CAPTAIN WILLIAM COIT IS a Revolutionary War footnote. He was from New London, Connecticut, fought at Bunker Hill, drifted in and out of the army for a few years, and was captured by the British in 1781. An aide to George Washington once dismissed him as “a mere blubber.”
Coit had one success to his credit, though. In the fall of 1775, he took command of a privateer and sailed out to look for British ships bringing provisions to the encircled Redcoats at Boston. Coit’s vessel was barely seaworthy. The mainmast had rotted off. The deck, he joked, was new “when it was first made” and now “ashamed of being old.” His cannons were artifacts from the early days of English Connecticut. He warned that firing them might split his ship in two. He reassured his commanding officers, however, that as long as he encountered only “unarmed vessels,” he would keep his ship afloat. It worked out. As Washington reported, Coit “blundered upon two vessels from Nova Scotia.” He took the ships, their crews, and his modest plunder—hay, livestock, and chickens—to the nearest port, which was Plymouth.
Once there, he had some fun at his prisoners’ expense. He made them “land upon the same rock our ancestors first trod when they landed in America.” From upon the rock, either Coit’s men or his prisoners—the account is unclear—“gave three cheers, and wished success to American arms.” Coit and his crew soon abandoned their ship, which was put out of service the next year.1
During the Revolutionary era, New Englanders revived their interest in the Pilgrims, and many of them took the “Forefathers” far more seriously than did William Coit. In Massachusetts, Patriots yoked the Forefathers to the cause of American independence, and by the early nineteenth century, the Pilgrims had become symbols of republicanism, democracy, and religious toleration. “We have come to this Rock,” Daniel Webster proclaimed at the bicentennial of the Pilgrim landing, “to record here our homage for our Pilgrim Fathers; our sympathy in their sufferings; our gratitude for their labors; our admiration of their virtues; our veneration for their piety; and our attachment to those principles of civil and religious liberty.” Americans did not always agree on what exact forms of liberty the Pilgrims had established. Webster, for instance, called on Americans to pledge themselves “upon the Rock of Plymouth, to extirpate and destroy” the slave trade. Unitarian ministers stressed Pilgrim tolerance, whereas more conservative Congregationalists praised the Pilgrims’ adherence to Calvinist verities. Depending on the time, place, and political party, the Pilgrims stood for social order, democratic equality, or even secession (because of their separatism). Regardless of how they refashioned them, however, nearly all white Americans lauded the Forefathers as the forerunners of ideals they themselves cherished.2
By the time Webster delivered his bicentennial oration, Plymouth Rock was no longer the massive granite boulder the Pilgrims would have seen in 1620. In or around 1775, independence-minded townspeople led by Colonel Theophilus Cotton—a grandson of John and Joanna Cotton—decided “to consecrate the rock on which [the Pilgrims] landed to the shrine of liberty.” Cotton’s act of consecration was to move the rock to the “liberty pole square” in front of Plymouth’s meetinghouse. Plymouth’s townspeople were not as adept with giant screws as their Forefathers had been. In their attempt to raise the boulder, they split it in two. The upper portion went to the liberty pole; the larger base remained at the wharf.3
As new generations of politicians and ministers heaped praised on the Pilgrims, the rock itself became smaller and more fragile. People sat on the rock, wrote on it, chipped off bits of it as souvenirs, and moved the two remaining halves around. On July 4, 1834, townspeople transported the rock’s upper portion from the town square to the front of Pilgrim Hall. Meanwhile, the rock’s base remained exposed at the wharf and was subject to many indignities. When the base was moved under a canopy completed in 1867, a considerable portion was removed to make it fit. One large hunk of the rock ended up as a doorstep at the Harlow House in Plymouth. In 1880, the Pilgrim Society reunited the two halves of the rock. Finally, on the occasion of the Pilgrim tercentennial in 1920, the town built the stately portico that has housed Plymouth Rock for the last hundred years. Many of the million or so tourists who come to Plymouth each year peer at the rock and wonder why it isn’t bigger. It is remarkable that there is anything left at all. The boulder has had a rough last few centuries.4
Just as some Americans chipped away at Plymouth Rock, so others have chiseled away at the mythology surrounding the Pilgrims. The Mayflower Compact? The terse document had no influence on the political theory of the American founding. The landing on the rock? There are no references to the rock as the Pilgrim landing spot until 150 years after the Mayflower. The First Thanksgiving? Not a proper thanksgiving, and even if it had been, not the first. What about religious toleration and friendship with the Indians? In the years that followed the compact, the landing, and the 1621 harvest, Plymouth Colony leaders beheaded Indians and took their land, fined Baptists, and whipped Quakers.
Some Americans never bought into the myths fashioned by men like Daniel Webster. “The pilgrims landed at Plymouth,” stated William Apess, an early nineteenth-century Methodist minister of mixed Pequot ancestry, “and without asking liberty from anyone, they possessed themselves of a portion of the country, and built themselves houses, and then made a treaty, and commanded them [the Wampanoags] to accede to it.”5 Apess pointed out that if the New Englanders of his day faced such an invasion, they would rush to defend their country. Yet with no awareness of their hypocrisy, Apess’s white neighbors celebrated the Pilgrim invaders. Apess’s argument now gains a broader hearing. Each year, the United American Indians of New England holds a National Day of Mourning above Plymouth Rock on Cole’s Hill. Speakers talk about “Thankstaking” instead of “Thanksgiving” and link New England’s seventeenth-century history to ongoing Native American struggles for justice. The National Day of Mourning gathering now draws larger crowds than the Pilgrim Progress procession held the same day.
Perhaps the Pilgrims and the colony they founded are like Plymouth Rock, diminished and disappointing. Yet when Pilgrim mythology is stripped away, the more expansive and colorful history of Plymouth Colony remains, like the base of the rock buried underneath the sand. The Mayflower Compact and the 1621 harvest are still significant, if not in the same ways that nineteenth-century politicians and painters imagined them. Moreover, these well-known founding moments have obscured the colony’s subsequent history, including the decades-long Quaker struggle against persecution and the resilience of the Sakonnet community amid war and dispossession.
What about the contribution of the Pilgrims to American “principles of civil and religious liberty?” The Pilgrims and their successors cared a great deal about liberty, but they understood it in particular, seventeenth-century ways. Over the colony’s seven-decade history, there were ongoing contests over the meanings of Christian liberty, liberty of conscience, and the political liberties of “freeborn English people.” At the same time, settlers left no record of any debate about African slavery, and there are only a few hints of controversy among English settlers about their reduction of Wampanoags and other Native peoples to servitude, slavery, and subjection. Plymouth Colony leaders took it for granted that some groups of people were entitled to more liberties than others, while English dissenters and Natives pushed back against these assumptions. Rather than bequeathing to later generations of Americans a simple story of democracy and freedom, the Pilgrims and the other inhabitants of Plymouth Colony left behind both a complicated legacy of human bondage and unresolved debates about liberty.