They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty
By John G. Turner
Yale University Press, 2020

George Mason University professor John Turner begins his new book, They Knew They Were Pilgrims by telling his readers that “despite the ongoing popular appeal of the Pilgrims, academic historians have largely ignored Plymouth Colony.” Almost 400 pages later, when he’s introducing his book’s Bibliography, he tells those same readers “There has been no end to the writing of books about the Pilgrims and the early years of Plymouth Colony.”

In order to explain this apparent discrepancy, he might be hanging a fair amount of weight on that word “academic,” but much as one might love and venerate the works of Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison (two Plymouth-slighters, according to Turner), they hardly possess an adjective. The plain truth is that the pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation have never lacked for histories, academic and otherwise. Turner himself mentions Nick Bunker’s Making Haste from Babylon, Jeremy Dupertius Bangs’ Strangers and Pilgrims, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, George Landon’s Pilgrim Colony, and Eugene Aubrey Stratton’s Plymouth Colony. He might also have mentioned Rebecca Fraser’s The Mayflower, which covers much the same ground as his own book, or James and Patricia Deetz’s The Times of Their Lives, or any of the many biographies of the Mayflower patriarchs and matriarchs. And of course there’s the first and in many ways still the best book on the subject, William Bradford’s surpassingly readable Of Plymouth Plantation. 

Turner poises They Knew They Were Pilgrims as a “fresh lens for examining the contested meaning of liberty in early New England,” a pitch full of promise since the Pilgrims very quickly soured on treating the native Cape Cod tribes with any kind of fairness or plain dealing. Throughout the book, Turner is an animated and insightful guide to those earliest years of Plymouth Plantation, and although he might have “the meaning of liberty” in mind while he’s telling these stories, readers will likely be struck more by the storytelling itself. He’s combed through the records and plucked some of the most interesting and instructive anecdotes, like one of the plantation’s early re-supplies of inhabitants:

In November 1621, the Pilgrims were surprised to see a ship sail into Plymouth Harbor. Sent by Thomas Weston and the colony’s investors, the Fortune carried thirty-five settlers, mostly “lusty [strong] young men, and many of them wild enough,” When the newcomers first saw the “naked and barren” landscape of Cape Cod, they begged the captain to take them home. He promised them that if the Mayflower planters were dead or vanished, he would transport them to Virginia. According to William Bradford, the fact that the surviving Pilgrims had supplies of food convinced the Fortune passengers to remain. In order to feed the newcomers, Bradford put everyone on half rations for the rest of the winter.

(In this as in so many Plymouth stories, the strange unappealing magnanimity of Governor Bradford is unmissable.) 

It was pilgrim leader Edward Weston, fresh from coveting the gorgeous berth that would later be known as Boston Harbor, who advertised New Plymouth as a place where “religion and profit jump together,” and this brave and sordid tale, America’s origin story, is regularly revisited by historians seeking to make sense of their present moment. Turner is concerned with the differing concepts of freedom in the context of how America got started, which is itself a muted kind of commentary on our own age of xenophobia and revanchist nationalism. This will be a kind of pilgrim history Turner’s younger readers especially will recognize immediately; as he points out,”the National Day of Mourning procession now draws larger crowds than the Pilgrim Procession held the same day.” 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.