The Pilgrims: Unshakable Myth

Somewhere in the back of the collective American mind lies a quaint and engaging folk memory that surfaces once a year on Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims. Stouthearted, pious, gray-clad churchmen marching to their meetinghouse with bell-mouthed musket and faith in God. Brave Miles Standish. Gentle Priscilla. "Speak for Yourself John" Alden. The Mayflower Compact, that cornerstone of American democracy. Freedom of worship in a new world.

Myth, much of it, the creation of patriotic 19th century romantics. Yet the coming of the Pilgrims is being celebrated this year with particular fervor, for 1970 marks the 350th anniversary of their landing on Nov. 21, 1620, at what is now Provincetown, Mass., and their final settlement at Plymouth a month later. The celebration will continue until November 1971--the 350th anniversary of the First Thanksgiving --and it is richly deserved, because the Pilgrims were more fascinating in fact than they ever were in fiction.

Separatist Saints. The Mayflower company was, to begin with, no homogenous assembly of pious churchmen, but a mixed bag of cantankerous "saints and strangers"--angry religious rebels and ungodly adventurers who took unseemly pleasure in hurling invective at one another. The "saints" were bona fide revolutionaries--reformers within a Reformation. The Anglican Church under the Stuarts, with its emphasis on bishops and mandated ritual, was for them hardly more pure or godly than the "whore of Rome," as they called the Roman Catholic Church. The Bible should be the only authority, the reformers felt. Some also believed that each congregation should be its own independent governing body. Those who hoped for such independence within the Church of England were "non-separating Congregational-ists," represented in New England by the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those who felt reform could only be achieved outside the established church were Separatists, and from their number came the Pilgrim "saints" of the Plymouth Company.

The Pilgrims do not deserve the sentimental image created for them by Longfellow and his contemporaries in the 19th century, when the name Pilgrim itself finally began to catch on.* They had to be, and were, considerably tougher to surmount the brutal odds threatening their survival--one aspect of the myth that has not been exaggerated. During the first winter, cold, disease and famine cut their number in half--13 out of the 18 wives who came on the Mayflower died. More might have perished had not an early landing party stolen Indian corn from buried caches--a find they considered to be "God's providence." Only privation made the Pilgrims temporary teetotalers; only because of their "great thirste" was the New England water "as pleasante unto them as wine or bear had been in for-times." Soon enough they began to make their own wine and beer.

Weekdays, the Pilgrims looked like any other Englishmen: wearing the rich browns or the Lincoln greens then popular in their homeland. Governor Bradford even had a red vest and William Brewster a violet coat. The traditional dour grays and blacks were principally for Sundays. Their observance of the gloomy Sunday, however, was a practice not without its perils. Since the Pilgrims believed that a baby born on a Sunday had been conceived on a Sunday, preachers thundered when a woman gave birth on a Sunday. One preacher stopped such harangues after his own wife gave birth to twins during the Sunday afternoon period he regularly reserved for prayer and meditation.

Swift Punishment. The Pilgrims were certainly not opposed to sex: families were large, and widowers remarried quickly, sometimes within weeks of a wife's death. But aberrations were punished swiftly and, in at least one case, with terrible severity. During 1642, reported Bradford, "even sodomie and bugerie (things fearfull to name) have broak forth in this land, oftener than once." One hapless boy of "16 or 17," having confessed to bestiality with "a mare, a cowe, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey," was tried by jury and executed, but not before such animals as he could identify were slaughtered, in accordance with an injunction in the Book of Leviticus.

Democracy in government hardly existed. The Mayflower Compact was only an agreement to ensure self-government and good order for the new colony, and it was neither signed by all nor did it contain any democratic guarantees. The Separatist elite kept tight hold on the reins of government and sometimes made life uncomfortable for those not among the "saints." When Bradford permitted Anglican members of the community to abstain from work on Christmas--a holiday not observed by the Separatists--he expected them to observe the day solemnly. Finding some men playing sports, he "took away their implements" and sent them home.

Yet the Pilgrim congregational church structure--like that of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans--was democratic, a tradition carried into New England's history. Moreover, the Plymouth settlers preserved not only the fundamental rights of Englishmen--among them, trial by jury and due process--but gave legal protection to Indians. They did not hesitate to execute two fellow Pilgrims for killing an Indian.

One thing that the original Pilgrim congregation did not preserve intact was its orthodox Separatist faith. At the beginning of the 19th century, the congregation of the First Church of Plymouth split over belief in the Trinity, and took a vote. The losers would leave the congregation. The Unitarians won the election, but lost their church to fire a century later. The pastor of the trinitarian Church of the Pilgrimage across the street could not resist the opportunity to scoff a bit. "We kept the faith," said a sign he hung outside his church. "They kept the furniture."

* Governor William Bradford seems to have been the first to use the name, describing their departure from Leyden: "They knew they were pilgrimes." But the colonists never applied it to themselves as a group. Bradford's history, Of Plimouth Plantation, could have been a corrective to the 19th century myths, but the manuscript, spirited away to England during the American Revolution, was lost until the mid-19th century.

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