!

Wednesday; 27 October 2010

Andrew S. Terrell
HIST 6393: Atlantic History to 1750

In Creatures of Empire, historian Virginia DeJohn Anderson looks at how animals not
only produced changes in the land but also in the hearts, minds, and behavior of the people who
dealt with them. Her study focuses on New England and the Chesapeake colonial periods. She
guides her readers through three periods of interaction between domestic animals and humans.
The first part contrasts how Native Americans and the English and how they understood animals.
Natives looked on animals in terms of reciprocity where they would kill in the wild only what
was necessary as if they were a brother species, while English settlers created legal status for
animals as property in order to root an overlord relationship with livestock. Because of the stark
differences in how the two people approached livestock, Anderson believes they were bound to
have conflict over the mass migration of English domestic animals. The English believed the
relationship toward livestock as property was a defining point between civil society and
savagery, thus a mission was set up in hopes of civilizing the Natives in contact with the English
settlers by teaching them to be more responsible herders. In the second part, Anderson looks at
“animal husbandry” and the teaching of English methods to Natives. Deficiencies in the new
climate and land forced the English colonists to adapt new free range styles for cattle and pigs
largely. At the end of the day, English colonies were meant to find and capitalize on cash crops,
which for the Chesapeake region meant massive tobacco farming and long hours. New England
settlements used a private ownership system with management falling on a community effort in
order to avoid the problem with animals returning to feral mindsets and practices as seen in the
Chesapeake.
The traditional narrative of English settlers taking land forcefully away from Native
populations who could not use it to its fullest extent led Anderson to her third theme and part.
Natives went on the defensive because of encroachment and in large part as we see now,
livestock required as much land as crops in many cases. Anderson argues that negotiations
between Natives and colonists were commonly associated with animal land disputes. A case in
point were the reactions from Natives when English herds would ruin a Native’s farm. The
Natives would then kill the animals which the English saw as destruction of property. Not until
the mid seventeenth century did the Common Wealth rule in favor of the Native’s grievances that
it was the ultimate responsibility of the colonists to keep track of their livestock in order to avoid
crop destruction. Nonetheless, the proliferation of animal land forced more Natives off their
traditional land on through King Philip’s War.
Anderson leaves her readers with an entirely new level of analysis over interactions
between Natives and colonists in New England and the Chesapeake. She makes a good case for
her argument that the constant land disputes were good cause for Metacom’s Rebellion. Of her
other arguments that were prevalent and rightly defended, this new layer of explanation for
Native-Colonist warfare is most intriguing and allows the topic of domestic animals to enter the
discussion with the ongoing wars and conflicts throughout the colonial period.