ON THE ELEVENTH DAY of the eleventh month in the year of 1620, forty-one men shuffled on the decks of a creaky cargo ship. They had been bobbing for weeks within Cape Cod’s fingertip; most of them had not yet stepped foot on land. Despite three months of animosity and sickness, they lined up to sign a binding social contract. The signers represented less than half of the ship’s passengers, and the majority were like-minded “Separatist” Pilgrims, but otherwise they were a pretty motley crew: merchants, preachers, a physician, a tailor, a soldier of fortune, an indentured servant, even a mutineer named Billington who would become the first hanged man on Plymouth Plantation. The document, of course, was the Mayflower Compact.
Some four hundred years later, many hold up this paper as the earliest vestige of American democracy. If you read it the right way, you can almost see it: the undersigned came together in a “civill body politick” and agreed to obey laws that would be “most meete & convenient for the generall good of the Colonie.” When you read it in its proper context, however, you see that it guarantees the authoritarian system that the Separatists had in mind for New England. The “generall good” was of course the Separatist good, anchored in devotion to Calvinist law. More to the point, those who trace America’s democratic tradition back to the makeshift Mayflower Compact—from framers of the Constitution to Pulitzer Prize–winning historians—prefer to see the people’s power refined within government, or legally bound on a dotted line. But America’s lifelong yen for democracy has much racier, messier origins.
The compact was written under serious duress. Winter was closing in. The Pilgrims had been bobbing in the harbor for weeks, and their scouts had already drawn deadly fire from indigenous people hiding in the woods. They needed to erect a “governmente” fast. William Bradford, the compact’s principal author, reports that the document had two main motives. Some of the unfaithful among their number had been giving “discontented & mutinous speeches” about using “their own libertie” once they hit shore; containing these rogues was the first order of business. Indeed, without the contract, “none had the power to command them.” Second, the compact, if it could get enough buy-in, would prove “to be as firme as any patent” in setting up a system that the English courts would recognize. Once a small majority had signed it, all they needed was to elect a leader. They chose the “godly” John Carver on the spot.
Carver may have been the benevolent leader that Bradford made him out to be (managing to “[quell] & overcome” uprisings with his “just & equall carrage of things”), but the following spring, after a hot day in the fields, he died of sunstroke. Bradford himself was promptly elected governor, as he would be annually for the next thirty years. Bradford’s regime—much more accurately than his Mayflower Compact—tells the true story of America’s character, or at least one fierce side of it. William Bradford was nobody’s democrat. He crossed the Atlantic to build a fortress in the wilderness where he could wall out natural and social evils and wall in his tidy hive of “Saints.” He was the first in a long line of American fortress builders—from slave owners and Klansmen to corporations and country clubs—elitists, oligarchs, and authoritarians for whom the wilderness was either weeds to be incinerated or woods to be hewn into exclusionary towns. He was also the first great American curmudgeon.
And he had his work cut out for him. Fortress builders always do. Not only did his Pilgrims face the constant peril that they had known to expect when they left Amsterdam—sickness, starvation, Native American hostility. But, more surprisingly, they also encountered an ideological threat to their fastidious utopia: Thomas Morton, who founded a camp of free-loving bondservants within striking distance. A lover of the wilderness who consorted with Indians, a radical democrat and reckless hedonist, Morton represented an opposing side of the incipient American character, the gleefully unruly side. Cheerful, curious, horny, and lawless, he anticipated the teeming masses, the mixing millions who would exploit the New World as an open playground for freedom, equality, and saucy frolic. His experiment in insanely energized democracy at his anything-goes Merry Mount colony, thirty miles north of Plymouth’s spiky fortress, made confetti of their Mayflower Compact. Bradford’s coup to bring it down, in the spring of 1627, counts as the first volley on the battlefield of American fun.
BRADFORD’S CHILDHOOD WAS FILLED with misery. He was born in 1590 to a Yorkshire yeoman, and by age five he had lost both his parents and his grandparents. He suffered a prolonged and debilitating illness, and from the age of seven, his feeble health aside, he toiled in the fields, herded sheep, and probably attended some grammar school. He was twelve when he declared his independence, enraging his father’s surviving brothers by abandoning the family’s Anglican Church and joining a congregation of Separatist rebels in the nearby town of Babworth. Richard Clyfton, the Separatists’ “grave & revered” preacher, soon became Bradford’s father figure. In all likelihood, he inspired the young fellow with the Puritanical beliefs that all people are depraved, that only God elects those who will be saved, that His grace flows freely to the chosen few, and other such maxims of Calvinist philosophy that would have been meaningful, even comforting, to a boy who had been thrown into a world of unrelenting hardship.
While other children his age played quarterstaff and barleybreak, typical village sports of the period, young Bradford took Clyfton’s preaching to heart and pursued intense Bible study. A boy with stern will and a spiritual zeal, he was jailed at seventeen with the rest of the Saints for trying to escape England for more religiously tolerant Holland. They emigrated successfully the following year. The Dutch tolerated Separatism, as they did other forms of aberrant behavior—drunkenness, promiscuity, festivals, free speech, and various notions of liberal government that rankled the authoritarian Saints. To be sure, as Bradford insisted, it was “not out of any newfangledness, or other such like giddie humor” that the congregation struck out for North America; it was “for sundrie weightie & solid reasons,” particularly the “great licentiousness of the [Dutch] youth” and “manifold temptations of the place.” Just as Eurailers flocked to Amsterdam for coffeehouses and sex tourism, so too were young Separatists hooked by Holland’s “evill examples into extravagante & dangerous courses”—chief among which, in Bradford’s words, was their desire to pull their “neks” from their parents’ “raines.” Never mind that Bradford himself had been a willful child.
All along the Saints had wanted to “separate”—from the Anglican Church, from England’s monarchy, from any pollutants and social deterrents that threatened to maculate their pious cloth, hence the nickname “Separatists.” Their decision to shun urban Renaissance comforts for “those vast & unpeopled” (Bradford’s word) wilds of North America must have called for a deeper appreciation of the anguish that had brought them closer to God.
But separate they did. They endured their share of hardship on the crossing—from scurvy to seasickness to a narrowly avoided mutiny, but Bradford gets most exercised in his account of a “lustie” and “very profane younge” seaman whom it “plased God … to smite … with a grievous disease, of which he dyed in a desperate manner.” (He was unceremoniously buried at sea.) This death is the first of many cautionary tales that brighten the pages of Bradford’s Historie—and warn against the evils of having fun.
The Separatists themselves, with few “sadd” exceptions, liked to follow the rules. They relocated from the Mayflower to a Wampanoag village (whose previous tenants had died of the plague), and there they founded a highly regulated community devoted to work and constant worship. That first punishing winter on savage Cape Cod, when half of their number died, Bradford’s inner circle of John Carver, William Brewster, and Myles Standish “spared no pains, night nor day” to care for each other in their hours of need—building fires, dressing meat, fetching wood, even scrubbing one another’s “lothsome clothes.” Meanwhile, a band of non-Separatist so-called Strangers who “had been boone companions in drinking & joylity” turned on each other when hardship set in, isolating themselves and refusing to help. One of them denied Bradford “but a small cann of beere” and in this way secured his low place in the annals of American history.
Such fun-loving, beere-cann-hoarding, fair-weather friends became a running joke for Bradford. They pitched their tents on sandy ground and looked like jerks beside the Separatists. His message was clear: a life built on frivolous pleasure, not work, spreads its infection to the surrounding community. It had best be yanked like a rotten tooth.
One year after the Mayflower arrived, a smaller ship, the Fortune, plagued Plymouth Plantation with thirty-five non-Separatist emigrants—most of them “lusty yonge men, many of them wild enough.” One month later, on Christmas, a holiday that the Separatists didn’t recognize, most of them refused when Bradford called them out to work. He respected their appeal to their own religious law, but when he returned from the frozen fields to find them “pitching the barr” and playing “stoole-ball, and shuch like sports”—frolicking while others toiled away—he confiscated their “implements” and officially forbade “gameing and reveling in the streets.” He recounts this Christmas story as a bit of “mirth” but concludes it with a haunting boast: play was gone from Plymouth Plantation, “at least openly.”
Plymouth’s most severe crackdown on pleasure came in the year 1642, a year “of sundrie notorious sins,” when a young servant, Thomas Granger, no older than seventeen, was spied having sexual congress with a mare. After submitting to days of interrogation, which required him to identify a parade of animals with whom he may or may not have lain, Granger confessed to committing “buggery” with: “a mare, a cowe, tow [sic] goats, five sheep, 2 calves, and”—a winking joke among Early American scholars—“a turkey.” According to Levitican law (20:13, per Bradford), this bizarrely detailed crime of perversion (Bradford called it a “sadd accidente”) required an equally ridiculous punishment. Poor Granger, whose likeness was also recognized in a certain piglet’s face, had to stand by as the mare, the cow, and the “lesser catle” were slaughtered before his eyes. “Then he him selfe,” Bradford writes, “was executed.” The cattle were buried in a massive pit, “and no use made of any part of them.” Apparently the turkey lived to sin another day.
This story warned “how one wicked person may infecte many” and showed what happens when “so many wicked persons and profane people” come pouring in from Europe to “mixe them selves amongst” the Separatists. Granger had learned to practice “such wickedness” in England (not, Bradford contended, on Plymouth Plantation), and the only way to prevent the foreign sickness from spreading throughout the God-fearing colonies was to cure it with the harshest medicine.
Granger’s may have been the most perverse example in Bradford’s cautionary history, but it wasn’t the most menacing. That had come some fifteen years earlier, when they crushed Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan.”
BRADFORD CAME TO PLYMOUTH to build a spiky fortress to fence out all things mixed and messy. His eventual enemy, Thomas Morton, crossed the same ocean two years later with an eye for natural beauty and a powerful libido. From the moment Bradford arrived in America, he put up his dukes against the “hidious & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men,” but Morton wanted to dive right in. An Anglican lawyer from England’s West Country, he described the lush landscape as a light-toned virgin who “long[s] to be sped” and to “meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed.” Morton belonged to a leisurely class, and an older generation. If Bradford was at the forefront of a Puritan revolution that was rattling its sabers across Northern Europe, Morton was a son of the Elizabethan Age, with its free-spirited politics and quick-witted hedonism. On his first trip over, he was taking a summer vacation.
Little is known of Morton’s Devonshire youth. He was born to landed gentry around 1579. From an early age he practiced falconry and other noble sports. Yet the fact that he studied law at Clifford’s Inn, on Fleet Street, all but guarantees he had a healthy education in the “science” in the “Art of Revels.” The Inns of Court and Chancery, in Morton’s time, fostered a fast-paced college culture (not unlike today) that asked little more of their young gentlemen scholars than to show their faces at regular moot courts. There was just so much else to learn—especially in what King James’s “Master of Revels” cheekily called the Third University of England: “To wit, London.” Fencing, dancing, drinking, courting, pulling pranks, staging plays, spinning lewd verse—such rakish pursuits weren’t merely diversions; they were sanctioned curriculum for a rising lawyer making his way in the halls of power. In general the revelry was licensed and orderly (“Master of Revels” and “Lord of Misrule” were ironically official titles), but even as the parades of decadent mummers fêted England’s national spirit—sometimes enlisting delighted participation from the merry Stuarts themselves—there were always loose bands of free-lance rapscallions who devised sexier fun in the shadows. Morton must have belonged to this faster set, and he showed a taste for the randiest pursuits, but only decades later, among the friendly Massachusetts, would he get his honorary doctorate in the science of revelry.
He practiced law for many years in Devon, representing clients up and down the social ladder and maintaining a country lad’s love of the outdoors. He was in his early fifties when he made his first crossing, arriving on the Charity in June 1622. Glad to take a breather from an acrimonious lawsuit raging back home with his churlish stepson, the gentleman roamed the sloping shores of Wessagusset and “did endeavour to take a survey of the Country.” This hillocky region thirty miles north of Plymouth offered reedy marshes and hardwood forests and pastures cleared by previous tenants. While Andrew Weston’s crew, with whom he was traveling, used the summer months to build village houses, Morton took leisurely tours of the land, fishing in streams, climbing low mountains, and exploring the tricky coast in his boat. He fell into reverie over soft breezy plains and “sweete cristall fountaines.” He was lulled almost to sleep by “cleare running streames, that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweete a murmuring noise to heare … so pleasantly doe, they glide upon the pebble stones.” Something of an armchair Aristotelian, he totted great lists of flora and fauna and spotted fine differences between sycamores and oaks and among his beloved birds of prey. Indeed, when he departed in the crisp early days of September, he had already fallen in love with the country where he would die an outlaw and nobody’s hero.
Returning two years later with several bondservants under the charge of Captain Wollaston, he helped to found a fur-trading colony on a treeless hill in Passonagessit, at the site of present-day Quincy. The smooth, arable mound afforded 360-degree views of wooded mountains—and open fields—and a chain of islands in Boston Bay, but this time he hadn’t come to sightsee. His new motivation, both personal and commercial, was to get to know the “Infidels,” whom he quickly found to be “most full of humanity, and more friendly” than the local “Christians.”
Morton’s open love of the Massachusetts marks his sharpest difference from the Separatists, whose professed mission, in Bradford’s words, was to convert the “poore blinde Infidels.” The Separatists had fought the Wampanoags since arriving on Cape Cod, and they maintained chilly communication through their loyal guide Squanto. Their excitable imaginations almost seemed to relish “the continuall danger of the salvage people,” whom they perceived to be not only “cruell, barbarous, & most treacherous” but downright cannibalistic—prone to flaying men alive with scallop shells, roasting their “joyntes” and “members” over coals, and savoring these “collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live.” While it remains to be proven that any northeastern tribes engaged in such acts of cannibalism, it is striking that from 1623 forward Plymouth Plantation, in a barbarous Mistah Kurtz–like warning to local Indians, kept the severed head of the Massachusett leader Witawamet on display. Operating on a rumor of aggression, and on Bradford’s orders, Myles Standish and his militia had ambushed and slaughtered a band of Witawamet’s men.
If Bradford’s Of Plimmoth Plantation, the A to Z of Pilgrim history, consistently reduces Native Americans to “litle more than … wild beasts,” then Morton’s New English Canaan, his own autobiographical take on the early Bay Colony, is all the more stunning for devoting twenty chapters to admiring and praising and honoring a people who welcomed him into their midst. Railing against the Separatists’ ignorant “new creede”—“that the Salvages are a dangerous people, subtill, secreat, and mischievous”—Morton testifies to the Indians’ cordiality, to a decency that puts thieving Separatists to shame, and to a heightened sense of taste and civility that implicitly only a gentleman could see.
He affords the Massachusetts every last dignity. Their fastidious loincloths are signs of “modesty.” They are too wise to be “cumbered” by eating utensils. Their dainty skill of drinking with their hands is the same human “feate” that made “Diogenes hurle away his dishe.” He marvels at their superhuman eyesight and their ability to distinguish a Spaniard from a Frenchman simply by the smell of his hand. Even his belief that the Indians were “without Religion, Law, and King” doesn’t faze him: they believed in a god, and their society was governed by a deep moral sense—hardly the cannibalism that Bradford imagined. He shows time and again how the “uncivilized” are “more just than the civilized”: their commerce was sophisticated, their judgment discerning, their companionship a joy. They lived in happy and “plentifull” communities and had no need for the jails and gallows that the English built for “poore wretches” and “beggers.” Plus they held elders (like himself) in high esteem.
The way Morton describes them, the Massachusetts showed a capacity for fun that harked back to his youth. He joined the “great entertainement” of their wedding ceremonies, where he seemed to see an Anglican balance between orderly “solemnities” and liberating “reveling.” They invited him to join their national “Revels,” where “a great company” gathered from all over the country and met “in amity with their neighbors” and where this aging alumnus of the Inns of Chancery was amazed to see their great sachem cavorting among his people. (At the Inns, the royals made only rare appearances at the masquerade parades, where it would have been unseemly for them to break the stage barrier.) Sitting among the feathered tribes, Morton watched Chief Papsiquine prove his honor by performing “feats and jugling tricks”—such as swimming underwater for what Morton suspected was an impossible length of time. Indeed, he wishfully believed the Massachusetts “worshipped Pan the great God of Heathens,” or in any case held him “in great reverence and estimation.” He drew this wild conclusion from his classicist fantasy that their language was a mix of Ancient Greek and Latin that made frequent use of the homophone “pan.” More precisely, and in line with Morton’s own project for a New English Canaan, he admired the Massachusetts’ epicurean practicality: “According to human reason guided onely by the light of nature, these people leades the more happy and freer life, being voyde of care, which torments the mindes of so many Christians: They are not delighted in baubles, but in usefull things.”
LATE IN THE WINTER of 1626, less than a year after establishing his colony, Captain Wollaston rounded up most of his bondservants and sailed to Virginia to sell them off. Morton stayed behind with the remaining seven, who were left in the charge of a Lieutenant Fitcher. The weather was bad, the granaries were low, and the rest of the crew started making noise about seeking their fortunes on surrounding plantations. According to Bradford, whose hearsay is our only source for this event, Morton, who had taken a liking to Passonagessit, prepared a feast for the hungry men, opened his personal stock of liquor, and counseled them on their legal right to rebel—before Wollaston returned and sold them too. If they took his free advice, Morton promised to join them in open society.
Bradford ventriloquizes the radical democrat: “I, having a parte in the plantation, will receive you as partners and consociats … and we will converse, trade, plante, & live together as equalls, & supporte & protecte one another, or to like effecte.” Even as a mocking squib, his speech rings true for today’s readers, who see in it the tenets of basic civility. But to its intended audience, the Separatists, it would have hissed liked the serpent in the Garden. It promised knowledge beyond man’s control.
The servants took Morton’s bait, ran feckless Fitcher into the forest, and quickly “fell to great licentiousness” as willing pupils in Morton’s “schoole of Athisme.” They also became incredibly prosperous. Even Bradford, whose own beaver trade was operating at a loss (due in no small part to his bad rapport with the Wampanoags), had to admit that this new rebel colony “gott much by trading with Indeans”—though naturally, as the antagonists in his ongoing parable, they squandered their fortunes, “10 pounds worth in a morning,” on “wine & strong waters.” It was thanks to this financial hardship that Plymouth Plantation itself, in the same year of 1627, was forced to take in a host of Strangers that further diluted their social purity. To be sure, in ridiculing Morton’s open society, Bradford may have been, as Douglas Anderson suggests, protesting too much.
History hides the names of Morton’s “worthy wights,” who would have been listed among Wollaston’s cargo as so much merchandise. They were the lowest of the English low. They could have been petty criminals working off sentences, or they could have been folks from the London slums who had signed away their rights in a drunken blur and ended up locked in a dockside tank. Aboard ship, confined in the airless hull, they would have suffered conditions like those of Africans making the Middle Passage: sickness, starvation, abuse, and death. Hence, to have thrown off their chains and been incorporated as traders on a thriving plantation must have given them the communal thrill that has long since been associated with coming to the New World—the land of plenty, opportunity, and freedom. Morton himself names few names in his book, but the honor he affords these new fellow colonists supports Bradford’s charge that he was radically democratic:
And pitty ’t is I cannot call them Knights,
Since they had brawne and braine and were right able,
To be installed of prince Arthures table,
Yet all of them were Squires of low degree,
As did appeare by rules of heraldry.
Rules of heraldry need not apply in America, not so far as Morton was concerned. The New English Canaan need not be stratified, exclusive. For Europeans to prosper in this abundant new land, an ethic of friendship had to prevail. Traders had to mingle and deal as equals, among themselves and with the Indians. To this extent, Morton’s vision of social upheaval wasn’t the old European “misrule,” the festive suspension of social roles that actually kept them more firmly intact. It was an explosion of Old World order, and he urged his wights to enjoy the fireworks. Though he lacked the authority to “call them Knights,” on Merry Mount such titles didn’t carry weight. Morton claimed the right to treat them as partners and dignify them as intellectual peers.
In his efforts to get closer to the Massachusetts, moreover, he exchanged sporting secrets and also (allegedly—he never copped to it) broke the king’s ban on teaching indigenous people to shoot. Before long, his trading company was trouncing its competition up and down the New England shore. William Bradford, sounding the alarm, cited the spread of Morton’s technology throughout the local tribes: “Fouling peeces, muskets, pistols & c.” made the already “barbarous savages” even deadlier combatants, a point he sensationalized for European readers (though Indian archery was quicker and deadlier than heavy, clumsy early guns). But these skills also made them unbeatable hunters, for as Bradford complained, Indians were already nimbler than the English, ran faster, could see farther, and knew “the hants of all sorts of game.” Compound these threats and financial costs with Morton’s infectious example of democracy—“all the scume of the countrie, or any discontents, would flock to him from all places”—and one could see why, in Bradford’s opinion, Morton’s “nest” had to be “broken.” A conspiracy of families and smaller English colonies began holding meetings at Plymouth Plantation on how to destroy this strange new menace.
IN THE SPRING OF 1627, Morton renamed Wollaston’s camp “Merry Mount”—cheekily spelling it “Ma-Re Mount” as a digitus impudicus aimed at the Separatists. Richard Slotkin lists the name’s witty abominations: its innocent homonyms with “Merry” and “Marry” call forth visions of merriment and nuptials, but it also rhymes with “Mary,” a name that makes for “bawdy blasphemy” when coupled, as it is, with “mount.” Worse yet, when read for its brazen spelling, “Mare Mount” flaunts the Levitican crime for which Thomas Granger (plus menagerie) was executed. But even a bawdy name like Ma-Re Mount declared the colony’s permanence. Morton called it a “memorial to after ages.” Bradford scoffed, “they call it Merie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted forever.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his marvelous romance of the events, depicted their dispute as a battle for staying power: “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.”
Near the end of April, to commemorate their audacious new name, Morton’s wights made preparations for a May Day festival. As blossoms opened and new leaves glittered, a gentleman and seven roughnecks brewed “a barrel of excellent beare” and filled a case of bottles “with other good cheare.” They fashioned green garlands to wear in their hair, disseminated word among the locals, and felled an eighty-foot-tall pine to which they would affix ribbons (after “the olde English custome”) and a set of buckhorns as a New World innovation. Morton wanted the Maypole big—phallus-big, America-big—as a “faire sea marke” that would welcome visitors from all directions. The more the merrier was his position. Unlike the Separatists, who warned off visitors with tales of cannibalism, Morton advertised America’s riches, inviting strangers to impregnate the land’s “wombe” through “art & industry,” lest it wither in “darck obscurity.” He was laying plans for a thriving civilization, not an exclusive promised land.
In preparation for the festival, Morton also wrote a ribald twenty-three-line poem, overloaded with classical references. The Inns where he had studied had a thriving theater culture where biting satire had been the dominant tone, often at the expense of pisse-froid Puritans. Morton’s legendary friendship with Ben Jonson, who was the Inns’ most famous working-class interloper, will probably never be confirmed, but it is likely he counted himself among the “Sons of Ben,” the cavalier writers in the younger generation who parroted Jonson’s wit. He declared himself “a Satyrist” with “smarting fanges.” Where Bradford preaches throughout his Historie, Morton cracks jokes—turning short-statured Myles Standish into “Captain Shrimpe” and the righteous John Endicott into “Captain Littleworth.” And the revels themselves were soaked in satire. It has been speculated that they were inspired by a 1594 Gesta Grayorum masque, performed in front of Queen Elizabeth, featuring a Maypole and “Indeans” and even Proteus, whom Morton puts at the center of his poem and jokingly conflates with “Priapus.” This may be so, but such revels were utterly changed on Merry Mount, where the instruments of monarchy became the lubricants of democracy: the “Indeans” were actual, the would-be courtiers were lowly bondservants, and their pleas for fertility weren’t theatrical, but real.
For when May Day arrived, Morton’s young bachelors hoped their pretty garlands would catch the eyes of local women—especially Massachusetts women. Having waited long enough for English wives, they welcomed the idea of starting households that the Separatists would have abominated. (Of course courting wasn’t preliminary only to marriage.) But in a song he wrote to buoy the occasion—telling “Lasses in beaver coats,” “Yee shall be welcome to us night and day”—Morton encouraged open minds among his wights, declaring Indian women far more desirable than “Scotch” or “Irish stuff,” a bit of bigoted English misogyny that sent a strangely tolerant message. What is more, his harping on marriage throughout the account reinforces his interest in making Merry Mount last.
The pageant would have been a marvel to see. Local invitees filled the grassy, sun-drenched hill. Against a deep backdrop of shimmering wooded mountains, and the Shawmut hills in the distant north, a formal parade of Europeans and Indians—heralded by rifles, pistols, drums, “and other fitting instruments”—portaged an enormous, ribbon-streaming tree from the lapping beach of Boston Harbor to the crest of their village mount. They erected the thing with a communal heave, sturdily packed it deep in the ground, and tacked up the poem for the Separatists’ pleasure. Cheers were raised, shots were fired, toasts of beer and spirits were drunk. Probably the poem was read aloud in honor of their germinal colony. And when the mood was right, the mummers arrayed themselves widely about the pole, joined their hands and took up ribbons, and cordially began the old pagan dance that prettily weaves a rainbow-colored braid.
One fellow was assigned to replenish “the good liquor like gammedes and Jupiter,” and to lead the dancers in singing Morton’s verses:
Make greene garlons, bring bottles out;
And fill sweet Nectar, freely about.
Uncover they head, and feare no harme,
For hers good liquor to keep it warme.
All the while, dancing to pipes and tabors, men ducked under the arms of women, who curtsied beneath the arms of the men, and the two traipsing rings—probably quite clumsy for lack of practice, many of them hindered for lack of English—did what they could to sing the racy chorus:
Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes,
Let all your delights be in Hymens joyes,
So to Hymen now the day is come,
About the merry Maypole take a Roome.
Stamping grass into mud, stumbling up a sweat, singing and shouting and entwining their ribbons, Morton’s mixed company, in “harmless mirth,” closed in closer and closer on the pole, soon entangling in such an erotic knot that even William Bradford, who would have been tending his fields that day, let himself go with a bit of alliteration, imagining them: “drinking and dancing aboute it many days together, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices.” For who could resist this innovative pleasure—so youthful, vernal, innovative, and free? Naturally they wished it to continue for days. They wanted the joylity to last forever.
Morton nurtured a species of pleasure that later Americans would simply call “fun.” In England, in 1755, Dr. Johnson would nail its definition: “Sport; high merriment; frolicksome delight.” But Americans, following Morton’s lead, would hone their fun to an even sharper edge—they would have it in spite of Puritan laws. In a land of danger and opportunity, they would often have it at high personal risk. And in an ever growing and complicated society, flooded with classes and races and cultures, where the laws were in flux, when laws applied at all, the frontier was expanding, and the competing social systems weren’t held in check by legal rituals like Saturnalia, Americans learned to have fun with friends and aliens whose styles and differences revved up the pleasure. In point of fact, as this history aims to show, these necessary rebellions, these tantalizing risks, and these extraordinary prospects for open gathering are part and parcel of the fun itself. And yet, by the same token (and this is essential), it has always remained such a simple pleasure. It requires only that you get involved—throw in a joke, raise your voice in song, take up a ribbon and give it a go with one of the Maypole’s merry, merry boyes. It may be illegal, dangerous, rebellious, but all of these things give tingles of freedom when you’re a bondservant or gentleman or Massachusett lost in the merry, merry dance. Thomas Morton’s fun, which would mature down the centuries into American fun, sprang from conflicts and dangerous differences. It was the fun of mixing, not the comfort of recoiling into a gated community. All it needed was “harmles mirth,” an attitude Morton found “much distasted of the precise Separatists,” who “troubl[ed] their braines more then reason would require over things that are indifferent.”
It makes sense that the First Thanksgiving, and not May Day at Merry Mount, should become a national holiday, though the event doesn’t rate a mention in Bradford’s honored history. Thanksgiving gives the impression that even the most authoritarian system can reconcile itself with America’s “savage” side, when in fact the event was a wary détente that would fall to pieces during King Philip’s War. The First Thanksgiving, as such, is a wishful anodyne to rival the Mayflower Compact’s “democracy.” Much as laws contain the people’s excesses, treaties ensure a grimace of tolerance among aggrieved and mistrustful nations. It’s an American tradition worth recognizing: laws, treaties, prisons, and gallows undergird a powerful empire. They try to ensure a measure of fairness, and they keep the trains running on time. But there is also a necessary American rowdiness that is more consistent with Merry Mount. A nation that has maintained deep currents of civility throughout its rough history of Indian massacre, institutionalized slavery, and unpopular waves of immigration should also look to the successful experiments that have brought it into states of feverous harmony—dangerous intimacy—mutual enjoyment. Radical movements like Thomas Morton’s launched their snowballs at cranky despots and let the people in on their joke: they posted their poems, published their books, performed their dances, whipped up the crowds. They celebrated civility outside the law. In centuries to follow, the ways such practices have lured people together have grown ever more daring, widespread, sustained, and the best ones have been an absolute blast. The best ones have become the American Way.
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THE WAY BRADFORD TELLS IT, the earth was still warm from all the stamping and dancing when Plymouth’s militia made their ambush. In fact they waited until the following summer, June of 1628. After an unrecorded year of stormy disapproval, Standish and his men stormed in from the woods and found Morton’s maskers ready for battle—doors locked, guns loaded, bullets and powder laid on the table. In Bradford’s version, the wights were too “over armed with drinke” to work their guns, so they peaceably handed them over to Standish. In Morton’s version, he and his men, having been warned in advance by Indians, stood the militia down at gunpoint. They shouted negotiations through the windows and brokered Morton’s safe return to England, where he anticipated getting a fair legal hearing. Only when he had secured his house and property did he offer himself up without (he boasted) “the effusion of so much noble blood.” In September, with Morton on a boat home, Standish felled the Maypole with a still-ringing slam.
EARLY IN THE SUMMER of 1630, as the English Arbella bashed the Atlantic swells—leading ten other vessels and seven hundred passengers in the first strong wave of the Great Migration—John Winthrop, a wealthy Puritan whom the king had appointed governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, stood firm on its pitching decks and regaled his congregation with the first great sermon of American exceptionalism. He was forty-three years old. He had high-arched eyebrows, a sundial nose, and a pointed shovel of a beard. His message was even nobler than the Mayflower Compact. “We must be knit together in this work as one man,” he intoned. Detailing his vision of the glorious new colony, he entreated them to join in “brotherly Affection” and to rise above their “superfluities.” He urged them to come together “in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality” and, best of all, to “delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together,” et cetera. To this end, as a chosen people, in the eyes of God and all the world, they should become “as a city upon a hill.”
When the fleet hit Salem on June 22, Winthrop’s inspired flock got cracking. One of their first tasks, upon settling in Boston, was to burn Morton’s Merry Mount to the ground. Then they paved the region under a Puritan empire that expanded and fortified with impressive speed, joining forces with the Separatists in 1648. For more than a century their City upon a Hill imposed its message throughout the Northeast. Song was silenced, dancing forbidden. The American Self was menaced from all sides—by threats of the stocks, dunking pools, whipping posts, ear-cropping, branding, banishment, public execution, and eternity in the Hands of an Angry God. Indians, of course, were the hardest to reform. During King Philip’s War of 1675, for instance, when Plymouth’s colonists faced shameful defeat by the martially more skillful Wampanoags, they exacted their revenge against all native peoples by burning the peaceable “praying towns” (which they had vowed to protect) and by impressing other communities’ women and children as slaves.
In Boston’s early years, Morton kept making his presence known—escaping from his jail cell, returning to America from his exile in England, but the dispersal of his merry, merry boyes and the spread of law throughout New England had reduced his threat to a ghostly legend. He was apprehended in Boston in 1644 for the publication of New English Canaan, distinguished ever since as America’s first banned book. He was jailed for one year without charges or trial and eventually released for general infirmity. He was ultimately exiled from Massachusetts and died in Maine in 1647. He left more than twelve thousand acres of land to his cousins, as well as the island of Martha’s Vineyard, but nobody can prove it was his to give. In any case, the cousins never claimed it.
But shining from the shadows of Winthrop’s City upon a Hill came glimmers of lingering American fun. The maskers had to keep a low profile. Writing in his diary on March 10, 1687, Samuel Sewall relates a sermon by Cotton Mather, “sharply against Health-drinking, Card-playing, Drunkennes, Sabbath-breaking, &c.” Two months later he shows the latest Thomas Mortons pushing back: “It seems the May-pole at Charleston [Massachusetts] was cut down last week, and now a bigger is set up, and a Garland upon it.”