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What I’m Reading Now 17

Posted June 6, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

What I’m Reading Now: Night by Elie Weisel
What I Just Finished Reading: Mayflower: A Story of Courage Community and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. Published by Viking (2006).

My friend Dave lives near Plymouth. My sons and I have often traveled to the small town to explore one aspect or another of its history. The reconstructed Pilgrim village, Plimouth Plantation, may be the best living history installation I’ve ever been to. But several people I’ve told to go there have been disappointed. The village itself is sort of early 17th Century Communist Eastern Europe, with every house more or less the same as every other. The town was, after all, a sort of religious commune for most of its first decade.

The real treasure at Plimouth Plantation are the living historians themselves. They have mastered the accents and attitudes of the Calvinist separatists and “Strangers” who settled the colony. Go on a weekday when it is not crowded and spend some time with each of the costumed interpreters and see if you don’t come away understanding the lives, and conflicts, of the Pilgrims, the Strangers, and the native population.

Before you go, read Nathaniel Philbrick’s extremely well-written account of the Pilgrims from their start in Europe through the the first 75 years of their history.

The Mayflower carried 102 passengers.

Not all were Pilgrims and not all had been living in England.

The Pilgrims were the extreme end of the Puritan movement. Unlike their brethren, they were so extremely anti-Catholic that they rejected the idea that the Church of England could ever be purified and they broke away to form their own Separatist church. They felt they had to leave England, but they did not leave for America. They relocated from Anglican England to Calvinist Holland. There they endured the psychic agonies that immigrants often experience. They couldn’t speak the language and they were slow to learn it. They felt discriminated against in finding work. Even though they essentially practiced the same religion as the Dutch, they magnified the differences between their religion and that of their hosts, often finding the land that generously sheltered them less than truly “godly”..

After years of living among the Dutch, aching uncertainties about being immigrants in a society not their own came to a head as they saw their children growing up to become Dutch themselves. And the fear for the future was compounded when a Dutch mob, unhappy with the Pilgrim’s failure to assimilate, attacked and beat a Pilgrim. Even though the Pilgrims were angry enough at their mother country to have left it, they were, Philbrick notes, still “defiantly English”.

When the Pilgrims left Holland for America, they were joined in Plymouth, England, by men they called “Strangers”. The strangers were non-Calvinists and they would make up nearly half of the 102 settlers on board the Mayflower. The Mayflower Compact, hailed as the foundation of self-government in America, was actually worked out before the Mayflower group landed because the Pilgrims and Strangers mistrusted each other so much. It was a secular document binding two disparate groups together.

On Nov. 11, 1620, the Mayflower arrived in the harbor at Provincetown on Cape Cod. The local Wampanogs had seen their warriors decline from three thousand to just a few hundred due to epidemics brought by previous European explorers and fishermen. Their sachem Massasoit decided that he could ally with the Mayflower group and use them as allies against his Indian enemies. After the new settlers began work on establishing themselves in Plymouth on Christmas Day, 1620, Massassoit decided to make contact with them. On March 16, the Indian Samoset walked into the middle of Plymouth and announced to the startled Pilgrims: “Welcome Englishmen”.

The Pilgrims, those religious refugees, could be quite intolerant towards the Strangers. For example, after the Strangers celebrated Christmas in 1621 with the frolics common in their homeland, the Pilgrims banned further Christmas observances. Later, when several Strangers tried to organize Anglican prayer services, the Pilgrims beat them. The revered Plymouth governor William Bradford, a pious and intelligent man, led the fight in the colony against allowing for religious toleration.

Sexual improprieties were severely punished. For example, a 17 year old boy accused of bestiality was forced to watch as his “lover”, a cow, was killed. Then he was executed.

And, while the Pilgrims initially had better relations with the natives than the other English colonies, as the founding generation died out, their sons took a decidedly genocidal approach to dealing with the Indians. Where their fathers had punished those who abused the Indians, the sons took to cheating and killing them.

When King Philip’s war erupted in 1675, Indian bands throughout New England, who had suffered a decade of mistreatment, rose against their tormentors and murdered them. The Pilgrims and their Puritan allies struck out not just at the insurgents, but at neutral nations as well. Even Christianized Indians who lived in English style “praying towns” were rounded up by militia and forced onto an island in Massachusetts’ Bay where they were left without supplies to starve by their co-religionists.

The New English struck at the neutral Narragansetts in western Rhode Island. Roger Williams refused to send Rhode Island troops to join in what he saw as an unjust war against a peaceful nation. The New Englanders attacked a Narragansett village in the Great Swamp. After a thousand colonial troops surrounded the village, they set fire to it, burning alive hundreds of native women and children.

This so-called Great Swamp Fight so disturbs me that I hiked out to the scene of the massacre a couple of years ago. It was hunting season and I could hear shooting nearby. Men on ATVs tore through the wetlands at high speeds, with full gun racks and tubs of beer in their trunks. I sang as I went along. “I’m man, not a deer, don’t shoot me” was the chorus.

The terrorization of the Rhode Island Indians did not have the desired effect of “pacification”. Other neutral Indians feared that if they did not rise, they too would be exterminated. Raids on English villages increased. Mary Rowlandson, whom I wrote about two weeks ago, was one of the victims of the new round of attacks.

In March of 1676 there were raids all over New England. Even a fortified position on the outskirts of Plymouth was attacked and burned.

But, as the New Englanders burned their way through Indian country, the natives began to give up. Nearly 60% of the Indian population of the region had been killed. Nearly one in ten English men had also died.

When King Philip, the Wampanog leader, was killed at the end of the war, his severed head became Plymouth’s first tourist attraction when it was placed on a pike near the entrance to the town.

What I’m Reading Now are occasional blogs that I post when I start a new book. They are not always immigration related. Here are some other notes I’ve written on books I’ve finished since September 2009:

16. Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer.

15. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson by Eve LaPlante.

14. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson.

13. Einstein by Walter Isaacson

12. The Possessed by Elif Batuman.

11. Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew

10. The Renaissance At War by Thomas Arnold

9. Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America by Allen Guelzo

8. Lincoln: Speeches and Wriitings 1832-1858 by Abraham Lincoln

7. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan

6. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

5. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand