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PLYMOUTH Plantation, on the Shore of Cape Cod Bay, Began 588 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY PLYMOUTH PLANTATION’S PLACE IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD carla gardina pestana LYMOUTH Plantation, on the shore of Cape Cod Bay, began P as a small outpost, its precise location initially unknown to other Europeans.1 An isolated settlement set in an out-of-the-way place, Plymouth persisted almost seventy years without achieving the sta- tus of an official colony in the emerging English empire. Belying its small size and unsettled status, Plymouth’s fame arose because it later became a national symbol: of “firstness” and of settler sacrifice. Its significance has been captured in a series of vignettes garnered from the events of the first year, including the landing of the passengers from the Mayflower, their later meeting with Native man Tisquan- tum (or Squanto), and their enjoyment of a harvest feast on a day of thanksgiving. These mythic elements all drew upon the two published accounts of Plymouth’s first years, which provide sufficient detail to support selective remembering of the plantation’s beginnings. Beyond these popular images, Plymouth later gained scholarly attention for its interactions with the resident Wampanoags and for the possible in- fluence of its separatist heritage on the emergence of New England’s variant of the Protestant faith. Plymouth continues to be viewed in the context of a national narrative of beginnings—the Mayflower is ar- guably the single most famous ship throughout the entirety of United States’ history—and Plymouth is further recalled as an aspect of a re- gional story. It has been left out of the history and historiography of the Atlantic world. The author would like to thank Sharon Salinger and Adrian Weimer as well as Ken Minkema for advice on this essay. 1The term “plantation” would come to refer to a large landholding that produced a single crop for export using enslaved laborers, but in the early seventeenth century, it carried a different meaning: that of a transplanted group of people. In that sense, it became the quasi-official name of first the village occupied in the winter of 1620–21 and later the jurisdiction that included the town of Plymouth as well as a handful of others under the same government. Plymouth landowners did not initially buy slaves, either African or Native, but Plymouth itself came into being out of transplanted En- glish people who occupied Indigenous lands. For a discussion of the term, see Carla Gardina Pestana, The World of Plymouth Plantation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 2020), 28–36. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00864 by guest on 02 October 2021 PLYMOUTH IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD 589 Yet Plymouth, for all its appearance of lonely isolation, was a well- connected place in at least two respects: it took part in larger trends that were shaping other locations and it was linked to—indeed deeply dependent on—many distant places. In the terms used by David Ar- mitage in his influential discussion of the variety of approaches that allow us to assess the history of the early modern Atlantic, it can be seen as both a transatlantic case, a place that can be compared with others in the Atlantic basin, and a cis-Atlantic case, which is to say a particular place shaped by “the interaction between [its] local particularity and a wider web of connections.”2 Plymouth had much in common with other Atlantic outposts, and its history—indeed its very survival—was affected by how its own features—its location and attributes—interacted through these connections to other places. Both Plymouth itself and the Atlantic of which it was a part appear different once it is acknowledged as participating in the wider world, not just sitting on the edge of the continent, withdrawn and timeless. I Plymouth holds a prominent place in the national imaginary of the origins of the United States. Its role as the first permanent En- glish settlement in New England—however inadvertently that came about—gave it an advantage in the regional mythmaking that began in the late colonial period but gained traction after the American Revo- lution.3 That Plymouth was the first English settlement in what would become New England bolstered claims to its significance. The set- tlement’s promoters chose a boulder to symbolize the landing itself, a moment depicted in nineteenth-century art in a manner that em- phasized December weather on a wind-swept and lonely shore. The men who traveled on the Mayflower were credited with introducing democratic principles as well because they signed a “civil combina- tion,” a document intended to guide their governance of the outpost in the short term. The legacy of that “Mayflower Compact” took on such great importance that the first political parties in US history con- tested its meaning as they vied to claim and to shape the lessons of 2David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2002), 18, 21. 3Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv, 5, 7, 10. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00864 by guest on 02 October 2021 590 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Plymouth.4 Once the significance of Plymouth had been established, those who could trace their ancestry to the Mayflower earned cachet. With the Mayflower descendants, the new United States created its own aristocracy, one incongruously elevated not for its exalted birth but for its suffering and sacrifice. Plymouth also served as a backdrop for imagining peaceful relations with the region’s original residents. The story of Squanto teaching the settlers to plant corn suggested that the Natives welcomed the new arrivals and depicted grateful planta- tion residents eager to rely on their neighbors while ignoring the fact that they quickly set aside his guidance to revert to their usual ap- proach to planting. The allure of such harmony was so strong that the Squanto story—alone among those associated with Plymouth— also had a Virginia counterpart in Pocahontas’s misunderstood rescue of John Smith.5 The tale of the Thanksgiving meal involved rewriting Edward Winslow’s mention of a harvest celebration—complete with a martial display that brought a large contingent of native warriors to the settlement—into a meal celebrating piety and harmonious re- lations.6 These stories related events that occurred—if not remem- bered exactly—in the first year of Plymouth’s history: landing ata rock, signing a shipboard compact, meeting Natives, and celebrating a harvest. The implication was clear: important patterns were set at the start and would be carried to fruition in the United States. Alongside the images of Plymouth Plantation that allowed later res- idents of the United States to connect the colonial era to the nation’s identity, Plymouth also has a place in the region’s historiography. The religiosity of Plymouth planters is key to the nationalist version of the plantation, as the piety of the first arrivals runs as an undercurrent 4William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, The 400th Anniversary Edition, ed. Ken- neth P. Minkema et al. (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, New England His- toric Genealogical Society, 2020), 189 (hereafter Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation), refers to it as a “combination,” and “the first foundation of their government.” On nine- teenth century political uses, see Mark L. Sergeant, “The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in the American Myth,” The New England Quarterly 61 (1988): 246–49. 5Ann U. Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). 6Winslow’s mention is contained in his “A Letter Sent From New England to a friend . setting forth a briefe and true Declaration of the worth of that Plantation ...,”printedinA Relation or Journall of the proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England, . (London, 1622), 61; for a discussion of the martial display possibly prompting the arrival of native warriors, see Paula Peters, “Of Patuxet,” in Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation, 37. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00864 by guest on 02 October 2021 PLYMOUTH IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD 591 through all the varied images. Most consumers of Plymouth’s popu- lar image do not think too deeply about the precise nature of that piety although some evangelical Christians identify with Plymouth separatism in a specific and even proprietary way.7 Scholars scruti- nize the faith of the residents, debating the influence of Plymouth’s ostensible separatism on the broader religious culture of colonial New England. Many accounts assume that the Plymouth church adhered closely to a strictly separatist stance and that it therefore attracted radicals like Roger Williams, who served the church briefly in the early 1630s. Others attempt to determine the extent to which the church’s separatism influenced the congregations gathered in Mas- sachusetts on such issues as admission requirements. Citing the fact that Plymouth church deacon Samuel Fuller visited Salem very early in its history and consulted on church matters, some assert the later radicalism of Salem’s church or the general nature of the New En- gland way bore signs of Plymouth’s contribution.8 In most accounts, Plymouth’s distinctive nature did not last as the churches in that juris- diction eventually took part in the region’s broader religious culture. Some have noted occasional signs of difference such as a great ten- dency to offer succor to Quakers. Attributing this relative acceptance to any attribute unique to Plymouth appears problematic, however, since greater tolerance was on display in other jurisdictions such as Barbados and Rhode Island, which had no link to Plymouth or sep- aratism.
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