The most important conflicts in the founding of the English colonies and the American republic were fought against enemies either totally outside of their society or within it: barbarians or brothers. In this work, Wayne E. Lee presents a searching exploration of early modern English and American warfare, looking at the sixteenth-century wars in Ireland, the English Civil War, the colonial Anglo-Indian wars, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War.Crucial to the level of violence in each of these conflicts was the perception of the enemy as either a brother (a fellow countryman) or a barbarian. But Lee goes beyond issues of ethnicity and race to explore how culture, strategy, and logistics also determined the nature of the fighting. Each conflict contributed to the development of American attitudes toward war. The brutal nature of English warfare in Ireland helped shape the military methods the English employed in North America, just as the legacy of the English Civil War cautioned American colonists about the need to restrain soldiers' behavior. Nonetheless, Anglo-Americans waged war against Indians with terrifying violence, in part because Native Americans' system of restraints on warfare diverged from European traditions. The Americans then struggled during the Revolution to reconcile these two different trends of restraint and violence when fighting various enemies.Through compelling campaign narratives, Lee explores the lives and fears of soldiers, as well as the strategies of their commanders, while showing how their collective choices determined the nature of wartime violence. In the end, the repeated experience of wars with barbarians or brothers created an American culture of war that demanded absolute solutions: enemies were either to be incorporated or rejected. And that determination played a major role in defining the violence used against them.

AcknowledgmentsNotes on StyleIntroductionPart 1: Barbarians and Subjects: The Perfect Storm of Wartime Violence in Sixteenth-Century Ireland1. Sir Henry Sidney and the Mutiny at Clonmel, 15692. The Earls of Essex, 1575 and 1599Part 2: Codes, Military Culture, and Clubmen in the English Civil War3. Sir William Waller, 16444. The Clubmen, 1645Part 3: Peace Chiefs and Blood Revenge: Native American Warfare5. Wingina, Ralph Lane, and the Roanoke Colony of 15866. Old Brims and Chipacasi, 1725Part 4: Gentility and Atrocity: The Continental Army and the American Revolution7. "One Bold Stroke": Washington in Pennsylvania, 1777-788. "Malice Enough in Our Hearts": Sullivan and the Iroquois, 1779Conclusion: Limited War and Hard War in the American Civil WarAbbreviationsNotesIndex