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Peter Mancall
In.
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Thomas Morton
The year since the incarnation of Christ, 1622, it was my chance to be landed in the parts of New England where I found two sorts of people. The one Christians, the other infidels. These I found most full of humanity.
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Narrator
It's the 1630s, and a man named Thomas Morton sits down to write a book, a book that almost changed America's origin story.
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Thomas Morton
If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor?
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Narrator
Morton journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean to New Plymouth, Massachusetts.
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Thomas Morton
The more I looked, the more I liked it.
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Narrator
Except the Pilgrims had gotten there first and had already set up one of North America's first European colonies. And Morton, by the time he writes his book, had already been kicked out of New England twice.
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Thomas Morton
The separatists, envying the prosperity and hope of the plantation at Merrymount, conspired together against mine host.
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Narrator
The book tells his story and made.
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Thomas Morton
Up a party against him and mustered up what aid they could, accounting of him as of a great monster.
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Narrator
On November 18, 1633, the book went to the press in London. The title of that book was New English Canaan, as it's being printed, full.
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William Bradford
Of lies and slanders and fraught with profane calumnies against their names and persons and ye ways of God.
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Peter Mancall
The agents of the New England people go to the press, wickedness, scandal, and they literally stop the publication of it and they destroy it. Sometimes we look at the past and we think it's all inevitable. What happened had to happen. And we forget how much individuals shaped what happened.
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Narrator
This is Peter Mancall.
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Peter Mancall
I'm a historian of early America at the University of Southern California, and he.
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Narrator
Wrote a book called the Trials of Thomas Morton, an Anglican lawyer, His Puritan foes, and the battle for a New England.
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Peter Mancall
Central characters in this story, in the national story, are the Pilgrims who go to Plymouth and the Puritans who go to Massachusetts Bay. And I think, like anyone raised reading American history, they had this very privileged position in American myth, American lore, and it was often tied in with the idea that, especially with the Pilgrims, that they have come seeking religious freedom.
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Narrator
A lot of us know that story isn't as clean as the textbooks say it is, but we're rarely taught just how contested the vision for early America was. Even the Pilgrims and Puritans themselves disagreed about how to colonize America. There was and is no single story of the birth of this country. And the book that Thomas Morton wrote offered a very different version of what that very bloody beginning could have looked like.
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Peter Mancall
What became the very destructive relations between Europeans and Native Americans didn't have to happen.
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Thomas Morton
They died on heaps as they lay in their houses.
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Peter Mancall
People chose that course to happen.
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Thomas Morton
For in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left alive to tell what became of the rest.
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Peter Mancall
These were choices, not the sort of unmovable laws of history.
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Narrator
Choices we are still reckoning with. Way before today's book bans, way before laws restricting what history can be taught in schools, there were people in America trying to suppress ideas and silence dissent. And at its core, it was a battle over what narrative and whose story would define what America is. The English colonists who arrived on Massachusetts shores went to great lengths to make sure their version of America would win. But one man, an outlier named Thomas Morton, stood in their way. This is a story of what could have been a different version of America. On this episode of Throughline from npr, the story of what's widely considered to be America's first banned book, the man who wrote that book, and the people who tried to stop him. This is Samuel Choi from San Diego, California. You're listening to throughline from NPR. Part 1 Ghost of the Clearing it is a warm night in Massachusetts. The year is 1628. A group of men from one of England's first permanent American colonies, New Plymouth, are out on a hunt. They methodically cut through the shrubs, trees and bushes in their way. They step over creeks. Their cotton shirts and pants are damp from the summer humidity. They're armed with at least one sword and probably guns. They were sent by their leader, William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, to find a gathering of people, a threat deep in the woods. As they journeyed deeper into the forest, the Christian men from Plymouth prepared themselves for what might await.
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William Bradford
But I am afraid of evil to.
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Peter Mancall
Come comfort me by showing me that.
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William Bradford
In myself I am dying.
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Narrator
William Bradford had warned them about what they would find. A rebel community led by a man named Thomas Morton, someone who Bradford later.
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Sarah Rivet
Called Lord of Misrule. Lord of Misrule maintained, as it were, a school of atheism.
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Narrator
This is scholar Sarah Rivet reading Bradford's exact words describing Thomas Morton and his followers.
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Sarah Rivet
And after they had got some goods into their hands and got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it as vainly in quarantine and drinking both wine and strong waters in great excess.
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William Bradford
I am literally ashamed. I am what I am in myself. I am a fading leaf that the wind drives away.
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Narrator
After hours of searching in the darkness, they finally arrive at a clearing. In front of them stood the rebels they were looking for, and they are shocked by what they see.
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William Bradford
They encountered cross winds and many fierce storms by which the ship was much shaken and her upper works made very leaky.
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Narrator
Eight years earlier, in 1620, about 100 colonists from England arrived in Massachusetts on a cramped wooden ship, which is the Mayflower. The Mayflower.
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William Bradford
Having thus passed the vast ocean and that sea of troubles, they now had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain and refresh their weather beaten bodies.
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Paula Peters
They arrive initially at the tip of Cape Cod and a group of explorers from the ship go out and they explore the region. This is Paula Peters.
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Narrator
She's an independent scholar who studied and written extensively about the early history of Massachusetts.
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Paula Peters
My traditional name is Sank Wabin. I'm a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.
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Narrator
Paula says that these English colonists from the Mayflower soon found a place to settle.
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Paula Peters
They've encountered a village that is empty.
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Narrator
The Pilgrims who survived the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean were now determined to create a foothold in the Americas. They called their settlement New Plymouth.
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Sarah Rivet
The primary vision was religious. They fled from England due to religious persecution.
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Narrator
Pilgrims were similar to Puritans, English Protestants who viewed the Church of England as corrupt, and members of both groups came to Massachusetts. But while Puritans thought they could reform the Church from within, the Pilgrims were more radical.
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Sarah Rivet
The Pilgrims were largely considered separatists, and by separatists it means that they wanted to separate out from the Church of England.
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Narrator
The leader of the Pilgrims was a man named William Bradford.
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Paula Peters
William Bradford was one of the leaders who had left England because of the tyranny of the king.
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Narrator
Bradford was 30 years old when he landed on Massachusetts shores. He was a stern, religious man who believed that he was on a holy mission.
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Peter Mancall
Bradford doesn't like misrule. Bradford likes rule.
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Narrator
He came from a wealthy landowning family in England and at a young age became inspired by Puritan beliefs. He dedicated himself to the settlement of Massachusetts. He became New Plymouth's governor and documented it all.
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Peter Mancall
And we know that because William Bradford, who's the governor and great historian of early Plymouth, writes his history.
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William Bradford
The place they fixed their thoughts upon was somewhere in those vast and unpeopled countries of America which were fruitful and fit for habitation.
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Narrator
These words are from William Bradford's book of Plymouth Plantation.
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William Bradford
Though devoid of all civilized inhabitants and given over to Savages who rage up and down, differing little from the wild beasts themselves.
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Peter Mancall
The Pilgrims, when they come over, in their rhetorical construction of their arrival, depict themselves as entering into a wilderness.
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William Bradford
What could they see but a desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men?
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Peter Mancall
And as Bradford would later write about it, they enter into this wilderness, a word he uses more than once, where they're surrounded by hideous beasts and hideous men. So they create this rhetorical moment of descending into this dark wilderness, place filled with menace, though that's not true.
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Narrator
For thousands of years, the area around New Plymouth had been inhabited by Native people called the Wampanoag. What you're hearing is their music.
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Sarah Rivet
There are about 2,000 Wampanoag, and that's a branch of the Eastern Algonquian, and they had lived there for over 10,000 years. According to archaeological records, there were at.
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Paula Peters
Least 69 coastal and inland Wampanoag villages that were thriving.
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Sarah Rivet
Their livelihood consisted of farming and fishing, and they had a complex cosmology that included responsibility to all living beings.
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Paula Peters
The coastal villages were places where families spent the summers. It was where they did their planting, and then whatever they harvested from that would be what would get them through the winter. It was a really vital place.
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Sarah Rivet
But then in 1616, there was a.
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Paula Peters
It spread terribly quickly from coastal villages in Maine all the way to the tip of Cape Cod.
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Sarah Rivet
When Bradford and his crew arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower, they literally had to clear skeletons of native people from the land because so many died in this plague.
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Narrator
The plague was said to have been brought by European traders, and it devastated the Algonquian people, including the Wampanoag.
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Sarah Rivet
Tens of thousands of Eastern Algonquian died as a result of the plague.
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Narrator
It became known as the Great Dying.
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Paula Peters
When someone became ill, the families all gathered around that person to pray over them. So that probably made it spread even more quickly. The people just died so quickly that they couldn't even bury their dead.
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Narrator
So this is what the Pilgrims witnessed when they arrived.
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Peter Mancall
They go to a place that is already settled. There are corn fields right there. There are other Europeans who've shown this place as a settled place. What a great port this would make if we could eventually come and take this place.
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Narrator
The Pilgrims met the surviving community of the Wampanoag people. They saw their villages. They knew this was their land.
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Peter Mancall
Yet the English see them as impermanent.
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Narrator
Impermanent.
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Peter Mancall
The Pilgrim construction of this is that they are agents of a divine plan. They believe in predestination. For whatever reason, God has sent them out into the wilderness, and they're to go into this place and they are to live their life as they believe God is telling them to live it.
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Narrator
Religion was not the only thing that inspired people to take on the long, treacherous trip from England to Massachusetts. Some came to pursue their desire for bounty and wealth. Even in its infancy, the business of America was ultimately business.
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Peter Mancall
About half of the colonists who've gone there aren't going there for religious reasons. They're going there to make money.
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Narrator
And the money was in the fur trade.
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Peter Mancall
Europeans are obsessed with fur and what you can do with fur, and they're particularly interested in beaver. So there's sort of, basically around this time, a real demand for beaver pelts in England and across much of Europe.
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Narrator
In 1624, an English colonist arrived in New Plymouth seeking to make his fortune in the fur trade. His name was Thomas Morton.
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Peter Mancall
He's probably born somewhere in the west country of England in the middle of the 1570s. We know that he trained for the law and he is a lawyer. He doesn't make much of a mark in the historical record until he appears around 1620 in a legal case.
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Narrator
That legal case is complicated, full of drama, and extremely petty. Basically, Morton started representing a rich woman whose husband had just died. He was hired to kind of sort out her estate. At some point, while representing her, he starts a relationship with her, and eventually they marry, which meant that as her new husband, he had access to the money her late husband left behind. Her children were obviously not very happy about that.
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Peter Mancall
I mean, they're really at each other. There are allegations of people, you know, shooting weapons and yada, yada, yada. I mean, the level of animosity is very high.
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Narrator
Morton battled her children in court for years.
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Peter Mancall
And what it tells me about Morton is that Morton doesn't shy away from a fight. And that seems to be the personal characteristic that I take from this legal case that then becomes important through the rest of his life.
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Narrator
The case was still ongoing in 1622, but Morton was gone. And not long after, he shows up in New Plymouth.
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Peter Mancall
Maybe he's on the lam, right? Maybe he says, okay, it's time for a new phase of my life.
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Narrator
Morton was pushing 50 at this point, which for the 1600s is very late to start over. So Morton doesn't waste time. Almost as soon as he arrived, Morton.
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Peter Mancall
Leaves the cluster of pilgrims and he goes down to a sort of failing little trade post.
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Narrator
Morton would later call this trade post Merrymount.
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Peter Mancall
And so he moves in to this tiny little. This little it almost feels like a clearing in the woods, you know, where they probably thrown up a few, you know, ramshackle cabins. And he gathers a few men around him, as far as we can tell, all men and not very many, like half a dozen guys.
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Narrator
They're not very far from New Plymouth.
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Peter Mancall
And they decide they're going to make their fortune on the fur trade.
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Narrator
Morton basically becomes the leader of Merrymount and immediately makes decisions that show he was different from the Pilgrims.
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Peter Mancall
What Morton figures out very quickly is that he can't succeed unless he establishes really good relations with native peoples. And though he is not an unreligious person, religion does not seem to be at the forefront of his vision. At the forefront of his vision, and this may sound rather vague, is this idea of respect.
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Narrator
Morton seemed to fundamentally respect the native community he was trying to do business with. The Pilgrims, on the other hand, they.
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Peter Mancall
Were not as eager to embrace positive relations as Morton seemed to be.
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Narrator
William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, he was certainly not happy about Morton's approach.
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Peter Mancall
He singles out Morton for his, what Bradford sees as overly friendly relations with indigenous peoples.
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William Bradford
In order to maintain this riotous prodigality in excess, Morton, hearing what profit the French and the fishermen had made from trading guns, powder and shot to the Indians, began to practice it hereabouts, teaching them how to use them.
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Peter Mancall
And one of the reasons that Morton comes to the attention of the Pilgrims is he's competing with them for basically the supply of beaver to be found in southern New England in the 1620s.
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William Bradford
And here I must bewail the mischief that this wicked man began in this district and which continued by men that should know better, has now become prevalent, notwithstanding the laws to the contrary.
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Narrator
Radford viewed Morton as a sinful, godless man who was basically a traitor. But he was also just afraid. The Pilgrims were vastly outnumbered by the native people.
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Peter Mancall
And so when Morton is arming local natives with guns, this to the Pilgrims just adds to their sense of doom.
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Narrator
Initially, Bradford sent a letter to Morton requesting he stop trading with the native people. According to Bradford, this is how Morton responded.
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William Bradford
He answered as haughtily as before that the king's proclamation was no law, and asking what was the penalty, that if they came to molest him, let them look to themselves, he would be prepared for them. So they saw there was no way but to take him by force. They resolved to proceed. When I am afraid of evils, to come comfort me by showing me that in myself I am dying.
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Narrator
Coming up the Pilgrims arrive and marry Mount.
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Diani
This is Diani calling from Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Yelput Willam clan of the Bunurong people. You're listening to Throughline from npr.
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Ran Abdelfattah
Hey, it's Rent. Before we get back to the show, I want to take a quick step back and talk about what makes Throughline and everything you hear from NPR possible. It's you think of NPR as civic infrastructure freely available to everyone. We can do this all thanks to your support. So on behalf of the whole team at Throughline, thank you for diving into history's incredible and complex stories with us each week. And a huge thank you. If you already support this work through NPR or by donating to your local station, your generosity fuels one of the most trusted news sources in America today. If you haven't made the leap to contributing yet, Giving Tuesday is next week, so it's the perfect time to support what you love. Sign up for perks across more than 25 podcasts with NPR today. It's a tax deductible donation that helps make the world a more curious place so you can feel good about it while you enjoy. Sponsor free listening and Throughline's monthly bonus episodes. Join us at plus.npr.org or you can always make a gift at donate.npr.org thank you.
- [25:09]
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Narrator
Part 2 17th Century Troll.
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Sponsor Message
Bright were the days at Merrymount when the maypole was the banner staff of that gay colony. They who reared it, should their banner be triumphant, were to pour sunshine over New England's rugged hills and scatter flower seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.
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Peter Mancall
Nathaniel Hawthorne the Pilgrims, you know, getting word of shenanigans taking place at Maramount arm people to go into the town to arrest Morton and his fellows. And they are ready for what they think is going to be a a battle. They show up make young garlands, bottles out. They find that these seven men are inebriated. The only blood that is shed that day is when one of Morton's followers, standing up.
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William Bradford
One was so drunk, you know, you.
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Peter Mancall
Can sort of imagine them standing up as these pilgrims are coming so drunk.
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William Bradford
That he ran his own nose upon the point of the sword that one held before him.
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Peter Mancall
There is no violence that takes place. But when the pilgrims get there, they find that not only have they erected this maypole, which they find offensive, they find salacious poems about. About the pilgrims mocking the pilgrims.
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Narrator
What kind of stuff is he saying about them? Like, what did he find worthy of? Like, making fun of.
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Peter Mancall
He mocks their seriousness, Captain Shrimp. He mocks what he sees as their inability to enjoy life's pleasures, troubling their.
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Thomas Morton
Brains more than reason would require.
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Peter Mancall
He's messing with them. He's having sport with them.
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Narrator
Yeah, he's trolling them. He's like a 17th century troll.
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Peter Mancall
He's trolling them. They arrest them. It's unclear what happens to the guys, you know, the other guys. And they take Morton and they put him on this place called the Isle.
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Narrator
Of Shs, which is off Port Smith, a remote island.
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Peter Mancall
The exile.
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Narrator
And he waits.
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Peter Mancall
A ship's gonna come pick you up and take you back to England. You're gonna go to jail. Much to the pilgrim's disappointment, I have found no record of him being tried. Going to jail instead. Nope. Morton comes back.
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Narrator
Back. First to Marymount, then to Boston.
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Peter Mancall
He said, I'm gonna try my luck with these people. And then he infuriates them for different.
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Narrator
Reasons, and they torch his house and kick him out. In case you're counting, this is the second time Morton was exiled.
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Peter Mancall
So he's what, 50?
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Sponsor Message
Wow.
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Narrator
So he's not like some kid, swashbuckling kid. He is a grown man. A grown man who ticked off the pilgrims and got sent away. But he's also not done with them.
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Peter Mancall
He goes back to England and he starts to write a book.
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Thomas Morton
In the year since the Incarnation of Christ, 1622. It was my chance to be landed in the parts of New England where I found two sorts of people.
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Narrator
This is when he'd start to write New English Canaan.
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Thomas Morton
The more I looked, the more I liked it.
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Narrator
It's what you might call a travel narrative, which at the time was popular for people who had traveled to the New World.
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Peter Mancall
It says, I went to this place.
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Narrator
I met these people.
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Peter Mancall
Here's what I saw.
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Narrator
And he divides New English Canaan into three books.
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Sarah Rivet
So the first book is devoted to describing the native people. The second book is describing the natural landscape, but for the purposes of how to turn the land into a commodity. So it's almost like he's setting up a sort of missed opportunity that then gets explained in book three when he kind of articulates the kind of simple mindedness of the Pilgrims.
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Narrator
Everyone who wrote these travel narratives was trying to be believed.
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Peter Mancall
They are writing books describing a world that the vast majority of English people are never going to see, have very little information about, and of which there are these competing claims over time.
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Narrator
And as for William Bradford and Thomas.
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Sarah Rivet
Morton, it's hard to overemphasize how fraught their relationship was by this point.
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Narrator
And so there's Morton, twice exiled, chip on his shoulder, riding away, trying to set the record straight as he saw it.
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Sarah Rivet
There was a strong sense of historical narrative, a strong sense of we are making history through this new world endeavor and we have to record it.
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Narrator
And he starts by describing who was there first. Morton's experience with the Algonquin people was welcoming.
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Thomas Morton
If anyone shall come into their houses and there fall asleep when they see him disposed to lie down, they will spread a mat for him of their own accord.
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Sarah Rivet
He has other moments like this where he says that, in fact, the Massachusetts have more respect than the English.
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Thomas Morton
I have found the Massachusetts Indian more full of humanity than the Christians.
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Sarah Rivet
So he has several ways of kind of having a dig at the Pilgrims by presenting the Massachusetts natives as more humble, more charitable, more respectful, and more humane.
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Thomas Morton
I cannot perceive that the Separatists do allow of helping our poor, though they magnify their practice in contributing to the nourishment of their saints.
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Narrator
Other times it feels like he's just straight up making fun of the Pilgrims.
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Sarah Rivet
Poking fun is sort of one aspect.
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Thomas Morton
The setting up of this maypole was a lamentable spectacle to the precise Separatists that lived at New Plymouth.
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Sarah Rivet
He's also intensely critical of what he sees as the pilgrim's sternness and kind of overzealousness and rigidness with trying to impose their religiosity on everyone in such kind of stringent ways.
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Thomas Morton
This harmless mirth made by young men that lived in hope to have wives brought over to them that would save them a labor to make a voyage to fetch any over, which much distaste did of the precise Separatists he tagged.
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Narrator
The government of Plymouth.
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Sarah Rivet
She talks about the government's in shambles.
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Narrator
Even the town minister wasn't safe from his wrath.
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Sarah Rivet
Anyone can be a minister, including a cow Keeper.
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Thomas Morton
The church of the separatists is governed by pastors, elders and deacons, and there is not any of these, though he be but a cow keeper, but is allowed to exercise his gifts in the public assembly on the Lord's day.
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Sarah Rivet
It's a pretty derogatory, you know, kind of thing to say where he just says, anyone can be in charge.
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Narrator
And just to be clear, we shouldn't really view Morton as some kind of hero. He was still participating in the colonization of Massachusetts, and he was, at his core, a businessman. A whole section of New English Canaan is devoted to financial and economic opportunities the New World has. But the book does present a different vision for what the inevitable relationship between colonists and native people could have looked like. A different vision for what would become America's future. And that brings us Back to London, 1633, when people representing the colonies in New England shut the book down. There aren't a ton of details about what happened next, but we know the bookseller Charles Green recorded that he'd lost 400 copies of the book.
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Peter Mancall
When some few sheets of the said book were printed, it was stayed and those sheets taken away.
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Narrator
This event is widely seen as the first example in American history of a book being banned or oppressed. But Morton didn't give up. He kept looking for ways to get the book published. And in the meantime, he didn't just try to get back to the colonies. He wanted to take over.
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Peter Mancall
He is at this point, in touch with another group of English people who think that they are the proper owners of New England.
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Narrator
And so Morton joins the fight from London to colonize the colonizers.
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Peter Mancall
So what happens is that various people go to court and they try to get patents. They say, okay, this is English territory, and can you allocate some to us? And so there are these competing companies.
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Narrator
Remember, Morton is a lawyer, a useful lawyer, and he's a boss, a guy.
- [35:48]
Peter Mancall
Who'S spoiling for a fight, who has courtroom experience.
- [35:51]
Narrator
And so he ends up fighting on behalf of this group, this company, in front of the King's Bench, one of.
- [35:56]
Peter Mancall
The highest courts in England.
- [35:58]
Narrator
And they win. The court essentially gives Morton and his allies the rights to colonize New England. The colonists already in Massachusetts basically ignore the court's order. So Morton and his allies decide to.
- [36:15]
Peter Mancall
Take it by force to militarily invade, to get rid of the colonists.
- [36:28]
Narrator
The plan was to get 1000 soldiers and arms on a boat and send it to Massachusetts.
- [36:34]
Peter Mancall
There is no doubt that they are literally deadly serious. A ship was now in building and near finished.
- [36:45]
Narrator
An eyewitness account is our only record of what happened next.
- [36:49]
Peter Mancall
When God that had carried so many weak and crazy ships thither, so provided.
- [36:54]
Ran Abdelfattah
It that this strong new built ship.
- [36:57]
Peter Mancall
In very launching fell all in pieces and it sinks in the docks before it ever leaves England.
- [37:14]
Narrator
And that's it. The invasion fails. But Morton's book is still alive. Coming up, the book is published and Morton returns to New England for the last time.
- [37:38]
Peter Mancall
My name is Atal Osama. I'm from Denver, Colorado, and you're listening.
- [37:43]
Sponsor Message
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- [38:31]
Diani
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- [39:23]
Ran Abdelfattah
Part 3 Third time's the charm.
- [39:35]
Narrator
The ship has sunk. Morton lost yet another battle, but he didn't quit. Of course he didn't quit. This is Thomas Morton were talking about. Instead, he tried to publish his book a few years later, but this time in a different city.
- [39:50]
Peter Mancall
Morton's book has come out of a press in Amsterdam, sort of evading English authorities Now.
- [39:59]
Narrator
Why Amsterdam? A couple reasons. One is that Amsterdam was also a publishing center at the time, just like London was. And two, it would be far away from anyone trying to interfere. Morton had reason to be worried. New English Canaan laid out an alternative vision for how European colonists could coexist with native people. But in the time that it had taken Morton to write and publish the book, relations between Massachusetts native communities and their Pilgrims had only gotten worse.
- [40:31]
Paula Peters
They had fled for religious freedom, but they did not afford that same religious freedom to the Wampanoag or to any of the indigenous people that they met. They considered them all to be heathens, and until they had been converted, they were not valued human beings. So that's, that's where things began to fall apart.
- [40:57]
Narrator
By the 1630s, English colonists were at war with a neighboring native people called the Pequot. The war was brutal and it led to a massacre. On May 26, 1637, a group of armed Puritan colonists attacked a village of Pequot people. After killing most of the Pequot defenders, the Puritans blocked the village exits and set everything ablaze, burning everyone alive inside, mostly women and children. The attack killed hundreds. Those who tried to escape were shot. Most of those who survived were sold into slavery. And it was around this same time that Morton's book finally, finally reached Massachusetts shores.
- [42:22]
Peter Mancall
Someone gets that book and ships that book over to Boston. So by the time Morton then decides to finally return, the book has gotten there before he has gotten there.
- [42:38]
Narrator
Morton returns to Massachusetts in 1643. He's in his 60s, and what he doesn't know is that the column colonists already have his book. In reading it, they come to believe.
- [42:50]
Peter Mancall
That Morton is trying to undermine them, tell the world what terrible people they are, and now they should get rid of him. But they don't quite know what to do with him because publishing this book isn't necessarily a crime. So they put him in jail and they sort of debate, what should we do with this guy? They refer to him as old and pathetic, right? He's poor. They say we could beat him, right? They could literally physically beat him and keep him in jail. But what would be the point? He's this old man with no power. And so they decide, let's exile him again.
- [43:29]
Narrator
Not long after, Morton lands in Massachusetts, he's arrested and exiled.
- [43:34]
Peter Mancall
But this time, rather than send him to England, he goes up the coast to this little place, Acamenticus.
- [43:40]
Narrator
There's hardly anyone there, which is present day Maine. There he's surrounded by trees and left to be alone with his own thoughts.
- [43:48]
Peter Mancall
Morton goes there and that's where he dies.
- [43:55]
Narrator
But what about his book? What happened to all those original copies?
- [43:59]
Peter Mancall
We don't know. Most things from 400 years ago don't survive. Let's call it 200 plus books. There are about 20 left today.
- [44:09]
Narrator
Whatever happened to the books? We don't know. But what's for sure is that Morton's ideas were enough to make him a serious threat. So much so that he had to be banished not once, but three times.
- [44:22]
Peter Mancall
He is a threat because he represents a different way forward, a way forward that would not have surrounded a village, set it on fire and shot people as they came out, that he would have instead sought some other resolution. He has a radically different vision than the Pilgrims had. So I think when he shows up again, even though he is, by their own admission, he is not a threat, but he does represent this idea, and that idea is different from their plan of colonization. I think that they hope to vanquish his ideas in and to do that maybe symbolically by vanquishing his body. Now, they don't say all that, so I'm making certain inferences here, but I think that's the deeper meaning of that last exile. He represents a threat to a community that is still not as secure as it wants to be.
- [45:30]
Sarah Rivet
I think New English Canaan is written with that sense of future generations in mind as much as the present day, you know. And in fact, it is the legacy, more than his contemporaries, that constitutes his readership. Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in the 1830s, is the major popularizer and discoverer of Thomas Morton and his legacy, the Scarlet Letter.
- [46:00]
Narrator
You remember it, that one book we all had to read in high school, that was by the same guy.
- [46:05]
Sarah Rivet
Hawthorne actually wrote an entire story called the Maypole of Merrymount, in which he's clearly deeply engaged with the text and sympathetic to Morton's vision.
- [46:20]
Narrator
This is Sarah Rivet reading a passage from that story.
- [46:25]
Sarah Rivet
Old and young were gay at Marymount. The young deemed themselves happy, the elder spirits, if they knew that mirth was but the counterfeit of happiness, yet followed the false shadow willfully. And he describes Morton and Merrymount, in contrast to the Pilgrims, as a kind of war that jollity and gloom were contending for, an empire. You know, he really sees this as a deep debate between joy and gloom, between severity and a kind of fuller embrace of humanity and of life.
- [47:09]
Narrator
And it wasn't just Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1812, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson about Morton's book, saying, it is whimsical that this book, so long lost, should be brought to me. The two would later exchange a few more letters about the book. The ideas in New English Canaan rippled out for centuries. The poet Will William Carlos Williams wrote about it, the novelist Philip Roth and others. The book changes how we understand what we consider to be America's origin story.
- [47:43]
Sarah Rivet
It goes back to the counternarrative in the early years of the United States, there was a strong attempt to create a story of the rise of the young nation that was coherent and chronological and began with the Pilgrims and the Puritans as a cohesive group. It was consciously constructed as such. And then here's the rise of this great democracy. There are a lot of reasons why that narrative is in place and actually continues to be part of the American story. But it is dangerous. It's a single story. It's never at any point in colonial or early national history was the United States quite that coherent. And so Morton's text is a really important counter voice, no matter what he's saying. He's showing that the 17th century was multivocal, that people disagreed, that there was possibility for dissent within these communities.
- [48:49]
Narrator
This is a very old practice, not just in the world, but in the US or in what we now call the US that somehow by banishing the idea, you're protecting the ideal.
- [48:59]
Peter Mancall
Yes, I think that's one of the most important reasons to study Thomas Morton's life. As I mentioned, the Puritans want to banish his ideas. If they can get rid of the book and they can get rid of him, then they can get rid of the idea. That is as ridiculous a concept in the 1630s as it is today. Banning books is such an insult to human intellect that we are so afraid that someone's going to read something that we don't like. Read something about an alternative lifestyle that is somehow not our own lifestyle or not those of the book banners. Book banning flies in the face of not only my 21st century idea about why people should be able to read books, but it flies in the face of early Americans ideas about the importance of ideas and being confronted with them and letting the marketplace of ideas, the discourse of how we do the things, sort out the right way forward. Guess what? It doesn't work. Getting rid of the physical manifestation of an idea does not crush the idea itself. Morton's ideas don't die. Morton's story doesn't die. New English Canaan, despite the best efforts, doesn't die. It comes back.
- [50:37]
Ran Abdelfattah
That's it for this week's show. I'm Ran Abdelfattah.
- [50:40]
Narrator
I'm Ramtin Arab Louie and you've been listening to throughline from npr.
- [50:44]
Ran Abdelfattah
This episode was produced by me and.
- [50:46]
Narrator
Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya.
- [50:50]
Sarah Rivet
Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama.
- [50:54]
Peter Mancall
Peter Balanon Rosen, Thomas Liu, Irene Noguchi.
- [50:59]
Narrator
Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. The episode was middle mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Thanks to Johannes Durgi, Edith Chapin, Colin Campbell and Anya Grundmann. Thanks also to Neil Strickland, Chris Turpin, Thomas Liu, Peter Balananrosen, Devin Katayama and Lawrence Wu for their voiceover work.
- [51:21]
Ran Abdelfattah
Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya.
- [51:26]
Narrator
Mizani, Navid, Marvi, Sho Fuji and finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us@throughlinempr.org thanks for listening.
- [51:49]
Sponsor Message
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- [52:05]
Diani
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