MARCH 1621
WHAT SAVED THE PILGRIMS is well known yet still astonishing. One day – March 16, 1621 – a Wampanoag chief walked into their settlement and said in English, “Welcome! Welcome Englishmen!” Events unfolded rapidly in the Pilgrims’ favor in the weeks and months that followed.
A book titled 1620 and aiming to make a case that the Mayflower Compact is a better starting place for American history than the arrival of the White Lion near Point Comfort, Virginia, ought to have a little more to say about the Pilgrims. So I interrupt these observations and strictures about the Times’ 1619 Project to explain what happened to that desperate group of men and women who landed on these shores in November 1620.
IDEALS
The signers of the Mayflower Compact as well as the other Mayflower passengers and crew suffered terribly during the winter of 1620–21, and their troubles did not end there. The Mayflower departed from Plymouth on April 5, taking the seventeen surviving crewmen (out of the thirty-five who landed) with it, and leaving the weak and struggling community to fend for itself. The Compact can by no stretch be taken as securing that community from famine, disease, attack from hostile Indians, or disagreements among the survivors. It seems fair to ask in light of what followed its signing, Did it do any practical good at all?
That question resembles the one that Hannah-Jones and other critics of the Founders raise about the Declaration of Independence. The parchment document declares, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration, of course, did not free the 20 percent of the population held in bondage. It did, however, plant the seeds of emancipation. Statements of principle are seldom if ever carried immediately to their fullest application. We might not even bother making declarations of principle if they were that easily realized. To say “all men are created equal” is to tacitly acknowledge that, right now, they look pretty unequal, but we can hope for some improvement. The Declaration, however, did have real short-term consequences. It established the sovereignty and collective political freedom of a people. It gave purpose and direction to the war for independence that had already begun. It voiced a new national identity – and a new kind of national identity.
Pronouncements such as the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration of Independence are aspirational. They enunciate a simplified and pure vision of how things will be, not a description of how things are. Often this is projected onto the recent past. The Mayflower Compact’s opening – “Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith, and the honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia …” – departs from literal truth. Some of the signatories undertook the voyage “for the Glory of God.” But some surely did not: They signed on as a commercial proposition or because they were bound to their masters as servants. Others may have undertaken the voyage partly for the Glory of God but also for the hope of religious freedom or simply for the sake of their families.
But “for the Glory of God” is not a misrepresentation or a lie. Saying “for the Glory of God” is itself an act of piety that has some steadying force. It says that, whatever your personal doubts or venial motives might have been when you first considered this voyage, you committed yourself to serving a godly purpose when you set foot on the ship. You weren’t deceived about the collective goal of the voyage: the advancement of the Christian faith, the honor of king and country – all of it. Now you find yourself in a situation where that commitment will demand something from you more than passive assent.
Oaths, pledges, and promises all work like this. They clear away the clutter of mixed motives and temporizing and present us with a distilled truth. The cynic or worldly sophisticate can always point out that this truth is only a pretense, a “truth,” whose hollowness is denoted by scare quotes, and not a reality. But such insistence on seeing only trees and no forest is itself a kind of blindness. The force of gravity acting on an object can be offset by thrust, air pressure, and wind, but gravity is still real. Trying to account for everything at once doesn’t clarify anything at all. What we want from a Mayflower Compact or a Declaration of Independence is gravity, the force that keeps us rooted.
The settlers at Plymouth understood that they were operating to some degree outside English law. They had no grant to the land or a charter for their settlement.1 They had no right under English law to establish self-government. They understood that this put them in legal peril, and for many years afterward they sought unsuccessfully to get a “land patent” from the British government – though they did get legal status of a sort from the Council for New England, which King James established in 1621. In the meantime they improvised and, under the terms of the Mayflower Compact, created a local government of their own – one strikingly different from those of other colonies or communities in England. The Plymouth government elected its own leaders and pretty much required all adult men to vote. According to the historian Eugene Stratton in Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620–1691:
With the Mayflower Compact, the colonists agreed to a form of democracy that would not be practiced in their homeland for several centuries. Though Bradford and his supporters had envisioned something close to a church-state, the large non-Separatist population prevented the full implementation of this idea as it was subsequently practiced in the adjoining Massachusetts Bay Colony. As a result, Plymouth obtained a reputation for having a less rigid and more moderate government, though it never practiced the toleration soon to come to Rhode Island. Its land policy of making grants to the many prevented it from becoming a manorial or proprietary colony, such as Virginia or other English colonies would later become. It became something unique.2
The government that Plymouth put in place was naturally small-scale but it was not informal. Adult males voted, served as grand jurymen and trial jurors, and participated in town meetings, “made virtually obligatory by assessing fines for absence.”3
The government was devised by William Bradford, one of the authors of the Mayflower Compact, and Plymouth’s governor for thirty years. “He developed Plymouth’s legal code; negotiated a deal with the stock company to settle the colonists’ debts for £1,800; put down the nearby Merriemount colony of libertines with armed force, and built a lucrative trade for the colony in furs, fish, and timber.”4 He did this while maintaining a high degree of religious tolerance and a commitment to private agriculture. Bradford also wrote the complete record we have of the founding of the colony, Of Plymouth Plantation. He explained that what prompted the Mayflower Compact was seeing the need for
the first foundation of their govermente in this place; occasioned partly by the discontented and mutinous speeches that some of the strangers amongst them had let fall from them in the ship-That when they came a shore they would use their owne libertie; for none had power to command them, the patente they had being for Virginia, and not for New-england, which belonged to an other Goverment, with which the Virginia Company had nothing to doe. And partly that shuch an acte by them done (this their condition considered) might be as firme as any patent, and in some respects more sure.
Bradford also described what immediately followed the signing of the Compact:
After this they chose, or rather confirmed, Mr. John Carver (a man godly and well approved amongst them) their Governour for that year. And after they had provided a place for their goods, or common store, (which were long in unlading for want of boats, foulnes of winter weather, and sicknes of diverce,) and begune some small cottages for their habitation, as time would admitte, they mette and consulted of lawes and orders, both for their civill and military Govermente, as the necessitie of their condition did require, still adding therunto as urgent occasion in severall times, and as cases did require.5
What exactly these “laws and orders” were, Bradford doesn’t say, but the new government considered them binding on the whole company of 102 men, women, and children, not just the forty-one members of the religious congregation.
SAMOSET
We know quite a lot about what happened after the passengers of the Mayflower disembarked. The Pilgrims kept good records, and historians have spent countless hours poring over them, crafting compelling accounts of life in the colony during the early years. Scholars have also traced the settlers back to their lives and families in England and the Netherlands. We could hardly hope for a more vivid picture of a marginal English settlement on the edge of the known world.
The Pilgrims’ determination to govern themselves by law enabled their survival. But the great fortuitous event was when Samoset, a Native American, walked up to them and greeted them in English. Samoset had learned some English from English fishermen, who had been venturing into the coastal waters of New England for a generation to fish as well as to trade with the Indians. It was no accident that Samoset appeared, and it was not just his own curiosity that brought him to the Pilgrims. He was sent by Massasoit, the sachem (elected chief) of the Wampanoag confederation. Massasoit was weighing his difficult choices. An epidemic disease had taken a devastating toll on his people, and he feared that his hostile neighbors to the west, the Narragansetts, would overrun his tribe. He sent Samoset to begin to explore the idea that the Plymouth settlers could be his allies against the Narragansetts.
The first contact with the Plymouth settlers went well. Samoset provided detailed descriptions of the country where the Pilgrims had landed and its inhabitants. He stayed the night and returned the next day with five men, whom the Pilgrims entertained. They also stayed. Then on March 22, Samoset introduced another Indian, Tisquantum (also known as Squanto), who spoke fluent English, having been enslaved once by an Englishman and having spent several years in England. Tisquantum carried the conversation forward to the point where Massasoit himself ventured forth to meet the settlers. Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins, guided by Tisquantum, paid a return visit to Massasoit, and negotiations proceeded.
The Pilgrims survived, just as the schoolbooks for generations have said, because the Indians taught them how to live in their new landscape, but also because the Pilgrims fell into a useful place in the complicated chessboard of alliances and hostilities among half a dozen Native American tribes. Mutually beneficial misunderstandings added to recognition of common interests. Neither side quite knew what the other wanted, but they contrived to get along, and the alliance lasted for twenty-five years.
Others have told this story deftly and with depth of detail.6 I simply want to underscore that when Plymouth Colony was faced with a great likelihood of failure, it somehow found the capacity to act in a coordinated and trustworthy manner. It sought to make up for past transgressions that members of the Plymouth community had committed; it avoided violence; it treated visitors respectfully; and it went a fair distance toward living up to those “just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices” that it had agreed to uphold in the Mayflower Compact.
Things were far from perfect, but America was catching a first glimpse of itself.