During the nineteenth century, historians looking for antecedents to the American Revolution made the Mayflower a sacred mascot, the flagship of freedom whose passengers escaped the English state. It bore the first English settlers to make a successful colony in northern North America, where they could worship as they pleased. As Puritans, the sect that preserved freedoms against royal absolutism, they were admired by Anglo-American constitutionalists. Today, by contrast, the American Revolutionaries’ traditions of liberty can ring rather hollow. Although early modern England prided herself on the absence of slavery compared to other European powers, by the end of the seventeenth century not only were there a number of African slaves in Plymouth colony, but Native American slaves and servants were a common sight in many households.
In fact, the once hallowed Puritans, including the Mayflower passengers, have been under attack for some while. In 1975, the American historian Francis Jennings changed the historical weather when he published his iconoclastic The Invasion of America: Indians, colonialists and the cant of conquest. The subtitle said it all. Thanksgiving, America’s most important national holiday, based on the symbolic, peaceful feast that the Mayflower Pilgrims shared with the native American tribes, seemed no more than a legend. Nowadays, as the historian Graham Taylor writes, the Mayflower passengers are not only held responsible, as Puritans, for the Puritan persecutions in New England, but also for “colonialism, slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans”.
On the 400th anniversary of the founding of Plymouth Colony, four historians have put the Mayflower expedition under the microscope again. In One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the beginning of English New England, one of America’s most distinguished scholars of the Puritans, Francis J. Bremer, defends the Mayflower settlers. He makes the case that the earliest political forms of the region, the exceptionally broadly based democracy of the town hall meeting, derived from the congregational traditions of the church which drew up the Mayflower Compact. In his view, the settlers’ unique brand of separatism stood for community inclusion, and that community has expanded through the centuries. Under Professor Bremer’s leadership, indigenous peoples have been to the fore in the 400th anniversary commemorations.
