Might the Mayflower Not Have Sailed?

[Dave Monroe]

>From Theodore K. Rabb, "Might the Mayflower Not Have
Sailed?," What Ifs? of American History: Eminent
Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ed. Robert
Cowley (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003), pp. 1-16
...

"... the lucky strokes that enabled the Mayflower
voyage to prosper...." (p. 11)

   "And what if one of the circumstances had not
fallen into place and she had not planted a 'godly'
community at Plymouth?  That question leads us to the
crucial moment for the long-term success of the
colony: the arrival from England in 1630 of John
Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer, with a fleet of eleven
ships carrying some seven hundred colonists.  Would
they have come if the Mayflower had not preceded them
can be argued that they would not.
   "The genealogy of Winthrop's group was quite
separate from that of the Pilgrims.  It starts in the
early 1620s with a dissenting minister from the twon
of Dorchester in the west of England, the Reverend
John White.  Aware that, in contrast to Virginia,
there had been little to show for colonizing efforts
farther to the north, he determined to do better.... 
White and a few associates began sending out settlers.
 They received the right to do so by creating and
funding colonizing companies ....  Their one permanent
acheivement was to be the foundation of Salem in 1628,
but by then a new company was already in the works,
the Massachusetts Bay Company.  Itw as at this point
that Winthrop and his colleagues entered the picture
....
   "Five months after the Massachusetts Bay Comnpany
was founded, twelve of its leaders, all Puritans
including Winthrop, signed an agreement to emigrate
with all their families to New England if they could
take the company with them.  Faced with a regime ever
more hostile to religious dissent, they wanted to
leave only if they could avoid having the governance
of the company (as in all previous cases) remain in
London.  The lawyers among them ... had noticed that
the company's royal charter did not specify where the
annual meeting was to take place.  Seizing on this
loophole, they headed out across the Atlantic, taking
the charter with them.  Thus was founded the city of
Boston and a cluster of nearby communities, and thus
did the development of New England begin in earnest.
   "But would this story have unfolded if the Pilgrim
Fathers had not led the way?  The odds are good that
it would not.  Without the beacon planted at Plymouth
to reassure them, these staid, comfortable, and
conservative creators of a 'Bible Commonwealth' would
scarcely have risked their families and their
possessions on so hazardous an enterprise.  Again one
must say that without the Mayflower, there could have
been no Massachusetts Bay.
   "Nor was there a long window of opportunity for
this kind of follow-up...." (pp. 11-13)

"A fundamental stream of American culture--shaped by
ideals of sobriety, godly living, and hard work on the
one hand, and a focus on the individual and the
struggle for religious tolerance on the other--might
never have gathered the force and influence it was to
achieve over the next three centuries.
   "Given the history that brought the Pilgrims to New
England, it is perhaps not surprising that their
descendents should have been the first to sound what
became two persistent American themes....  For the
Pilgrims were to be unique among the early settlers in
their commitemnet to religious ends.  The small
sprinkling of Catholics who went to Maryland aside, no
other group was so single-minded in the motivation
that drew it across the Atlantic....
   "The result, given the harsh climate and terrain
the adventurers inhabited ... was a society very
different from its neighbors to the south.  To some
extent, of course, it was the Puritans' Calvinism that
had long emphasized thrift, sobriety, and hard work as
especially godly virtues.  But there is no question
that their insistence on discipline and honest labor
... was reinforced, and to some exetent inspired, by
the land they inhabited...." (pp. 14-15)

   "It was thus a combination of belief and
circumstances that enabled the Puritans to inject into
American culture an expectation of religious faitrh, a
commitment to self-reliance and daily toil as morally
worthy, and a stern regard for the virtuous life that
have given their country a quite distinctive
coloration among the modern nations of the West...."
(p. 15)

   "For religion itself their heritage was more
ambiguous....  The result is an 'indeparable faith in
God and Country' that makes the United States
distinctive among Western nations.  To the extent that
this has been an essential thread through 250 years of
history, its origins lie in the Puritans' conviction
that faith is the foundation on which a person's liufe
is built and thus the foundation of society itself.
   "From the outset, however, this commitment has been
riven by an irresolvable tension.  As with Luther and
Calvin themselves, it was one thing to demand respect
for the private conscience when facing persceution by
a majority; it was quite another to permit what one
reformer calld 'private paths to hell'--that is,
dissent--when those who were certain of the road to
salvation were in a position to require
conformity...."
(pp. 15-16)

   "We may now take for granted the role of these
traditions--the force of religion, the equation of
work with virtue, the focus on the individual, and the
insistent devoutness alongside the tolerance--in
detrmining the course of American history.  But there
is little doubt that they might well have died in
infancy if the Mayflower had not set sail...." (p. 16)

Recall ...

"Could he have been the fork in the road America never
took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way
from? Suppose the Slothropian heresy had had the time
to consolidate and prosper. Might there have been
fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in
the name of Judas Iscariot?" (GR, Pt. III, p. 556)

As well as ...

William Pynchon is Thomas' colonial descendant, born
in Springfield, Essex, England on 11 October 1590. He
married Anne Agnes Andrew about 1623. The family
emigrated to New England on Winthrop's fleet of 1630,
Anne dying soon after their arrival. A few years
later, William married Frances Sanford of Dorchester.
William was the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts
and one of the Bay Colony's leaders until his
publication of a book about justification and
redemption, The Meritorious Price of our Redemption
(1650).

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/ety.html


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail