Volume 1, Chapter 18, The Founding of Plymouth Colony
The mere granting of land by the Crown did not yet create a settlement.
The first successful settlement in New England was something of an accident.
By 1617, the pilgrims had determined to leave the Netherlands, where their youth were supposedly
being corrupted by the licentiousness of even the Calvinist Dutch, who, for example, persisted
in enjoying the Sabbath as a holiday, rather than burying it as a penance.
Deciding to settle in America, the Pilgrims were offered an opportunity to settle in New
Netherland, but preferred to seek a patent from the South Virginia Company, which would
provide an English atmosphere in which to raise their children.
The Pilgrims formed a partnership in a joint stock company with a group of London merchants,
including Thomas Weston, an ironmonger, and John Pierce, a clothmaker.
The company, John Pearson Associates, received in 1620 a grant from the Virginia Company
for particular plantation in Virginia territory.
In this alliance, each adult settler was granted a share in the joint stock company and each
investment of 10 pounds also received a share.
At the end of seven years, the accumulated earnings were to be divided among the shareholders.
Until that division, as in the original Virginia settlement, the company decreed a communistic
system of production, with each settler contributing his all to the common store and each drawing
his needs from it.
Again, a system of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Just over a hundred colonists sailed from England on the Mayflower in September 1620.
Of these, only forty-one were pilgrims from Leiden, Holland. Eighteen were indentured
servants bound as slaves for seven years to their masters, and the others were largely
Anglicans from England seeking economic opportunity in the New World.
Unsupposedly for the mouth of the Hudson River, the Mayflower decided instead to land along
what is now the Massachusetts coast, outside Virginia territory. Some of the indentured
servants began to grow restive, logically maintaining that since the settlement would
not be made as had been agreed in Virginia territory, they should be released from their
contracts. They would use their own liberty, for none had power to command them. To forestall
All this rebellion against servitude, the bulk of the colonists and especially the pilgrims
decided to establish a government immediately, even though on shipboard.
No possible period without governmental rule was to be permitted to the colonists.
The pilgrim minority straightway formed themselves on shipboard into a body politic in the Mayflower
are compact, enabling them to perpetuate their rule over the other majority colonists.
Thus, the first form of government in the New World established by colonists themselves
was by no means a gesture of independence from England.
It was an emergency measure to maintain the pilgrim control over the servants and other settlers.
In mid-December 1620, the May Flower landed at Plymouth.
In a duplication of the terrible hardships of the first Virginia settlers, half of the colonists were dead by the end of the first winter.
In mid-1621, John Pearson Associates obtained a patent from the Council for New England, granting the company 100 acres of land for each settler and 1,500 acres compulsorily reserved for public use.
In return, the Council was to receive a yearly quit-rent of two shillings for 100 acres.
A major reason for the persistent hardships for the starving time in Plymouth, as before in Jamestown, was the Communism imposed by the Company.
Finally, in order to survive, the colony in 1623 permitted each family to cultivate a small private plot of land for their individual use.
William Bradford, who had become governor of Plymouth in 1621 and was to help rule the colony for 30 years thereafter, eloquently describes the results in his record of the colony.
All this while no supply was heard of, so they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.
At length, the governor, with the advice of the chiefest among them, gave way that they
should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves, and
so assign to every family a parcel of land, for that end, only for present use.
This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn
The experience that was had in this common course and condition tried sundry years of
"...despite sundry years, and that amongst godly and sober men may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's, that the taking away of property and bringing community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing. For this community was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine
They should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children
without any recompense.
The strong had no more indivision of vitals and clothes than he that was weak and not
able to do a quarter the other could.
This was thought injustice.
Upon all being to have alike and all to do alike, they thought one as good as another
and so did work diminish the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst men. Let
none object that this is men's corruption. All men have this corruption in them.
The Antipathy of Communism to the Nature of Man Here receives eloquent testimony from
a governor scarcely biased a priori in favor of individualism. Plymouth was destined to
to remain a small colony. By 1630 its population was still less than 400. Its government began
in the Mayflower Compact with the original signers forming an assembly for making laws,
choosing a governor, and admitting people to Freemen's citizenship. The governor had
five assistants, elected also by the Freemen. This democratic set-up signified a very loose
Religious exclusiveness in a colony necessarily hampers its growth. We have seen that Lord
Baltimore soon abandoned the idea of Maryland as an exclusively Catholic colony in order
to encourage its rapid development. Thus, persecution of non-separatists for playing
ball on Sunday and for daring to observe Christmas as a holiday was hardly calculated to stimulate
the growth of the colony.
To inject some variety into the colony, the English merchants therefore sent the Reverend
John Lyford, a Puritan within the Church of England, with a group of colonists to Plymouth.
As soon as Liford began to administer the sacraments according to the Church of England,
his correspondence was seized by Governor Bradford, and Liford and his chief supporter
John Oldham were tried for plotting against Pilgrim rule both in respect of their civil
and church state.
To the charge of Liford and Oldham that non-Pilgrims were being discouraged from coming to Plymouth,
Governor Bradford replied that strangers were perfectly free to attend the Pilgrim Church
as often as they liked. When Bradford spread the stolen letters critical of the government
upon the record, Oldham angrily called upon the assembly to revolt against this tyranny,
but no one followed his lead. The Rev. Leifert instantly recanted and groveled in his errors
before the court. Both men were ordered banished from the colony. Oldham went thirty miles
First North were the number of the discontented to found a settlement at Nantasket, now Hull.
Included in this company were Roger Conant and William and Edward Hilton, who shortly
traveled further north to join David Thompson, a Scottish trader who had established a settlement
at what is now Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the mouth of the Piscataqua River.
The Hiltons were later to found the nearby town of Dover, New Hampshire. In return for
his abasement, the Reverend Liford was put on six months probation, but again some critical
letters to England were purloined by the government and this time Liford was truly expelled and
went on to join the Nantasket settlement. The Pilgrims, however, had not seen the last
of the Rebellious Band. In the spring of 1624, the Pilgrims built a wharf some 60 miles
north on the current site of Gloucester, at Cape Anne in northeastern Massachusetts, only
to find the following spring that Liford, Oldham and their group had moved there. They
had been invited to Gloucester by the Dorchester Company of merchants from Western England.
The company's founder, the Rev. John White, a Puritan, had already established a fishing
village at Gloucester in 1623. Roger Conant was now installed as superintendent of the
community and Liford became its pastor. Upon returning to Gloucester to find the dissidents
established there, the first instinct of Plymouth's military leader, Captain Miles Standish, was
It was typically to demand the surrender of the unwelcome wharf, but cooler heads prevailed
and a peaceful compromise was soon reached.
The Pilgrims, however, could not make a go of this fishing station and abandoned it at
the end of the year.
Upon the bankruptcy of the Dorchester Company the following year, the Conan Oldham Group
left Gloucester and moved 15 miles down the coast to found the town of Nommkeeg, later
in 1625 Thomas Morton, gentleman lawyer and an agent of Sir Ferdinando Gorgias, organized another settlement, Marymount, north of Plymouth at the present site of Quincy, Massachusetts. Marymount was an Anglican settlement, and the citizens did not comport themselves in the highly aesthetic fashion to which they belonged.
The Plymouth Separatist wished them to conform. Apparently Marymount was merry indeed, and
whiskey and interracial white Indian revelry abounded, including the old Anglican, but
denounced by the pilgrims as pagan, custom of dancing around a maypole, a practice which
King James I had urged in his Book of Sports, 1617. Plymouth had established friendly relations
The Pilgrims denounced Morton's Colony as a school of atheists and atheists. The Pilgrims denounced Morton's Colony as a school of atheists and atheists.
Atheism apparently signifying the use of the Anglican book of common prayer, the maypole,
and selling ramen firearms to the Indians and buying furs in exchange.
The sale of ramen firearms was condemned even though relations with the Indians had been
perfectly peaceful.
Then in 1628, Plymouth established a virtual New England tradition of persecution by dispatching
Captain Standish with an armed troop to eradicate Marymount. Having surrendered on the promise
of safe treatment to himself in the settlement, Morton was assaulted by Standish and his men
and almost killed. The Plymouth forces not regarding any agreement made with such a carnal
man. Hauled into a Plymouth court, despite Plymouth's lack of legal jurisdiction over
for Marymount, Morton was almost executed. His death was urged at great length by Miles
Standish. Finally, he was deported back to England, with Standish still threatening to
kill Morton personally before he could leave the colony. Before deportation, Morton was
confined alone for over a month of severe winter at the Isles of Shoals without a gun,
Knife or Proper Clothing
Despite the destruction of Marymount and the failure of other attempts at settlement, the
1620s saw several settlements dot the Massachusetts coast.
The most important was the Roger Conant Group at Narmkeeg.
Another was the settlement at Boston led by the Puritan minister, Rev. William Blackstone.
In 1627, the inherent conflict between colony and company in Plymouth was finally resolved
by the elimination of the company from the scene.
In that year, the seven years of enforced communism by the company expired and all the
assets and lands were distributed to the individual shareholders.
Grants of land were received in proportion to the size of the stock so that the larger
by 1633, the entire purchase price had been paid, and the colonists were freed from the last remnant of company or reserve.
or indeed of any English control.
There still remained, of course, the overlord council for New England.
In 1630, the council granted a new patent to the Plymouth colony, clearly defining its
territory and recognizing its right to freedom of trading and fishing.
But Governor Bradford limited the privileges of trade to the original pilgrim partners,
and the Old Commerce and kept the patent in his own possession before relinquishing it in 1641.
Plymouth was destined to remain a small colony in which the nominal rulers, the free men, were rarely consulted
and the governor and the council imposed an oligarchic rule.
But after the Council for New England was dissolved in 1635,
Plymouth nevertheless became a fully self-governing colony.