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'The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo America' by Kevin Phillips

The roots of war: mostly failures to communicate (1)

Sunday, February 21, 1999

By Bruce Clayton

	The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo America By Kevin Phillips Basic Books $32.50

In 1969, the conservative Republican Kevin Phillips astutely heralded the rise of the Republican Party’s strength in the South in his first book, “The Emerging Republican Majority.”

The success of the GOP’s so-called “Southern strategy” made Phillips a prophet with honor, certainly in his own party, but he gradually lost interest in a career as a political policy wonk.

Instead, he immersed himself in history, particularly the earliest connections between England and America and the making of a shared culture. His prism would be war, politics and, somewhat to his surprise, religion.

The result is wide-ranging, discursive, creative, provocative and occasionally opinionated. It’s also a repetitive, sometimes lugubrious and frequently disjointed narrative of 400 years of Anglo-American history.

The focus is on three wars — the English Civil War of the 1640s, the American Revolution and the U. S. Civil War.

These were “cousins’ wars,” with countrymen at each other’s throats. Geography, particularly in the first two wars, was pivotal; many of the most ardent American revolutionaries had ancestors in East Anglia and the London area, home of Puritan zealots like Oliver Cromwell.

In addition, language, faith in representative government, individual rights and liberties, along with race and religion made America’s Founding Fathers cousins.

Even their fiercest enemies at home, the Loyalists, were also cousins.

Phillips’ treatment of the American Civil War, namely its political and social background, stresses causation by examining the era’s similarities with the earlier two wars. His approach is fruitful.

The Civil War pitted Northeastern low church Congregationalists and their evangelical offspring against Southern high church Anglicans. Yankee anti-aristocrats took their stand against plantation nabobs, and urban industrialists touted free labor against their country cousins who talked up the virtues of slavery.

Any such broad canvas as “The Cousins’ Wars” is bound to invite specific criticisms from scholars, though most of Phillips’ facts sit comfortably on the shoulders of highly respected historians.

But in his run-up to the Civil War, Phillips frequently distorts and simplifies. He overlooks the evangelical South. He assumes(wrongly) that antislavery and Abolitionism were the same thing; he considers Northern churches hotbeds of antislavery. They were not.

Revealingly, the radical Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who railed at the churches, is passed over. Black Abolitionists also get left out, as do women firebrands of either color. But on most big issues, Phillips gets it right.

He underscores the important fact that when the victorious rebels of 1776 and the conquering Yankees of 1865 laid down their swords and shields, “they blithely turned their backs” on blacks, Native Americans and most immigrants, particularly the Irish.

These “cousins” had fought bravely. Their people had died fighting for freedom. But once peace came, they were abandoned by the new power brokers. So, too, were women, whom Phillips all but ignores.

At first glance, “The Cousins’ Wars” and James H. Merrell’s “Into the American Woods” would seem to have little or nothing in common, yet they do.

Pennsylvania looms large in Phillips’ discussion of the two American wars. The Keystone State, bordering Virginia and New York in 1776 (and Ohio in 1861) absorbed significant numbers of German and Quaker immigrants — important groups to both sides during the Revolution and the Civil War.

Philadelphia in 1776 and Pittsburgh by 1861 were important centers of republican and unionist Republican sentiment. And no other state in the pre-Revolutionary era was as important as the Commonwealth in trying to negotiate with Indians on the frontier, in Penn’s Woods just outside Philadelphia.

Merrell’s book is a fascinating, perceptive look at professional negotiators, a group little known even to scholars. The negotiators, or “go-betweens,” were engaged in tough, controversial discussions which, before the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754 (sometimes called the Seven Years’ War), provided a modicum of peace.

The negotiators, whether Indian or settler, left few traces of their work, but Merrell, a historian at Northwestern University, has tracked down a handful whose stories reveal a good bit about American-Indian relations. Negotiators had to be persons of character, courage and good standing. If not, they were no match for the hardships of the work.

A go-between might spend months living in the woods or, for an Indian, in a strange urban area.

Merrell’s writes with deep affection for his subject but most of his conclusions are sobering. Neither side would tolerate a woman as a negotiator. For all their enforced close dealings, neither side developed a shred of human interest in the other.

Whites who went “native” were forever shunned. A “civilized Indian” was an oxymoron to most whites. To Indians, all whites were alike — not truly human.

Merrell’s diggings suggest that something deep within whites and Indians repelled the other. Not surprisingly, Indians would not tolerate clergymen as negotiators.

One highly qualified Oneida go-between, Shickellamy, devoted his life to getting along with Europeans. But when prayed over by a missionary, Shickellamy cut him short, summing up a historical chapter still in the making:

“We are Indians, and don’t wished to be transformed into white men.”

Phillips concludes his book speculating that the future will probably revolve around English, “the language of victory.”

It may, but his book about wars and rumors of war, and Merrell’s sobering account of the failure of “negotiators,” suggest that the future will need more than just language, any language.

Bruce Clayton, a professor of history at Allegheny College, Meadville, is the author most recently of “Praying for Base Hits: An American Boyhood.”