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| -Land of the Free |
| The Pilgrims Were English Ethno-Nationalists |
| 2025-11-27 |
| [Federalist] After winning the New York City mayoral election earlier this month, Zohran Mamdani declared “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and as of tonight, led by an immigrant!” It’s become commonplace among liberals to say things like this. They have gone far beyond the “we’re a nation of immigrants” trope, such that we now routinely hear assertions that “America was founded by immigrants” or “America was built by immigrants.” But of course the truth is quite nearly the opposite. America was actually founded and built by seventeenth-century English colonists and settlers who, arriving in a largely depopulated wilderness, were so anxious about retaining their English cultural identity and folkways it would not be too much to call them ethno-nationalists. This is especially true of the English colonists we most associate with Thanksgiving — the Puritans of New England, or Pilgrims. For decades now American schoolchildren have been given a potted history of the Pilgrims and our early colonial history that goes something like this: Seeking the freedom to worship God according to their conscience, the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in England and landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, almost perishing that first hard winter. But the local natives helped them, Squanto the friendly Indian taught them how to plant corn, and in the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims and the Indians celebrated a great feast of friendship. It’s not that this narrative is untrue, exactly, just incomplete. By the time the Puritans decided to sail for the New World in 1620, they had already fled religious persecution in England a decade earlier and secured religious freedom in the Netherlands. Once it became clear that King James I was going to continue Queen Elizabeth’s policy of religious persecution of Puritans and other separatists, a group of English Puritans from East Anglia moved to Holland in 1608, settling in the city of Leiden the next year. Leiden was then a growing industrial center where the Puritans were able both to support themselves and worship free from persecution. But after about a decade in Leiden they began to fear that their situation in Holland was untenable. In addition to economic and political concerns, there was growing anxiety about retaining their English identity and religious traditions in a foreign land. William Bradford, a founder of Plymouth Colony who sailed on the Mayflower, wrote about the “the great licentiousness of youth” in Holland, and decried the “evil examples” and “manifold temptations of the place.” Nathaniel Philbrook, author of the 2006 bestseller on the Pilgrims, Mayflower, has said, “Their biggest concern after a decade in this foreign land was that their children were becoming Dutch.” In addition to losing their Puritan religion, they were afraid they would also gradually lose their English culture. So the Pilgrims did not sail to America in search of religious liberty, but in search of something more. Edward Winslow, also a founder of the Plymouth Colony, wrote that God had given them “much peace and liberty” in Leiden, and they hoped to find “the like liberty” in the New World. The “like liberty” they sought was not simply freedom from religious persecution by the state, which they had secured in Holland, but liberty in a place where they could be fully Puritan and fully English, and pass their religious and cultural ways on to their posterity. This they did with gusto once they were established in New England. The Puritans were not just English, they were self-consciously English, hyper-English. As the historian David Hackett Fischer explains in his magisterial 1989 book Albion’s Seed, the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, being separated from their English homeland by a vast ocean, feared what Cotton Mather called “Criolian degeneracy.” A mood of cultural anxiety persisted in Massachusetts, where the Puritan colonists, fearing the loss of their identity, preserved the folkways of the mother country and in some cases modified or exaggerated them in accordance with Puritan beliefs. For centuries after their arrival in America, they referred to themselves simply as “the English.” Writes Fischer: Change of any sort seemed to be cultural disintegration. In consequence, the founders of Massachusetts and their descendants for many generations tended to cling to the cultural baggage which they had carried out of England. This mood of cultural conservatism created a curious paradox in colonial history. New settlements tended to remain remarkably old-fashioned in their folkways. They missed the new fads and customs that appeared in the mother country after they were planted. They tended also to preserve cultural dynamics that existed in the hour of their birth. It was as if they were caught in a twist of time, and held in its coils while the rest of the world moved beyond them. |
| Posted by:NoMoreBS |
| #2 |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2025-11-27 11:55 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2025-11-27 11:41 |