Of Turkeys, Pilgrims and...Maypoles?

Ah, it's that time of year again...the annual slaughter of the turkeys; the inevitable inaccurate images of drably dressed pilgrims; the old American legends of Pilgrims and Indians sitting together in harmony in some vaguely horrible but much more idyllic circumstance, to give thanks for being alive; Algonquins and indentured servants erecting a Maypole in celebration of their new found freedom and new homes...

Say what?

I'd like to introduce you all to my new personal hero for the Thanksgiving season, Thomas Morton.

Thomas was well-educated, opinionated, inclined to fight, and got on well with his Algonquin neighbors. All of which did not endear him to the good folks of Plimouth, particularly William Bradford.

So in 1624, while the poor wretches at the plantation were ostracizing the various indigenous peoples who had saved their asses the previous years, Tom settled a small outpost with his trading associate Captain Wollaston and about 30 indentured men. They were given a bit of land by the local Algonquin people (we now know this land as Quincy) and set up a trading post. Thomas Morton was a man ahead of his time. He respected and admired the Algonquins, and preferred their company to that of his Puritan neighbors. His own particular brand of Christianity, (which just happened to rub the Puritans the wrong way) may have had something to do with this preference. It also helps if you treat the people you are trying to convert in a friendly and helpful manner, but I digress.

So they set up a healthy trade in guns and liquor for furs and provisions. The trade was so successful the post was expanded into an agrarian colony named Mount Wollaston. Unfortunately, Captain Wollaston decided to start his own trade on the side...in slaves, with the Virginia tobacco plantations. Also unfortunately, the people being sold into slavery were the indentured servants they had brought with them. Morton encouraged the remaining servants to rebel. In a rare triumph of the underdog, Wollaston left with his supporters for Virginia in 1626, and Morton became “host” of the colony, which he promptly renamed Mount Ma-re or Merrymount.

And now began a short, idyllic interlude. All the indentured colonists were declared free men, and a community of tolerant Europeans and Algonquins began to coexist in quite a friendly and prosperous manner.

The good folks at Wikipedia have a great entry about Tom, so I'll let them do the writing for a bit.

“Morton’s ‘Christianity’, however, was strongly condemned by the Puritans of the nearby Plymouth Colony as little more than a thinly disguised heathenism, and they suspected him of essentially ‘going native’. Scandalous rumours were spread of the debauchery at Merrymount, which they claimed included immoral sexual liaisons with native women during what amounted to drunken pagan orgies in honour of Bacchus and Aphrodite. Or as the Puritan Gov. William Bradford wrote with horror in his history Of Plymouth Plantation: "They ... set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians."

In truth Morton had merely transplanted traditional West Country May Day customs to the colony, and combined them with fashionable classical myth, couched according to his own libertine tastes, and fueled by the enthusiasm of his newly-freed fellow colonists. On a practical level the annual May Day festival was not only a reward for his hardworking colonists but also a joint celebration with the Native Tribes who also marked the day, and a chance for the mostly male colonists to find brides amongst the native population. Puritan ire was no doubt also fueled by the fact that Merrymount was the fastest-growing colony in New England and rapidly becoming the most prosperous, both as an agricultural producer and in the fur trade in which the Plymouth Colony was trying to build a monopoly. The Puritan account of this was very different, regarding the colony as a decadent nest of good-for-nothings that annually attracted “all the scum of the country” to the area. Or as Peter Lamborn Wilson more romantically puts it, ‘a Comus-crew of disaffected fur traders, antinomians, loose women, Indians and bon-vivants’. The reality as ever was probably somewhere between the two.”

And so they all existed quite happily until the summer of 1628, when Bradford sent Miles Standish to shut down the operation.

Apparently, the Mayday revels that year, with it's eighty foot, deer antler topped maypole, was just a little too over the top for our Puritan fore fathers. Or maybe they were singing this too loudly:

Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne,
No Irish stuff* nor Scotch* over worn,
Lasses in beaver coats, come away,
Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.

Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes,
Let all your delight be in Hymens joyes,
Iô! to Hymen now the day is come,
About the merry Maypole take a Roome.

Personally, I think they were just jealous of the drinking song.
And they couldn't take the competition.

But, while it lasted, it was a hell of a party. Thanks, Tom, for some of our first real Thanksgivings. Even if they were in May.

*not whiskey, you bad people, woolens.

Cross posted at NE Mamas