CONCLUSION

Plymouth’s World

WILLIAM BRADFORD, who did more than any single author to shape the modern understanding of Plymouth Plantation, knew full well how thoroughly embedded that plantation was in the wider Atlantic world. While the first part of his great work “Of Plimoth Plantation” recounted the history of the settlers who came from Leiden (in a narrative that reached all the way back to the Protestant Reformation of the previous century to give their story context), the longer second part of his tale offered year-by-year accounts of key events in Plymouth through 1646. That narrative addressed a whole range of matters, from Native diplomacy to church affairs, with attention to debt, commodities, migration, rumors, crimes, and every other matter that might capture the attention of a seventeenth-century colonial governor. No single source gives a greater sense of Plymouth’s level of involvement with the world beyond Cape Cod Bay than this handwritten account.

A simple editorial decision in the preparation of the most readily available modern edition of his work makes it hard to see the extent to which Bradford engaged the wider world. The editor, Samuel Eliot Morison, altered Bradford’s organization, removed most of the letters that he had inserted into the flow of the narrative, and moved them to an appendix at the back of the published volume. As Bradford composed it, “Of Plimoth Plantation” frequently interrupted its story to insert letters from various locations and authors, letters that demonstrated the connectedness of Plymouth and the importance of its interactions with those beyond its borders. Bradford relays the intrusion of various other English traders into the vicinity, the arrival of the privateering squadron sailing up from the West Indies, and the struggles to find an economic strategy for paying off the ballooning debt. His Plymouth Plantation rested firmly on the edge of the Atlantic, entangled in matters of trade, investment, religious reform, labor needs, rumors, and political infighting.

Approaching Plymouth from this broader perspective, in other words, recovers that sense of connection that Bradford himself felt. With Plymouth firmly in its place, we can better understand how a small settlement ended up in southern New England in 1620, why it developed as it did, and how it contributed to larger trends then emerging in the English Atlantic. A myriad of factors shaped Plymouth, not just the religious experiences of some of the first migrants, as showcased by Bradford in his first section. Certain features of New England—with its colder climate, its modest agricultural potential, its dense forests, its proximity to fishing grounds and the river systems in which the residents hunted for beaver and otter, its distance from the sites of Spanish colonization and the conflicts that prompted—profoundly affected Plymouth.

The plantation became what it did not only because of the Protestant Reformation in England and the desire of some English people resident in Leiden to leave Europe, but also because of its participation in many other contemporary trends. One of these changes was rising migration out of England into locations on the western shores of the Atlantic. When Plymouth was founded, it became England’s third Atlantic settlement (after Virginia and Bermuda), but by the end of just one decade, it was one among many. Other outposts by 1630 included Providence Island, St. Christopher, and Nevis in the Caribbean, and Massachusetts Bay Colony as well as New Scotland (Nova Scotia) in the north. Plymouth hosted many visitors not only because the presence of the first English residents made it a known destination but also because of this broader uptick in the circulation of peoples. After Plymouth was planted, many more English people frequented southern New England.

Returning to the famous scenes that make up our national memory of Plymouth, these mythic images all included a component of Atlantic engagement. The Mayflower Compact—treated by later writers as the birth of American democracy—had parallels elsewhere. In every English colony, residents worked out local governance and argued over questions of political legitimacy. Plymouth viewed its “civil combination” at the time as a temporary measure that would allow self-governance until the plantation could secure its status as a bona fide colony with a royal charter. Having landed north of Virginia (which stretched as far north as the Delaware River but not all the way to New England), the Mayflower passengers were not included under the Virginia charter, as they had planned. They knew that by settling at Plymouth (which was necessitated by the lateness of the season as well as the difficulties of navigating around Cape Cod), they were putting their enterprise at risk. If they stayed there, their leaders were aware that they would need to sort out their status in England. Very quickly they moved to do so, gaining a patent from the newly established Council for New England that allowed them to settle under its jurisdiction. They failed utterly—despite repeated attempts—to gain a charter. That they desperately wanted one linked them outward from southern New England into a transatlantic context of legal documents and government authority far more than it linked them forward to a time when their democratic stopgap measure would be elevated to a founding moment.

Given that the migrants failed to gain a royal charter, the agreement signed on the Mayflower took on greater significance. When Bradford wrote the first part of his history, he skipped over the signing as inconsequential. By the time he returned to his account more than a decade later, the significance of the civil combination had grown. In order to explain the event, which had become (in the absence of anything better) one piece of the basis for the settlement, he backed up in his story—writing, “I shall a little return back, and begin with a combination made by them before they came ashore; being the first foundation of their government in this place”—in order to recount the agreement. It had not rated a mention in his first section, but by the time he penned the second book, it assuredly did.

Not only Bradford but other early Plymouth leaders had by that time come to appreciate the importance of the combination. The man who kept the Plymouth record book eventually recounted its signing, but only in 1636, when it had been identified as fundamental to the legitimacy of the government. Plymouth used the combination, along with the patent that granted limited land rights but no rights of governance, to fend off others who had moved into the region with far better political authorization. Bradford and others were acutely aware that more powerful and populous colonies pressed around them. Far from being a triumphal moment, the signing garnered attention in the somewhat desperate scramble to bolster Plymouth’s claims. Places like Rhode Island and Connecticut were able to gain royal charters eventually. Others, like New Haven, never did and subsequently disappeared. Plymouth would last longer than New Haven, persisting as a separate although charterless plantation until the 1680s. In the end, it was, as its early leaders feared it might be, absorbed into Massachusetts. It remains a county in that state to the present day.

The purported landing on Plymouth Rock also supported wider themes in Atlantic history. Those who designated a rock as the landing site in the 1740s conveyed an astonishing ignorance about sailing (which was somewhat surprising since it continued as the main mode of seaborne travel). They also apparently failed to read the surviving sources, which recorded complaints of the health dangers of wading through the surf fully clothed. The women with wet skirts and the men with sodden breeches had not stepped out of a boat onto a rock but had struggled through water to the shore. The imagined landing—regardless of how ludicrously it has been portrayed—linked Plymouth to the ocean crossing and the maritime connections that made the English settlement of southern New England possible.

The prominence given to the ship itself similarly highlights these maritime connections. The new arrivals were tied to other places by the sea. Boats and men to sail or row them were essential for local transportation along the coast and in the streams and rivers since overland transportation was slow and cumbersome. Ships visiting the settlement kept residents supplied with various items, informed them of events elsewhere, brought passengers to join or visit the plantation, and allowed the indebted residents to load fish, timber, and furs that went toward paying their debts. Long before privateers arrived via the West Indies with money to spend, Plymouth was firmly linked to maritime networks. Ships came to Plymouth from England, the fisheries to the north, the Dutch colony to the west, and Virginia to the south. All of necessity came by sea, connecting Plymouth to distant places.

The meeting with Squanto (or Tisquantum) also offered insight into Atlantic trends. As a kidnapped captive, he joined other indigenous people who had been transported to Europe, a practice that began with the first voyage of Columbus. Native people were transported to prove the existence of indigenous Americans; they were often paraded about or made to pose for viewers so that interested parties could catch a glimpse. The kidnapper, Thomas Hunt—judged at Plymouth to be a man who “cares not what mischief he doth for his profit”¹—carried off Tisquantum and his companions in order to sell them. Among those captured were three brothers; Plymouth men described a heart-wrenching meeting with their bereft mother. Hunt carried his captives to Spain, which had a market for slaves, and he tried to sell his victims there. When the local religious authorities realized that the captives were Natives of the Americas, they challenged the sale. With indigenous Americans legally acknowledged by Spain’s king as his vassals, they could not be held as slaves unless they declined the king’s care. Tisquantum and at least some of the others were freed as a result. Getting hauled into a distant labor market but also coming under a particular legal regime first threatened Tisquantum with slavery and then led to his unexpected release. Both slave markets and laws entangled this Patuxet man in Atlantic trends. That he eventually made it all the way home was a tribute to his own ingenuity but also evidence of the increasing traffic in ships coming to New England.

Tisquantum’s role as an interpreter between the Plymouth planters and the local peoples was also reprised elsewhere. Certain key players throughout the history of European-American encounters served as go-betweens. The meeting with Squanto, retold endlessly, connected the Plymouth experience to all the other places up and down the coast of both American continents where Native inhabitants encountered newcomers.

Finally, the image of the first Thanksgiving connected Plymouth to the wider Atlantic. Described as a multiday harvest festival that gave an opportunity for the English to host their new allies and to take a much-needed break from their grueling labor, the gathering invoked the seasonal festivals of English rural culture that granted laborers a holiday. Popular representations of it—in nineteenth-century paintings, for instance—add religious overtones, with an emphasis on giving thanks to God. The name bestowed on the event in the nineteenth century, the “First Thanksgiving,” reflected that understanding. Plymouth residents and other seventeenth-century Christians did stage days of thanksgiving consisting of worship services in order to thank God for good occurrences, among them a successful harvest. Although this was not the type of event Winslow described, which was clearly a simple harvest celebration, both understandings of the gathering relate to larger themes. The harvest celebration reminds us of the settlers’ efforts to import their own cultural practices. Marking a successful harvest helped to honor their new home as a “new England.” The second idea—a day set aside for prayer and reflection—relied on the importation of European religious practices. Travelers always carried their religious beliefs and practices. Despite variations across the English Atlantic—the biggest division being between those who tried to recreate the Church of England in America and those who did not look to the Book of Common Prayer as the pattern for their church services—every settlement tried to transplant English religion. Settlers could not prevent themselves from bringing with them their understanding of how the world worked. Every time a planter had a theological conversation with a Native person, European Christianity and Native belief met.

This imaginative recreation of “the first Thanksgiving” by Jennie Brownscombe contains some obviously inaccurate elements, most glaringly structures and Native attire from other places and periods. The 1875 painting emphasizes some standard representations of Plymouth: the devout nature of its society and the significance of its family bonds, not to mention the harmonious relations between English newcomers and Native residents. Little that matches the original written sources can be found in this depiction.

The subtext for both Plymouth Rock and the Thanksgiving story—as developed by later authors—is of course the twin (if somewhat contradictory) ideas of religious purity and religious freedom. These issues too played out throughout the Americas. Despite Bradford’s record, which tells the story as one of English separatism, European exile, and American conclusion, Plymouth was like every English colony in that it played host to people with a range of religious views and varying levels of commitment. Working out how to live together and deciding where to draw the lines of inclusion and exclusion was part of the Plymouth project. Some people were not welcomed. That was certainly true of Sir Christopher Gardiner, who tried to hide his Roman Catholic faith. Despite its reputation as strictly separatist, the Plymouth church did welcome a variety of Reformed Protestant viewpoints. Following the advice of the Leiden minister John Robinson, it willingly held communion with those in the Church of England and did not require any prospective minister to renounce a previous ordination in that church. It did not, however, use the Book of Common Prayer. Plymouth’s archnemesis Thomas Morton probably made more of that issue when trying to rouse Archbishop William Laud than was ever the case in New England itself. Morton did have a point, however: the prayer book was one easily transported aspect of English religiosity, so it was significant that the Plymouth people did not introduce it. Its absence would have placed Plymouth on the side of those reformers who would settle other parts of New England later, as well as many inhabitants in every other English colony—rather than on the side of those trying to recreate the national church.

Plymouth’s toleration had its limits. The colony excluded those it saw as troublemakers. The church regretfully let Roger Williams go because his preaching, although inspiring, became too radical. More obscure people were made to feel unwelcome too. Such was the case with “one Manton”: the men of Yarmouth church asked Edward Winslow’s help in removing Manton after they decided he was “a discontented man” who was “unsettled and opposing God’s people.”² It is not clear how Winslow responded to their plea, but their letter documented that the tolerance of Plymouth’s people had limits.

On every point, Plymouth’s history can be woven back into a wider story. These connections provide a framework for understanding labor systems (like slavery and servitude), Native relations, religious practices and policies, and every other aspect of Plymouth life. In Plymouth Plantation, as elsewhere, existence was shaped by why people came, what they hoped to build, what features shaped the place where they settled, and how they thought of and treated those they encountered. These questions animated all the history of the Americas at least from the moment Columbus arrived in the Bahamas in 1492.

Some advocates of Plymouth Plantation might say that presenting that settlement as participating in larger events and trends minimizes its significance. Rather, I would suggest that Plymouth remains important, but not for what it contributed to the United States. An Atlantic perspective does challenge the narrative of American exceptionalism, but it also elevates small and marginal places to new importance by showing that they took part in the movements and events of their own day. Unlike those who debunk the myths associated with the plantation (and, as Francis Stoddard’s complaints show, have done so for at least seventy years), my intention is not to prove wrong those famous tableaux—signing an agreement, stepping onto a rock, meeting a Native man, or celebrating a meal. Instead I would like to suggest that an emphasis on firstness and uniqueness needlessly limits our understanding of the experience of these early settlers. Plymouth, neither first nor unique, participated in a growing network of people, ideas, and things that slowly pulled southern New England and many other places into a newly connected world.