interest to academics, but it's a poor choice for most readers. It's very poorly written. The tortured syntax makes it hard to read, and that's not helped by the authors tendency to skip around with little structure. That's too bad, because the subject is an interesting one. Save your money for a better presentation of the subject.