A brave band of sectarian Protestants facing a harsh winter ahead stepped ashore 400 years ago to establish Plymouth Colony, England’s second foothold in America following Jamestown.
The date was December 18, but most readers probably think about these “Pilgrims” on Thanksgiving Day, which is patterned after their legendary 1621 harvest feast with Native American guests.
Print and broadcast media professionals who are already planning Thanksgiving features could not do better with sourcing than to debrief award-winning historian John G. Turner of George Mason University (jturne17@gmu.edu, 703-993-5604) about his timely book “They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty” (Yale University Press).
The Pilgrims were supposed to arrive at what would become New York harbor, but were lucky to land safely anywhere due to leaks and damage on the Mayflower.
Their “first Thanksgiving” was apparently no formal observance of gratitude to God, and the menu was probably fish and venison, not wild turkey. Whatever Plymouth Rock signified, the colonists subjected it to later neglect. The acclaimed “Mayflower Compact” was not the New World’s first constitution but a hasty bare-bones agreement.
Since Plymouth was absorbed in 1691 into the wealthier Massachusetts Bay Colony, run by rival “Puritan” Christians, many historians have dismissed it as an unimportant backwater. But Turner uplifts the Pilgrims’ significance, then balances their contributions against their sins, well summarized in this National Review piece. The most important story theme for journalists is the role of these pioneers at the beginnings of American democracy, human rights and religious liberty.
The Pilgrims received hosannas as democratic pioneers from 19th Century boosters like John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster, but Turner says they “were neither democrats nor theocrats.”
The colony was run by the believers, but did not require everyone to join the church or attend worship. They did, however, make everyone pay taxes to support their churches. They fled England to escape religious persecution, yet sent Baptists and Quakers into exile. (To be fair, in most countries religious dissenters faced prison or worse.)
State and church leaders were both elected, and lay elders shared power with the clergy — all rather foresighted and with far-reaching implications.
With 21st Century sensibilities, readers will chiefly lament the treatment of Native Americans. The Pilgrims would probably have all died off that first winter without native helpers. At first, relations were warm, and a treaty between the English and nearby tribes brought both sides economic benefits with mutual defense against unfriendly Native Americans. But later developments in Massachusetts included some slavery and land swindles.
Turner will assist writers unfamiliar with religious intricacies in England that produced the two factions of “low church” Protestants who were to have such wide influence upon American faith and culture. The Puritans were a sizable wing within the Church of England that agitated for simplified worship and Bible-based reforms alongside suspicions toward the power of bishops and monarchs. They played a key part in England’s Civil War of 1642-51.
The Pilgrims were a minor faction of strict separatists who totally rejected England’s established church as corrupt, demanded fiercely independent congregations, were harassed as outlaws and thus fled to Holland, then Plymouth. (For simplicity’s sake, The Guy suggests writers skip past a third Calvinist faction, the Presbyterians.)
Barely half of the Mayflower passengers were alive after that first winter. But compare that with Jamestown, where about two-thirds died during the first year. Despite that, Turner observes, in Plymouth “apparently no one begged to return to England on the Mayflower.
Whatever their flaws from a 21st Century outlook, the pious Pilgrims managed to create a well-ordered wilderness community, while Jamestown laid the foundations of the South’s slave society and suffered incidents of blasphemy, mutiny, murder, madness and cannibalism.
It’s old news, but still relevant.
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