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Amantha Harmon
September 17, 2008
Everyone Died Badly

Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny traces the shifting ideas that justified

aggressive American expansion. Americans believed they had a distinct role to play, and initially

the Puritans hoped for a “renovation of the world” that would begin in America (Horsman 83).

Later, Enlightenment thought deeply influenced leaders, but in the nineteenth century, hopes that

had previously been aimed at improving all of humanity were altered and racialized. By 1850,

transforming and culturing other races into Americans gave way to a desire to populate the

continent with the white descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. Those not fitting into this picture had

to be dealt with. However, minimization of the “problem” of other races was difficult to achieve

in a reality where Americans were involved in “constant and bloody border struggle[s]” on ever

changing boundaries (109).

In a frontier with shifting borders, Native Americans were “of particular importance in

the development of American racial thought in the context of an expanding and aggressive

nation” (Horsman 100). This is epitomized in the violence of King Philip’s War where even

words lost their ability to define the devastation that resulted from the clash of cultures. As words

and writing lost credibility and “alone . . . could no longer qualify as evidence—only the

physical damage itself” proved sufficient (Lepore 65). This physical evidence included the

bodies of the dead of both English and the Native Americans which offered a more concrete

representation of the war. Bodies apparently held great interest for both sides. While a dead or

mutilated body is common consequence of war, it is also a text, and the bodies of King Philip’s

War were read and reread as they were reconstructed in verbal accounts, reports, stories, and

books. Like the words that ineffectually attempted to describe the war, these bodily texts were

open to interpretation. They were also open to possession.

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The interest in simply seeing these bodies (or, “seeing” by way of reading about them) is

evidenced in the quantity and character of reports that Lepore presents from the time, and far

from being succinct body counts or lists of names, a number of these preserved reports contain

details gruesome enough to rival our current ten o’clock news. The reader is offered stories with

grisly elements similar those of the 1675 account of an elderly couple half burned in their house,

a son with “his head dashed in pieces,” and his pregnant wife “dead, her head skinned” (75).

After the details, Lepore sums up: “Everyone died badly” (75). Also dying badly at the hands of

the colonists were the Indians, whose bodies might be mutilated in much the same fashion.

The head and body of Philip himself were some of the most abused. His body was drug

from a swamp, cursed to rot above the ground, beheaded, quartered, portioned out, and placed on

display (Lepore 173-4). The head became a tourist attraction and remained for years a possession

of the town, on display, to be looked at (178). This exemplifies the colonists’ desire to “see”

bodies. The question as to why they wanted to observe these may in some degree be answered by

human curiosity or a seemingly natural interest with the grotesque. Bodies were becoming

visible in unusual ways, whether they were being left out to rot or being stripped naked. Also,

observing the end result of torture might deliver a portion of the “shameful pleasure in being

witness to torture” (15) without the guilt. However, the colonists’ interpretations of the bodies

also offer insights into why they wanted to see them.

Enemy bodies served as proof of victories. Also the bodies might have been proof of, if

not the humanity of the enemy, their mortality; the fact that they could be killed, supported by

proof in the form of a corpse or head, might have soothed fears of their status as supernatural

devils. Colonists and Native Americans reported and received accounts of their own dead as

well, and they saw their bodies. This, in a practical view, might have been a chance to confirm

the questionable words and reports about family members and friends. Additionally, these bodies
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could be interpreted as proof of enemy savagery, despite the fact that the both sides engaged in

mirrored cruelties. It is questionable to what degree these bodies would offer verification of the

superiority of the English colonists; they might, though, have served as a more Puritanical

warning that while the victims were similar in death, their respective killers might be more

closely related in life and that degeneration was only one step away.

Colonists and their enemies both went beyond looking at and interpreting the dead; they

both took parts of bodies with them. Even early in the war “mementos of the enemy, mainly

body parts . . . had been cherished by Indians and colonists alike” (Lepore 178). The

Algonquians dismembered bodies, “carrying away body parts as prizes or erecting them as

monuments” (179); colonists reported that “enemy Indians might wear necklaces of human

fingers” (179). And the English hoisted heads on poles, kept hands, and displayed other various

parts. The pieces of the enemy body became possessions; they could not fully understand nor

control their enemy, but through this physical reminder perhaps they were more readily able to

separate themselves from the threat. If one holds the head or hand of an enemy and remembers

his body—dead and rotting, dismembered and powerless—then by comparison, the possessor

can see themselves as more alive and in control. Having these bodies via written word was yet

another, more widespread, form of possession. While they could not fully control the shifting

borders of the country nor establish their place between civilization and savagery, they could

establish their relation to the thing they had conquered, making them instantly powerful and

dominant. While caught in the confusion and “violence of border warfare” (Horsman 106), both

sides tried to get a firm hold of their situation, and part of this was a literal taking hold of bodies.