AMERICANS LEARN ABOUT THE Pilgrims when they are children. In elementary schools across the country, late November has been a time for Pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses. Along the way, Americans absorb elements of the Pilgrim myth: a ship, a compact, a rock, a winter of death and disease, a harvest, and a Thanksgiving turkey meal. It is a heartwarming story about two peoples feasting together instead of fighting each other.
There is also an alternative, more dispiriting history, a story of betrayal and theft. The Pilgrims made a treaty and alliance with the Indians, then took their land and killed or enslaved those who resisted. Those Native communities that survived found themselves reduced to small, impoverished enclaves. In this line of thought, the ongoing American adulation of the Mayflower passengers is offensive. Late November is a time for mourning, not a time for giving thanks.
They Knew They Were Pilgrims includes aspects of the above stories but also introduces other narratives. This is a history of the peoples who lived in Plymouth Colony (alternatively New Plymouth, later known within Massachusetts as the Old Colony) from the English and Dutch events that led to its 1620 founding until its 1691 incorporation into a larger Province of Massachusetts Bay.1 In its pages, readers will encounter famous men such as Governor William Bradford and Massasoit Ousamequin but also meet less familiar individuals: Awashonks, a female sachem who preserved a Native community for two decades amid dispossession and war; William Vassall, who established a second church within a single town and contended for religious liberty before colonial and English courts; and James Cudworth, a Plymouth Colony magistrate who lost his position when he defended persecuted Quakers. In his own history, Bradford promised to proceed “in a plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things.”2 Plymouth Colony’s history, though, is not plain, singular, or simple.
During the early years of the American republic, ministers, politicians, and historians lionized the Pilgrims. Timothy Dwight, John Quincy Adams, and George Bancroft drew straight lines from the Mayflower Compact to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention, making the Pilgrims the heroic progenitors of democracy and republicanism. Then, in the mid- to late nineteenth century, Americans came to associate the Pilgrims with an annual observance of a late-November Thanksgiving Day. The holiday further enhanced interest in the Mayflower passengers, now the most famous colonists in the history of what became the United States.
Despite the ongoing popular appeal of the Pilgrims, academic historians have largely ignored Plymouth Colony. When the mid-twentieth-century historian Perry Miller resuscitated an interest in New England puritanism, he concentrated on the more numerous, literary, and wealthy settlers of Massachusetts Bay. Plymouth makes no appearance at all in Miller’s magisterial New England Mind. Apparently there were no Old Colony minds worth mentioning. In particular, Miller convinced generations of historians that the Pilgrim church exerted no influence on the broader development of New England Congregationalism. For example, historian of puritanism Theodore Dwight Bozeman dismissed Plymouth’s congregation as “pathetically unimportant.” If Plymouth Colony didn’t matter for the development of New England religion, it obviously carried little weight in terms of politics or commerce. Samuel Eliot Morison, Perry Miller’s colleague at Harvard, admired the Pilgrims and edited a popular edition of Bradford’s history, but he conceded Plymouth’s insignificance. “By any quantitative standard,” he wrote, “[Plymouth] was one of the smallest, weakest, and least important of the English colonies.” For the most part, therefore, historians set Plymouth aside once John Winthrop and his puritan flotilla reach Massachusetts Bay. Boston is the city on a hill, Plymouth a moribund backwater.3
Besides their place within American mythology and genealogy, then, do the Pilgrims and their colony matter? The Mayflower passengers and the other English settlers of Plymouth Colony had genuine accomplishments. The separatists among the Mayflower passengers transplanted a church in which laymen elected their officers and exercised discipline over each other. When they formed a government and made laws, Pilgrim leaders could not envision—and would not have favored—democracy as later Americans would understand it. Nevertheless, they established a political framework with a significant degree of participation and one that endured for nearly seventy years.
Plymouth Colony also matters in a very different respect. A few months after their 1620 landing, the Pilgrims established a mutual defense treaty with Massasoit. While this alliance initially benefited both English settlers and Wampanoags, the Pilgrims took steps to establish themselves as the foremost military power in the region. By the time of Massasoit’s 1660 death, Plymouth’s magistrates treated and mistreated the Wampanoags as their subjects. Settlers acquired Wampanoag land through purchase, pressure, and swindle. Eventually, sachems in the western portion of New Plymouth chose armed resistance over further dispossession and humiliation. The resulting King Philip’s War (1675–78) shattered Native and English communities across New England.
Still, the merit of unearthing and narrating New Plymouth’s history does not hinge only on the colony’s grand significance or lack thereof. Rather, They Knew They Were Pilgrims uses Plymouth Colony as a fresh lens for examining the contested meaning of liberty in early New England. The English settlers who came to New Plymouth over the span of its seven-decade history shared a fierce commitment to liberty, but they understood it in a variety of often contradictory ways.
Prominent among these meanings were the many varieties of Christian liberty articulated by the colony’s Protestant Christians. The majority of the Pilgrims were separatists, men and women who had entirely rejected the Church of England. They did so to reclaim what they understood as “the liberty of the gospel,” their freedom to form their own churches and choose their own officers. These Pilgrim separatists embarked for North America because they wanted to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. “They knew they were pilgrims,” wrote William Bradford. Even before John Bunyan further popularized the motif through The Pilgrim’s Progress, many English Protestants understood their lives as spiritual pilgrimages, beset with temptations and afflictions but with the promise of eventual glory. Plymouth Colony’s settlers disagreed among themselves, however, about the prescribed earthly course for this pilgrimage, in particular about what constituted the pure worship of God.4
Many settlers also favored “liberty of conscience,” but this was another slippery phrase. Liberty of conscience sometimes simply meant that religious dissenters could opt out of established forms of worship, but it also could imply a fuller toleration of religious pluralism. Throughout most of Plymouth Colony’s seventy-year history, magistrates did not force individuals to attend worship, join churches, or have their children baptized. In these significant respects, settlers enjoyed a certain amount of liberty of conscience. At the same time, dissenters did not possess the freedom to air their opinions or gather with like-minded men and women for their own religious exercises. Also, once Plymouth’s government mandated that towns tax inhabitants to build Congregational churches and pay Congregational ministers, it did not exempt dissenters from these obligations. Quakers and some Baptists contended for a more complete religious toleration. They eventually gained the liberty to worship according to their own principles, but their struggle against church taxes continued long after New Plymouth’s demise.
Some of the Pilgrims suffered persecution for their religious beliefs and practices in England. Once in charge of their own colony, however, they persecuted others. Plymouth’s leaders banished a number of dissenters, and they whipped, imprisoned, and fined scores of Quakers. As the historian Alexandra Walsham observes of seventeenth-century Europeans more generally, “This apparent double standard was not rank hypocrisy.” Like most of their contemporaries, Pilgrim leaders desired religious uniformity and understood Christian liberty as mandating very specific forms of worship, church government, and discipline. Until late in the seventeenth century, the main argument among European Christians was not whether there should be only one religious option, but what that option should be and how governments should penalize those who did not conform to it.5
Debates about liberty were as much about politics as religion. Building upon the ideals of the Mayflower Compact, Plymouth’s settlers declared that “according to the free liberties” of England, they would not suffer any law or tax to be imposed on them except by their own consent. They also regarded annual elections and the right to a jury trial as fundamental liberties. Both in New England and old England, there was disagreement about who possessed these liberties and exactly what constituted consent, but there was a common vigilance against the arbitrary exercise of political power.6 Towns resisted when New Plymouth’s General Court ordered them to build meetinghouses or levy church taxes, and settlers protested when a crown-appointed governor imposed taxes on them without their consent.
Finally, there were English men and women who simply wanted the liberty to live as they pleased. These individuals wanted nothing to do with New England’s churches or governments. If they criticized those institutions, or in other ways made themselves conspicuous, they suffered reprisals. Especially on the margins of the colony, though, settlers found the space to follow their own principles and pursuits.
When seventeenth-century Englishmen felt deprived of their liberties, they complained that they were being made slaves. It was a powerful argument because the English were well acquainted with slavery and servitude. As was the case in other colonies, Plymouth’s settlers reduced people to various forms of bondage. Many English and some Irish men, women, and children came to the colony as indentured servants, and courts sometimes sentenced offenders to periods of servitude.
Even before the Pilgrims anchored off Cape Cod, moreover, Europeans had captured and enslaved dozens of Native people in the region. One of those victims, Tisquantum (or Squanto), was from the site of the Pilgrim settlement. While Plymouth’s early leaders criticized the men who had mistreated Squanto, their descendants enslaved large numbers of Native men, women, and children, sometimes for a set number of years, but in many cases for life. Hundreds of Native slaves were exported, ending up in the Caribbean or across the Atlantic Ocean. By this time, Plymouth’s English households also owned a small but significant number of African slaves. As in the rest of the transatlantic English world, liberty and bondage developed in tandem.
Over the course of the seventeenth century, New Plymouth’s English settlers—and at times, the Native peoples and African Americans within its bounds—came to speak shared languages of liberty, but conflicts about the nature and extent of those liberties remained unresolved. They still are. Present-day Americans cherish liberty but disagree vehemently about its meaning. One person’s religious liberty is, from another vantage point, a license to discriminate, and Americans have bitter arguments about who is entitled to the rights enshrined in the founding documents of the United States. Four centuries after the Mayflower, the history of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony points us back to earlier chapters in this contest for liberty.