The History of What Might Have Been
I have just finished reading The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England, by Peter C. Mancall. I do recommend it. You can find an inexpensive copy on AbeBooks.
If we ever actually learn anything from History—a Sisyphean task, to be sure, but one always worth the effort—then we must delve into the “what might have been,” those dead ends or roads not taken. To do otherwise takes History out of the realm of narrative—fulsome, instructive and entertaining when done correctly—and dumps it into the antiseptic anteroom of Science, where names, dates and places are just so much data to accumulate. Morton’s story illustrates the tantalizingly different arc of American history that could have unfolded had his vision of a “New England” prevailed instead of that of John Winthrop.
Morton was the leader of the small village on Massachusetts Bay known as Ma-re Mount, which Winthrop salaciously dubbed as “Merrymount.” The settlement existed as an alternative, if not an outright rebuke, both to the severe purity of his nemesis Winthrop’s Boston to the north, and to the even crankier cluster at Plymouth to the south. The leaders of both communities saw him as a thorn in their flesh, and worked tirelessly to eliminate Morton’s influence within the string of precarious outposts.
Morton arrived in Plymouth in 1622, then returned to England before returning again in 1624 to open a trading post north of Plymouth. His easy relations with the Natives aroused the suspicions of William Bradford. The erection of a maypole in 1628 hardened the Pilgrim leader against Morton, whom he labeled “The Lord of Misrule.” When Winthrop arrived in 1630, he immediately saw the threat Ma-re Mount posed to the society he planned.
What were Morton’s offences, exactly? For starters, he was no Puritan. He was a solid Book-of-Common-Prayer Church of England sort of guy. The Puritans, and especially their troublesome sect of Separatists (“Pilgrims’), came to Massachusetts Bay precisely to get away from people like Morton. The larger body of Puritans believed, at least in theory, that the Established Church could perhaps be considered marginally Christian. The “Pilgrim” sect, however, would not go that far. The Book of Common Prayer outlined that a communicant could be expelled only for being “an open and notorious evil liver.” To the justice-dispensing Puritans, this set the bar much too high. Nathaniel Hawthorne later noted that in Ma-re Mount’s struggle with Boston, “jollity and gloom were competing for an empire.”
Next, he frankly admired the indigenous inhabitants (or at least those who were left after the plague of 1616-1619). Morton recognized the basic humanity of the American Indians, maintaining excellent relations with the Ninnimissinuaks. He traded with them as equals, including firearms. And there was often a certain amount of mutual revelry around the maypole, which not surprising, led to a bit of canoodling and comingling with the Ninnimissinuaks. Winthrop seethed at this “dancing and frisking together like so many fairies.” The 80 foot Maypole at the center of the village was apparently the last straw. Winthrop’s attack on Merrymount is the stuff of comic opera, but he did succeed in jailing Morton and chopping down the maypole.
Morton’s real threat, however, was the fact that he was a seasoned attorney and a quick-witted writer who could do real damage to the Bay Colony’s precarious legal standing. Winthrop’s fears were not unreasonable, for once back in England, Morton published a book, New English Canaan. The first part was a topographic study of New England, the second part a ethnographic treatment of the Native peoples, but the third part was a scorching indictment of the excesses of the Puritan religion in general, and the Winthrop regime in particular.
Morton was an lively writer. In one passage, he sarcastically commented on the unusual Puritan practice of praying with one’s eyes closed. He concluded that they were obviously so sure of their salvation that they could follow the road to Heaven blindfolded! Normative in Protestantism today, it was novel enough in the 1630s to draw attention.
Morton came back to New England and died in Acomenticus, Maine in 1646. By the Revolution, his story was only the one told by his adversaries. His book was almost lost to history as well.
In the early years of the 19th-century, John Quincy Adams purchased a copy by chance in a bundle he obtained in Germany. He shared it with his father, former President John Adams, who in turn discussed it by letter in his renewed friendship with former President Thomas Jefferson. The book had especial interest to the Adamses, as the site of Ma-re Mount was on the Adams farm (and, as I discovered, directly opposite of Rainsford Island, owned by my 10th-great grandfather, Edward Rainsford). Charles Francis Adams, Sr. recognizing its worth, transcribed the book completely by hand. Another scholar did the same thing in the Adams library over a ten day period. Finally, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. had the book republished from the family copy, which was, it seems, the only one on this side of the Atlantic. Morton’s story slowly sifted into our national narrative, and by the late 1800s several authors had made him into something of a folk hero.
In a sense, all history is revisionist, as every work seeks to tell a story in a slightly different way than what has been written before. If not, then what is the point? The Trials of Thomas Morton adds layers of meaning to a tale that had too long been seen from a single perspective. But some revisionism, however, strains credulity. For example, the Puritans themselves may be having a bit of a moment.
The conventional wisdom about the Puritans is that they were drab, sexually repressed teetotalers. Every bit of that is incorrect, of course. They wore colorful clothes, actually mandated a vigorous sex life within marriage, and enjoyed their drink, as long as it did not lead to public drunkenness. The more troubling aspect about the Puritans, however, is in the very things that they believed: what they believed about themselves and their relationship with their Calvinist god. If their idiosyncracies had remained confined to a ring of fishing villages around Cape Cod, no one would care. But Puritan influence extended far beyond their actual numbers, in both space and time. In short, they wrote and set in place the American mythos.
Earlier in the summer, I enjoyed reading The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservatism” is Not Enough, by Michael Warren Davis. The title explains his entertaining premise, aimed primarily at a Conservative audience. And in light of the vacuous winding-down of Progressivism and the fatuous unreality of what passes for modern Conservatism, the word “reactionary” should not scare anyone. As is often the case, John Lukacs said it best: “While America’s liberalism has grown senile, its conservatism remains infantile.” So there we have it: a choice between imbecility and childishness. No thanks.
Davis’ book is not at all about politics, or I would not have read it. He tagged quite a few points that I hold dear, but his airbrushed history had some large holes in it, one of which being his stab at rehabilitating the Puritans. It was, in fact, the weakest part of the book. The thing about the Puritans is that they were an extremely literate people who left a written record of exactly what they were up to, and more importantly, why they were doing it. So, if you are fine with the whole City on a Hill/Manifest Destiny/American Exceptionalism/Rugged Individualism/Pull Yourself up by Your Bootstraps/Chosen People/Indispensable Nation version of American History, well then, you can thank these New England Calvinists for that.
And of course, there’s Max Weber’s “Protestant Work Ethic.” The novel Calvinist doctrine of Predestination is a tortured Reformed Protestant dogma that I can only approach with the broadest of brushes, to-wit: Everything is already sorted out by the Sovereign God. There is really nothing you can do about it; you are either predestined to be in the Elect, or you suffer as one of the Damned by a wrathful God. This had to be disconcerting to the oh-so-conscientiously devout Puritans. For if they thought about it, they had to realize that all of their devotion would be for naught if they were not numbered among the Elect. One way out of this theological cul-de-sac was the insidious notion that material success and prosperity was a sure sign of God’s favor. And so it went; the Puritans worked like Trojans to be attain prosperity so that they could be proven righteous, to themselves as much as to others. Even a cursory examination of either Testament shows this as the rankest of heresies, but no matter, this is how this particular doctrine translated into practice.
Some would say that such a foundation nurtured some of our very worst tendencies; greed, avarice, self-righteousness, entitlement, etc. Now we can’t very well pin all of this on the Puritans, can we? The early settlers of Virginia—no Puritans, they—took a back seat to no one when it came to this sort of acquisitiveness. But it was the Puritans who systematized it; who put lipstick on this pig and called it beautiful.
The noted American author Marilynne Robinson has also recently penned an apologia for the Puritans. To be fair, she is not on my Reading List. I remember when her book Gilead came out in 2005 to much acclaim. I was not interested then, nor am I now. She is Calvinist in background and has studied John Calvin in depth, whom she thinks he is misunderstood. She dismisses Max Weber’s “bad little book” without further comment. In her article, she constructs a straw man from the tired Puritan cliches, then demolishes it and reconstructs the Puritan Commonwealth as one of “radical liberality.” Well, okay then. Who knew?
She even tries to rehabilitate Oliver Cromwell, who is himself enjoying a bit of a comeback these days (along with Richard III), what with Wolf Hall and all that. The problem with Cromwell is that he said, wrote, and did many things. The “real” Oliver Cromwell is not a great mystery waiting to be uncovered. Robinson bemoans that Charles II was disrespectful to his corpse, once the Restoration was in place. Using what happened to Cromwell’s remains as a template, an old friend suggested that the same thing be done to the bones of Lyndon Baines Johnson. I have to say, I am not unsympathetic to either of these scenarios. And in Cromwell’s case, it is not without irony, considering the desecration of the English reliquaries in the 1530s and 1640s.
I do agree with Robinson’s contention that the growth of Puritan New England be seen in the context of the “Puritan Revolution” back in England and Scotland. That is certainly the way I teach it in class. Recently in doing a bit of genealogy, I came across a 1649 reference in a Lancashire parish where the clerk scribbled an apology for the three year gap in the records due to the “Cromwellian Rebellion.” I like that terminology.
Morton’s vision of melding European and Native culture into a very different New England (and by extension, a very different American nation) never really stood a chance of success; realism rarely does against zealotry. But it is nice to contemplate the “what might have been.” Imagine if it would have been normative for American communities to develop around a village green, a maypole, and of course, a tavern. That, my friends, would have been a real new England.