Pilgrims and the Political Agenda

Today's guest post comes from Jeremy Bangs, a leading expert on 17th-century history, the Pilgrims, and the Plymouth Colony. Bangs follows up a lively discussion in the comments section of an earlier post with more on the 17th-century historical context.

Jeremy Bangs

In our exchange in the comments section Tom van Dyke expresses annoyance at “scholars with a political agenda.” He “found no attempt anywhere to simply tell the story.” But he “did manage to get to Bradford's account ...”

The problem is that William Bradford is the first of the scholars with a political agenda writing about the topic of the Pilgrims’ early experiments with land distribution. Simply telling the story requires a little analysis of the context beyond a mere repetition of the text(s).

The background information about the financial circumstances of the Pilgrims’ colonial enterprise consists of descriptions by Bradford and Edward Winslow, together with business correspondence and contracts incorporated in Bradford’s memoir. From this we know that for the first seven years the colony was mortgaged to the company of investors. All the assets and increase of the colony were to be liquidated at the end of seven years, when the contracted debt was to be paid and the surplus distributed to the investors. Every colonist was counted as having at least one share in the venture because of the colonist’s labor. Some colonists also invested money and thus owned more than one share. Some investors of money did not become colonists but remained in London (and elsewhere). This arrangement meant that in Plymouth Colony there was no private property (not even property in personal labor) until 1627. All property belonged in common to the investors, but as investors the colonists also were co-owners proportional to their shares. This was capitalism, not communalism, and in no way socialism. The Pilgrims had wanted a different arrangement that would have granted them two days per week for private labor, whose profits were to be personal. But in the end their contract did not grant them even this amount of individualism. In setting up the colony people needed to find a way to conform to the total mortgage of their contract. In the first couple of years, rotating land assignments were made, following a medieval custom then practiced in the region from which the leaders came (northern Nottinghamshire and adjacent parts of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire). Dissatisfaction with this system (unfamiliar to some of the colonists) led to the decision to make unchanging assignments of field use after 1623, so that farmers could expect to use the same land from one year to the next; but this did not involve any property in the land, all of which was still to be liquidated at the end of the seven-year term. Thus scholars who identify the early system as a form of capitalist incorporation are correct, and no political agenda is implied by making this observation. Further, the early reports by Winslow and Bradford mention a bounteous harvest the first year. Scarcity the second year was the result of the arrival of thirty-five more colonists who came without supplies – not the result of poor harvests. This plenteousness is also reported in a letter by a visitor to the colony writing in 1621 (William Hilton). Winslow wrote that wheat and Indian corn had grown well, barley not very well, and peas not worth gathering. Bradford comments on a “great store of wild Turkeys, of whih they took many, besides venison, etc.”

Writing around a quarter century later, Bradford gave a different story – the anti-communalist version that has attracted the attention of Libertarians and others who fantasize about the Pilgrims’ discovering capitalism after experimenting with communalism. Tom quotes from that description. What is Bradford’s agenda, that inspired him to misrepresent the economic circumstances of the past? (As I have commented in my article, “A Level Look at Land Allotments, 1623”) Bradford wrote that part while confronting the social unrest arising from the actions of Samuel Gorton, John Lilburne, and the Levellers. Gorton had been troublesome in Plymouth before causing serious unrest in Rhode Island, where his opposition to taking oaths in court or as part of legal business contracts was abhorrent to representatives of established government. Gorton in New England and the Levellers in England preached a far-reaching equality that was thought to threaten society's stability by abolishing what Bradford and many others thought were divinely ordained differences of social standing and responsibility expressed in wise government. In the mid-1640's, Bradford used his recollection of this administrative shift (regarding land use) as the base upon which he could construct a propagandistic comment aimed at the social circumstances of the later period. In 1646 it was important to oppose Gorton and the Levellers' threat from England, important to consider that practical experience of human nature had disproved idealistic theory — "the vanity of that conceit of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times; — that the taking away of property, and bringing in community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God." Bradford ends his memoirs by noting that Edward Winslow had been sent to England in 1646 to defend New England against complaints of mistreatment lodged in London by Samuel Gorton.

Recent writers who emphasize the year 1623 rather than 1621 when writing about the Pilgrims’ thanksgiving have made a choice that is obviously driven by a political agenda. And simply telling the story is not what concerns them.

Commie Pinko Pilgrims and Peaceful (?) Puritans

Paul Harvey

A little Thanksgiving history blogging for you. I hadn't quite realized how much of a cottage industry peddling the anachronistic "Socialist Pilgrims" thesis had become, but this piece from the New York Times explores the spread of this myth. I was shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn how much of a role Glenn Beck and his historical henchman W. Cleon Skousen have played in marketing this story, My favorite part: the time when Rush Limbaugh added in the bit about how they grew organic vegetables, after they had learned that capitalism worked and produced an abundance which they could share with the Indians.

In "Peace, Love, and Puritanism," David Hall, of Harvard Divinity School, defends the Puritans against generations of Hawthornian and Menckenian scorn (and adds that, yes, wild turkeys probably appeared on the original menu). He writes:

Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.

Historiann has no problem with Hall's conclusion, but points out some of the darker underside to the history of feasting and fasting in America -- in particular, its long connection to war and tribalism:

Both fasts and feasts were opportunities to reaffirm tribalism, of a world view of us versus them. The history of fasting and feasting in the English communities of New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be written in blood–both blood in the sense of kinship ties, and in the sense of the shedding of outsiders’ blood in war.

The history of fasting and feasting is "more complicated and much darker than Americans would like to remember," she reminds us. Reading the many pages on this subject in George C. Rable's God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War, reinforces this point. About every five pages, it seems, someone from North or South is calling for a fast day, or preaching a fast day sermon. There was a lot of ostensible bowing, scraping, and humility, but ultimately it was all about killing. With all these fast days during the war, it's a wonder anyone ever ate.

John Fea reflects on what he would teach about the original Thanksgiving here, at his new column over at Patheos, and what it meant for the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, who both had been through some brutal times, to share a brief celebration together. I hope your celebration goes well.

Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners

Editor's Note: A previous reference and post on the Pilgrims provoked a flurry of emails from scholars and others quite passionate on the subject. So, again, mea culpa; more importantly, to atone for my sin of an unnecessarily flippant tone, I'm posting below author Jeremy Bangs's explanation of his recent very extensive work Strangers and Pilgrims, based on thirty years of research in the original sources, including many years researching in the original Dutch sources in Leiden.

A note along the same lines: I made reference earlier to Nick Bunker's new book as well as a review of it in The New Republic. Jim Cullen appreciatively reviews this work, Make Haste from Babylon, over at HNN this week.
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Strangers and Pilgrims
by Jeremy Bangs

Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners – Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, Massachusetts: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2009). 894 pp. + xxxii; 134 ills. and maps. $55.

Of my eleven scholarly books and many articles, six concern the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony. Four are document publications - the 17th-century town records of Scituate, Massachusetts (3 vols.), and Indian Deeds: Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691. The Scituate records are more extensive than those of any other New England town outside Boston. They provide information that allows a reconsideration of the generalizations found in the detail studies of other towns from ca. 1970. In fact, most of those generalizations do not hold up to comparison with more extensive and explanatory documentation. Similarly, the information in the Scituate records contradicts the generalizations in David Hackett Fisher's famous work from the 1980s. The introductions to the Scituate records (totalling ca. 225 pp.) explain the implications for historiography.

I started that project merely as something to do, since I was living in Scituate at the time As the transcription progressed, I realized that the contents differed from what had become common knowledge - for example, it turns out that Scituate was the major town of Plymouth Colony after 1650, being sixty percent larger in population and economy than its nearest rival, the town of Plymouth. No one has paid attention to this in writing a history of the colony, or of New England. Scituate was an actively growing commercial center with interesting religious controversies as well, all overlooked in histories of New England. Similarly the introduction to Indian Deeds, again, ca. 225 pp, explains the significance of the documents that follow for the historiography of Indian relations with the colonists - The fifth book is a biography of Edward Winslow, third gov. of Plymouth Colony. Contradicting the assumption that Plymouth was of no wide importance beyond its own insignificant borders, this revises the history of Plymouth colony's early finances then continues with Winslow's role in the Cromwellian government. He returned to London in 1646 and rose in the committee structure of the government. Eventually he was appointed jointly by the Dutch States General and by Cromwell to be a member (acting as chairman) of an international committee whose task was to resolve commercial disputes remaining between The Netherlands and England after the first Anglo-Dutch war. His career puts Plymouth Colony in the middle of the now fashionable Atlantic history

As for Strangers and Pilgrims: Rejecting centuries of stereotyping both pro and con, Strangers and Pilgrims portrays the emergence of the Pilgrims as a coherent religious and social group whose goals and experimental choices when reacting to past and current events and circumstances made Plymouth Colony unique. Rather than providing neat, static definitions of who they were and then proceeding to conclude that their lives and their colony evaporated into insignificant myth, the book gives attention to the various shifting contexts – religious, political, social, industrial, and domestic - that called these people to responsive action. It is the culmination of thirty years' archival research in America, England, and The Netherlands.

The first chapter reviews the hopes that animated English Puritans when James I ascended the throne - hopes whose disappointment inspired Pilgrim leaders, William Brewster, Richard Clyfton, John Robinson, and John Smyth. They concluded that no true church could exist within the traditional hierarchies, parish structures, and rules retained from Roman Catholicism. Withdrawal from the Church of England led to persecution, while they and their congregations thought they saw God’s anger at England’s failure to achieve further reformation revealed in signs of divine wrath – the tsunami that devastated southwest England in January, 1607, followed by crop failure and famine throughout the country in the summer, the return of the plague in the fall, and a portentous comet towards the end of the year. Christians who had separated into a covenanted community seeking to lead a godly life felt the need to flee. Holland offered religious refuge.

Other English Separatists had found safety in Amsterdam a decade earlier, but sexual scandal among them threatened to associate the newcomers with their disrepute, a danger that increased when Rev. John Smyth re-baptized himself and some followers, calling up images of revolutionary Anabaptism with its end-time social chaos. Rev. John Robinson led the group now known as the Pilgrims to the university town of Leiden, famous for its cloth industry relying on refugee laborers. That city, however, had become the focal point of controversy that would split the Dutch Reformed Church and culminate in a military coup that put an end to the toleration for which Holland had become famous.

Familiarizing themselves with the town, the Pilgrims came into contact not only with the university and with Dutch Reformed and Mennonite churches, but also with English soldiers garrisoned throughout Leiden (such as Myles Standish) and with the thousands of French-speaking refugees who made up around 15% of the town’s population. Some people already in Leiden joined the Pilgrim church, while more new members came over from East Anglia, Kent, and London; the diversity of origins required communal attempts to build unity of purpose. This effort contrasts with any simplistic characterization of the structures of their colony in New England as representing a conscious or unconscious re-creation of regional folk customs and habits recalled from y^e olde England.

Although the Pilgrims’ arrival in Leiden coincided with the beginning of the Twelve Years’ Truce in the Dutch revolt against Spanish Hapsburg domination, the peace was unstable. England was providing nearly half the soldiers in the Dutch army; King James exploited this dependence to demand ever greater influence in Dutch religious and political affairs. The Pilgrims found themselves under increasing pressure from England, whose ambassador successfully called for the suppression of the Pilgrims’ publishing project when he discovered offenses to the king’s majesty in Pilgrim calls for reform. King James demanded that Pilgrim William Brewster be arrested; an English bishop even made a clandestine visit to Leiden apparently to try to discover Brewster’s hiding place. The Pilgrims felt the pressure to seek a safer haven before Holland was once again engulfed in war

John Robinson participated in the university theological faculty's debates between double-predestination Calvinists (the Gomarists or Contra-Remonstrants) and their less rigid opponents (the Arminians or Remonstrants). The major focus of the controversy in Leiden was the appointment of Conrad Vorstius to be professor of theology. His opponents accused him of Socinianism and used that charge to convince King James I to retreat from religious toleration to a demand for Calvinist conformity in the Dutch church. Under his political pressure, Prince Maurits carried out a military coup, deposing the toleration-minded Remonstrants in government. The Synod of Dort then proceeded to condemn anyone with a broader theological view than that of the Contra-Remonstrants. The book's examination of documented political intrigue gives a new interpretation to the entire period in Holland. Although agreeing theologically with the decisions of the Synod of Dort, Robinson and the Pilgrims rejected calls to require everyone in Plymouth Colony to subscribe to the Heidelberg Catechism and the Belgic Confession, thus taking a position that had been among those for which the Remonstrants were condemned at Dort. In the Pilgrims' view, only the Bible and Apostles' Creed (which they thought had been composed by the Apostles) could be obligatory - everything else was inevitably imperfect because all things human are imperfect. Their colony became relatively tolerant because of this literalist understanding of the story of the Fall in Genesis.

With the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims established independent democratic government in their colony. Introducing the Dutch custom of civil marriage registration, the Pilgrims provided equitable laws for all colonists, whether or not members of the Pilgrim church. With their constitution of 1636, they conceived a representative government that gave no role to the clergy. Recognizing the Indians as equal creatures, the Pilgrims attempted to provide fair treatment for all in their courts; and they acquired land exclusively by sale or trade from the Indians who were understood to be the proper owners. Through their familiarity with the Dutch Union of Utrecht (1579), the Pilgrims helped form the United Colonies of New England (1643) on that model - a model that in turn served to inform the confederation structure of American independence in the late 18th century. Without any emphasis on presentism or triumphalism the book shows how the Pilgrims affected the societies in which they lived and were in turn affected by them.

By the Rivers of Babylon, where the Pilgrims Wept

Paul Harvey

In The Book, David Wallace-Wells has a nice review of a book that will interest some of you, especially you colonialists and economic history types: Nick Bunker, Make Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and their World. I haven't read this book, but the review is interesting, and ends with a nice passage:

The unfortunate emphasis in Making Haste on pilgrim entrepreneurship, and its pointed disinterest in Calvinist theology, is telling, and natural enough. Though the United States remains in some sense a Christian nation—churchgoing, evangelical, exceptionalist—the strange theology of our Puritan forebears is far more foreign to us, and far more difficult to reckon with, than their scuffling pre-market mercantilism. American religion was not really invented until the nineteenth century, and the expansive denominations that emerged, largely on the frontier, in that Second Great Awakening represent perhaps as profound and complete a repudiation of the Puritans' early modern Protestantism as that Protestantism had been a rejection of the establishment Catholicism that governed Europe in the centuries before Luther. In the severe Mayflower Calvinism of William Bradford and his Plymouth pilgrims, predestination was an inscrutable covenant, piety a gratuity from fear and trembling, and prayer an expression of desperate agnosticism. In the inviting creed of the new American religions, whose triumphal culture we still inhabit today, salvation was there for the taking. All one had to do was claim it.

Update: Some of you all were taking my intended joke about not being interested in the Pilgrims in the slightest a little too seriously, so have changed the above post accordingly. Sorry all you Pilgrim-heads, didn't mean to offend!

The scholarly Jeremy Bangs, who has made a career out of studying the Pilgrims, presents a contrasting view of this material in his book Strangers and Pilgrims, Travelers and Sojourners, which Randall referenced some time ago on the blog. That is the place to go for the most in-depth primary source research on the Pilgrims' origins in Leiden and sojourn to America.

Rebunking the Pilgrims?

[crossposted at the THS blog]
Randall Stephens

As Americans prepare to stuff their faces with turkey, pie, turkey pie, and all manner of bread-related foods, and clock in millions of hours of TV football viewing, it’s worth considering the Pilgrims, originators of America's holiday. (I was just thinking that a Martian would have a very hard time understanding how football and overeating are linked to an otherworldly religious sect.) How do Pilgrims fit into American history and religious history in general?

How low the founders of our national myth have fallen. Nineteenth-century Protestants celebrated the Pilgrims as hearty, pure-of-heart forbearers. Yet even in the 19th century Pilgrims had their share of detractors. Eli Thayer, the Kansas prophet, and the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale fussed about the place of Pilgrims in American history. Every lowly Kansan (which I proudly count myself among) had more grit and determination and was more deserving of panegyrics than were the not-all-that-great Pilgrims.

In 1881, Mark Twain delivered an uproarious address, in the form of a plea, to the New England Society of Philadelphia. Why all this “laudation and hosannaing” about the Pilgrims? he asked his audience. “The Pilgrims were a simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before, or at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this one.” “Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims” was a classic piece of Sam Clemens’ contrarianism. As the whole country went mad with Pilgrim fever, Twain shouted, “Humbug!”

Good fun. But did Twain’s comic take on those “ignorant,” “narrow” Pilgrims win the day in the 20th century? And did it win the day minus the comedy? Historian Jeremy Bangs thinks so. In 2004, he wrote:

Those inspiring Pilgrims of my youth have taken a beating! According to today’s historians, the Pilgrims were among the least significant of England’s American colonists. Their tiny Plymouth Colony was soon absorbed by the larger and more prosperous Massachussets Bay. The Pilgrims were no friendlier to Indians than other Europeans in the Americas—which is to say, they were greedy, duplicitous purveyors of genocide. Nor did they invent democracy: the Mayflower Compact was just an expedient means of maintaining order in a new environment. And their first “Thanksgiving” was nothing more than a replica of a traditional, secular English harvest feast. The Pilgrims didn’t even call themselves Pilgrims, a term coined by the 19th-century Americans who invented these virtuous forbears out of thin air in an effort to grace the relatively new United States with a glorious past. Indeed, about the only aspect of my schoolboy Pilgrims that has survived this assault is their poverty.

The truth about the Pilgrims—and yes, I do still call them Pilgrims—is perhaps closer to the “myth” than to what we can learn from today’s textbooks.

So Bangs offers an erudite rebuttal to the Pilgrim’s modern-day cultured despisers. His Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners (General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2009) sets the Pilgrims in their thick historical context. His well-written scholarly account has no rival as far as scope and detail goes. The book has a whopping 894 pages and by my reckoning weighs nearly 4lbs. As a bonus, it's richly illustrated with a variety of prints and photographs (Bangs has spent much time working on the material culture of English separatists.)

Bangs writes that Samuel Elliot Morrison, Darret Rutman, and Theodre Dwight Bozeman dismissed the Plymouth colony as insignificant, a backwater. Add to that Malcolm X’s turn of phrase: “We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us!” (I'm not sure if Brian Wilson's immortal words count as a critique or a drug-related bit of wordplay: "Rock, rock, roll, Plymouth Rock roll over . . .") Since the 1970s, a simple formula has guided much wisdom on the Pilgrims: Indians = good; Pilgrims = bad.

Why do the Pilgrims deserve a new look? Their lives and the record they left tell us something basic about the European roots and the hot Protestant context of America’s first English settlers. The Pilgrims later significance, Bangs notes, also reveals a great deal about what future generations wanted to remember (and one might add, forget) about early colonial America. Bangs argues: “No history of the Plymouth Colony, no history of Leiden, no history of the Netherlands so far explains adequately the Pilgrims' defining experience in exile.” Travellers and Sojourners “undertakes the necessary task of starting over, not simply to add incrementally to what is already known about the Pilgrims in Leiden but instead to reconceive the question of who the Pilgrims were and what contributed to the choices that make them interesting historically.”