The thesis presented in Peter Silver's debut book is that early American society transformed itself from one in which incongruousness between various European settler groups was the salient feature to one united by a shared value of tolerance, and that the key which explains this transformation is the experience of Indian war. Focussing on groups of Moravians, Anglicans, Quakers, Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans and Native Americans in Pennsylvania in the second half of the eighteenth century, he combines excellent storytelling with sharp historical analysis in a highly readable work. Silver succeeds in illustrating the transition he perceives in Pennsylvania society and in advancing a novel and significant interpretation of the process by which toleration became an American ideal.

In the first half of the book, Silver surveys colonial Pennsylvania's “unhappily assorted” society, showing how revivalist energies and geographical proximity to one another increased tensions between groups of settlers who were (in varying degrees) unwilling or unable to live together in harmony. This changed with the colony's first major Indian war in 1755. Silver carries his readers to the borderland farms where horror and death could descend upon men, women and children at any moment in the form of sudden, unexpected and shockingly brutal Indian attacks. Newspaper accounts focussed heavily on Indian atrocities. Panicked and frightened country people lived in constant unease, holed up in makeshift fortresses, waiting. A reverse migration filled cities and towns with terrified country folk who knew all too well what savage cruelty had been shown by Indian attackers to people like them.

In this atmosphere, Silver argues, a new type of rhetoric became highly influential, and brought power and authority to those who used it. The “anti-Indian sublime” ignored the causes of Indian attacks and focussed on aspects which enflamed the imagination and incited emotional reactions. The image of the white body scalped and mutilated by Indian aggressors, evoked repeatedly in literature, political rhetoric, and visual culture, became a powerful symbol for a suffering, victimized community of all-white settlers. Anyone who could be painted as unsympathetic to the suffering of this new inclusive American community became an easy target for those adept at bending this rhetoric to their own purposes. None were so readily denounced as the Quakers, whose efforts to maintain peace and harmony with the Indians were easily interpreted as treason against the folk.

In the second half of the book Silver's primary focus is on the murder of Indians by whites. He shows that whites who killed Indians in and out of wartime were normally not motivated by revenge or by racist Indian-hating, but by a disturbing, ruthless greed. Colonial officials were aware that innocent Indians were being murdered, robbed and plundered, but they often could not bring white fighters to justice. “Anti-Indian culture” had become so strong that to reproach a white man for murdering an Indian would result in popular accusations, perhaps even a rebellion, against the government.

This was what was feared in early 1764 when anti-Indian mobs appeared ready to descend upon Philadelphia. The events leading to and resulting from the march of the “Paxton rioters” to Germantown are the focus of the two pivotal chapters in Silver's work. Silver argues that the disturbing massacres of neutral Indians by whites in Lancaster County touched off a period of ideological warfare between those who could and those who could not condone the murders. Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia Quakers, and supporters of the colonial assembly who condemned the Indian-killers as white savages were shouted (and voted) down by those who came to the defense of the “distressed and bleeding frontier inhabitants.” Silver argues that anti-assembly publicists and politicians were effective because they were able to portray the pro-assembly faction as elitist, intolerant bigots who looked down on Germans and Irish Presbyterians and placed the safety of Indians above that of backcountry whites. The success of the “New Ticket” in the election of 1764 signaled that henceforward in American politics, success could only come through an appeal to “the people.”

In the final chapters Silver indicates that the democratic shift and the idea of an inclusive, suffering American community initiated in the Indian conflicts are crucial to understanding the American Revolution and its aftermath. During the Revolution itself British and Indians were linked together in American literary productions as savage opponents to the new virtuous American community. When Indian war dragged on after the surrender at Yorktown, anti-Indian sentiment, unchecked by the weak central government, partially explains how white volunteers could round up and slaughter innocent Indians without punishment by American authorities.

Silver indicates in his notes that Our Savage Neighbors is intended partly as a correction to long-held and oft-invoked historical misunderstandings about European settler society. Taking inspiration from developments in new Indian history, which he reapplies to the study of various European groups, Silver aims to dispel the idea that whites and Indians thought of themselves as taking part in a racial struggle. Instead, he shows that Indian war created an atmosphere in which whites saw themselves not as a united race struggling against another, but as a multicultural people suffering at the hands of a common enemy. In the conclusion of the work Silver, perhaps inadvertently, sheds light on the genesis of this understanding. Attempts by early reformers to reverse American anti-Indianism by focussing on the issue of “prejudice” failed because they did not address the repartitioning of Western lands. Silver blames these reformers for giving prominence to (or even creating) a “race problem” and ignoring the real, political one.

Our Savage Neighbors hardly needs another endorsement. It has recently been awarded the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Bancroft Prize for 2008. The beautifully cut volume comes packaged with glowing quotations from five prominent American historians. It is nonetheless a pleasure to recommend this book as one which will interest and delight readers of American history.