The Shocking Savagery of America’s Early History

Bernard Bailyn, one of our greatest historians, shines his light on the nation’s Dark Ages

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The ”peaceful” Pilgrims massacred the Pequots and destroyed their fort near Stonington Connecticut in 1637. A 19th-century wood engraving (above) depicts the slaughter.
The ”peaceful” Pilgrims massacred the Pequots and destroyed their fort near Stonington, Connecticut, in 1637. A 19th-century wood engraving (above) depicts the slaughter. (The Granger Collection, NYC)

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The Lenape gave this wampum belt, now in the National Museum of the American Indian, to William Penn in the 1680s.

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It’s all a bit of a blur, isn’t it? That little-remembered century—1600 to 1700—that began with the founding (and foundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, that’s not right, is it? I said it was a blur.

Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 and ensconced at Harvard for more than six decades, Bailyn has recently published another one of his epoch-making grand narrative syntheses, The Barbarous Years, casting a light on the darkness, filling in the blank canvas with what he’s gleaned from what seems like every last scrap of crumbling diary page, every surviving chattel slave receipt and ship’s passenger manifest of the living and dead, every fearful sermon about the Antichrist that survived in the blackened embers of the burned-out churches.

Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being “flayed alive” means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

“In truth, I didn’t think anyone sat around erasing it,” Bailyn tells me when I visit him in his spacious, document-stuffed study in Harvard’s Widener Library. He’s a wiry, remarkably fit-looking fellow, energetically jumping out of his chair to open up a file drawer and show me copies of one of his most-prized documentary finds: the handwritten British government survey records of America-bound colonists made in the 1770s, which lists the name, origin, occupation and age of the departing, one of the few islands of hard data about who the early Americans were.

“Nobody sat around erasing this history,” he says in an even tone, “but it’s forgotten.”

“Conveniently?” I ask.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”

Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.

“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”

Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.

The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.

“The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory” were driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.”

***

Bernard Bailyn made his reputation when he took upon himself the leviathan task off cataloging the store of pre-Revolutionary War-era pamphlets, the denunciations and speculations and accusations privately published by surprisingly literate gentlemen farmers, Greek- and Roman-quoting tradesmen—“the Ebenezers,” as I think of them—most of whose colorful and thoughtful works had not been read for two centuries. He drew on that knowledge base to write The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which won him the first of his two Pulitzers after it was published in 1967.

***


It’s all a bit of a blur, isn’t it? That little-remembered century—1600 to 1700—that began with the founding (and foundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, that’s not right, is it? I said it was a blur.

Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 and ensconced at Harvard for more than six decades, Bailyn has recently published another one of his epoch-making grand narrative syntheses, The Barbarous Years, casting a light on the darkness, filling in the blank canvas with what he’s gleaned from what seems like every last scrap of crumbling diary page, every surviving chattel slave receipt and ship’s passenger manifest of the living and dead, every fearful sermon about the Antichrist that survived in the blackened embers of the burned-out churches.

Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being “flayed alive” means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

“In truth, I didn’t think anyone sat around erasing it,” Bailyn tells me when I visit him in his spacious, document-stuffed study in Harvard’s Widener Library. He’s a wiry, remarkably fit-looking fellow, energetically jumping out of his chair to open up a file drawer and show me copies of one of his most-prized documentary finds: the handwritten British government survey records of America-bound colonists made in the 1770s, which lists the name, origin, occupation and age of the departing, one of the few islands of hard data about who the early Americans were.

“Nobody sat around erasing this history,” he says in an even tone, “but it’s forgotten.”

“Conveniently?” I ask.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”

Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.

“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”

Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.

The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.

“The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory” were driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.”

***

Bernard Bailyn made his reputation when he took upon himself the leviathan task off cataloging the store of pre-Revolutionary War-era pamphlets, the denunciations and speculations and accusations privately published by surprisingly literate gentlemen farmers, Greek- and Roman-quoting tradesmen—“the Ebenezers,” as I think of them—most of whose colorful and thoughtful works had not been read for two centuries. He drew on that knowledge base to write The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which won him the first of his two Pulitzers after it was published in 1967.

***

Bailyn could have coasted on that success, researching and publishing on the multitude of controversies still raging over the meaning of the Revolution and the Declaration and the Constitution. Going forward, the way most historians have done.

But instead, he did something unusual: He stepped backward, not just in time but in spatial perspective. He had what he would call his “cosmic eye” on a grand vision of the massive westward movement from Europe and Africa to North and South America that began before 1492, and he chronicled it in his subsequent book, Voyagers to the West. In examining the interactions of four continents bordering the Atlantic, and seeing them as a single, mutually interacting whole, he reshaped the modern history profession and helped create what is now known as “Atlantic history.”

“From 1500,” he wrote in an earlier book, “it has involved the displacement and resettlement of over fifty million people and it has affected indirectly the lives of uncountable millions more.”

But Bailyn’s “cosmic eye” saw even deeper. He wanted to capture not just physical movements but also “the interior experiences, the quality of their culture, the capacity of their minds, the patterns of their emotions.” He wanted to look inside heads and read minds. Bailyn’s voyage was a monumentally ambitious project, a voyage through unmapped oceans of data analo­gous to the Columbus-era explorers setting out on a vast uncharted ocean.

The opening section of his new book stands out for his profoundly sensitive appreciation of the sensibility of the original inhabitants whom he introduces simply as “Americans” rather than “Native Americans.”

He captures that sensibility as well as any attempt I’ve read: “Their world was multitudinous, densely populated by active, sentient and sensitive spirits, spirits with consciences, memories and purposes, that surround them, instructed them, impinged on their lives at every turn. No less real for being invisible...the whole of life was a spiritual enterprise...the universe in all its movements and animations and nature was suffused with spiritual potency.”

In person, Bailyn expresses an almost poetic admiration for this sort of spirituality.

“All the world was alive!” he exclaims. “And the wind is alive! The mountains are alive!”

Then, he adds: “But it’s not a terribly peaceful world. They were always involved in warfare, partly because life would become imbalanced in a way that needed justification and response and reprisal. And reprisals, within their lives, are very important. But partly the onus is on the threats that they’re under.”

“Would both civilizations have been better off had they not been forced into contact,” I ask, “or if all the colonies on the verge of failing had, in fact, failed and the two civilizations continued separately, merely as trading partners?”

“Well, the Indians were not genocidal on the whole. Their effort, even the 1622 massacre [which he calls “genocidal” in his book], was not to wipe the Europeans off the face of the map. It’s the English after the massacre who write these letters saying ‘wipe them off the map.’

“But the Indians had the view they wanted to use them [the Europeans]. They wanted the English there on the fringe so they would have the benefit of their treasure, their goods, even their advanced weapons. They wanted that, but under their control.” It didn’t exactly work out that way.

Bailyn does not let either of the two adversary cultures off the hook. He recounts little vignettes of the original inhabitants’ behavior such as this: Following the ambush of four Dutch traders, Bailyn quotes a report, one “had been eaten after having [been] well roasted. The [other two] they burnt. The Indians carried a leg and an arm home to be divided amongst their families.”

And, on the other side, consider that fixture of grade school Thanksgiving pageants, Miles Standish, an upstanding, godly Pilgrim stalwart who does not at all seem the sort of man who would have cut off the head of a chief and “brought it back to Plymouth in triumph [where] it was displayed on the blockhouse together with a flag made of a cloth soaked in the victim’s blood.” (Happy Thanksgiving!)

“What happened,” Bailyn continues, “is a legacy of brutality in intercultural relations developed through this period of which, of course, the overwhelming legacy was slavery.” Bailyn points out that although there were only “a few thousand” slaves in the colonies toward the end of King Philip’s War in the 1670s, when he concludes The Barbarous Years, “The rules for chattel slavery were set.”

And so the legacy of the barbarous years continued beyond the white male liberation of the Revolution.

Bailyn is fascinating when he speaks of questions of value. The day we talked was the peak of the fevered notion that the American government should settle its national debt by minting a platinum coin arbitrarily given a “trillion dollar” valuation. And it made me think of wampum, the original inhabitants’ currency. I’d always wondered how you could found an entire centuries-long economics on beads and shells as these “Americans” did. And yet, isn’t that what we’ve done since, basing our economics on shiny metal objects that have a declared, consensus value unrelated to their worth as a metal?

So I asked Bailyn why wampum was accepted in exchange for an obviously more highly valuable commodity, such as furs.

Bailyn: “They’re little shells.”

Me: But why should people massacre each other over these little shells?

Bailyn: Because they had great value.

Me: Because of their beauty?

Bailyn: No, because they’re hard to make and they don’t exist everywhere. You ever see how this was done?

Me: No.

He picks up an imaginary shell from his desk and says:

“OK, they have a shell like this and then they have to bore a hole all the way down through the middle of the thing in order to hitch it to the next one and do it with certain color regularities. It’s hard to do! And it becomes of value.”

Me (thinking of home-beading kits my mother had): Doesn’t it seem arbitrary?

Bailyn concedes he’s not up on “wampum literature.”

“There’s wampum literature?” I asked. “You think I’m kidding. There are wampum experts and they don’t fool around!”

Our wampum discussion leads to the fascinating “fair price” controversy in the Puritan communities, the argument over how much profit a pious person should make on a given transaction.

Free market theory dictates there should be only one motive in economic culture: getting the max. But early colonists integrated piety and humility into their economic lives. Spiritual considerations. One of his favorite stories is about the English merchant who couldn’t stop confessing the sin of overcharging.

“Robert Keayne,” he recalls, “was a very, very proper Puritan tradesman from London who made it big and set up trade here and then got caught for overpricing.”

“The guy who made a big apology?” I ask, recalling the peculiar episode from his book.

“He wrote endlessly, compulsively,” of his remorse, Bailyn replies.

“50,000 words or so, right?”

“Unbelievable!,” he exclaims, “A 50,000-word will which explores the whole business of revaluing, of cheating and so forth. And I published his will, the whole thing, 158 pages in the original. And the question is whether you could be a proper Christian and make money. See, they were caught in a double bind. Max Weber started all this out [with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism].”

Weber argued that Protestants were driven to make money and create urban centers of wealth to display it because these were an external sign that one had been saved, chosen by God to enter into his grace and be redeemed. But in fact most of the Protestant heretics who settled America believed that salvation was a matter between God and the individual, no matter what their bank balance—and that too much wealth could signify the exact opposite of sanctification: greed and spiritual degradation. Thus the “fair price” controversy and what British economic historian R. H. Tawney called the Puritan “double bind,” a theory Bailyn has adopted. “They were against exhibitionism,” Bailyn tells me. “There were moral prohibitions against making as much as you possibly could—that’s not good! You have to do it within constraints. There’s a big literature about this.”

It makes you think of the con­trast with our hedge fund wealth-worshiping culture, our conflicted attitude toward the “1 percent”—envy and moral disapproval. Perhaps judges should sentence insider traders to write 50,000-word apologies while in prison.

Speaking of price made me think of the overarching question of early America: whether the barbarism, torture, murder, massacre—the ethnic cleansing—that Bailyn describes in The Barbarous Years was the inevitable price we had to pay for the civilization that followed.

When I ask the question of whether there could have been another way for the races to interact than mutual massacre, he brings up one of the few figures who emerges with honor from his chronicle of this savage period: Roger Williams.

“There were people who tried to have amicable race relations,” he says, “but it broke down again and again.”

I had always admired Roger Williams for his belief in religious toleration, which was realized in his Rhode Island colony, a place where all the dissenters and the dissenters from the dissenters could find a home to worship the way they wanted. And I’d admired him for standing as a reminder to certain contemporary zealots that America was a refuge for people who believed there should be a separation between church and state—and that both church and state were better off for it, sentiments that entered into the First Amendment.

But in Bailyn’s account, Williams becomes a great American character as well. Not only was he close to the original inhabitants, he could speak some of their languages and had the humility to recognize he could learn from them.

I told Bailyn what an admirable character his Williams came across as.

“Well, the people at the time didn’t think he was. He was a perfectionist. And no form of Christianity was good enough for him. He started out in the Church of England. He was a very strange man. He was a zealot.

” “But didn’t his zealotry lead to tolerance?”

“It did, but this was not the big issue for him. He was trying to find out the proper form of Christianity. He started with the Church of England and that was full of trouble. Then he became a Baptist and that was no good. He kept taking off all the clothes of organized Christianity till nothing was left. And he ended up in a church of his own with his wife and a few Indians. He’s a zealot who went all the way!”

“But he wasn’t a zealot who persecuted others.”

“No, he was not. That’s why they hated him...he was complicated. He was well educated, he was a gentleman—but he was a nut case! They didn’t know what to do with him. Among his views, first of all, was that you do not seize Indian land. You don’t own it, you don’t take it. And you treat people civilly and there is no purity in any stage of Christianity, hence toleration.”

“What’s nutty about that?” I asked

“You don’t live in the 17th century.”

“So you’re not saying he’s a nut case from the perspective of the 21st century?”

“No, certainly not. He became properly famous for all this—later. At the time people hated him. Because he was breaking up the unity of Christianity. One of his contemporaries had a wonderful phrase for him. Namely, he is ‘unlamb-like.’ No lamb, this guy. He sure wasn’t. But he got close to the Indians, knew them well, lived with them.”

Bailyn’s description of the many contradictory aspects of Williams’ character stayed with me. A zealot, but tolerant. An outcast, but a self-outcast. Willing to be seen as a “nut case” in his time. A visionary sense of the way to a better future in that dark century. So much of the American character, like Williams, emerges from the barbarous years. And that century has left its stamp on us. Not the “zealous nut case” part, though that’s there. I’m thinking of that compound word Bailyn likes about Williams: “unlamb-like.” That’s us.


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Comments (41)

Nice stinker of a last line, though it probably appeased some of the whiners throwing around "America hater." America was briefly liberal, but has fast fallen hard into the hands of the pathologically wealthy and fool-baiting demagogues, who are little better than the savages and hands-of-glawd pictured here.

Posted by Ed Head on April 3,2013 | 11:32 AM

In the Western Plains Indian culture, ingenious means of torture was a way of life. They practiced it on other tribes (with whom they warred continually) as well as the white settlers. With-in the tribes, women were literally slaves. The myth of "The Noble Savage" is just that; a myth.

Posted by Timothy Rea on March 19,2013 | 11:23 AM

As a direct descendent of the eastern tribes with an unpublished history of our family tree,I would have to agree with most facts Mr.Bailyn points out.On the other hand ivy league schools,(with the help of the Smithsonian especially},are well known by those who care about real history as the ones who destroy the evidence of N.A.'s past.I am an amateur archeologist with great disdain for the college educated,I admit.On one hand I want to thank him for his research, on the other I wonder why he would even regard the Smithsonian as someone to talk to as they have purposely destroyed every bit of evidence pertaining to the advanced state of natives on this continent before the advance of the white puppet savages.Here is a message to these evil people,"we are still alive, we still remember, and we have not converted!"This is a damage control article.

Posted by Julian Alien on March 13,2013 | 08:19 PM

I was the tribal archaeologist for the Catawba people who still own a relatively small reservation in South Carolina. I never really settled on what to call them. Some insisted on Native Americans, some, aboriginals etc.. Since I retired I have begun to call them the First Americans. Feels right, and is not confusing. I hope i t catches on.

Posted by Rita Kenion on March 13,2013 | 05:45 PM

Pretty humorous, all these comments from (supposedly ex-subscriber) folks who reject the study of history, in favor of ideology. Believe in your ideologies all you want, but they do not alter the facts of history. Which many of us happen to be interested in. Allan Bloom got 'The Closing of the American Mind' a bit muddled. It doesn't proceed from higher education nearly so much as it does from Christianity and today's GOP.

Posted by vebiltdervan on March 13,2013 | 02:06 PM

As Captain Renault would say, "I'm shcoked". To think it is revealing information that there was violence between invaders and defenders anywhere at any time in history is pretty naive. The violence that ensued was normal and typical within the context of when it occurred. This is one of the worst articles I have ever read in any publication. The mis-statements (for example, actual definition of free market:an economic system in which prices and wages are determined by unrestricted competition between businesses, without government regulation or fear of monopolies)are so glaring and so numerous. I would have to write a response as long as the article to cover them all If this is what Smithsonian intends to present in its magazine, I will cancel. I can get this drivel in our community newpaper

Posted by John Rockwell on March 12,2013 | 02:57 AM

It's interesting that initial reactions among historians is that this is not new and that aspects of his approach are dated. That doesn't make the book bad. Bailyn's writing is sufficiently clear that he can appeal to a more popular audience than most historians--who all too often write for other scholars. As for balance, that is just hard. Yes civilizations are built on blood, as one person said below, and the fact that we have, to some extent, gone beyond blood to something better is an accomplishment of the highest order. But part of that accomplishment represents the willingness of a minority of Americans at different points in time to say to the majority, "this is wrong." To say that slavery is bararic and not just "peculiar." To say that the conquest of Native Americans put the lie to the majority's claim to be peace loving; to say that barring someone from voting just because you don't like the way he looks or smells (or what gender the voter may be) puts a lie to our claims of democracy. In short, the concern with the blood Americans have spilled (or are spilling today) is not simply a response to the past, it is the sort of thing that has helped us all move forward.

Posted by Oscar on March 7,2013 | 11:13 AM

More anti-American pablum. "The Shocking Savagery of America’s Early History." Fine. Now try this: "The Shocking Savagery of ________'s Early History." Fill in the blank with ANY country's name, and you will not only find more egregious examples, but you will find them essentially for the entire history of the country. That, of course, is not the case with America, where we acknowledge our past, and do our best to atone for it. The Smithsonian is now in the tank of Leftism. That is why I canceled my subscription.

Posted by tps on March 7,2013 | 10:32 AM

What a turd of an article from a guilt-ridden America hater

Posted by RonRaygun on March 6,2013 | 08:18 PM

How Ironic! Antichristians always see their demons reflected in mirrors around them. Even today, we can see leaders of state doing the same thing, justifying their unholy wars in the name of secular holy ideals.

Posted by Padma Drago on March 5,2013 | 03:26 AM

The opening section of this essay falls into a common error found in most discussions of early New England--the conflation of the pilgrims with the Puritans. the Pilgrims did really tend to be tolerant and non-violent, but their era only lasted for ten years. In 1630, the Puritans arrived and imposed their very different rule upon the colony. Virtually all the moral and ethical failings we focus upon in this period belong to the Puritan influence. See Hawthorne for the puritan view of the "heathen wilderness."

Posted by william reedy on March 4,2013 | 09:12 PM

It is this type of slanting judgmental unnecessary that gives history a bad name. Sorry to see Smith going this way lately....or perhaps America just has no more in depth people ... everything is very surface and slight. I read better and more involved history than this article in eighth grade. Yea, I guess I am old.

Posted by lmcknight on March 4,2013 | 03:17 PM

Shock and surprise! Why, none of this was known to anyone...except, of course, for anyone who's ever read any of a thousand books on the era. The "new" Smithsonian continues on its inexorable journey to dumbed-down mediocrity. I'm sure your subscriber numbers are up, good for you. But fair warning re: your next headline--"Headless body in topless bar" has already been taken.

Posted by Joe Jones on March 4,2013 | 12:18 PM

Let me know what you think.

Posted by Michael Fitzgerald on March 4,2013 | 04:37 AM

For native Americans, Saturday night meant going to the next village and killing all the males and carrying off the women. Nice courtship rituals.

Posted by jorod on March 3,2013 | 10:04 PM

A couple of corrections. They may be the original inhabitants of Jammestown they weren't of North America. those were ice age europeans. the evidence of this has been ignored by academia for years.'locals ' weren't exactly pastoral pacificists. For a realistic account of the Indian-White wars read Thomas Goodrich's "Scalp Dance."

Posted by Herman King on March 3,2013 | 06:48 PM

Fantastic! Shedding light on any part of the history that we have been led to believe is the whole truth, so help us God -- is worth its weight in Wampum. And thank you for revealing the character of an early Colonial American (Roger Williams) who dared to think differently from his contemporaries even at the expense of being considered a "nut-case". Wow! We need more Roger Williams's today.

Posted by Patricia on March 3,2013 | 03:04 PM

When I read the article above I was struck by the truth that resonated with me. I had always suspected that there was way more to the beginnings of the US than what makes it to text books and gets taught as "gospel" from the time we are small children till the time we wake up and see the truth. I appreciate the candor with which Mr Bailyn has talked about the figures of our collective history without the presence of the intolerable "sugar coating" so that our history is easier to accept and be proud of. The are many aspects of our history that we should be ashamed of from the far distant to the history being made today. This article shows yet again that "those that do not study history are doomed to repeat it.". Let us ask ourselves each day if the choices we made and allowed be ones we can be proud of.

Posted by Chuck Griesel on March 3,2013 | 02:18 PM

Just another chapter of human history. All cultures have always believed they were right true and pure; and all cultures have always been at least skeptical of the humanity of people of other cultures. Add to that stunning ability of people to rationalize there own self interest,and their great ingenuity in devising ways to inflict pain and death and we have business as usual. We look back in horror and disapproval from a brief point in history where we in a few countries have somewhat pulled back from traditional ways such as are described in the review.

Posted by David S. on March 3,2013 | 02:03 PM

You wonder why I do not renew my membership. When you write articles of "Supposed forgotten history".... please include all of it. Not just usurps that justify your original leftist, communist, idealologies. Consider what was happening abound. All the wars between Mexicans and indians...and wars among indians and indians. The wars in european countries. The British and how they starved their neighbors...etc. etc. And..cannibalism among indians. And some of the barbarian methods of indians of the time. There was a reason ... called survival. If you are all soooo ashamed...why don't you all get out?? Go to a country who's history you want to live with.

Posted by Jenny on March 3,2013 | 11:19 AM

You don't have to be a revered Harvard historian to understand that whenever a dynamic acquisitive civilization encounters a static stone-age culture conflict will result.

Posted by Wm. R. Bridgeman on March 3,2013 | 11:02 AM

Find a copy of Daniel Dorchester's "Christianity in the United States", ... From the First Settlement Down To The Present Time. Published in 1888, the book tells incredible history of a people from the first visits, leaving off at 1888. We sometime suffer ourselves a great disservice by our lack of historical perspective. We base our views on an idealization of our forefathers and the history written by the "winners". Our country was settled by people with strict ideals and dreams, it was implemented by saint and sinners, sometimes the difference was lost. We become disillusioned when we see that those that came before us had feet of clay. Also, one of our great fantasies is that of the idyllic "Native American", had there not been the European Intervention, would be living in some Utopia! There would be one tribe based on the one's with the biggest tomahawk!

Posted by Jackson DeLand on March 3,2013 | 10:25 AM

Many of these comments try to defend the violence of the early days of the United States as being no different from most other cultures and blame Smithsonian and Professor Bailyn for exaggeration. I think the point of the article is as expressed in the first paragraph: most of us know only the chapter headings about our nation's early history and the rest of it is "a blur." The reason a turkeyfest Thanksgiving was a big deal is because it WAS peaceful. Otherwise, why was it so remarkable? I for one am grateful to Smithsonian for a bit of "the rest of the story" based on good historical evidence. It's for this type of insight and careful elucidation that I continue to subscribe to Smithsonian Magazine.

Posted by Elizabeth on March 2,2013 | 10:53 AM

Yawn. As usual, the Native Americans' penchant for savagery is glossed over and/or completely ignored. It's only those evil white Europeans who slaughtered innocent people and "stole" this land from the Natives (still no word from the media how the natives in turn stole this land from the Mexicans, who stole it from the ancients, etc.)

Posted by Sheila on March 1,2013 | 07:01 PM

Expressing finger-waving dissapproval at Miles Standish for proudly flaunting the severed head of an enemy combatant displays a surprising lack of historical context on the part of the writer. You are a judging a man of a far more dangerous time from a comfortable, politically correct 21st century perch.

Posted by david on February 28,2013 | 09:34 AM

Though I have not yet read the book, I would be interested to know if there is any comparison with the Thirty-Years War that was going on in Europe 1618-1648. Were the Europeans in America any more barberous than those remaining in Europe?

Posted by James Vice on February 26,2013 | 11:39 AM

(Wikipedia: W.H. Harrison... big Indian Killer!!! I'm so glad he died in office after only 32 days. He was a noted Indian killer/torturer: that's what got him elected) Before election as president, Harrison served as the first territorial congressional delegate from the Northwest Territory, governor of the Indiana Territory and later as a U.S. representative and senator from Ohio. He originally gained national fame for leading U.S. forces against American Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811,[1] where he earned the nickname "Tippecanoe" (or "Old Tippecanoe"). As a general in the subsequent War of 1812, his most notable action was in the Battle of the Thames in 1813, which brought an end to hostilities in his region. This battle resulted in the death of Tecumseh and the disbandment of the Native American coalition which he led.[2]

Posted by Michael Just on February 25,2013 | 02:21 AM

i may not be as educated as the good author but it seems this is a bit one sided. i will concede there were wrongs done but as far as the good amiable natives someone is dreaming here. if memory serves me well one tribe had the good people of Jamestown wipe out a competing tribe. add to the history of the barbaric Aztecs and Incas as well as Mayans...let us not forget Apache is Zuni for thief. if we consider the world at large we can safely say....humans were humans... i am eagerly awaiting his next book....Christians invented slavery...however a history of the introduction of the horse enabled a warrior class to rise and tribes pushing tribes out of the home lands

Posted by Tim Ray on February 24,2013 | 10:46 PM

Bernard Bailyn is truly one of the most important historians America has ever produced and I eagerly look forward to reading his new book. It's just a shame that this profile wasn't a bit more insightful, and that the author felt the need to make so many banal little asides about things like the banking crisis. It was like watching a sophomore in high school trying to show off in civics class after having read half a newspaper article. Tiresome, and wasteful of the opportunity to drill down and learn something more about a very interesting subject (why, for instance, the wampum exchange in which our author fails to grasp the concept and Bailyn is clearly at a loss as to how and explain it any simpler?) I hope if I ever get to meet the man I don't blow the opportunity like this.

Posted by ScottA on February 24,2013 | 08:59 PM

"The American character was forged by barbarism, torture, murder, and massacre." That is the Arts and Letters one-line summary. Maybe that is the real problem here. Sounds like Noam Chomsky.

Posted by Luke Lea on February 24,2013 | 11:47 AM

Ah, it's a white male revolution and therefore bad. Tell me, what country of that time was not savage? Whom do you hold up as an example of what we should have been? I have never before read such excitement over self-loathing. And the taxpayers are paying for the Smithsonian??

Posted by pjca on February 24,2013 | 11:18 AM

Oh, come on, where are the comments? No doubt attrocities were committed, but on what scale and compared to what? Communist China? The Soviet Union? What do we really know about how the Indians treated each other? The truth is what we traditionally call "civilization" was a barbarous creation. It could not have been otherwise and wasn't from the very beginning in ancient Iraq. The miracle and the mystery is how we created a truly civilized civilization in the last couple of hundred years -- one based on ideals of liberty and justice for all, with liberal institutions, the rule of law, civil rights, etc.. Explain that!

Posted by Luke Lea on February 23,2013 | 01:02 AM

Did George Washington ever kill an Indian ?? They called him Conotocaurious (Town Destroyer) . He chopped down the blood red cherry tree !

Posted by Mark Breza on February 23,2013 | 10:43 PM

An equally important blip in our self-understanding concerns the high numbers of convicts transported here. The political sociology of the US cannot be understood without reference to this.

Posted by John Mountfort on February 23,2013 | 09:03 PM

And he acts as if these were bad things. Maybe the time has come to celebrate the ferocity of those years.

Posted by Chuck on February 23,2013 | 02:02 PM

FTA: "Bailyn does not let either of the two adversary cultures off the hook. He recounts little vignettes of the original inhabitants’ behavior such as this: Following the ambush of four Dutch traders, Bailyn quotes a report, one “had been eaten after having [been] well roasted. The [other two] they burnt. The Indians carried a leg and an arm home to be divided amongst their families.” And, on the other side, consider that fixture of grade school Thanksgiving pageants, Miles Standish, an upstanding, godly Pilgrim stalwart who does not at all seem the sort of man who would have cut off the head of a chief and “brought it back to Plymouth in triumph [where] it was displayed on the blockhouse together with a flag made of a cloth soaked in the victim’s blood.” (Happy Thanksgiving!)" In other words, neither "side" had a monopoly on sin and rebellion. And as for the history not being taught (it wasn't "forgotten"), you can blame the public schools for that. And the public schools aren't controlled by white, Protestant Christians (those white, Protestant Christians would just as soon get their children out of state schools). No, you can thank the Left in this country for robbing us of our heritage. "My country tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died! Land of the Pilgrim's pride! From every mountain side, Let freedom ring! "Our father's God to, Thee, Author of liberty, To Thee we sing. Long may our land be bright With freedom's holy light; Protect us by Thy might, Great God, our King!"

Posted by Jeanne T. on February 23,2013 | 11:16 AM

It is surprising to see here no mention of the "French and Indian" wars endemic from about 1660 to 1760. French and English colonists brought European rivalries with them as well as European religions, and eagerly enlisted Amerindian allies when their competing spheres came into contact. Most of the massacres seem to have occurred under these auspices.

Posted by Don Phillipson on February 23,2013 | 10:18 AM

"'unlamb-like.' That’s us." No, pushy, materialistic, selfish, vulgarian hustlers. That's "us".

Posted by Rob T. on February 23,2013 | 09:27 AM

It's interesting to compare the past and present of the United States to that of a country where the races mixed, such as Paraguay.

Posted by Steve Sailer on February 23,2013 | 05:11 AM

Sounds like a great book. I just wish this reviewer could write a coherent paragraph.

Posted by Disheveled on February 22,2013 | 10:44 PM

The Indians made war among themselves and on us. We made war among ourselves and on the Indians. We ALL made war whenever we felt we could justify it and our ability to rationalize was seldom restrained. There is only one natural sin and that is weakness. As the Indians (and occasionally the colonists) found to their sorrow.

Posted by on February 22,2013 | 01:08 PM



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