From Pilgrims to Americans

Everyone knows the story of the Pilgrims, right?   They were the humble, devout Protestants who fled oppression and in 1620 founded the first English colony in Puritan New England.   After passing through bitter hardship, they celebrated the first Thanksgiving in fellowship with the Indians.

Americans' view of the Pilgrims has passed through several stages.    For future president John Adams growing up in Quincy, Massachusetts in the 1750's, the Pilgrims were his ancestors, the bedrock of his world.   The author of the Massachusetts Constitution and Declaration of Rights recognized in the zealous, hardworking, rigid, and righteous ethos of the Pilgrim Fathers, the foundation of a democratic American society.

Nineteenth century modernists could dismiss the Pilgrims as intolerant religious fanatics.  But for Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison in the 1950s, there was a need to rescue them from this opprobrium.   While he reassures us that "their faith is not my faith," Morison identifies with the Pilgrims.   Their struggle to colonize a new land is the start of the American project.

But no settler state can exist without dispossessing the natives, and Puritan New England was no exception.    Though they long maintained relatively peaceful relations with the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, the Pilgrims soon joined the other New England colonies in exterminating the Pequots in 1637, a tale movingly retold at the Pequot Museum in eastern Connecticut.  By 1675, the steady encroachment of white settlement caused King Philip's War, a New England-wide war of racial annihilation in which all Indian tribes united under the leadership of Massasoit's son Philip, and after a hard, bitter fight, were destroyed; many of the  survivors were sold into slavery in the Carribean.

While in 1957 Morison could describe the murderous Indian policies of the Pilgrims without apology and without any effort to see events from the Indian side, in 50 years times have changed.  The 2006 bestseller Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick presents the Native point of view and depicts King Philip's War as a tragedy.   However, it is still necessary that we believe in the mastery of the settler.  "The great mystery of this story is how America emerged from the terrible darkness of King Philip's War to become the United States.   A possible answer resides in the man who has been called America's first Indian fighter, Benjamin Church".   Church, as much the hero of Philbrick's account as judicious Plymouth governor William Bradford, is the rugged frontiersman, recruiter and leader of friendly Indians, who matches Indian methods of unconventional warfare and, by tracking and killing Philip, ends the conflict.  

American exceptionalism is with us still.   While we now respect and consider the feelings of the Others, the resilience of Bradford's Puritan faith can be read in the confident verities of George Bush, indeed of all mainstream American political culture, particularly apparent in this election year.   We will be a light among nations.  We will bring democracy to the world.  (And of course, if you do not accept our version of democracy, we will bring to you a fire the like of which you have never seen.)

As Barack Obama said on PBS this evening, "We imagine a world, not as it is, but as it should be."  The Pilgrims said the same, and acted boldly on their belief.   The Pilgrims did not die.   Their messianism is the foundation of Americanism.   Conservatives, liberals, and radicals, we are Pilgrims still.