Getting to the origins of American life

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, north american history, colonial america

In the course of research in support of a family history project, I've done a lot of reading from source books of early North American history. Nothing much that I can review; a little here, and a little there. But I did read one book in its entirety, one renowned for its comprehensiveness and scholarship, Plymouth Colony: Its History & People 1620-1691 by Eugene Aubrey Stratton. At 477 pages, apparatus included, it is a bit of a daunting read, but made a little less massive by the large amount of bibliographical material, most of which is appended chapter by chapter, to avoid a hundred-page "References" section at the end.

When doing genealogical research, it is exciting to one day track down an ancestor whose great-grandparents were early colonists, or even Mayflower passengers. That means you've suddenly tapped into a treasure trove of published material, and your ancestor will undoubtedly prove to be descended from several others who came on the same ship, and quite a number more who came to colonial America in the years following 1620.

Plymouth Colony is comprehensive in three things. Firstly, it names more than 3,000 individuals who came on dozens of ships throughout the years the colony existed. Secondly, the author and editors have tapped all the primary and many secondary sources to produce this portrait of colonial life. Thirdly, the author avoids the narrow focus on religious freedom seen through a modern lens that mars so many treatments of "the Pilgrims", and instead paints a balanced portrait of colonial life among people very much like us, complex people, people who wanted better things than they'd been offered in the England of the 1600s.

The book has three sections of comparable size plus a set of appendices. First is a seven-chapter history from the landing of the Mayflower to the merging of Plymouth Colony with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691. The second comprises seven chapters of topical material, including politics, real estate, sex, daily life, and the writers among them whose writings are many of our primary sources. The third section presents mini-biographies of more than 1,000 persons. The appendices include lists of persons on various rolls such as the 1643 "Men able to bear arms" muster, and an example or two of estate inventories which give an idea of the material goods available to the colonists.

Having pored over the names and records in my family tree for half my life, I found it fascinating to read this or that tidbit about someone whose name I knew. As in any family record, there are a few famous names, such as William Brewster, the ruling elder of the Plymouth church in its early years. There are also a black sheep or two, such as Edward Doty, an irascible fellow who was before the court, usually engaged in a lawsuit, more than 100 times. Am I right to consider that appalling? I've never been in a courtroom except as a jury member, or to witness a naturalization (barring one traffic offense at age 18). The majority of the people were like the majority of people around you. Making a living, trying to raise their kids well, and enjoying life as well as they can.

A lot has been written about the Pilgrims (so-called only decades later) and their quest for religious freedom. That was true for about half the Mayflower passengers, but for a much smaller proportion of those who came later. Many were the younger sons of modestly wealthy English families who stood to inherit little or nothing from their fathers' estates. The right of primogeniture, in which the eldest son got all the land and most of everything else, was one English custom quickly abandoned by the colonists in favor of a more Biblical method of giving the eldest a double portion.

While the colony was indeed run as a theocracy, the rapid increase in population, and the mixed nature of that population, led to the splitting off of town after town in the Plymouth area, and also led to frequent religious conflicts as separatists and puritans of various (fairly recent) traditions chivvied for control of the churches. There was division after division. Quite a sad prospect. It is little wonder that the following generations did not share the zeal of their parents and grandparents. But it is the story of every religious movement throughout human history.

I took lots of notes about the lives of my ancestors as I read. Of most value to me, however, was the treasury of bibliographical material, which directed me to sources I'd been slowly gathering in a much more arduous way. It is one thing to build a tree and gather sources in Ancestry.com; they almost spoon-feed you with their database search results. Of course, not everything is in their databases (though they are working on that!). So it is quite another matter to do actual library research, searching for snippets of information in this book and that article. Having a narrative reference like Plymouth Colony is a Godsend. Though the book is 24 years old it is by no means dated, though a few conclusions are superseded by later research. Colonial history is an area of very active scholarly interest, and many smart and persistent people are continually making new correlations, and new conclusions being drawn. This book stands as a landmark of scholarship in this fascinating area of the nation's history.