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Virtuous Pilgrims?

Last issue I explained the haphazard manner in which Thanksgiving became the holiday we know and celebrate today. While I personally enjoy the celebration, I confess to an abiding dismay about many of the beliefs that Americans cherish when they speak about Thanksgiving.

The root of the misinformation about Thanksgiving begins in our earliest education about the holiday. In early grade school we are all regaled with the story of the struggling Pilgrims who fled to America from England to escape religious persecution and established a colony at Plymouth Rock. We are further told how these Pilgrims suffered mightily and were ultimately saved through the kindness of the Native Americans who taught them how to plant crops and hunt game. And finally, we are told how, after a successful first harvest, the Pilgrims and Native Americans gathered together and shared a huge feast.

A few years back I dispelled the myth about the Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing the land and enjoying life in America together. True, they did participate in a great feast but within a generation, the Pilgrims and Native Americans were killing one another. The culmination of my column explained how the Pilgrims killed King Philip (the son of Chief Massasoit who led his tribe to the great feast with the Pilgrims) and then hung his head over the gate of their now fortified colony.

The next myth that needs to be corrected is the notion that the Pilgrims were escaping religious persecution and were, therefore, tolerant of other religious beliefs. While the myth provides a moral weight to the beginnings of America by seeming to indicate that we welcomed diversity from the very beginning, the facts are very different. My case in point is the sad tale of Thomas Morton.

Morton sailed to America in 1624 with some 30 indentured men under the leadership of a Captain Wollaston. They settled on land given them by the native Algonquin tribe and began trading furs. It wasn’t long before Wollaston began to sell off many of the indentured servants to Virginia tobacco farms, which led Morton to persuade those that remained to flee with him and found a new colony as free men.

Morton and his followers set up their colony, which he called Merry Mount (sometimes “Ma-re Mount as a pun on the Latin word for sea), not far north from the Pilgrims. Soon, disgruntled members from the Plymouth colony were “defecting” to Morton’s colony.

One of the chief characteristics of Morton’s society was their close relation with the Native Americans. Morton traded guns freely with his native neighbors and, according to allegations emanating from Plymouth, consorted with native women and encouraged his male colony members to do likewise.

The Plymouth Pilgrims came when Morton’s colony hosted a grand May Day celebration. According to Morton’s account in his book New English Canaan, the celebration went something like this:

“The inhabitants of Merrymount … did devise amongst themselves to have … Revels, and merriment after the old English custom … & therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beer, & provided a case of bottles to be spent, with other good cheer, for all comers of that day. And upon Mayday they brought the Maypole to the place appointed, with drums, guns, pistols, and other fitting instruments, for that purpose; and there erected it with the help of Savages, that came thither of purpose to see the manner of our Revels. A goodly pine tree of 80 foot long, was reared up, with a pair of buckshorns nailed on, somewhat near unto the top of it; where it stood as a fair sea mark for directions, how to find out the way to mine Host of Ma-re Mount.”

According to Plymouth Governor William Bradford, in his History of Plymouth Plantation, the celebration went like this:

“They … set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.”

As you no doubt surmised, the Pilgrims under the leadership of Miles Standish, invaded Merrymount and arrested Morton. John Endicott led the chopping down of the Maypole, in addition to burning of all the structures within the colony.

Morton was taken before Gov. Bradford, but because of Morton’s many influential connections in England, he ordered Morton to be marooned on an island.

Morton was eventually rescued by an English ship and returned to England where, for the next decade he wrote and used legal maneuverings to make life as uncomfortable as possible for the Plymouth Plantation. His New English Canaan was published in 1637 and extolled the abundance of the land while staunchly defending the integrity of the Native Americans, and he played an instrumental role in getting the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter revoked.

Near the end of his life, Morton, desiring to see his New Canaan one more time, set sail to America. When he arrived he found that most of his Native American dead through violence or disease and the Pilgrim’s influence greater than ever. He was immediately thrown in dank dungeon where he spent the entire winter.

When he was released (again, because the Pilgrim’s did not dare execute him), his health was nearly destroyed and he fled to Maine – as far as he could get from the Pilgrims and their influence – where he died in 1647.

So by all means, enjoy your Thanksgiving festivities this year – and every year – just avoid extolling the virtues of the Pilgrims when you do so.