Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain

3. Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount

THREE Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount On the face of it, the tale of the Maypole at Merry Mount seems almost too trivial to take seriously.In allPlymouth Colony, where it begins, there were only about two hundred people at the time. At Thomas Morton's trading post there were seven. Morton eventually left Massachusetts without leaving a lasting trace, and Plymouth never amounted to much either. A generation later it still had but a thousand inhabitants, scuffling for a living on a stubborn shore. A generation after that, it faded from formal political existence altogether, in the imperial embrace of MassachusettsBay. On the face of it, as well, the tale seems too vulgar to bear any weight of interpretation. A comic-opera army under Miles Standish first arrested Morton by a ruse, then lost him by drunken ineptitude, then recovered him because the men at his post themselves proved "overarmed with drink." No one on either side displayed any discernible courage or tactical aptitude, and no one suffered any heroic hurt. The sole casualty was one of Morton's inebriated comrades, who "ran his own nose upon the point of a sword" held by a Pilgrim soldier and lost "a little of his hot blood."' Yet American poets, playwrights, and novelists have always seen something immensely suggestive in this tawdry contretemps. Nathaniel Hawthorne thought that "the future complexion of New England was From New England Quarterly 50 (1977): 255-77. 1. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1959), 209, 210. Spelling, in this and subsequentquotations, is modernized. 77 78 ALiMOST CHOSEN PEOPLE involved" in the struggle of "grizzly saints" and "gay sinners," and others have seen still more: a portent of the very fate of the nation implicit in the conflict.2 American historians have gone over this ground more gingerly than the poets, perhaps because the historical record is so thin. There arc, essentially, only two accounts of the affair: those of Morton and Governor Bradford, the chief antagonists. Between them there is little agreement . But history often becomes engaging at exactly the point where, if we would approach the past at all, we must deal in inference more than in certainties. The defectsof the record may be precisely our opportunity . It is not difficult to establish the outlines of Morton's American career . He arrived in New England in 1625, as a minor partner of Captain Wollaston in a private colonizing venture. When Wollaston departed for Virginia with most of the company's men, whose terms of service he sold there, Morton persuaded the remainingfew to stir themselves before they too were summoned. Together with them, he ousted the lieutenant left in the master's stead and took over the plantation, renaming it Merry Mount. He fell to "frisking" with the Indian women of the vicinity and carousing with the Indian men. He revived the roisterous English holidays of old. And, withal, he prospered in the fur trade, even to the point of out-maneuvering the Pilgrim traders themselves for the furs of the Kennebec. Then, in the spring of 1628, he was arrested by the Plymouth authorities and deported to England, ostensibly for selling guns to the Indians. A little more than a year later he returned, was arrested again under the auspices of the new colony at Massachusetts Bay, and was banished once more to England. Finally, over a decade after that, he came back again, was taken prisoner yet another time, and died shortly after his release from jail.3 In itself, such a recital hardly suggests anything remarkable. Hundreds of forgotten soldiers of fortune must have endured as much in an 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Maypole of Merry Mount," in Twice-Told Tales (Boston and New York, 1895), 78. 3. On Morton's career, sec Charles Banks, "Thomas Morton of Merry Mount," Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 58 (1924-1925): 147-92; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., "Thomas Morton of Merry-Mount," in Thomas Morton, NewEnglish Canaan (Boston, 1883), 1-98; and Charles Francis Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (Boston and New York, 1892), 162—250 and passim. For a nice explication of the rich punning implicit in the name Merry Mount, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middlctown, Conn., 1973). The reference to "frisking" is in Bradford, Plymouth Plantation, 205. PILGRIMS IN THE WILDERNESS 79 age of...