Pilgrims and Patriots

It’s independence day soon and stars and stripes are everywhere. But the shows of patriotism aren't just found in the bunting and banners, it’s seen all over the social media websites as well. A friend of mine has posted a quotation on Facebook recently that read, "We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls. -Robert J. McCracken.” I stated that the first settlers actually came looking for wealth. She replied “I don’t count Columbus as the first settler of the USA. This quote is in reference to the pilgrims who were indeed looking for religious freedom.”

I gave a long reply and no doubt she will wonder why such a seemingly innocuous quotation resulted in such a strong opinion, and no doubt this opinion will anger those brought up on the Shiny Picture of the Beginning of American History that we've all been fed since Kindergarten. My opinion touches such sore nerves, not because it’s anti-American or unpatriotic, but because it’s informed and doesn't fit the Shiny Picture everyone believes is incontrovertible truth.

Before I delve into my opinion, what does this Shiny Picture consist of? 1) the Puritans, also known as the Pilgrims, were the victims of the evil King of England and came to America in a last ditch effort to live their lives in religious and political freedom. 2) The Pilgrims were God-fearing people who threw a big “thanksgiving” feast and invited their Indian neighbors to share in their bounty. (The pictures we’re shown as children, if you remember, the ones that form the foundation of our understanding of this era, depict happy, smiling Pilgrims and Indians sitting at a long table, eating, laughing, and getting along marvelously.) 3) The Pilgrims minded their own business, but just as the settlers were getting used to their new-found freedom, the greedy King of England decides to tighten his choke-hold, leading to the skirmishes between the most powerful army in the world and a bunch of poor, abused Americans just struggling to make a living under a heavy burden of taxes.

This, in a nutshell, is the Shiny Picture of the Beginning of American History. Starting in junior high, your education in history repeats this Shiny Picture, spends months on the Revolution era, and progresses in rapid brevity to end right before the Civil War and summer vacation. This pattern continues throughout high school. (In fact, I hardly knew anything about history during and after the Civil War because no class ever seemed to get that far. I was in college before I’d heard of Lincoln’s attack on habeas corpus, McCarthism, Henry Kissinger blunders in Cambodia, or Julius and Ethel Rosenburg.)

But I digress. In regards to my comment on the aforementioned quotation, about the first settlers, I wasn’t talking about Columbus, as my friend supposed. Columbus, after all, wasn’t a settler but an adventurer/explorer. The central reasons the first settlers in what is now known as the United States of America migrated was for wealth and power. The Puritans weren't as politically/religiously oppressed in England as everyone thinks they were. The Puritan ideology had a LOT of political power in England. (Who do you think financed the migrations and finagled the charters?) In fact, one of the reasons for shipping Puritan settlers over here was to spread Puritan power to this new, resource-rich land to continue to threaten the strength of the King and Company. (And the King's followers shipped over their own settlers to threaten the power of the Puritans. It was a chess game.)

To gain this foothold, however, willing bodies were needed to venture into a virtually unknown and alien territory full of cannibalistic savages. To counter this widespread idea of a dangerous place full of death and far from the reach of all that is civilized, the idea of ‘freedom from the King’s oppression’ was sold to the lower classes to get them shipped over here.* It took a while for the ill-prepared Pilgrims to stop starving long enough to prosper, but once they did, they built up their base of power, and the wealth they derived from it, with a grisly vengeance. With the support of the Puritan power base in Mother England, the American contingent was able to become an almost unstoppable force, so blood- and land-thirsty, non-Puritan settlements took on the attitude of ‘stay far away and try not to piss them off too badly and maybe they’ll leave us alone’. (They didn't.)

 The pitiful story of shamefully abused and innocent Christians in search of respite, however, has stuck. The full details of the initial settling of America don't give people warm fuzzies and a sense of righteous superiority. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.  So we hold up this vague idea of ‘freedom from tyrants’ and skip over the details that make us face the uncomfortable truth that doesn't mesh with our Shiny Picture.

Instead, we focus on the Revolution era, where we take the justifications for treasonously rebelling against the government and use it to gloss over the reasons we set foot on the continent in the first place, as well as the things that happened once our feet touched soil. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the political ideology of the Revolution era and can get just as much caught up in the excitement of David kicking Goliath's trash as the next person. England was too comfortable in its own Shiny Picture and paid the price. However, I don't much care for the use of borderline jingoistic platitudes that, whether in ignorance or not, completely dismiss or purposely manipulate the facts of history.

Eighteenth Century America, the Articles of Confederation, and later the Constitution and Bill of Rights, were based on divinely inspired ideas, but this doesn't mean we can overlook the greedy, blood soaked foundation they were built upon. Looking back, we can see how the Puritan personality of ‘I’m right and everyone else will burn in hell especially you Kingy’ was watered down, mixed with other influences, and morphed into the spirit that fed Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but this in no way excuses the Puritan’s secular reasons for building their little empire, nor the evils they perpetrated to achieve their ends.

In fact, understanding the sordid and wonderful history of the country is one of the points of an Independence Day celebration. Being reminded of exactly where this country started, where it’s been and what it’s done is supposed to give us not only pride in our history, but a renewed determination to build on the past and become better than our forefathers. Not more powerful, not more wealthy, but genuinely better. To rephrase something Dinesh O’Souza said, the shape of the future is most affected by the debts and actions, both good and bad, of the past. If we don’t truly understand the good, bad, and ugly of our history and instead continue to uphold an incomplete Shiny Picture, we will be little better than Icarus, glorying in our fragile strength and freedom and killing ourselves in the process.

*I acknowledge the fact that there were individual Puritan settlers who truly believed in moving to the New World to worship as they pleased. I speak more on the widespread belief that this was the only and pure reason for Puritan migration and that therefore we ought to hold them up as some sort of holy paradigm. I also note that the settlements of Maryland, Virginia, New York and Maine had quite a different sort of settler and history. These other settlers really did ‘cross the Atlantic to find soil for their ploughs’. Liberty for the soul had little, if nothing, to do with it.