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.

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.”