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Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims, and the Indians

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Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims, and the Indians 5 Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims, and the Indians Plymouth Rock is the oldest important artifact of American civil religion. T ough the Rock looks small and disappointing to most visitors (Figure 5.1), a cult of the Pilgrims has grown up around it. T e Rock has been moved and bro- ken four times by May f ower descendants, chipped away by Plymouth business- men, urinated on by drunks, and buried in sand by Native Americans. T e four hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing, in 2020, has already provoked a search for consensus. Controversy starts with the identity of the Rock, because the English were living at Plymouth for more than a century af er the May f ower arrived in 1620 before it was marked as anything special. Geologically, it was a ten-ton piece of granite (now reduced to six, of which only three are visible), a few feet high that had been lef on the beach as masses of ice retreated more than ten thousand years ago. T ough the Rock may have been remembered as a marker of the place where the founders of Plymouth f rst came ashore on December 22, 1620, no one wrote about it. During the seventeenth century, as Plymouth Colony was overshadowed and then absorbed by Massachuset s, becoming known as the “Old Colony,” the Rock on the shore at ained no wider fame. One map pub- lished in 1715 did make note of a “great rock” that marked one boundary of the town. T e Rock began to be called Forefathers’ Rock in 1741, af er an incident that coincided with the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. For several years, outdoor meetings and traveling preachers brought new, young mem- bers into the churches of New England; at the same time, those churches were being torn apart by conf ict over the emotional sensationalism of the preachers (such as George Whitef eld, Jonathan Edwards, and George Tennent) who were 2OGEQWUDO=GSCOPGQ9OCPP7AOO?QC1IIOGEQPOCPCOSC inspiring these multitudes to seek church membership. Whenever an “itinerant” preacher came to a community, the churches would have to decide whether to allow him to use their pulpits. Of en the losers in these votes were disaf ected 5?OCII?9CQCO-G/1COGA?2GSGICIGEG,>?Q1COGA?P6I<?AOC-G/UDO=GSCOPGQ9OCPP7AOO?QC38 9O:RCPQ4H2CQO?IQQ,CHACQO?IORCPQAIGP?OQOCCQ?GI?AQG0A73. 2OC?QCDOP?OQOC ,, GGardella150613OUS.inddardella150613OUS.indd 3388 110/11/20130/11/2013 88:52:53:52:53 PPMM Plymouth Rock 39 Figure 5.1 All that remains of Plymouth Rock, in its protective cage. T e original ten-ton granite boulder was never very large, but it was split during a disastrous move in 1774, chipped away for souvenirs, then split again when it was moved in 1834. Photograph by William Gardella. enough to found another church. All over New England, towns that began with one Congregational church now had two: an “Old Light” church that disap- proved of emotional preaching and a “New Light,” revivalist church. An elder of the original Plymouth Church, T omas Faunce, started the cult of Plymouth Rock at the same time that he lef his home congregation, along with other “Old Lights” who had fallen into minority status. T e “New Lights” tended to be younger, more enterprising types who criticized their elders with regard to politics and economics as well as religion. Some of them wanted to build a wharf from the main street of Plymouth to the water, covering the “great rock” near the high-tide line. Disapproving of these plans, Elder Faunce (who was not only a church elder but also ninety-f ve years old) had himself carried in a chair to the beach to speak against the construction. He said that he had brought his chil- dren and grandchildren to the rock every year and stood them on it, recalling the story of the landing at Plymouth. Because Faunce’s father had come to Plymouth 2OGEQWUDO=GSCOPGQ9OCPP7AOO?QC1IIOGEQPOCPCOSC in 1623 and Faunce himself had known several of the May f ower passengers, his story was believed. Although construction of the wharf went forward, the top of the rock was allowed to protrude though a hole in the wood. For the next thirty 5?OCII?9CQCO-G/1COGA?2GSGICIGEG,>?Q1COGA?P6I<?AOC-G/UDO=GSCOPGQ9OCPP7AOO?QC 9O:RCPQ4H2CQO?IQQ,CHACQO?IORCPQAIGP?OQOCCQ?GI?AQG0A73. 2OC?QCDOP?OQOC ,, GGardella150613OUS.inddardella150613OUS.indd 3399 110/11/20130/11/2013 88:52:53:52:53 PPMM 40 AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION years it interfered with the wheels of commerce but stood for conservative val- ues, the good old ways in church and state. In the following decades, tensions between old and new extended to relations between Britain and America. T ose tensions increased af er the British victory in the French and Indian Wars in 1763. An Old Colony Club was founded at Plymouth in 1769, a few months before British troops enforcing taxation shot f ve civilians in the Boston Massacre. T e club had the explicit purpose of giving those who could prove descent from the f rst generation an alternative to mixing with newcomers in taverns. On December 22, 1769, and on that date for a few years thereaf er, the Old Colony Club held a celebration of the 1620 landing, with a meal of shellf sh, waterfowl, and venison to recall the diet of their ances- tors. T ese meetings included prayer for peace and continued union with Great Britain, and they became caught up in conf ict over the impending revolution. Where Plymouth once had a majority of New Lights who cared lit le for the old ways in the church, it now had many Liberty Boys (or Sons of Liberty) who wanted to break from the British Empire. With the Liberty Boys stood T eophilus Cot on, the heir of Boston’s f rst pastor and colonel of the local militia. On the other side was Edward Winslow, a Mayf ower descendant who took note of Forefathers’ Rock on a map of 1774 and who referred to the Sons of Liberty as “Sons of Licentiousness.” During the evening of December 21, 1774(the night before the Old Colony Club dinner and a few months before hostilities began at Lexington and Concord(the Plymouth rebels decided to capture Plymouth Rock. Armed with wooden screws, they raised the rock from its bed, put chains around it, and tied the chains to many teams of oxen(thirty or forty, according to some accounts(intending to drag the rock up to the main street and place it next to an elm they had named a Liberty Tree, from which they hung ef gies of tax collectors and to which they at ached a Liberty Pole to f y a “Liberty or Death” f ag. Forefathers’ Rock was to become one more symbol of the rebel cause. Unfortunately, as they raised the rock, it broke in half. Some saw the break as a sign that the colonies would break free from Britain. Leaving the lower half of the rock where it was, the Liberty Boys brought the upper piece to the Liberty Tree. T ey also took over the celebrations of Forefathers’ Day from the Old Colony Club, most of whose members decided to side with the Tories. Af er the Revolutionary War began in earnest the celebrations ceased, and they were not resumed until 1793. It was at the revival of Forefathers’ Day in 1793, under the auspices of the town government of Plymouth, that Chandler Robbins, pastor of the oldest Congregational church in town, f rst called the Forefathers “Pilgrims.” Although 2OGEQWUDO=GSCOPGQ9OCPP7AOO?QC1IIOGEQPOCPCOSC the name was based on a passage from Governor William Bradford’s history of Plymouth, in which Bradford said that the colonists did not complain about hardships because they “knew they were Pilgrims” on the way to Heaven, 5?OCII?9CQCO-G/1COGA?2GSGICIGEG,>?Q1COGA?P6I<?AOC-G/UDO=GSCOPGQ9OCPP7AOO?QC 9O:RCPQ4H2CQO?IQQ,CHACQO?IORCPQAIGP?OQOCCQ?GI?AQG0A73. 2OC?QCDOP?OQOC ,, GGardella150613OUS.inddardella150613OUS.indd 4400 110/11/20130/11/2013 88:52:54:52:54 PPMM Plymouth Rock 41 Robbins was actually beginning a strange usage. Pilgrims are normally travel- ers to a sacred place like Jerusalem or Mecca (or Heaven), and the forefathers of Plymouth were primarily refugees f om religious persecution, seeking escape and a place of safety. But by the time Robbins spoke, Plymouth had actually become a place of pilgrimage that centered on its Rock. T e journal of James T acher, a revolutionary soldier who passed through Plymouth in 1775, spoke of “holding converse with celestial spirits” at the site and asked, “Can we set our feet on their rock without swearing, by the spirit of our fathers, to defend it and our country?” T ough the Separatists of the May f ower would not have answered to the name of “Pilgrim,” James T acher had become a pilgrim to their site. T acher went on to write a history of Plymouth that has been reprinted many times (as recently as 1992). T e name “Pilgrim” became part of a cult of Plymouth that expanded beyond clubs for the descendants of the May f ower . By the two hundredth anniversary in 1820, the Old Colony Society and the town government had been replaced in running the celebrations by a Pilgrim Society that did not discriminate by ancestry, accepting anyone willing to pay dues. During the nineteenth century, Plymouth Rock came to be seen as the foun- dation of an American empire. Speaking at the Forefathers’ Day of 1802, the young John Quincy Adams noted that it had been less than two centuries since “the f rst European foot” touched the Rock and predicted that in “[t] wo cen- turies more .
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