American History for Truthdiggers: Roots in Religious Zealotry
"The First Thanksgiving, 1621” by J.L.G. Ferris. The Pilgrims of
first-Thanksgiving legend were soon followed to the New World by the
Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (Library of Congress
/ Wikimedia Commons)
Truthdig editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about
ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and
help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “Make
America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our
past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate
America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?
Below is the second installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers”
series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The
author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army,
served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s
checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of
history at West Point. His wartime experiences, his scholarship, his skill
as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.
Part 2 of “American History for Truthdiggers.” / Click here to see the
first installment in the series.
It is the image Americans are comfortable with. The first Thanksgiving.
Struggling Pilgrims-our blessed forebears-saved by the generosity of kindly
Native Americans. Two societies coexisting in harmony. If Colonial Virginia
was a mess, well, certainly matters were better in Massachusetts. Here are
origins all can be proud of.
Our children re-create the scene every November, and we watch them with
pride through the lenses of our smartphones. But is this representation of
life in Colonial New England an accurate portrait of Anglo-Native relations
at Plymouth, or, for that matter, in the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony? Of
course it isn’t, but nonetheless the impression-the myth-persists. That’s
a story unto itself.
Consider this: How many Americans even know there was a difference between
Pilgrims and Puritans? The distinctions matter. The Pilgrims, of course,
arrived first. Calvinists of humble origins, the Pilgrims were Protestant
separatists who believed the mainstream Church of England was beyond saving.
They fled England for the Netherlands in the early 17th century, and then,
in 1620, about a hundred boarded the Mayflower to go to North America. It
was they who landed on Plymouth Rock.
The far more numerous Puritans were also pious, dissenting Protestants, but
they initially believed the Church of England could be reformed from within.
They were generally wealthier, more prominent citizens. In about 1630, about
1,000 Puritans formed the first wave to settle the area claimed by the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were, indeed, fleeing the persecution of King
Charles I, but-unlike the Pilgrims-they received a royal charter for their
colony. They hoped to found a “New Jerusalem” in the New World.
Stark Contrasts: Virginia vs. New England
These weren’t the gold-hungry aristocrats of Colonial Virginia. The
Puritans (and Pilgrims) came as families-they included women. The
Massachusetts climate and natural population growth made for far lower
mortality than that experienced at early Jamestown in Virginia. Everyone was
willing to work, and the productive family units made, eventually, for
bountiful harvests. This was not a land of “gentlemen” and cash crops, as
in Virginia, but of dutiful families tilling the land.
The motivations and origins of the two English colonies affected the social
structure of each. Differing goals set the tone from the first. Virginians
sought to exploit the land, mine its resources, compete with the Spanish and
turn a quick profit. Not so the Puritans. They strove to settle, to put down
roots and thrive in an idealized community. Their middling origins combined
with communal goals and resulted in familial plots with widespread land
ownership-another contrast with the tobacco plantations of Jamestown. All
this translated into a rough economic equality, at least in the early years.
There was also a near total absence of chattel slavery: The climate didn’t
support the most common cash crops, and so there was little incentive to
import Africans to New England.
God Wills It: The Motivations of the Puritans
John Winthrop, a governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. (Wikimedia Commons)
It all sounds harmonious, idyllic even. Yet something lurked below the
surface, something dark and unpleasant to modern eyes. These were
fundamentalist zealots! These insufferable, millenarian Calvinists held
themselves in shockingly high esteem. They were chosen, they would transform
the world by their example. If the Pilgrims sought separation from a world
of sin, the Puritans meant to create a New World, an example for all to
emulate. It briefs well, and makes for an agreeable origin narrative, but
isn’t there something disturbing about such a people, about such
overbearing confidence?
Ponder the words of John Winthrop, an early governor of the Bay Colony:
“
… wee shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall
be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise
and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it
like that of New England: for we must Consider that we shall be as a City
upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. …
These were people on a mission, the Lord’s mission, come what may. Such
people would seem to be on a collision course with the region’s natives and
Anglo nonconformists. And this would soon come to pass.
The Puritans’ motivations and goals raise some salient questions. What does
it say about, and what are the implications for, a society founded on such
colossal self-regard? Is it, ultimately, a good thing? That’s certainly a
matter of opinion, but the questions themselves are instructive. Americans
must make such queries to get an honest sense of themselves and their
origins. This much is hard to argue with: Here, in Massachusetts, we find
the geneses of American exceptionalism-the blessing and curse that has
shadowed the United States for more than three centuries, driving domestic
and especially foreign policy. Divergent modern political figures, from
Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, stuck carefully to an American exceptionalist
script, in rhetoric if not in deed. One wonders whether this “City on a
Hill” milieu, on the whole, has been a positive attribute. This author, at
least, tends to doubt it. Perhaps we should mistrust such pride, and
conceit, in even its most American forms.
Stifling Dissent: Life in Colonial New England
“The Execution of Mrs. Ann Hibbins,” sketch by F.T. Merrill (1886).
(Flickr / CC 2.0)
Could you imagine living with these people, comporting with their way of
life? It sounds like a nightmare. Yet we Americans hold these antecedents in
high esteem. Perhaps it’s natural, but this much is certain: Such
veneration requires a certain degree of willful forgetting, a whitewashing
of inconvenient truths about Puritan society.
Sure, Massachusetts avoided the worst famines of Jamestown’s early years,
but life in Colonial New England was far from serene. It rarely is in
repressive religious societies. Remember, the Puritans constructed exactly
what they said they would, a theocracy on the bay. The Massachusetts Bay
Colony may indeed have more in common with modern Saudi Arabia-executing
“witches” and “sorcerers”-than it does with contemporary Boston. Our
ancestors were far more religious than most Americans can fathom. But
there’s also a problem of framing; we’ve omitted the uncomfortable bits to
fashion an uplifting origin narrative.
There were many subgroups that certainly didn’t enjoy life in early
Colonial Massachusetts: religious dissidents, agnostics, free thinkers and,
well, assertive women. We’ve all heard of the infamous Salem Witch Trials,
but nearly four decades earlier the widow Ann Higgins was executed, hung for
witchcraft, after having the audacity to complain that hired carpenters had
overcharged her for a remodeling job on her house.
All told, 344 citizens were accused of witchcraft in 17th-century
Massachusetts. Twenty were executed. The accused had commonalities that are
indicative of the nature of gender relations in the Bay Colony. Seventy-five
percent were women. Most of those women were middle-aged or older and
demonstrated some degree of independence. Many were suspected of some sort
of sexual impropriety. The point is that Colonial New England was inhabited
by zealots-conformist and oppressive fundamentalists who strictly policed
the boundaries of their exalted theocracy. Forget the Thanksgiving feast:
This was Islamic State on the Atlantic!
If life was as idyllic as the settlers intended in
hail-the-Protestant-work-ethic Massachusetts Bay, then why were so many
colonial “heroes” kicked out? Roger Williams, for example, founder of
Rhode Island, promoted religious toleration and some separation of church
and state, and asserted (gasp) that settlers ought to buy land from the
native inhabitants. His thanks? A ticket straight out of Massachusetts.
Slightly less well known was Anne Hutchinson. She had the gall to organize
weekly women’s meetings to discuss theology and even contemplated the
concept of individual intuition as a path to salvation. She too was
banished. There was simply no room for dissent in Puritan society.
‘We Must Burn Them’: Puritan and Native Relations
“The Figure of the Indians Fort or Palizado,” sketch by John Underhill
(1638). (Houghton Library / Wikimedia Commons)
This, naturally, brings us to the native peoples of New England. If
nonconformist Englishmen fared so poorly in Massachusetts, then what of the
Indians? You can probably guess.
Once again, as in Virginia, the Native Americans did not, or could not, wipe
out the nascent colonial community, even though, initially at least, there
were fewer soldiers among the settlers in Massachusetts. The explanation for
the settlers surviving among the native Americans is far more complex than
the simple myth of the noble, benevolent savage. The Puritans were the
“beneficiaries of catastrophe,” for New England native communities had
recently been ravaged by infectious European diseases that spread up and
down the coastline. The thinned-out native populations thus posed less of a
demographic threat to Massachusetts.
Far from the serene images of Thanksgiving amity, Anglo-Indian relations
quickly turned from bad to worse. Land was a factor, but not the only one. A
permanent settler community such as the Puritans’ would require inevitable
expansion and rapidly grow, to be sure. As in Virginia, land ownership
cohered with “freedom”-Anglo land and Anglo freedom, that is. Still, in
New England, ideology was as much of a stimulus for war as land, wealth or
further economic motives. The native tribes, swarthy and “unbelieving”
Pequot, Wampanoag, Naggaransetts and others, simply did not fit into the
Puritan’s messianic worldview. Conquered or converted were the only
acceptable states for local Indians.
Early colonial wars in Massachusetts were as brutal and bloody as wars
anywhere else on the North American continent. Here there was a direct
connection between the Puritan religion and the cruelty seen in the Pequot
War and King Philip’s War. In the Pequot War, Massachusetts militiamen
attacked a native fort at Mystic, Connecticut, and through fire and fury
burned alive 400 to 700 Indians, mostly women and children. The survivors
were sold as slaves.
The militia relied on allied native scouts. Observing the ruthlessness of
the Puritan fighting men, one native auxiliary asked Capt. John Underhill,
“Why should you be so furious? Should not Christians have more mercy and
compassion?” Underhill’s reply was as instructive as it is disturbing:
“
I would refer you to David where, when a people is grown to such a height of
blood, and sin against God and man … sometimes the Scripture declareth
women and children must perish with their parents; some-time the case
alters: but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the
word of God for our proceeding.
Should, from time to time, a tinge of doubt betray the Puritans’ devout
certainty, faithful zeal quickly assuaged the guilty conscience. Consider
the words of another participant in the “Mystic Massacre,” William
Bradford: “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire …
and horrible was the stink … but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and
they gave the praise thereof to God.”
Nearly simultaneous to the Virginian Bacon’s Rebellion, the Puritans fought
King Philip’s-or Metacom’s-War in Massachusetts. Mercilessly executed on
both sides, this was a war of survival that forever broke native power and
independence in New England. Nearly one in 50 colonists were killed in what
was by far the bloodiest war in American history, with 11 times the death
rate of World War II. The native leader Metacom, known to the settlers as
King Philip, was betrayed by an informer and killed, and his head was
displayed on a pole in Plymouth, Mass., for decades. Such was the savagery
of colonial war that the tactics and symbolism bring to mind Islamic State
in today’s Syrian civil war.
When it came to Native American affairs, the Puritans hardly set the “City
on a Hill” example. Or did they? After all, John Winthrop believed the
“God of Israel”-a jealous, smiting deity if ever there was one-was among
the Puritans, guiding their every move. As noted here earlier, Winthrop
claimed this God provided the colonists such strength that 10 of their
number could “resist a thousand enemies.” Viciousness and intolerance
toward racially distinct, heathen natives were actually at the heart of
“City on a Hill” teleology from the start. What Americans now decry in the
Greater Middle East is but an echo of their colonial past. That much is
worth remembering.
Not So Different: What Virginians and New Englanders Shared
When considering the two origin-societies of Virginia and Massachusetts, the
differences are stark and effortlessly leap forth. More difficult, but just
as relevant, are their significant commonalities. For it is in the overlap
that we find our shared heritage, that which is universal in the American
past, and, perhaps, the past of all settler-colonial societies.
Anglo dominance-and arrogance-acutely pervaded both colonial civilizations.
In Massachusetts, as in Virginia, conflict and brutality toward the native
peoples were regular features of settler life. In each setting, though to
differing extents, a fever for land combined with exceptionalist ideology to
conquer slave and native alike. For Englishmen, property ownership
corresponded with liberty, but all along the Eastern Seaboard, Anglo liberty
portended native death and displacement.
* * *
If Colonial Virginian society was fundamentally based on white unity at the
expense of African slaves, then perhaps Puritan Massachusetts was founded
upon Anglo zealotry at the expense of a “savage” Indian “other.” As
proud descendants-some of us literally, most figuratively-of these twin
settler-colonial enterprises, Americans must grapple with their inconvenient
past. Here there’s much work left to be done.
The exceptionalism and chauvinistic Protestantism of the Massachusetts
Puritans long influenced the American experiment. From the “City on a
Hill” it is but a short journey to Manifest Destiny and the conquest of a
continent-native inhabitants be damned!
Again, origins, and origin stories, matter. They inform who we were, and who
we are, in stark contrast to who we’d like to think we were and are.
America is its best self when it searches its soul and reforms from within.
When, that is, it confronts its demons and seeks a better, more inclusive
and empathetic future.
For further information on this period, see:
● Peter Silver, “Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early
America.”
● Jill Lepore, “The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of
American Identity.”
● Alan Taylor, “American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Volume
1.”
Maj. Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a U.S. Army