ad “as good live in Turkey” as under these newcomers.
Listen below to Canaan Book III, Ch. 23, on Morton’s 1630 arrest and exile:
Thomas Morton, “summoned” on August 23, was the first defendant before the Massachusetts Bay Court, on September 7, 1630. (Record in Shurtleff 1: 74). The “city on a hill” held no trial. There was “no color of law whatsoever” (Zuckerman’s phrase), with even a fake murder-warrant that never saw legal light of day. Boston simply ordered the burning of Merrymount before Morton’s eyes; then (December) hoisted him by cow-harness onto a ship whose voyage almost killed him.
The Merrymount threat was its success by Fair Means. The Puritans’ first business was to end those first Transatlantic experiments. Negotiation and compromise were “new creed” sins against The Lord. A new phase of experiment in how to live in America was in their hands.
Massachusetts Bay Company ordered “all males” to be “exercised in arms.” Native people were forbidden at plantations except at assigned times, and a “stiff directive” promised “severe” punishment for gun-trade --- soon carried out when one “Hopkins of Watertown” was “branded in the face” for trading “a piece and pistol” to the friendly Sagamore James, of Saugus (Vaughan Frontier 94-5). Within a year, anyone with Native “servants” was to discharge them, and to forbid Native people in their houses without permission from the Court (Shurtleff Records 1: 83).
“We have great Ordnance,” wrote Rev. Frances Higginson (in Force 3). “But…our greatest comfort is, we have plenty of Preaching, and diligent Catechizing, with strict and careful exercise…to bring our people into a Christian conversation with [those] whom we have to do withal….If God be with us, who can be against us?”
Another ominous development was also preposterous.
Myles Standish and John Endecott were poised to become the “Injun Expert” officers training the next generation of colonists. They were ready to confirm and prosper by every ignorant assumption --- their own, and those of the people they kept “protected” inside the palisades. “Religion” was putting its faith in guns and foolhardy tactics at the same time. Endicott took his wrath into the Pequot “Long Water Land.”
Profit, Advantage, and Progress grew more entwined. How many people should Profit Dis-advantage, to achieve how much human Progress? In his appeals for Council support against rival "irregular" traders, Bradford offered to stop "the unprofitable consuming of the victuals of the land" by "these salvages" (Letters 56).
Within a few years, Massachusetts Bay built its first ship --- the Desire --- for the African and Caribbean slave trade. Ten years after the May Day Revels, Boston and Hartford (CT), with Plimoth manpower in the wings, set out to destroy the next people in England’s way, The Pequots. You can take their documented journey and find out why they failed in Mystic Fiasco: How the Indians Won The Pequot War. Yet, that was the war that hard-wired the American colonial psyche through today.
Plimoth and Boston made a good lawyer angry in 1630. Thus began Morton’s second exile, and the “Late” years of his long life --- See Time Line 4.
Click to enjoy the feature-film script MERRYMOUNT: A True Adventure Comedy (also for radio & performance). Watch a movie in your mind!
According to David Petegorsky’s Left Wing Democracy in the English Civil War, for thinking people in the Renaissance “The conception of a personal God or Devil, of an actual Heaven and Hell, were the psychological result of the inability to understand the nature of the physical world: the refuge of those who felt impelled to substitute fancy and imagination for the knowledge they were unable to achieve.”
Morton prized reason as “the light of nature,” as did Gerard Winstanley, a leader of “displaced” people in England (and no university man): it was “a doctrine of a sickly and weak spirit who hath lost his understanding of the Creation, and of the temper of his own heart, and Nature --- and so runs into fancies” (Winstanley qtd. 179). Diggers, Ranters, Quakers and more defied