Barbarians & Brothers

Review by Dennis Showalter

Lee, of the University of North Carolina, introduces this sophisticated, comprehensively researched analysis by asserting violence is ultimately perpetrated with the intention to communicate specific messages. Only rarely is that message merely “we intend for you to die.” War, in other words, has a grammar in which acts have meaning outside themselves. The result is a complex synergy of atrocity and restraint in warmaking.

Lee presents that synergy through five sets of conflicts in early modern Britain and North America that shaped and reflected restraint/atrocity in the English colonies and the American Republic. Part I addresses the Anglo-Irish struggle in the 16th century, a war that on both sides was simultaneously between “brothers” and against “barbarians.” Part II focuses on the development of codes of conduct in the English Civil War of 1642-1646, a process that grew out of the need for discipline in the armies and the ability of a political public to limit military behavior toward civilians. Part III offers a Native American perspective, demonstrating the existence of a highly developed system of restraints on internecine conflict that failed to synchronize with the divergent perspective on war held by their European enemies.

Part IV addresses two operations of the American Revolution conducted by the Continental Army in the same time frame, 1777-1779. They confronted very different adversaries: the British in eastern Pennsylvania and the Iroquois Confederacy on the northwestern frontier. The strikingly different approaches and results illustrate Lee’s position that the Americans developed distinct relationships of restraint and violence, depending on the perceived nature of their enemies. Against the British the focus was on restraining violence. Against the Iroquois frightfulness was a norm.

Lee concludes by making a case that both the Union and the Confederacy began the Civil War with expectations of comprehensive restraint. As both sides’ warmaking capacity increased, the Union adopted a strategy of “hard war” waged against property, but only secondarily against people. Though the South had to suffer for waging a brothers’ war, a sense of American unity remained strong enough to limit atrocity.

That fact informs Lee’s final generalizations. Prejudice and racism, he declares, are insufficient matrices for explaining the violence of the wars he presents. English and Americans may have begun those wars from ethnocentric perspectives. They were, however, prepared to absorb their enemies if they submitted, accepted new sovereignty, and conformed to its mores—in other words, move toward “brother” status. The more that Irish, Indians and Confederates rejected incorporation, that is remained “barbarians,” the closer war moved to the pole of atrocity.

All of America’s formative wars were “extraordinary” in that they denied straightforward applications of restraint, pushing instead toward ambiguous behavior and absolute solutions. The result has been a continuing tension between absolute visions and increasing, no less genuine, concerns for international law and human rights. Will growing cultural preferences for restraint continue to enhance control of an exponentially developed ability to destroy? Lee declines to answer his final question.