Reviewed by James A. Percoco

If we are lucky, we will have our times analyzed by an historian with the intellectual and literary skills of Bernard Bailyn, who in his new book, The Barbarous Years, provides a highly detailed and meticulously researched account of the first great stage of England’s dominion over North America.

The Barbarous Years is about change, rapid and dramatic change with longstanding cultural and social implications. A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from Harvard, Bailyn seems to leave no stone unturned in his exploration of America in the 1600s. His encompassing narrative delves into a range of topics, including the lifestyle of native peoples, the greed of English trade company investors and the hopes and dreams of people seeking religious tolerance while at the same time attempting to evangelize those with different beliefs. The result is a violent struggle that consumed North America in the years after the establishment of Jamestown in 1607.

Bailyn’s title is apt given the variety of “barbarisms” that occur when cultures collide. If it true that history is written around the campfires of the victors, it is also true that in securing a colonial dominion in North America, England, along with the Indians it subjugated, the Africans it enslaved and the other Europeans it rooted out, paid a heavy price.

Bailyn’s exploration of the forces at play is not new. Many readers will be familiar with the general story of English settlement. What is new is the painstaking detail, often extracted from previously untapped primary material, that Bailyn uses to support his argument. Some may find the text too dense, a quality that has nothing to do with Bailyn’s writing style but with the abundance of information he provides.

As in his earlier works, particularly Voyagers to the West, Bailyn relies on an exacting analysis of period demographics to shape this tale, contrasting this migration with  migrations that took place more than a century later.  Bailyn uncovers a pre-colonial British immigrant society, which, though bound by a common language, was almost as diverse as that of the native inhabitants and the other Europeans who settled here under the auspices of the crown and Parliament. Bailyn traces migratory patterns of the English and other settlers within the context of social pressures that existed among the neighboring native peoples. Adept at generating intrigue, the English successfully played off tribes against one another as their colonial encroachments advanced. Yet when it was to their advantage the English had no difficulty with direct confrontation.

Migration patterns, which Baily skillfully demonstrates through maps, indicate that this first phase, beginning with Jamestown, was all about establishing a toehold of English land ownership. Competing visions of land was the single most significant difference between the native and the newly arrived English, making conflict inevitable. The violence in North America from 1607-75 was brutal and unrelenting in all of its horrors, complete with decapitations, dismemberment, wanton pillage and other barbarous behavior in which both parties — Native Americans and immigrants — were culpable.

Bailyn’s first chapter, titled  “The Americans,” places the book squarely on the ultimate losers in this story, the original Americans — the Indians. The conceit works, because it is in conflict with these people and their equally diverse world that the rest of the story unfolds, resulting in a new definition of Americans as people who came not only from England but also from the Netherlands, Sweden, the German and Italian states, and Africa. This migration was a genuine hodgepodge of people. While some may have been gentry, most were not. They were a motley assortment driven by all manner of motivation: economic and personal ambition, missionary zeal, a desire to craft model communities or a need to establish military outposts. Bailyn sees this lot as a cantankerous assortment who sometimes succeeded, more often failed, lied and cheated, and wantonly utilized violence against not only the indigenous people but among themselves.

The narrative flows geographically rather than chronologically. Readers move north from the Chesapeake, through the Middle Colonies and end in New England.

Bailyn explores the communal and social dimensions of each eventual colony principally on economic, personal or religious interests. He recounts the establishment and survival of Jamestown in all its horror, from brutal warfare with the powerful Powhatan Tribe to pestilence and famine, in which the dead were at times exhumed and eaten. That this fledgling group on the fringes of a hostile frontier somehow endured was miraculous. From it would arise a nation’s empire, a story that is clearer with 20/20 hindsight. Surprisingly, Bailyn omits the crucial creation of the House of Burgesses, North America’s first elected representative assembly. Given the depth of the book, it is a strange omission.

It wasn’t just Anglicans from England who played a role. England’s Catholic founders of Maryland floundered in inconsistent efforts to provide a place of toleration. Also seeking tolerance were the Puritans who settled in New England. Within a few short years they, too, were at war with local natives as well as ousting dissenters from their Massachusetts colony. The Dutch sought to unlock the resources of the Hudson River Valley, while Swedes and Germans settled mercantile colonies near present-day Philadelphia, only to find themselves by the end of the turbulent century controlled by Great Britain.

Africans were part of this mix. According to Bailyn, it is naïve to think that slavery began in 1619, the presumed arrival of the first African people to Jamestown. Blacks were here before that date. Slavery evolved, its complexity shaped by social and racial convictions that those whose skin was black or brown were inferior to those of European stock. Legalisms were often confused, sex reared its head, and forces drove some people to see others as a commodity. Over a half century of settlement, Bailyn writes, “there was never a time … when there was not racial conflict in one or another of the European colonies in coastal North America.” Violence, he says, was a pervasive way of life and an agent of change for all people.

Readers who delight in finding “the devil in the details” will find The Barbarous Years a cornucopia of human folly, mischief and intrigue. Those who prefer to read history written in broad brush strokes will probably, unlike our forbearers, be unable to endure to the end.

James A. Percoco is director of education for the National WW II Memorial and a member of the National Teachers Hall of Fame.