The Problem With Being Merry!

"We may look peaceful, but watch out!"

I feel I can't justify giving the Pilgrims only one post.  We only think of them around Thanksgiving and associate them with pumpkin pies, green bean casseroles and a turkey baking in an oven.  The Pilgrims are more than food.  They were devoted to God and left their homeland for the promise of religious freedom.  However, a man named Thomas Morton, would threaten their utopia.

Thomas Morton arrived in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts in 1625, shortly before he was to accompany Captain Wollaston and several men to Virginia.  Morton, however, decided not to go to Virginia.  Instead he remained in Massachusetts, removed Wollaston's lieutenant and renamed the existing settlement Merry Mount.  Morton wasn't a religious radical like the Pilgrims.  He was a full-blooded Anglican who openly had intimate relations with native women, celebrated all the old English holidays with lots of drinking and continued the pagan practice of the Maypole.

Merry Mount was a neighboring settlement of Plymouth and instead of having a nice block party in May, an unfortunate and hysterical incident occurred.  Morton nor William Bradford, however, would ever find this story funny and are rolling in their graves as I write.  None the less, historians and authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne have found this incident funny enough.

The Pilgrims, motivated by jealousy (the Indians preferred trading with Morton over the Pilgrims) and desiring their land not to be corrupted by sinful, pagan behavior, arrested Morton during the annual May Day festival.  Being to drunk to resist, the Pilgrims arrested him and cut down the Maypole.  The only person hurt was one of Morton's men, who was so inebriated he walked into Captain Miles Standish's sword and got a nose bleed.

The May-Pole at Merry Mount

After the arrest, Morton was exiled to the Island of Shoals with nothing more than the clothes on his back.  Luckily for Morton, the Indians took pity on him and feed and clothed him until an English fishing boat would rescue him.  Morton, however, was never one to give up and returned to New England several years later.  The Puritans, hating him even more than the Pilgrims, arrested him, tried him in a court of law and sentenced him first to the stocks and than exile.  The exact charges against Morton are unknown, because even the Puritans knew he wasn't guilty of anything.

When you sit down for your Thanksgiving dinner next Thursday, remember that the Pilgrims, like any other group in history, were a complicated bunch with conflicting desires.  They sought religious freedom and bravely sailed across the ocean to an unknown land.  Their desire for religious freedom, however, only applied to themselves

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