by John Butman
Webster invoked this history, not out of academic interest, but in service to a greater cause and much more immediate purpose. Now, Webster warned, the Pilgrims’ heroic achievement was being undermined by a deeply divisive social institution that entrenched inequality and threatened to rip apart the United States: slavery. He attacked the “Christian states”—referring to the southern states, including Virginia, home of the original Jamestown Colony, where the practice of slavery showed that they felt “no sentiments of humanity or of justice.” Webster exhorted the people of New England, as inheritors of Pilgrim values, to “extirpate and destroy” the slave trade. “It is not fit,” he concluded, “that the land of the Pilgrims should bear the shame” of slavery any longer.
Webster’s address marked the beginning of the so-called “Pilgrim Century,” during which the Pilgrim narrative was established as the founding story of America.3 It was just a few years later, in 1831, that Americans adopted the song “America”—known to schoolchildren as “My Country ’Tis of Thee”—as the unofficial, de facto anthem, for the nation:
My country, ’tis of Thee—
Sweet Land of Liberty—
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountain side
Let Freedom ring.
Many Americans (and many Britons, too) may not realize that this song of a proudly independent nation was set to the tune of “God Save the King,” the national anthem of England, which had already abolished the slave trade.* Nor may many Americans realize that the lyrics imply a preference for the Pilgrims over the Puritans, who in 1628 founded the ultimately far stronger and more successful Massachusetts Bay Colony. This preference reflected the perspective of nineteenth-century northerners—the New Hampshire–born Webster was one of them—who were dominant in the wake of the North’s crushing victory over the South in the Civil War that split the country apart between 1861 and 1865. They saw themselves in the Pilgrim tradition and disdained what they saw as the corruption and tolerance of the Puritan leadership.4 Although the Pilgrims advocated the radical step of complete separation from the established church—a step too far for Puritans—they were seen as more socially moderate and mainstream: a modest citizenry who valued hard work, tolerated diversity, formed democratic institutions, and devoted themselves to family and community.
This view of the Pilgrims got a significant endorsement from a notable foreign observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who famously toured America in 1831. He passionately glorified—but in many ways completely misrepresented—the founding story. “The foundation of New England presented a novel spectacle,” he wrote in Democracy in America, published in 1835. “Everything about it was singular and original.” He characterized the Jamestown Colony as based on the “disastrous idea” that “gold and silver mines constitute the wealth of nations” and dismissed its founders as “gold-seekers” who were driven by “no noble thought.”
The Pilgrims, he continued, must be praised for their soaring ideals. “What distinguished them most of all from other colonizers was the very purpose of their enterprise,” he wrote. “It was by no means necessity that forced them to leave their native land. They left behind enviable social positions and secure incomes. They did not travel to the New World in the hope of improving their situation or enhancing their wealth. They tore themselves away from the pleasures of home in obedience to a purely intellectual need. They braved the inevitable miseries of exile because they wished to ensure the victory of an idea.”5
But de Tocqueville can be forgiven for misstating the Pilgrims’ motives. This is because he did not have access to William Bradford’s seminal account of the Plymouth plantation. In Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford explained his people’s purpose very simply. Jobs were the key concern, the number one reason on the Pilgrims’ list of four motives for going to America. Bradford does not mention the pursuit of religious freedom, which the Pilgrims already enjoyed in Holland; and advancing the gospel by converting natives came last, at number four. Indeed, Bradford does not even talk about the driving force of an ideal. The Pilgrims left the Old World, he wrote, “not out of newfangledness or other such like giddy humor,” but for “weighty and solid reasons.”6
Bradford’s account, probably completed around 1650, only came to light twenty years after de Tocqueville exalted the America story. The manuscript had disappeared from a private collection in Boston in the 1760s and then, like the Pilgrims themselves, had been largely forgotten. The work, handwritten by Bradford on vellum, a fine parchment made of goat skin, had been tucked away in the library of Lambeth Palace, the official home of the bishop of London, whose diocese had once, rather bizarrely, encompassed the American colonies. Charles Deane, editor of publications for The Massachusetts Historical Society, first learned that the original manuscript might be there in February 1855. Excited, he sent a note by the first available steamer to the Reverend Joseph Hunter, a vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries of London, requesting that he look into the matter. By the middle of March, Hunter informed Deane that “There is not the slightest doubt that the manuscript is Governor Bradford’s own autograph.” He had a longhand copy made and this arrived in Deane’s hands at the beginning of August. By April of the following year, Deane had completed his editorial work and the typeset version was privately published by The Massachusetts Historical Society, dated 1856.* That same year, Little, Brown released the first commercial edition to great acclaim.
Since then, Of Plymouth Plantation has been hailed as the greatest written work of the early American period.7 In 1952, the New York Times reviewer of the standard modern edition lauded Bradford’s work, calling it “by common consent not only a historical document of the first importance but the first ‘classic’ in our literature” and claiming that its “finest pages belong with the best of English or American writing of the period.”8
Bradford’s book inspired new, more popular versions of the tale. In 1858, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most adulated American poet of the day, came out with The Courtship of Miles Standish. The long, romantic poem celebrated the Pilgrims’ military leader and painted the Pilgrims in broad, pious strokes. He glorified the legend of Plymouth Rock which had been “a door-step into a world unknown” for the Pilgrims and, furthermore, served as “the cornerstone of a nation!” Longfellow celebrated the Pilgrims’ fellowship with one another and praised their perseverance in pursuing an idyllic, idealistic cause in the harsh environment of the wilderness.
But Longfellow, like Webster, had more on his mind than courtship and legend-making. Although he avoided outright political proselytizing in his poem, antislavery sentiments reminiscent of Webster’s murmured through the poem’s subtext: that morality and civility were attributes of the North, the home of the Pilgrims. He described the original settlers as impossibly virtuous: “patient, courageous, and strong,” “modest and simple and sweet,” “tender and trusting,” “great of heart,” “noble and generous,” and “austere and grave.” Only such people, northerners, could and should represent the common cause of idealism and liberty that the divided nation required, not the slaveholders of the South.9
Longfellow’s poem ignited a fire of Pilgrim admiration in the national imagination. It became an overnight sensation, selling 25,000 copies in the United States in just two weeks and 10,000 copies on publication day in London.10 But even as the Pilgrim narrative was being invoked in the antislavery crusade, it was freighted with yet another task: to serve as the model for that bedrock of American life, the family and household. That meant, in particular, the white, Anglo-Saxon household of New England, which, at that time, seemed under siege by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration—with concomitant waves of German and Irish immigrants flooding into the burgeoning northern cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. It raised several questions: What was America now? What did it stand for? Above all, who was an American
? What had happened to the founding values?
All the orations, histories, ballads, and anthems seeded the idea that the Pilgrims were the true American originals, and then a national holiday rooted it even more deeply in the national consciousness. The first feast of thanksgiving took place in 1621, after the Pilgrims survived the first harsh winter. They celebrated again in 1623, and it was then that they referred to the event as Thanksgiving. For the next two centuries, the holiday was re-created in various ways, at various times and various places, largely in New England.11 Then, in 1817, New York declared a day for observance of Thanksgiving and made it an official state holiday in 1830—the first state outside New England to do so.12
Other states gradually followed suit. By midcentury, a country-wide campaign for Thanksgiving gathered momentum, spearheaded by Sarah Josepha Hale, who is best known as the creator of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”13 In 1846, as editor of Godey’s, a popular periodical of the time, she inaugurated an annual editorial to promote the virtue of the “Great American Festival” of Thanksgiving.14 Such a holiday, Hale contended, could unite the nation and, ideally, prevent the outbreak of the civil war that was then brewing.
Thanksgiving, as described by Hale and others, provided a way to celebrate the cherished American traditions of everyday life. It could bring together disparate groups, including those of different religions, as well as city dwellers and country folk, under an umbrella of shared nationhood. Thanksgiving helped remind everyone of the Pilgrims’ ideal and affirm the belief that God blessed America.15
In 1854, at the height of the Thanksgiving Day campaign and as the dark days of the Civil War approached, another foreign voice spoke up in favor of the Pilgrim cause. Joseph Hunter, the English antiquarian who would later confirm the authenticity of Bradford’s manuscript, made a grand pronouncement: “It was the working of a few private men of an overstrained spirit of opposition to the established order of ecclesiastical affairs in Protestant England,” he wrote, “which led to the colonization of New England, and, in the event, to the establishment of the United States of America as one of the great communities of the civilized world.”16
By 1859, thirty states, including twelve in the South, had climbed aboard the Thanksgiving bandwagon—perhaps with a boost from the publication of Bradford’s work and the attention it received. But the holiday could not achieve what Hale desired: to bring Americans together. In April 1861, the country descended into civil war, as Confederate forces, representing the southern states that had declared secession, fired on the Union troops representing the northern states, at Fort Sumter in Charleston. Two years later, in October of 1863, three months after the Union army rebuffed the forces of the Confederacy at Gettysburg in the conflict’s bloodiest battle, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a proclamation that reflected on the year gone by. Despite the horror of war, he said, the year had been “filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies.” Even the war’s drain on the “wealth and strength” of the nation had “not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship.” To celebrate the good among so much bad, Lincoln invited “the whole American people” to observe, on the last Thursday of November, “a day of thanksgiving.”17
From that year onward, Americans faithfully observed this national holiday and the Pilgrim heritage associated with it. The Plymouth history became part of the elementary school curriculum. Textbooks examined the nascent democracy manifested in the Mayflower Compact, the brief document that laid out the governance principles the Pilgrims agreed to follow to establish a “civil body politic.”18 Children learned that all Americans were immigrants or descendants of them. Thanksgiving became the holiday of the home, a nonreligious family gathering in which all could participate, and during which, as one observer put it, “the deepest feelings of patriotism were conveyed.”19
NOT EVERYONE, THOUGH, worshipped at the altar of the Pilgrim story or the Thanksgiving Day commemoration. Into the 1880s, the Catholic Church opposed Thanksgiving as “a Protestant rite.” Many Southerners considered it a “Yankee day.”20 One of New England’s beloved sons, the great intellectual Henry David Thoreau, sought in the Pilgrims the ancestral roots of his own naturalism, transcendentalism, and asceticism—but he was disappointed and disheartened that their ideals were so often “disregarded in moments of commercial greed.”21 Native Americans objected to the very underpinnings of the Pilgrim narrative, such as the characterization of the land as a “wilderness.” They went so far as to condemn Thanksgiving as a “day of mourning” rather than of celebration.22 Mark Twain, in an address to the New England Society in 1881, supported their point of view. He claimed that his true American ancestor was an Indian, scoffed at the Pilgrims, and exhorted the society to “get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock.”23
The debate over the meaning of the Pilgrim legend raged on for a century. “More, perhaps, has been written about the Pilgrims than any other small group in our history,” wrote the American popular historian George F. Willison in his 1945 book Saints and Strangers. “And yet they are still extravagantly praised for accomplishing what they never attempted or intended, and are even more foolishly abused for possessing attitudes and attributes quite foreign to them.”24
Just a few years later, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in his introduction to the 1952 edition of Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, shot back at Willison and even cranked the hyperbole up a notch. He wrote of the Pilgrims as “a simple people inspired by an ardent faith to a dauntless courage in danger, a resourcefulness in dealing with new problems, an impregnable fortitude in adversity that exalts and heartens one in an age of uncertainty, when courage falters and faith grows dim. It is this story, told by a great human being, that has made the Pilgrim Fathers in a sense the spiritual ancestors of all Americans, all pioneers.”25
Today, the Pilgrim narrative is not so often invoked, not so much revered, not so widely discussed as it once was. This is partly because the story, like all powerful stories, seems less relevant in the age of globalization and evolving national identities. As one of today’s popular historians, Nathaniel Philbrick, put it, “I grew up taking this myth of national origins with a grain of salt. In their wide-brimmed hats and buckled shoes, the Pilgrims were the stuff of holiday parades and bad Victorian poetry. Nothing could be more removed from the ambiguities of modern-day America, I thought, than the Pilgrims and the Mayflower.”26 But upon further reflection Philbrick concluded that “the story of the Pilgrims does not end with the First Thanksgiving” and so he proceeded to explore the fifty years after the landing and there he found much relevance in the tensions between cultures and the struggle for sustainability.
We chose to look in the opposite direction, to the seventy years that preceded the Mayflower voyage. In doing so, we have written what is, in effect, the prequel to the Pilgrims. Accordingly, Plymouth can be seen as a staging post on the road of discovery and development toward the United States, rather than as the starting point. After all, Plymouth was not the first sustained English settlement in America—Jamestown was. Nor was it the most successful of the period, by the measures of growth or wealth or influence—the later Massachusetts Bay Colony was.
The Plymouth story, serving as America’s default founding myth, derives its power from the fact that it reflects what America wants to be, how it wants to see itself and be seen. But in its popular conception the story is misleading because there is one major feature of American life that has been often left out, ignored, overlooked, or downplayed. Commerce. Business. Enterprise.
This is what caught our attention and made us curious. Looking back, we see that business and business people played a critical role in creating and establishing the earliest American settlements, laws, and civic institutions. Even the Pilgrims, those paragons of virtue, were funded by merchants, entrepreneurs, business leaders—both great and modest—and were organized as a commercial enterprise. Without the funding and the backing of a business organization, a
lbeit a badly managed one, the Pilgrims might never have left Leiden.
Before the Pilgrim Century, there was some recognition of the vital role of commerce in America’s beginnings. None other than Thomas Jefferson looked back to the pre-Pilgrim period when writing his Notes on the State of Virginia. He considered the license granted to John Cabot by Henry VII as among the earliest American state papers, and he regarded Sir Walter Ralegh as the founder of the first colony, Virginia.27 In his narrative of the creation of the Constitution, Jefferson also named Thomas Smythe (which he spelled “Smith”). According to Jefferson, it was Smythe and his associates who Ralegh turned to when, having exhausted £40,000 of his own funds on his Roanoke Colony, he at last found himself “under a necessity of engaging others to adventure their money.”28 One of the founding fathers of the United States and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence saw the connection between commonwealth and commerce.
Over the years, even as the moralistic storyline prevailed, other analysts worked to fill in the gaps. In 1939, Norman Gras, the first professor of business history at Harvard Business School, compiled a series of essays on great American companies and their leaders. In his Casebook in American Business History, Graf listed the well-known names one might expect: John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J. P. Morgan, among others. But who did he put first on his list? Thomas Smythe of the Virginia Company. Smythe, Gras noted, was “the first business man to have a profound effect upon America.”29