Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth for the New World with a group of fundamentalist Puritans on board. The sect had first moved to Holland, not to escape persecution in England but to escape such mortal sins as alcohol and dance. There they joined forces with French Huguenot refugees worshipping at the Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Lady) in Leiden. They discovered that the Dutch were just as sinful, and decided to move on. Most of those aboard the Mayflower (66 of the 110) were not members of the sect and were travelling for a variety of reasons, many of them financial. The Puritans referred to themselves as ‘saints’ and their fellow travellers as ‘strangers’. Once in the New World the divisions between the two groups broke down and the appalling hardships of the first winter bound the settlers together. Less than fifty survived and what happened next has become the stuff of legend.

  The traditional story recounts that on 16 March 1621, an Abnaki native strolled into the Plymouth settlement and started chatting in English which he had learnt from English fishermen. He later returned with another native, named Squanto, who claimed to have visited England and Spain.

  Squanto was instrumental in helping the Pilgrims to survive. He taught them which plants were poisonous and which had healing powers, how to tap the maples for their sap and above all how to cultivate corn. Their first harvest that October was very successful and the Pilgrims held a three day celebration to which they invited Squanto, the native chieftain Massasoit and nearly a hundred peaceful natives.

  The following year the harvest was not as successful but in the third year the harvest was bountiful again and Governor William Bradford ordered a day of celebration on 29 November, thereafter known as Thanksgiving Day.

  The facts described in the traditional version of this story are probably correct; even the presence of English-speaking natives at such an early date is quite possible as west country fishermen for long built seasonal camps along the coast. However, the overall impression given in hundreds of school text books is more than a little misleading. What is left out is more important than what is included. The charming story of interracial harmony reflects only one side of the historical coin. The natives soon got tired of making charitable donations to interlopers intent on occupying their land and as a consequence in the second year the Pilgrims ran short of food. What is missing from the conventional myth is that the colonists knew just how to handle uppity ‘Indians’, not with Christian tolerance but with the tried and tested methods of Spaniard and Virginian. In 1622, just a year after Squanto arrived at their camp, the Pilgrim Fathers invited a larger group of natives to gather for a conciliatory meeting and then attacked them, proving the superiority of muskets over bows and arrows. Seven natives were captured and then ceremonially hanged. Among the seven was the tribal shaman, to whom the Puritans took particular exception. His head was cut off and mounted on top of the fort at Plymouth to demonstrate to the world whose God was the true God. The next year Governor Bradford was able to gather the Pilgrims for the first real Thanksgiving. (This is the same Governor Bradford who described the natives as barbarous, treacherous savages, and fifteen years later was glorying in natives ‘frying in the fire’ after the Mystic Massacre.)

  The Pilgrim Fathers myth is a classic example of selective history, of the way nations use their histories not as photographs with which to capture their pasts but as mirrors in which to see themselves. And if many conventional US histories provide a less than complete picture of the Mayflower colonists’ first few years others add an extra dimension: the divine. In these versions Squanto is elevated into ‘a special instrument of God’ (a description first applied by Plymouth’s Governor Bradford). Squanto’s story is made to mirror Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt through plague and famine. What are sometimes described as Squanto’s ‘visits’ to England and Spain are more correctly described as his capture by slave traders and shipment to Europe. There he was bought by monks and converted to Christianity. Returning from captivity, thanks to the generosity of fellow believers in London, Squanto discovered that God had visited the plague on his tribe and their heathen neighbours: 95,000 natives had died, leaving the country almost empty of human habitation. According to one source Squanto realised that his enslavement had been God’s way of saving him from a far worse fate. God had chosen him for a divine purpose, and that purpose of course was to show the Pilgrim Fathers the milk and honey of the Promised Land. Truly Squanto was ‘God’s hand of deliverance’.

  It is easy to be cynical about the small and quite atypical group of settlers on the Mayflower, but the reality is that they survived appalling hardships that few modern Europeans or Americans would be willing to endure for the sake of their immortal soul. They were characterised not only by the arrogant certainty that they, uniquely, could unlock the gates of heaven but also by the conviction that to do so required effort, both spiritual and physical. They came to America to work. They were not looking for gold to loot or slaves to do their work for them. They positively welcomed the fact that the soil of New England had none of the tropical abundance of colonies further south. Idle hands were the playthings of Satan himself.

  The significance of the Pilgrim Fathers legend in American culture is enormous. The story itself and the facts behind it are not important but the underlying messages are. Most, if not all, tribal groups believe they are special, in some way superior to other mortals. They may put this down to something inherent in themselves or to the power of their gods. What the Pilgrim Fathers myth does for Americans is to consolidate both of these beliefs. The Pilgrims, and by extension all Americans, succeeded because they were chosen by God and because of honest toil. Americans are the ‘chosen people’, a model for other nations, and they deserve to be. God chose them not on a capricious whim but in recognition of their own efforts. Many years later the philosophical justification of American imperialism was articulated by John O’Sullivan in the concept of ‘manifest destiny’:America’s god-given destiny was to rule over lesser people. That philosophy can be traced back as far as 1637, and the paradigm shift that occurred in the world view of New England colonists following the Mystic Massacre. But the massacre has been airbrushed from American history. The sanitised legend of the Pilgrim Fathers provides reassurance that manifest destiny is about the just reward for virtue, not the bloodstained prize of conquest.

  Pilgrims and Puritans

  Plymouth would have remained an aberration in English colonial history, destined to disappear like other transient colonies springing up from Newfoundland south, but for events in England where king and country were pushing down the road that would end in civil war. Religious fervour was reaching new heights, with Protestant fundamentalists under attack by an increasingly oppressive monarch. The result was a wave of emigration fuelled purely by religion. The arrival of a thousand Puritan settlers in a fleet of seventeen ships to found Boston in 1630, rather than the solitary Mayflower reaching the New World in 1620, is the true takeoff point in the history of New England.

  Technically the term Pilgrim (with a capital P) is reserved for the Mayflower colonists. They were separatists, who wanted complete severance from the existing religious orders in England. The later Massachusetts colonists were Puritans, not Pilgrims, who were content to remain within the existing Church but wanted it to be purified. The leader of the Boston settlers, John Winthrop, was particularly concerned that his flock would be corrupted by the pernicious doctrines of the Pilgrim separatists. Purists get very upset when the two groups are confused. President Reagan outraged them by appealing for a return to the values of ‘that old Pilgrim John Winthrop’. President Bush I made things worse when, despite claiming to be a descendant of Pilgrims himself, he dedicated a Thanksgiving speech to ‘John Winthrop and his fellow pilgrims’. Bush I made his grasp of history even plainer when he went on to refer (in 1992) to the Pilgrims’ arrival ‘more than a hundred years ago’ – nearer four hundred years, actually.

  Of the 21,000 migrants who travelled to New England in the seventeenth cen
tury, two-thirds arrived in just twelve years between 1630 and the start of the civil war in 1642. During one short period a stream of migrants left England for reasons that had nothing to do with economics, and it is one of the ironies of American history that today their primary legacy is the economic wealth they made possible. These settlers quickly spread out beyond Boston demonstrating a degree of popular energy unknown in the colonies further south. The scale and speed of colonisation was unprecedented. Ten years after the founding of Jamestown Virginia still had an immigrant population of less than four hundred. After forty years Virginia’s non-native population was barely more than 13,000. By contrast Winthrop’s Massachusetts colony started with a thousand settlers on day one. Thirty years later there were 33,000 settlers living in New England. Within a few years there were vibrant colonies right along the New England coast. Unlike many of the colonies to the south (and the French settlements to the north) these settlements were self-perpetuating. The Puritans arrived as families and bred rapidly. (By 1700 two in five New Englanders were female compared with one in five Virginians.) The colonists relied on their children to help farm the new land rather than constant immigration of indentured servants or slaves.

  By the end of the century the New England colonies were clearly the most dynamic of any European colonies anywhere in the world, and the most likely to become a model for developments elsewhere. The reason lies in religion.

  Religious fundamentalism is the key to understanding the early history of New England. Most migrants to the south had little or no choice. By contrast the vast majority of those arriving in Boston wanted to be there. Even though they knew that the chances of survival, let alone prospering, were slim, they were prepared to pay significant sums to leave everything that they knew and voyage to a better life. And if God willed that this life would be in heaven rather than on earth so be it. They knew that conditions would be hard, but they were not afraid to join their maker if that is what He ordained. New England was populated by men and women with the religious certainty of today’s suicide bombers.

  After the initial burst of enthusiasm in the period immediately before the English Civil War there was relatively little further immigration into New England for the rest of the century. Religion ceased to be a factor in spurring migration from England. Over the next twenty years two-thirds of those migrating from English ports were bound for the West Indies, searching for Mammon not God. Indeed there was reverse migration when the civil war started;some Plymouth colonists returned to important posts in Cromwell’s army and government. The Rev. Hugh Peters, the pastor at Salem, Massachusetts, became the chief chaplain in Cromwell’s army, and after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II was executed for his role in the death of King Charles I. (The English Civil War in some ways prefigured the American Civil War, as New England Puritans returned to fight with the Roundheads and Virginia welcomed escaping Cavaliers. In one of the most obscure battles in American history northern Puritans defeated southern Royalists in the battle of the Severn near Annapolis, Maryland, in 1655.)

  The sudden wave of immigration between 1630 and 1642 was radically different to anything seen before or after, and it was the nature of this wave that made the new colonies that were to spring up on the north-east coast fundamentally different to all the others. By the end of the century there were two sets of English colonies in the Americas, which, if it were not for their common language, would have been as different from each other as Afghanistan and Zanzibar.

  It is only a slight oversimplification to say that there were three very distinct classes of migrants to most of the colonies outside New England: poor whites, slaves and a minority of the rich. The history of these colonies is the history of the relationship of these classes. While to say that New England had only one class really would be an oversimplification it would not be grossly misleading. And the class that dominated New England was none of the above three. New England was colonised by, and for, what today would be called the middle class. The promoters of the Virginia Company were rich London merchants and lawyers who became even richer by staying at home and sending shiploads of ‘sturdy beggars’ and slaves out to make money for them. The promoters of the Massachusetts Bay Company were certainly wealthy but they wanted more than profits; they wanted the key to heaven, and they believed that the key could be found on the other side of the Atlantic – so they themselves had to be ‘on board’, quite literally. Promoters like John Winthrop travelled with the migrants and ran the company from Boston. The promoters and other migrants took the same risks, had the same objectives and shared the same interests. (The Pilgrim Fathers were actually an exception: the Mayflower was financed by the London company of Merchant Adventurers to whom its passengers were indentured for their first seven years in the New World. The Plymouth colony was a commercial enterprise more typical of Virginia and the south than the later religious settlements in New England. Mayflower colonists socially were also more typical of the other English colonies: Bradford, their leader, was a cloth worker whereas Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts, was a lawyer.)

  These were not religious liberals seeking freedom of religion. The rigorously enforced laws prohibiting work, play or even travel on the Sabbath were redolent more of today’s fundamentalist Islam or Judaism than of mainstream Christianity. The Puritan migrants were Calvinist zealots who made it clear that heretics such as Anglicans or Baptists were not welcome in their colony. Nor were they content to wait until Judgement Day to witness the wrath of God in such cases. Quakers were regarded as a particular threat, being a sect that ‘tends to overthrow the whole gospell & the very vitalls of Christianitie’. On 19 October 1659 Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson were ‘convicted for Quakers’ in Massachusetts and led to the gallows with ropes around their necks. Stephenson and Robinson were duly hanged, but Mary Dyer was spared after pleas from the governors of Connecticut and Nova Scotia. Dyer, however, refused to be banished. On 1 June 1660 she was led to the gallows once again and this time was dispatched to her maker. (Unlike Europe the scaffold rather than the stake was the preferred method of execution even for heretics and witches, although hanging at that time meant being hung from a gibbet and slowly and painfully strangled; the ‘long drop’ hanging – in which the victim died quickly as his or her neck was broken – was introduced much later.) Anyone suspected of communing with the devil faced the hangman’s rope. In one case, when a piglet was born with a face that seemed to resemble its owner’s, the farmer was hanged, and for good measure so was the sow with which he had so obviously enjoyed carnal relations. The Salem witch trials were only the most famous examples of the Puritans’ extreme religious beliefs. Their society was closer to the Iran of the Ayatollahs than to America today.

  Like socialist dogmatism in Russia two centuries later, the Puritan dogmatism of the New England settlers was beset by sectarianism. Groups fractured along bitter ideological fault lines comprehensible only to themselves. The abundance of ‘empty’ land populated only by heathen natives made it easy for dissenting groups to strike out on their own and found new settlements. Although Massachusetts remained the heartland, more conservative sects founded colonies in Connecticut while others moved north to assert control over the fishing settlements being set up by less religiously fixated settlers in Maine and New Hampshire.

  Only Rhode Island demonstrated any real signs of the religious tolerance for which America was later to pride itself. Its founder, the dissident Roger Williams, was expelled from Massachusetts in the middle of a bitter winter in 1636. His heresy was to proclaim that religion was a matter of personal conscience; that, as he put it, ‘forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils’. Rhode Island became the one beacon of religious freedom in a sea of competing orthodoxies as the small colony became home for the rejects from its neighbours. Not only did various Protestant sects coexist but the colony’s toleration extended to a small Jewish group. (The history of Jews in America is one example, like English Quakers and
various continental European sects, where the early immigrants were genuine refugees escaping persecution. The first Jewish migrants to North America came from South America. A small group of Dutch Jews had settled in the Dutch colony in what is now Brazil. When the colony was seized by the Portuguese the Jews felt the full force of Catholic fundamentalism, and to escape burning at the stake they fled north.)

  As time went by religious discrimination became less severe but did not disappear. Anglicans tempted to work or travel on the Sabbath were liable to be arrested and fined by their more puritanical neighbours. Religious dissenters might not be burnt at the stake but other ways were found to exclude them from society; one method of suppressing dissent prefigured a tactic much used in Russia. The Rev. James Davenport, a Yale graduate and great-grandson of one of New England’s first Puritan clergymen, provoked a furious reaction with his brand of evangelical fundamentalism. He preached against the iniquities of wigs, jewellery and fine clothes, and with his followers organised the burning of books whose contents he deemed offensive. In 1742 he was arrested in Connecticut, tried, declared insane and banished. He promptly moved to Massachusetts only to be rearrested, retried and declared non compos mentis again. Two years later Davenport gave up and recanted his ‘errors’; he went on to become Moderator of the Synod in New York. A century later Pyotr Chaadayev, the first great radical Russian philosopher, was declared insane after criticising autocracy, serfdom and the Orthodox Church, and under Stalin the ‘Davenport’ method of suppressing dissent was to be employed on a horrific scale.