A NEW ENGLAND

IN SEPTEMBER 1638, the government of New Plymouth impaneled a jury of twelve to try four men for robbery and murder. The jurors concluded that the accused had robbed a man they met in the highway. Assaulting him, they took his possessions—three coats of woolen cloth and wampum, beads made from a shell with various uses in Native communities, valued as a means of exchange among Europeans—and left him for dead. The victim managed to travel home before dying, there relating his tale to various people, including Roger Williams, a former Plymouth resident and founder of Rhode Island. One of his four assailants, Daniel Crosse, escaped before the trial. The court sentenced the others to death. In accordance with both English and Plymouth law, they were executed by hanging. William Bradford—who that year served as an assistant to Governor Thomas Prence—bemoaned the fact that this incident marked the second trial for murder since the founding of Plymouth eighteen years before.¹ The court case, however much it dismayed Bradford, demonstrated that Plymouth had indeed imported the forms of governance and justice of his native England. Trial by jury and treatment of murder as a capital offense both supported the assertion that Plymouth instituted governance “after the English form,” as a Dutch visitor described it. The case nonetheless prompted some grumbling. No one objected on principle to death for murderers, a well-established and uncontroversial punishment. Rather “Some have thought it great severity, to Hang three English for one Indian.”² The victim, Penowanyanquis, was a Narragansett man.

The trial for the killing of Penowanyanquis showed observers that Plymouth would conduct business as an English outpost. The forms of justice—the trial and the sentence—reflected standard English practice. Before the trial, Plymouth and its larger neighbor, Massachusetts Bay, debated which colony held responsibility to punish the crime. Aware that the murder might spark retribution from the Narragansett, a powerful neighboring community, colonial leaders agreed that the transgression had to be addressed forcefully. Yet authorities in Massachusetts pushed the case to Plymouth, claiming that the crime’s location—at Misquamsqueece (present day Seekonk, Massachusetts)—put it within the smaller jurisdiction. Bradford later observed that subsequently the larger colony would reverse this geographical claim, asserting a right to the area based on its own land grant.³ Even these debates over boundaries and jurisdiction reflected European ways of organizing society. Punishing Penowanyanquis’s killers both protected settlers from retaliatory attack and demonstrated the legitimacy of English practices. What made some planters grumble—one dead Indian for three dead English—aimed to prove the point that settler justice could be fair and impartial. Executing Thomas Jackson, Arthur Peach, and Richard Stinnings averted war, and at the same time it signaled that English institutions could serve everyone impartially. The trial formed one small part of the larger project of making New England on an English model.

The very name of “New England” heralded that project. John Smith (of early Virginia fame) bestowed that name four years before the first Plymouth settlers arrived. His Description of New England (1616) not only coined the phrase, it also included—in some copies of the book—a list of English place names for various locations along the coast. According to Smith, Prince Charles (then the heir to the throne and later Charles I) renamed the major river and two capes, assigning names taken from members of the royal family. The cape already known to English sailors as Cape Cod for the plentiful fish in local waters he rechristened Cape James after his father. That new name did not catch on, but other royal referents—Cape Ann for his mother, Charles River for himself—endure. As Smith realized, naming laid claim to a place.

John Smith—best known for his sojourn in Virginia—wrote a detailed description of the region he dubbed “New England.” As part of his project of presenting the area as a great prospect for English colonization, he gave English place names to various locations. He claimed to have gotten Prince Charles (son of James I) to choose new names. Here he lists earlier (usually but not always native) names and the corresponding English terms in A Description of New England, 1616.

Previously—when England founded two charter companies to divide up the North American coast—each company was designated a Virginia company. One, set in London, had responsibility for the southern region, and it would become known as the Virginia Company, founding the colony of Virginia. The other, set in Plymouth, England, had charge of the northern coast (the area Smith renamed New England), but it never accomplished much. In fact, in the same year that the Mayflower sailed, that company was reorganized into the Council for New England, adopting the area’s new name to distinguish it from the southern undertaking. The Council produced a promotional publication that cited Smith’s naming, endorsing his efforts to reshape the northern region into a linguistically new England. Sir William Alexander soon published a different map, one that showed how elite men in England had hypothetically carved up the area, giving each man his own domain.⁴ According to that way of thinking, English names would be followed by English overlords who owned the land and supplied men to work it. This quasi-feudal view of how to manage expansion did not prosper, as new arrivals paid little attention to Alexander’s elites, who did less for the region’s development than they might have. Smith’s vision had more staying power, as the idea of creating English-style towns bearing the names of English places gradually conquered the landscape. Not all the names offered by Smith and the prince remained, but the project itself proved a success.

Plymouth Plantation may have been so named because of Smith’s map. The planters apparently carried it and the place-name list on the initial voyage, and their town was founded in the general vicinity of the place marked as Plymouth. For those conscious of earlier English claims to the area, Plymouth had another resonance as well. The English investment company known as the Virginia Company of Plymouth theoretically held the territory, so the planters may have meant to reference the company that they hoped to approach for belated permission to set up on Cape Cod Bay. Plymouth chronicler Nathaniel Morton later offered a third explanation for the name’s origins, stating that it honored the city from which they had sailed.⁵ However Plymouth came to be so named—in a nod to Smith’s map and Prince Charles’s naming exercise, in reference to the company, or in memory of the English port city—the planters supported the effort to rename the landscape with English place names.

The naming scheme, from Smith’s viewpoint, declared that the region was so similar to England itself that its new residents would be easily able to form it into a new England. He implied that settling in New England would allow English people to replicate their culture in every way, extending England across the Atlantic. Roger Cushman, writing of early Plymouth Plantation, which he had just visited, explained that New England (which he believed might be an island) was so called not just because of Smith’s renaming project but also for its similarity to “England the Native soile of English-men.”⁶ Thomas Morton, an enemy to Plymouth planters with whom he rarely saw eye to eye on anything, nonetheless agreed in praising the region. In Morton’s writing, he objected to the men who ran Plymouth but had nothing but complimentary observations about the location. Calling it “The New English Canaan” in a reference to the Old Testament idea of a promised land, he suggested that this promise would be fulfilled in New England.⁷ In his view, all the land needed to deliver that promise was to rid it of the pesky Plymouth residents. For English people, then, this land would be a sort of paradise, offering refuge and comfort. Morton even accused the settlers of hiding New England’s benefits in order to keep it to themselves.

Like all migrants, the people of Plymouth tried to create a new home that would seem familiar, one that would recreate not only legal institutions but also more basic aspects of life. They measured distance in the English mile. They brought English material culture and foods, built English-style houses, and wore English clothes. When explaining the appearance of the region’s original inhabitants, they likened them to a familiar group in England: “they are of complexion like our English Gypsies.”⁸ Although they quickly learned to subsist on Indian corn, they longed—without notable success at first—to replace it with English grains. They introduced English livestock and poultry so they could eat those animals as well as eggs, milk, and cheese. All these introductions sought to recreate what was known, to make the land more like home. As they experimented with bringing the specifics of English cultural practices to New England, they tried to shape the place into something like what they had left behind. They hoped, in the arrogant terms proposed by William Morrell, “If Heavens grant these, to see here built I trust: An English Kingdom from this Indian dust.”⁹

Those settlers who came from Leiden, in the Netherlands, may have been drawn by the opportunity to create a culture more like that of England than what they had known in Holland. According to a later account explaining the reasons for migration, one motive for leaving Leiden had been that their children had begun to assimilate to Dutch culture. The younger generation learned to speak Dutch and entered, as immigrant children eventually do, into the host culture. By moving to New England, their parents hoped to reclaim the English cultural heritage of their children and pass it on. In that respect, Smith’s naming practice and the planters’ goals (as described later by Nathaniel Morton) were entirely aligned. Although Smith did not much care for those who settled at Plymouth, they very much endorsed his project of a new England.

One of the great ironies, then, in the first years of Plymouth Plantation was that the Leiden migrants traded one foreign language and one foreign cultural context for another. Imagining they were going to a place where they could import English culture unchallenged, they nevertheless entered a world with its own languages and cultural traditions. The residents spoke variations of the Algonquian language. Unlike a handful of other North American visitors (such as Thomas Harriot of Roanoke), no one onboard the Mayflower had—as far as we know—learned a Native language in advance of sailing. Over time, a few settlers, particularly those who worked in the fur trade, learned—as Roger Williams put it—“to speak much Indian.”¹⁰ The prospect that migrants to Plymouth might learn a different second language rather than going back to using solely English seems not to have occurred to the residents of Leiden who chose migration in part to pull their children away from a foreign language and culture. Other settlers viewed with some suspicion those who mastered an indigenous language, especially if they thought this linguistic accomplishment had been facilitated by too-close contact with Native peoples. William Baker, one man whom Williams identified as having a facility with a local language, was also suspected of entering a sexual relationship with a Native woman. Cultural adaptation in Plymouth, as in Holland, dismayed many leading settlers (even Williams, who himself learned Native languages).

Language learning went the other way as well, a fact that did not bother the English. As is well known, the Plymouth planters found spoken English waiting for them in the persons of both Samoset and Tisquantum. Their writings communicate their sense of amazement when—after months of trying to make contact with the Native peoples—they were greeted by first one and then another English-speaking Native man. Samoset and especially Tisquantum (whose grasp on the language was superior) played important roles in facilitating interaction, although eventually the Plymouth planters realized that Tisquantum also had his own agenda, which did not always align with theirs. With time, communication between Native and newcomer became easier, as more people on both sides of the linguistic divide learned the others’ language and the reliance on interpreters declined. Captain Christopher Levett found it quite gratifying that under the circumstances of huge variation in Native dialects and the increased presence of English people up and down the coast, English might serve as a sort of lingua franca. He reported that when a Native person from Maine and one from southern New England met, they spoke English as the only tongue they shared in common.¹¹ If “speaking Indian” revealed acculturation that the people of Plymouth greeted with mixed feelings, the fact that Native peoples learned English implied that the effort to make the region English was bearing fruit.

In remaking this section of North America as an English province, the leaders in Plymouth did not want to replicate England perfectly but rather hoped to avoid what they considered its worst features. Their aim, as Winslow summarized it, was to expand the king’s “Dominions, by planting his loyal subjects in so healthful and hopeful a Country” as well as to achieve “the Church of God being seated in sincerity.”¹² Setting up an English outpost in America might bring the best of both worlds: they could reaffirm English language and culture but retain control that would have been lost if they had simply returned to England.

At times, the plantation’s leaders had to admit that they had fallen short. Bradford’s pained reference to the second murder trial in as many decades signaled one area where Plymouth failed. These handful of murderers were not the only causes of embarrassment. Thomas Hunt, who had kidnapped various men off the coast some years before the Plymouth planters arrived, they renounced as “a worthless fellow of our Nation” and “a bad man.” They asserted that “all the English that heard of it condemned him.”¹³ Thomas Morton—who enticed away other men’s servants, drank with the Indians, and traded them guns for furs—appeared to be another failure to attract only the best. The thieves among Weston’s men at Wessagussett they saw in similar terms. Bradford complained to the Council for New England, in 1627, of the “irregular living” in which some in the area indulged.¹⁴ It might be, as Bradford feared, that the region attracted troublesome men. Yet some of the criticism might have masked real differences of opinion about what constituted Englishness. When Morton raised a maypole and staged a joyous—and alcohol fueled—community celebration, he hosted a festival popular in rural England. Bradford, Standish, and others saw Morton’s community sinking into debauchery and crime, but that may have been a matter of interpretation, or so Morton tried to demonstrate when he published about their conflicts later. Murderers, maypoles, and men who not only spoke “Indian” but consorted with Native women gave the leaders of Plymouth pause: a new England it might have been, but not precisely the one they envisioned.

Still, the verdict on how English New England became during the first years in Plymouth was certainly not all negative. James Sherley, after more than a decade of investing in the plantation, gave Plymouth credit for getting the region off to a good start: “For had not you and we joined and continued together, New England might yet have been scarce known, I am persuaded; not so replenished and inhabited with honest English people as now it is.”¹⁵ Nathaniel Morton, like many younger colonists, looked back with admiration to the accomplishments of the first settlers. He declared “Our Fathers were English-men, which came over this great Ocean, and were ready to perish in this Wilderness.”¹⁶ This imagery of a wilderness that might overwhelm new arrivals but that could host Englishmen who transformed it offered a compelling memorial to the first generation’s struggles. The truth lay somewhere between Smith’s idea that the region simply awaited the arrival of English people to become a new England and Nathaniel Morton’s vision of sacrifice and peril. With the right sort of people, transplanting a version of English culture—replete with institutions of justice and loyalty to monarchy—might succeed, more or less.

In later years the idea that New England was the model for early English America came to be so widely accepted that historians wrote as if it were the only English presence that mattered. Partly the elevation of New England arose because so many excellent records from the colonial period (like the ones on which this book is based) survive. In addition, New Englanders like George Bancroft wrote the first national histories to gain wide currency, and they emphasized New England’s role. Finally, compared to the deep engagement of the southern colonies with slavery, New England chroniclers cultivated the (incorrect) impression that their region was never tainted by involvement in slavery or the slave trade. By creating a history that presented New England as quintessentially English and the United States as arising out of New England, nineteenth-century writers offered a version of the past that made the new nation admirable—and English. What began as a promotional device authored by John Smith developed into an idea that has had a significant impact on the region’s self-understanding, not to mention the histories written about the early United States.