[NonValueAdded]

In these earlier hostilities, Ferling writes, the colonists "not infrequently adopted terror tactics that included torture; killing women, children, and the elderly; the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies; and summary executions of prisoners or their sale into slavery in faraway lands." English soldiers would refer to such methods as the "American way of war."

In other words, they adopted the Indian war culture. Native Americans were doing this to each other long before White Man came on the scene.

[Pharmboy]

Agreed.

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

Other than the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies, the sentence should read “infrequently” instead of “not infrequently.”

Killing women, children and elderly in sneak attacks on isolated farms; raping women; torture, including running the gauntlet; the burning of farmsteads; taking some as captives who would be put to work in the Indian village (though many did become adopted Indians in a Stockholm syndrome); summarily killing captives who had difficulty traveling back to the Indian village; this was the typical way in which Indians made war on the colonists.

For the colonists, while one can find examples here and there of such activities as reprisals, these tactics were not their normal approach to war (other than burning villages and destroying crops, which was a standard tactic against Indians who fled instead of standing and fighting a militia force). The attempt by some colonists to sell Indians captured in war as slaves was generally abandoned fairly early on.