SOURCE: Drinnon, Richard. “The Maypole of Merry Mount: Thomas Morton & the Puritan Patriarchs.” The Massachusetts Review XXI, No. 2 (Summer 1980): 382-410.

[In the following essay, Drinnon finds New English Canaan to be an authentic and singular effort of the European imagination to accept Native Americans and the American surroundings on their own terms, and regards Morton as part of a countertradition that continues to be manifested in American social life.]

The devil would never cease to disturb our peace, and to raise up instruments, one after another.

John Winthrop, Journal, December 1638

In May 1968 Robert Lowell's play Endecott and the Red Cross opened at the American Place Theatre in New York. One of a trilogy called The Old Glory, it appeared at just the right time. That was the spring of the Columbia University sit-ins and, across the Atlantic, of the insurrectionary Paris May-days. That Easter, a half-block from Lowell's apartment in the West Sixties, Central Park danced with Indian-clad hippies and yippies making merry. On television the Vietnam Show dragged on, while half a world away U.S. soldiers and marines complained bitterly about an enemy “who would not stand up and fight” but, elusive as the play of shadows, glided back into the jungles and villages of what American officers liked to call “Indian country.” Ties between these current happenings and the poet-playwright's historical drama were palpable.

Set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1630s, Endecott and the Red Cross was an imaginative reconstruction of the actual suppression of Thomas Morton and his consorts and of their dispersal from Merry Mount near Wollaston and the site of present-day Quincy, Massachusetts. Proving ancestral distastes perennial, Lowell's nostrils took offense at the pleasure-loving Morton, as though he sniffed a yippie Abbie Hoffman who had unexpectedly ambled on stage from the streets of Greenwich Village. As Lowell presented him, Morton was a sloppy, fat, two-faced rogue who sold guns and liquor to the Indians while pretending to believe that “the blue-assed Puritans” hated him merely because of his love for the Book of Common Prayer. Even the Anglican priest Blackstone, his ally, choked on Morton's salacious doggerel about having free maids, white or red, in the forest or in bed, declaring in revulsion that there had to be some decency: “There must be some boundary between the Indian and the English subjects.” And though the priest and the invading Puritan captain agreed on little else, that was exactly why Endicott had marched his expedition from Salem—to establish such a boundary, to stop the infernal Maypole dancing and enforce moral decorum, and to put an end to the horror of drunken whites mating with red women. To their conventional English minds, it was as if Morton had gone native in a big way; proof existed in the number of his red friends among the revelers seized by the Puritans.

The expedition's chaplain, Elder Palfrey, warned Endicott not to consider these Indians harmless nor to underestimate the threat they posed:

There are three thousand miles of wilderness behind these Indians, enough solid land to drown the sea from here to England. We must free our land of strangers, even if each mile is a marsh of blood!

To this man of God the Indians were a plague that “must be smothered if we want our children to live in freedom.” He demanded they be taken out of sight and shot. Endicott later actually so ordered, with the promise that after his men had finished killing the Indians, they might then start burning down the houses of Merry Mount. Tomorrow would be soon enough to burn the native village itself.

It always was. As the actors spoke their lines in the American Place Theatre, traditional burnings and killings had just culminated at My Lai, though the massacre there would not become public knowledge until 1969. But to look forward so prophetically, which is to say realistically, Lowell had first had to look backward for basic historical truths about those immigrants who became Anglo-Americans. As he saw them, Morton and Endicott were archetypes in the development of the national character. Repelled by the former, the poet had him appear as a one-dimensional expression of the pleasure principle, an eruption of pure id. Attracted to Endicott almost in spite of himself, Lowell had that Puritan share his own predilection for antinomies.¹ His Endicott surprisingly turned out to be an irresolute and mild man, forced to suppress imprudent sympathies for his victims and unsettling memories of his former life as a courtier of King James: “Why did I come to this waste of animals, Indians, and nine-month winters?” Yet when circumstances seemed to demand action, act he did. At the play's end Endicott stood victorious atop Merry Mount, in control of the present and heir to the future.

I

In March 1837, thirteen decades closer this world of the Puritan fathers, Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “The Maypole of Merry Mount” appeared in Twice-Told Tales. In great measure the inspiration and foundation of Lowell's play, it, too, had ties to current events. The Second Seminole War was dragging on, with U.S. soldiers and marines trying to “root the Indians out of their swamps” and damning them for not standing up and fighting. The year before, President Andrew Jackson had urged that Seminole women and children be tracked down and “captured or destroyed” but even these tactics had not brought the Indians to heel. From Baltimore the Niles Weekly Register continued to hope, nevertheless, that “the miserable creatures will be speedily swept from the face of the earth.” Elsewhere preparations were under way to send the Cherokees on their Trail of Tears to the West. Worthy forerunners of this Jacksonian America, then, were Endicott and his band as they appeared in Hawthorne's pages. “Their weapons were always at hand to shoot down the straggling savage,” he wrote of the Puritans, or “God's afflicted Saints” as they called themselves. “When they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long or to proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians.”

In Hawthorne's hands that curious incident at Merry Mount two hundred years earlier came to resemble a sort of primal Woodstock nation of epochal significance. Nothing less than the future of the national character was at stake. “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.”

On one side were the children of Pan, though Hawthorne sensibly questioned whether they had come directly from classical Greece: “It could not be that the fauns and nymphs, when driven from their classic groves and homes of ancient fable, had sought refuge, as all the persecuted did, in the fresh woods of the west. These were Gothic monsters, though perhaps of Grecian ancestry.” That the great god was their ancestor was more certain than probable, however, for one comely youth “showed the beard and horns of a venerable he-goat,” while another appeared scarcely less monstrous with the head and antlers of a stag on his shoulders. Green boys and glee-maidens all, they loved twenty different colors “but no sad ones”; they wore “foolscaps and had little bells appended to their garments, tinkling with a silvery sound responsive to the inaudible music of their gleesome spirits.”

Flower children who dressed their Maypole in blossoms “so fresh and dewy that they must have grown by magic on that happy pine tree,” they acted out a wild philosophy of pleasure that made games of their lives. “Once, it is said, they were seen following a flower-decked corpse with merriment and festive music to his grave.” On the joyous occasion Hawthorne described, the jovial priest Blackstone crowned a “lightsome couple” Lord and Lady of the May and prepared to join them in pagan wedlock, for they were “really and truly to be partners for the dance of life.” In other, quieter times, the Merry Mounters were said to have sung ballads, performed juggling tricks, played jokes on each other, and when bored by their nonsense, “made game of their own stupidity and began a yawning match.” Yet their gay veneration of the Maypole was quite serious: they danced around it “once, at least, in every month: sometimes they called it their religion or their altar, but always it was the banner-staff of Merry Mount.” Theirs was no narrow creed of the elect, however, for sometimes they could be seen playing around the great shaft and exerting themselves to entice a live bear into their circle or to make a grave Indian share their mirth.

Onto this sun-bright field rushed the Saints, “black shadows” sworn to eternal enmity against such mirth and at the same time “waking thoughts” bent on scattering the fantasies of such dreamers. They displayed a taste for the funeral, the colors of death; their songs were psalms; their festivals, fast days. Among them, “woe to the youth or maiden who did but dream of a dance.” Mingling with the Merry Mounters that nuptial night, they suddenly turned on their unsuspecting hosts and captured the dancers one and all. Their leader's command followed swiftly:

Wherefore bind the heathen crew and bestow on them a small matter of stripes apiece as earnest of our future justice. Set some of the rogues in the stocks to rest themselves so soon as Providence shall bring us to one of our own well-ordered settlements where such accommodations may be found. Further penalties such as branding and cropping of ears, shall be thought of hereafter.

The lovelock and long glossy curls of the bridegroom challenged Puritan proprieties: “And shall not the youth's hair be cut?” asked ancient Palfrey. “Crop it forthwith, and that in the true pumpkin-shell fashion,” answered his commander. No unmanly sentiments tempted the latter to heed the youth's pleas to spare his bride, do what they would with him: “‘Not so,’ replied the immitigable zealot. ‘We are not wont to show an idle curiosity to that sex which requireth the stricter discipline.’” As for the dancing bear, “‘shoot him through the head!’ said the energetic Puritan. ‘I suspect witchcraft in the beast.’”

The zealot at the head of the invaders was, of course, John Endicott, “the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock-foundation of New England.” As indecisive as an avalanche, Hawthorne's Endicott was seemingly much less complex than Lowell's and much more grim and forceful, so that “the whole man, visage, frame and soul, seemed wrought of iron gifted with life and thought, yet all of one substance with his head-piece and breastplate.” To be sure, the early love of the bridal pair softened him a little and led him to command that after the boy's hair was cropped, they be brought along “more gently than their fellows.” But this order betrayed no second thoughts or inner misgivings. To Endicott's mind the boy was a likely recruit for his armed band, since he promised to become “valiant to fight and sober to toil and pious to pray”; the girl was a welcome addition, since she had the makings of a fit “mother in our Israel.” They merited special treatment, for one day they would join Israel in its Holy War for the American wilderness: “But now shall it be seen that the Lord hath sanctified this wilderness for his peculiar people,” as Endicott had already declared. “Woe unto them that would defile it!”

Yet Hawthorne saw in this man of iron, with his unswerving singleness of purpose, an essential side that Lowell passed by. The latter, in his preoccupation with inner hesitancies and divisions, created a figure not unlike himself and his age, a figure torn by doubts and frustrations, by ambiguous feelings of historical guilt, and by treacherous sympathies for the victims of New Israel. Hawthorne did not lack ambivalences of his own, of course, and was very much a man of his generation; still he burrowed within himself and back through the centuries to come up with an insight of critical importance: Endicott had enjoyed being a key part of the system of repressions. From all their deposits of self-denial he and the other Puritan patriarchs had made furtive withdrawals of gratification in the suppression of others—in cropping ears, placing reprobates in stocks, and branding and whipping them. That clearly was what Hawthorne meant when he said that the whipping post “might be termed the Puritan Maypole.” Around it the Saints got their kicks, albeit of a different sort from those of the Gay Sinners.

In all of American literature there is perhaps no greater metaphoric epiphany than when Hawthorne's Endicott, immediately after capturing the dancers, assaults the Maypole with his keen sword:

Nor long did it resist his arm. It groaned with a dismal sound, it showered leaves and rosebuds upon the remorseless enthusiast, and finally, with all its green boughs and ribbons and flowers, symbolic of departed pleasures, down fell the banner-staff of Merry Mount. As it sank, tradition says, the evening sky grew darker and the woods threw forth a more somber shadow.

There it all was, a tableau as memorable as “The Castration of Uranus,” except this time the victim was Pan and he was emasculated in an American setting: the fall of the Maypole indeed shadowed forth, as Endicott proclaimed triumphantly, “the fate of light and idle mirth-makers among us and our posterity.” It was Hawthorne's genius to see an orgiastic dimension in Endicott's wanton act, to cast the act as a sexual assault, and to have him carry it out with all the frenzied sadism of a “remorseless enthusiast.”

Any doubts that Hawthrone was consciously clothing his insight in this splendid symbolism are put to rest by the one regret he allowed Endicott to voice:

I thought not to repent me of cutting down a Maypole … yet now I could find in my heart to plant it again and give each of these bestial pagans one other dance around their idol. It would have served rarely for a whipping post.

Endicott's suppressed sexuality rose up here, in his vision of whipping pagans around the upright symbol of their bestiality. And just as his pleasure was perverse, Hawthorne made plain, so were many other Puritan violent delights.²

II

In his obsessive search for a usable personal past, Hawthorne had unearthed collective repressions that surfaced in “The Maypole” with near spontaneity. It was as though the long-silenced Thomas Morton had finally been allowed, in the gay and colorful part of the story, to say a few words on his own behalf.

For almost two decades, from 1627 through 1645, the colonial authorities had sought to silence Morton forever. Their straining efforts to retch him out of their systems by sending him off in chains might well be thought of as a prototypical case. It pretty much set the pattern for an unending series of attempts to purge the country, always once and for all, of rebels and heretics, savages and barbarians, familists and antinomians, loose livers and free lovers, and all other undesirable species. It came first, and it was no less pregnant with issues than the cases against Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers, and those that followed. That it remains so largely unknown today is the measure of the triumph of Morton's enemies: they discovered that if they could not spit him out of the country to be forgotten, they could swallow him, as it were, by having him rot away in prison to be forgotten. Almost.

The campaign to silence Morton had three distinct stages. The first dated almost from his arrival in 1625. He traded extensively with the Indians, prospered, and raised his Maypole in 1627. The following year Captain Miles Standish and eight men from nearby Plymouth invaded Merry Mount, captured its host, and hauled him off to their settlement. From there, in the late summer of 1628, he was shipped to England to stand trial for selling guns and spirits to the Indians. The allegations and evidence against him were so insubstantial, however, that the case collapsed before it reached the courtroom. Within a year from his deportation Morton returned mockingly to Plymouth and soon reestablished himself in his old home at Merry Mount. About Christmas of 1629 John Endicott, then in charge of the Bay Colony, tried to have Morton arrested for not submitting to his own “good order and government,” but the unrepentant scoffer “did but deride Captain Littleworth,” as he called Endicott, and easily eluded his pursuers.

The second stage dated from the fall of 1630: Shortly after the arrival of Governor John Winthrop and the first wave of the Great Migration, the enlarged body of magistrates met for the first time and issued a warrant for Morton's arrest. He was brought before them on September 17, for which session Endicott came down from Salem. Never was a kangaroo court more summary. Morton's words of self-defense were cut off short so he could hear the verdict against him. He was to be set in the stocks; his goods were to be seized to pay for his debts, and most curiously, “to give satisfaction to the Indians for a canoe hee unjustly tooke away from them; and … his howse, after the goods are taken out, shal-be burnt downe to the ground in the sight of the Indians, for their satisfaction, for many wrongs hee hath done them from tyme to tyme.” These were the men, as Morton ironically observed in his own account, who had “come prepared to ridd the Land of all pollution.” In imposing sentence, he added, Winthrop had explained that his plantation was to be burned to the ground “because the habitation of the wicked should no more appeare in Israell.” Four months later Morton was finally hoisted over the side of the Handmaid by tackle, since he refused to go aboard voluntarily. Only then, as he was shipped off into exile for a second time, was his house burned down—in his sight and not simply in sight of the Indians—leaving behind, as Morton recorded, “bare ashes as an emblem of their cruelty.”

Again set free in England, for this set of spindly charges had even less chance of surviving an Atlantic passage than the first, Morton promptly mounted a counterattack. A solicitor and member of Clifford's Inn before his emigration in the early 1620s, he was competent, angry, and possessed of an energy that made him a more formidable adversary than Winthrop and Endicott could have anticipated. He handled legal work for Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the dominant figure in the Council for New England and active foe of the Bay Puritans, and spearheaded an assault on the charter of the Massachusetts Company. By 1643 he and his associates had been so successful that the colony was in a state of panic that their patent and powers would fall to an expedition headed by Gorges, the newly appointed governor-general, and seconded by his aide-de-camp, the despised Morton. And it was during this heady period, with his high-handed enemies squirming, that Morton wrote New English Canaan, to which we shall turn presently. At all events, apparently only lack of funds kept the expedition from being launched, with Gorges, Morton, and their associates bidding fair to win all the stakes in both Old and New England. But their fortunes were tied to those of Archbishop Laud and Charles I; the rush of events toward civil war put an end to their hopes. In the summer of 1634 Morton reappeared at Plymouth as nothing more, in the unkind words of his editor, “than a poor, broken-down, disreputable, old impostor, with some empty envelopes and manufactured credentials in his pocket.”

The third stage was short and bitter. Morton was closely watched in his temporary refuge at Plymouth. When he made preparations to go to Maine in the spring of 1644, Endicott, by then governor, had a warrant issued for his arrest but was unable to serve it. A few months later, however, Endicott's officers grabbed Morton, perhaps as he tried to slip through the province, and brought him before the court of assistants in September 1644. This time his alleged offense was having appealed to the King's Privy Council against the actions of the colonial government. When even this singular “crime” could not be proved, he was thrown into jail until more evidence could be accumulated. He was still locked away in May 1645 when he addressed an appeal to the court to “behould what your poor petitioner hath suffered in these parts”; the list of sufferings concluded with his most recent, “the petitioner coming into these parts, which he loveth, on godly gentlemen's imployments, and your worshipps having a former jelosy of him, and a late untrue intelligence of him, your petitioner hath been imprisoned manie Moneths and laid in Irons to the decaying of his limbs.” Lying chained in an unheated cell through a New England winter might have broken the health of a much younger man. Now ill and enfeebled—or “old and crazy,” as Winthrop would have it—Morton was fined and turned loose to die somewhere, as he finally obliged the authorities by doing a couple of years later.

Out of this medley of unproved accusations and summary judgments emerged one awkward fact: the colonial authorities never once had compelling evidence that Morton had committed any punishable offense under English law. It was not a crime, at least on any formal level, to fraternize with natives. It was not a crime to have a Maypole and especially not since 1618 when King James had issued a decree encouraging Maypole dancing. And least of all was it a crime to petition the Crown through proper legal channels for redress of grievances. To move against Morton the Puritans were thus forced into indirection and extralegality, into veiling the true source of their fear and hatred of him—his true offense against “ye Massachusetts Magistrats,” as Samuel Maverick observed, “was he had touched them too neare.”

The least trumped up and most serious of all the counts was that he had sold guns to the Indians. This was never established in open court and in fact there was no English law against it—King James's proclamation (1622) against the practice did not have the status of law and was in any event of doubtful application to Morton. But say that he had traded firearms to the Indians for furs, as he almost certainly had, and then, as Governor William Bradford of Plymouth angrily recorded, had given the Indians instructions in their use. So what? Why prohibit one set of human beings something permitted another? The Saints affirmed they wished to live in harmony with the Indians and bring them Christian light: What then was more logical than for them also to share their technology with red friends who could thereby more efficiently share their wilderness? Alas, the logic was not that of sharing. The planters were colonizers. They were the cutting edge of a colonial empire that was currently subjugating Ireland and moving to apply that experience to North America. To arm those about to be conquered struck them as illogical to the point of madness. They knew that were they despoiled of their lands and subjected to foreign discipline, they would use the guns in their hands. It took little imagination for them to sense that others would do likewise, especially if the others were Indians.

Of course the planters and their kinsmen preferred to put the matter the other way round: not their expansion but their very existence was threatened. They warned Morton, according to William Bradford, that “the country could not bear the injury he did” by trading pieces to the Indians; “it was against their common safety and against the King's proclamation.” And this became the fixed view of the matter. Four generations later John Adams forcibly restated its essentials. Morton's fun, he wrote in 1802,

his songs and his revels were provoking enough, no doubt. But his commerce with the Indians in arms and ammunition, and his instructions to those savages in the use of them, were serious and dangerous offenses, which struck at the lives of the new-comers, and threatened the utter extirpation of all the plantations.

Three generations still further along, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., approvingly quoted his great-grandfather's dictum in the course of editing the 1883 edition of New English Canaan, conceding as well that Morton's suppression was not a question of law but one of self-preservation:

Yet it is by no means clear that, under similar circumstances, he would not have been far more severely and summarily dealt with at a later period, when the dangers of a frontier life had brought into use an unwritten code, which evinced even less regard for life than, in Morton's case, the Puritans evinced for property.

But the dangers of frontier life had seemed real enough to Bradford and the colonists of his day as they acted on the leading assumption of the vigilante code the Adamses later defended. Throughout, I venture, from 1628 to 1883 and after, the unwritten code assumed Indians not to be persons, who might be responsive to kindness and fair dealing, but “savages,” who would inevitably use any available weapon to strike at the lives of newcomers, those bearers of “civilization.”

And were it not for New English Canaan, there we would have to leave Morton, a curious footnote in the accounts of the first English settlements, known only through the hostile pages of Bradford and Winthrop as a man who, for gain and out of spite, transgressed the American Way. The book itself narrowly escaped the oblivion to which its author had been consigned. It excited little or no public interest when it was published in Amsterdam in 1637. It may not have reached the colonies in Morton's lifetime, though Bradford seems to have seen a copy, perhaps one that passed from hand to hand in Plymouth before it disappeared or was destroyed. John Quincy Adams finally ran it down in Europe and brought it home to his father in 1801, but in 1825 this copy was still the only one known to exist in North America. Toward the end of the century, when Charles Francis Adams, Jr., worked with the family copy to produce an annotated edition, only a dozen or so others were known to have survived in the various public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic.³ But survive somehow the book did, and that was a great good thing. It was like the man—sprawling and disorderly, abrasive and sometimes obtuse, yet usually intelligent, erudite and observant, overflowing with wit and high spirits, richly suggestive.

Morton's ironic title took his “courteous reader” back beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its conquistador hostility toward nature, to the first Promised Land and to the heathen Canaanites who lived happily therein till driven off or exterminated by the Israelites. Spiritual descendants of the latter, the Saints had stepped off their ships into what they could only see as a menacing waste. As Bradford mused in his narrative, “What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” What could they see indeed?!—only another land of milk and honey, retorted New English Canaan, only an enchanting green land full of game and friendly red men.

Morton shared the old English passion for field sports in full measure; he was a good shot and avid fisherman, and had scarcely arrived before he called his dogs and took to the woods and streams and bays. Everywhere he discovered astonishing fecundity: often he had a thousand wild geese “before the mouth of my gunne.” The black ducks were so plentiful it was the custom of his house “to have every mans Duck upon a trencher; and then you will thinke a man was not hardly used.” Wild turkeys sallied by his door in great flocks, there to be saluted by his gun in preparation for “a turne in the Cooke roome.” Never was he without venison, winter or summer, flesh which was “farre sweeter then the venison of England.” As for dangerous wild beasts, there were no lions; bears, though numerous, were not to be feared, since they “will runne away from a man as fast as a little dogge.” The New England coast so abounded with local cod, the inhabitants “doe dunge their grounds” with them. Oysters were at the entrance of all the rivers, fat and good: Morton had “seene an Oyster banke a mile at length.” Of mussels and clams there were an infinite store. Striped bass teemed in the rivers and bays, so that “I my self, at the turning of the tyde, have seene such multitudes passe out of a pound, that it seemed to mee that one might goe over their backs drishod.”

For this unspoiled moment, continent and man fused, the power of the one to arouse awe embraced by the nearly commensurate imagination of the other. Morton's lyrical summary of his findings should be known by every student of America's past:

The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, for so many goodly groues of trees, dainty fine round rising hillucks, delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines, and cleare running streams that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweete a murmuring noise to heare as would even lull the senses with delight a sleepe, so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they doe meete and hand in hand runne downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs. Contained within the volume of the Land, [are] Fowles in abundance, Fish in multitude; and [I] discovered, besides, Millions of Turtle-doves one the greene boughes, which sate pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were supported by the lusty trees, whose fruitfull loade did cause the armes to bend: [among] which here and there dispersed, you might see Lillies and of the Daphnean-tree: which made the Land to mee seeme paradice: for in mine eie t'was Natures Masterpeece; Her chiefest Magazine of all where lives her store: if this Land be not rich, then is the whole world poore.

Partly promotional tract for the schemes of Morton and his patron Gorges and partly anti-Puritan polemic, New English Canaan was also much more. The work represented an authentic and almost singular effort of the European imagination to extract a sense of place from these new surroundings or, better, to meet the spirit of the land halfway. There was thus absolutely no reason to question the sincerity of his 1645 petition, wherein he stated he had returned to these parts “which he loveth.” Like the Indians, he loved the wilderness the Saints hated.

A prime reason the country was so beautiful and commodious, more like an English park than the delusory waste of the Saints, was the Indian practice of firing the underbrush every spring and fall: without that, Morton pointed out, “it would be all a coppice wood, and the people would not be able in any wise to passe through the Country out of a beaten path.” In this and the other sections that made up the first of the three parts of New English Canaan, he proved himself a shrewd and sympathetic field observer of Indian manners and customs. To be sure, he did not always rise above colonial bigotry, as in his flat statement that the natives had no religion, a view he accepted on the authority of Sir William Alexander, and in his ethnocentric, Bradford-like celebration of the plague of 1616-17 that swept away so many natives the place became “so much the more fitt for the English Nation to inhabit in, and erect in it Temples to the glory of God.” Nevertheless, he placed the ethnographic chapters at the head of his work and in enthusiastic detail paid the Indians the uncommon tribute of taking their culture seriously.

The natives of Morton's pages had much to teach the European immigrants. “These people are not, as some have thought,” he wrote, “a dull, or slender witted people, but very ingenious, and very subtile.” They made their wampum or money from clam shells, built wigwams that looked like the houses of the “wild Irish,” tanned the skins of deer and other animals into “very good lether,” had excellent midwives who helped their women “have a faire delivery, and a quick,” and even had their own physicians and surgeons, who “doe make a trade of it, and boast of their skill where they come.”

Morton related an anecdote of one powah, or medicine man: He “did undertake to cure an Englishman of a swelling of his hand for a parcell of biskett, which being delivered him hee tooke the party greived into the woods aside from company, and with the helpe of the devill, (as may be conjectured,) quickly recovered him of that swelling, and sent him about his worke againe.” The playful conjecture may have reflected Morton's sober belief, for he said elsewhere of the medicine men, “some correspondency they have with the Devil out of all doubt.” But he was himself an ingenious and subtle man, quite capable of parodying the Puritan conviction that the Indians were in league with the devil. I see no other way of reading his conclusion that the Indians lived rich and contented lives, wanting nothing needful, “the younger being ruled by the Elder, and the Elder by the Powahs, and the Powahs … by the Devill; and then you may imagine what good rule is like to be amongst them.”

Sir William Alexander's views notwithstanding, Morton discovered that in fact the Indians were not altogether lacking in religion and that they had traditions that spoke of the creation and of the immortality of the soul. His account of their mournings for the dead had an ethnographic precision not to be found in John Bradbury, Henry Marie Brackenridge, or other explorers who centuries later encountered the same phenomena among the trans-Mississippi tribes: The natives of New England held it impious to deface graves and their monuments, Morton wrote, and “have a custome amongst them to keepe their annals and come at certaine times to lament and bewaile the losse of their friend; and use to black their faces, which they so weare, instead of a mourning ornament, for a longer or a shorter time according to the dignity of the person.”

The grave of the mother of one chief, Sachem Chickatawbut, had two bearskins sewed together and propped up over it as a monument, he recorded, “which the Plimmouth planters defaced because they accounted it an act of superstition.” To all appearances he joined the Indians in accounting this act a wanton desecration of a sacred place. Subsequently Chickatawbut had a vision that Morton tried to translate for his readers. He pictured the chief standing before his angry tribespeople speaking eloquently of his holy experience:

When last the glorious light of all the skey was underneath this globe, and Birds grew silent, I began to settle, (as my custome is,) to take repose; before mine eies were fast closed, mee thought I saw a vision, (at which my spirit was much troubled,) and, trembling at that doleful sight, a spirit cried aloude behold, my sonne, whom I have cherisht, see the papps that gave thee suck, the hands that lapped thee warme and fed thee oft, canst thou forget to take revenge of those uild people that hath my monument defaced in despitefull manner, disdaining our ancient antiquities and honourable Customes? See now the Sachems grave lies like unto the common people of ignoble race, defaced; thy mother doth complaine, implores thy aide against this theevish people new come hether; if this be suffered I shall not rest in quiet within my everlasting habitation. This said, the spirit vanished; and I, all in a sweat, not able scarce to speake, began to gett some strength, and recollect my spirits that were fled.

If not the first, this has to be one of the very earliest attempts by Europeans to catch the metaphors and rhythms of Indian oratory. More remarkably still, as Morton rendered the speech, notwithstanding its overlay of Anglicisms, it proved him capable of entering into the lives of the victims of colonial aggression and of sympathizing with how they felt as persons.

So did New English Canaan pose the ultimately subversive question: Who were the real “uild people”? The Indians? They were at home in the land, treated Morton and other planters hospitably, shared what they had (as in “Platoes Commonwealth”) danced as a form of communal art, and derived other innocent delights from living in their bodies. Or the Saints? They hated the land, had already massacred some of its inhabitants, defaced their graves and otherwise abused their hospitality, clutched avariciously at property and things, forbade dancing, and generally denied the pleasures of their bodies. Even the careless reader could not miss Morton's answer: “I have found the Massachusetts Indian[s] more full of humanity then the Christians; and haue had much better quarter with them; yet I observed not their humors, but they mine.” He perceived at its inception the stereotype of the treacherous savage and rejected it out of hand. The Saints demanded of every newcomer, he wrote, full acceptance of “the new creede” that “the Salvages are a dangerous people, subtill, secreat and mischeivous; and that it is dangerous to live seperated, but rather together: and so be under their Lee, that none might trade for Beaver, but at their pleasure, as none doe or shall doe there.”

Beside the radicalism of Morton's challenge, Roger Williams's questioning of Puritan title to Indian land seems innocuously liberal. Morton asserted the superior humanity of the Indians and then went dangerously far toward establishing that claim by living among them in amity. As a living example he undermined, just as they were establishing it, the colonizers' notion of the treacherous savage and their need to see themselves as a tightly knit armed band of Christians perched on the edge of hostile territory.

Now we return to the verdict of Winthrop, Endicott, and the other magistrates in 1631. Morton's house was to be “burnt downe to the ground in the sight of the Indians, for their satisfaction, for many wrongs hee hath done them from tyme to tyme.” The judgment showed commendable Christian concern for the natives, one the magistrates doubtlessly hoped would reach its mark in England, but it really had to be tipped over on its head to be understood rightly. His house was to be burned for the many rights he had done the Indians from time to time. He had willfully violated the racist core of the magistrates' nascent code by hunting with the Indians, trading them guns, enjoying their culture with them, dancing with them—all just as if they were persons.

As it happened, the Indians responded humanely and were not at all satisfied by the sight of Morton's house burning to the ground. While he was being shipped off in irons, he later learned, “the harmeles Salvages, (his neighboures,)” at Merry Mount, came up to the Saints, grieved to see these arsonists at work, “and did reproove these Eliphants of witt for their inhumane deede. …”

III

For good reason John Endicott figured centrally in “The Maypole of Merry Mount” while Morton was nowhere to be seen. More scrupulous than Lowell in his use of sources, Hawthorne curbed any temptation to achieve dramatic unity by staging a showdown that did not and could not have occurred. In fact Morton was on his way into exile for the first time, in the late summer of 1628, when Endicott landed with the Puritan forerunners at Salem, then Naumkeag. Shortly afterward Endicott did lead an expedition to Merry Mount and no doubt regretted his inability to get his hands on “mine Hoste” who had thus unavoidably been detained elsewhere. According to William Bradford, Endicott merely rebuked the remnant of Morton's band “for their profaneness and admonished them to look there should be better walking”—that is, they should walk the straight and narrow path of Puritan virtue. Beyond that we know next to nothing, save for the one detail Hawthorne found so critically important. Seeing the magnificent banner-staff still standing, Endicott fell upon it and did in historical truth cause “that Maypole to be cut down.”

John Endicott was in charge of the colony from 1628 until the summer of 1630, when he turned his authority over to Governor John Winthrop. Thereafter he served almost continuously as an assistant or deputy governor or governor until his death in 1665. Plainly he evoked and held the high esteem of his fellow Saints. Yet was he the relatively irresolute leader depicted by Lowell? Or the iron-willed zealot depicted by Hawthorne? Every shred of believable evidence supports the latter, who wrote, oddly enough, as if he had New English Canaan at hand, a most unlikely possibility. Nonetheless, Hawthorne would have found it most engaging, had it been available, for Morton's chapter, “Of the manner how the Seperatists doe pay debts to them that are without,” anticipated his own key insights.

Morton knew well the case of “an honest man, one Mr. Innocence Fairecloath,” since he had helped present it to the Privy Council in the course of his attack on the Massachusetts charter. “Fairecloath” or Philip Ratcliff, as he was known in the flesh, had come over as an agent of Matthew Cradock, head of the Massachusetts Bay Company in England. Members of the Salem congregation found Ratcliff's beliefs “without” their church, however, so “disdained to be imployed by a carnall man, (as they termed him,) and sought occasion against him, to doe him a mischeife.” They worked their way into his debt and, when he sought to collect, sent him “an Epistle full of zealous exhortations to provide for the soule; and not to minde these transitory things that perished with the body.” The counsel moved Ratcliff to exclaim in a moment of unguarded anger: “Are these youre members? if they be all like these, I beleeve the Divell was the setter of their Church.”

Endicott promptly charged blasphemy and determined Ratcliff would be “made an example for all carnall men to presume to speake the least word that might tend to the dishonor of the Church of Salem; yea, the mother Church of all that holy Land.” In court the charges against him multiplied, “seeing hee was a carnall man, of them that are without.” In June 1631, according to Winthrop's Journal, Ratcliff was sentenced to be whipped, have his ears cut off, pay a fine of forty pounds, and be perpetually banished—all this for “most foul, scandalous invectives against our churches and government.”

Morton dwelt on the pleasure the punishment gave the Saints. “Shackles,” or the deacon of the church at Charlestown, sobbed and wept with Ratcliff, “and his handkercher walkes as a signe of his sorrow for Master Fairecloaths sinne, that hee should beare no better affection to the Church and the Saints of New Canaan: and strips Innocence the while, and comforts him.” The executioner of their vengeance then went to work “in such manner that hee made Fairecloaths Innocent back like the picture of Rawhead and blowdy bones, and his shirte like a pudding wifes aperon. In this imployment Shackles takes a greate felicity, and glories in the practice of it.” And “loe,” Morton concluded, “this is the payment you shall get, if you be one of them they terme, without.”

Morton rather deftly emphasized the sanctimonious cupidity of the Saints by having the punishment carried out in “the Counting howse,” with the deacon expostulating with Ratcliff about being “so hasty for payment.” More obvious still was Morton's denunciation of the nature of their sentence—its stupefying harshness created a stir in England and word even came to Massachusetts, through one of Winthrop the younger's correspondents, that there had been “diuerse complaints against the severitie of your Gouernement especially mr. Indicutts and that he shalbe sent for ouer, about cuttinge off the Lunatick mans eares, and other greiuances.” Morton also put before his readers Endicott's menacing conviction that the Puritans were God's chosen, so that to speak against them was to defile their holy mission; and as Hawthorne later had Endicott say, “woe unto them that would defile it.” But Morton's analysis went beyond the economic level of pious acquisitiveness and the political level of religious nationalism to a psychological truth: his enemies were not coldly righteous monsters, however great their hypocrisy, but men who found their cruelty bloody good fun. Though they could hardly admit it, it gave them “greate felicity, and glories in the practice of it.” Morton recognized in effect, again before Hawthorne, that the pleasures they took from the whipping post made it their equivalent of his Maypole.

As a Puritan, Endicott believed in a two-species theory of European humankind. Outside the true faith were the carnal men, men like the libertine Morton, whose carnality was palpable, the traducer Ratcliff, and the blasphemous Quakers—all concupiscent, rational animals scarcely more worthy of consideration than the dancing bear Endicott ordered shot through the head in Hawthorne's story. Within the faith were the grace-endowed men, men redeemed from their sinful bodies by Jesus—men like Endicott, Winthrop, Bradford, all instruments of God's purpose. But it was hard, devilishly hard as it were, for spiritual men not to ease down into their sinful bodies, not to think of sex for more than procreation, to avoid “impurity” of thought and act. Not to “fall back into nature” required no less than twenty-four-hour watches all the days of their lives.

Within this context Endicott naturally would have commanded, as Hawthorne had him do, that the young Lord of the May be shorn of his lovelock and curls. In fact as governor in 1649 he and the magistrates had sought to stop such adornment of wickedness:

Forasmuch as the wearing of long haire after the manner of Ruffians and barbarous Indians, hath begun to invade new England contrary to the rule of Gods word, which saith it is a shame for a man to wear long hair, as also the Commendable Custome generally of all the Godly of our nation until within this few yeares Wee the Magistrates who have subscribed this paper (for the clearing of our owne innocency in this behalfe) doe declare and manifest our dislike and detestation against the wearing of such long haire, as against a thing uncivil and unmanly whereby men doe deforme themselves, and offend sober and modest men, and doe corrupt good manners.

Long hair took root in the lubricious skin, flaunted its origins, and seemed barbarously ungroomed, pubescent, suggestive of the unmentionable—of carnality, mortality, beastliness. The magistrates, with Endicott at their head, entreated the elders to manifest their zeal in ensuring that the members of their “respective Churches bee not defiled therewith.” At the very least Endicott had cleared his name and witnessed his “own innocency” of such defilement.

Women were the opposite sex and as such a threat to purity. It was admittedly better to marry than to burn, so Endicott, before he emigrated and then nearly forty, married Anna Gover, a cousin of Matthew Cradock. She died shortly after their arrival at Naumkeag, however—Morton unkindly suggested that it was through the good offices of Samuel Fuller, butcher turned Plymouth physician, that Endicott had been cured “of a disease called a wife.” In August 1630 he married Mrs. Elizabeth Gibson, a widow, of whom little more is known than of the first Mrs. Endicott, save that she bore him two sons and survived him.

The obscurity of his wives was not fortuitous, for Endicott would have considered it unmanly to let a “weaker vessel” take the lead or share authority and responsibilities. During the examination of Anne Hutchinson, for instance, he revealed keen interest in whether she had presumed to teach at meetings of men, found her defiance intolerable, hoped “the court takes notice of the vanity of it and heat of her spirit,” and joined his brothers in finding her “unfit for our society.” For a woman to presume to act as an enlightened individual with a conscience of her own would subvert the patriarchal family, church, and state, and lead to all the anarchic evils of the Antinomians, the Anabaptists, the Familists, “that filthie Sinne of the Comunitie of Weomen,” as John Cotton defined the sect for Anne Hutchinson, “all promiscuus & filthie cominge togeather of men & Weomen. wthout Distinction or Relation of Marriage [all of which] will necessarily follow. …” Endicott, too, knew very well “where the foundation of all these troubles among us lies.” He frankly believed, as Hawthorne had him say, that the female sex required the stricter discipline and supported Paul's injunction that woman not pray “with her head uncovered,” which he interpreted to mean that she had to wear not only a bonnet but also a veil to meetings.⁴

Her reproductive flesh being more accessible, woman was the devil's gateway to sin. Endicott had occasion to reflect on this commonplace of the times, for he had left a bastard son behind in England. The product of “an amorous episode in earlier years,” in the words of his biographer, the first John Endicott, Jr. was put out to a collier and provision made to apprentice the “poore boy” in “some good trade.” Though Endicott provided for his support, under no circumstances did he want the boy with him as a standing reminder of a lustful past he was “myselfe ashamed to write of.” As he wrote his agent, “onely I would not by any meanes have the boy sent over.” He made no mention, of course, of the person who had given birth to this shame, the boy's mother.

Such conflicts between the flesh and the spirit were the trademarks of Puritanism on both sides of the Atlantic, as Max Weber made plain in his classic Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5). No matter how resolutely the Saints sought to bring things of the flesh under total control, they had a way of getting out of hand. “Marvelous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickedness did grow and break forth here, in a land where the same was so much witnessed against and so narrowly looked unto, and severely punished when it was known,” Bradford puzzled. He listed, among the “sundry and notorious sins” that had become surprisingly common, drunkenness and uncleanness, incontinence between persons unmarried and even married, and, worse, “sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name).” Perhaps the devil was moved to greater spite by the greater holiness of the New England churches; perhaps the close examination of church members simply exposed sins that would have remained hidden elsewhere; and, closer to the marrow of the matter:

Another reason my be, that it may be in this case as it is with waters when their streams are stopped or dammed up. When they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels; so wickedness being here more stopped by strict laws; and the same more narrowly looked unto so as it cannot run in a common road of liberty as it would and is inclined, it searches everywhere and at last breaks out where it gets vent.

Flash floods of backed-up life left behind absurd deposits of the sodomitic Saints. In this remarkable passage Bradford directly foreshadowed Freud, even down to the dam simile, on the discontents of repressive “civilization.” What the Plymouth governor could not see, understandably, was that the pent-up natural impulses could find opening not only in forbidden venery but also, alternatively, in Puritan virtue.⁵

Endicott's outbursts against the unchosen were partial returns of this suppressed sexuality. In the role of judge and executioner he gave socially sanctioned outlet to his hatred and fear of carnality, struck at his own by branding and whipping it in others, and demonstrated all the while his own innocency, preserved the purity of church and state, and therewith extended their sway. He could measure his spirituality by the number of carnal men and women stretched out prostrate behind him. Unlike the poor buggers who channeled their frustrations into sex crimes, Endicott gained the acclaim of all right-minded people.

Precisely because he lacked Winthrop's introspective power, facility with language, and inner complexity, Endicott more directly symbolized the New England Saints. His rough, soldierly exterior stood for their will to harness all human energies to the chariot of their church and state or, better, could more transparently express their drive to bring the flesh—with “her interest” as Winthrop once put it—under the “yoake of the law.” His archenemy Morton was merely the most visible link between subversive forces within the colony and “Salvages” lurking on its borders. Endicott waged war on the lot.

In the arresting words of the biographer Mayo, Endicott had an interest “in the welfare of the better type of American Indian.” Unfortunately he had no opportunity to show more of this side of his character, for that sort was evidently in short supply, short-lived, or both. More at home in dealing with enemies, in any event, he was the natural choice in 1636 to command a punitive expedition against the Indians. He had reportedly seen service in the Netherlands against the Spanish, still bore the title of “captain,” and was the last man to question his explicitly genocidal charge.

As Winthrop summarized that charge in his Journal, Endicott was

to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away, and to take possession of the island; and from thence to go to the Pequots to demand the murderers of Captain Stone and other English, and one thousand fathom of wompom for damages, etc., and some of their children as hostages. …

Endicott did his level best to kill all the adult males on the island but—as with the chorused complaint of his successors down to the very recent past—they “would not stand up and fight.” At present-day New London he killed one Pequot, tried to kill more, and burned their village. Endicott then gave way to his Connecticut counterpart, John Mason, who became the hero of the war that followed, the high point of which was the holocaust of the Pequot fort on the Mystic River.⁶ In their surprise attack at daylight on June 5, 1637, the Saints set fire to the Pequot wigwams and in little over an hour burned and butchered some four hundred men, women, and children. Surviving Pequot families from outside the fort were pursued relentlessly and literally run to ground near present-day Fairfield. “Hard by a most hideous swamp, so thick with bushes and so quagmiry, as men could hardly crowd into it,” Winthrop wrote, “they were all gotten”—he put the overall body count at between eight and nine hundred. And in recognition of “his great services to this country,” the Massachusetts General Court later suitably granted John Endicott a quarter of Block Island.

Now, as an Armed Band of Christ, the Saints had taken pleasure in executing God's will. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay it: Endicott, Mason, and the others naturally were pleased to act as His agents. But their racial attitudes made certain that repaying Indians would heighten their pleasure. Indians already were the nature that the colonizers would fall back into should they yield to the impulses of their bodies. Wilderness creatures, they were the flesh with “her interest” outside the yoke of law. They flew to the thickets and swamps of their female wilderness the way dark, inner, “Secrett Corruptions” eluded spiritual authority.

On the clear, moonlight night before the assault on the Pequot fort, Mason noted in his narrative, “we appointed our Guards and placed our Sentinels at some distance; who heard the Enemy Singing at the Fort, who continued that strain until Midnight, with great Insulting and Rejoycing, as we were afterwards informed.” The Pequot festival of gladness, with the singing, rejoicing, and no doubt dancing, along with other animal pleasures, made “our Assault before Day” all the sweeter to contemplate. The reality even in retrospect moved the stern old soldier to rhapsody:

I still remember a Speech of Mr. Hooker at our going aboard; That they should be Bread for us. And thus when the Lord turned the Captivity of his People, and turned the Wheel upon their Enemies; we were like Men in a Dream; then was our Mouth filled with Laughter, and our Tongues with Singing; thus we may say the Lord hath done great Things for us among the Heathen, whereof we are glad. Praise ye the Lord!

At Mystic the Saints' suppressed sexuality at last broke out and found vent in an orgy of violence. Like men in a dream they burned and shot the flesh they so feared and hated in themselves: the breaking of the dam filled them with delight, their mouths with laughter, their tongues with singing.⁷ Praise ye the Lord!—Morton never had a better time around his Maypole.

IV

By contrast Morton's unrepressed joys at Merry Mount had hurt no one. True, as Bradford charged, he and his friends drank, erected an eighty-foot Maypole, and danced “about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices.” But the dancing and “worse practices” were between and among consenting adults, you might say, and helped free the participants from that oppressive starvation of life that Hawthorne maintained “could not fail to cause miserable distortions of the moral nature.” To paraphrase Bradford a little, Morton's “wickedness” was not stopped “by strict laws” and thus did not flow destructively back upon the self; nor did it flow outward to find projective “vent” in negating nature and nature's children, the Indians. Unlike Endicott, Morton experienced no need to scourge “bestial pagans” and to burn and spoil their country. By contrast he indulged in good clean fun.

“Of the Revells of New Canaan” suggests that Morton indulged in much more. Filled with humor, this fascinating chapter of New English Canaan poked fun at the Saints for impoverishing their lives by “troubling their brains more then reason would require about things that are indifferent.” He thumbed his nose at them with a drinking song to illustrate the “harmless mirth” of his young men—Hawthorne's sons of Pan—who had invited “lasses in beaver coats [to] come away” and made them “welcome to us night and day.” The chorus went

Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes;
Let all your delight be in the Hymens ioyes;
Jo[y] to Hymen, now the day is come,
About the merry Maypole take a Roome.

“The Song” was a relatively straightforward celebration of drink and sex, though one had to know that Hymen was the Greek god of marriage rites, a beautiful youth who carried his “bridal torch” to a virgin's vagina.

“The Poem” at the head of the chapter, on the other hand, was really a riddle, and it demands full quotation:

Rise Oedipeus, and, if thou canst, unfould
What meanes Caribdis underneath the mould,
When Scilla sollitary on the ground
(Sitting in forme of Niobe,) was found,
Till Amphitrites Darling did acquaint
Grim Neptune with the Tenor of her plaint,
And causd him send forth Triton with the sound
Of Trumpet lowd, at which the Seas were found
So full of Protean formes that the bold shore
Presented Scilla a new parramore
So stronge as Sampson and so patient
As Job himselfe, directed thus, by fate,
To comfort Scilla so unfortunate.
I doe professe, by Cupids beautious mother,
Heres Scogans choise for Scilla, and none other;
Though Scilla's sick with greife, because no signe
Can there be found of vertue masculine.
Esculapius come; I know right well
His laboure's lost when you may ring her Knell.
The fatall sisters doome none can withstand,
Nor Cithareas powre, who poynts to land
With proclamation that the first of May
At Ma-re Mount shall be kept hollyday.

All this was “enigmattically composed,” Morton chuckled, and “pusselled the Seperatists most pittifully to expound it.” Twitting “those Moles” for their blind presumption in thinking “they could expound hidden misteries,” he grandly expounded it himself in terms that left the reader no less pitifully puzzled.

Better at explaining why Morton should not have traded guns to the Indians, Charles Francis Adams, when preparing his annotated edition of New English Canaan in the late nineteenth century, gave up on the verse in disgust, denouncing it for its “incomprehensibility.” And its Sphinxian inscrutability was baffling to all save an Oedipus or perhaps a Renaissance Platonist. To unfold its hidden meaning the reader had to reach for the understanding that pagan gods and goddesses of fertility functioned as metaphors for universal forces in nature. Tides of fecund seas flowed in “so full of Protean formes that the bold shore” presented the yearning Scylla with “a new parramore.” To apprehend Morton when he “[did] professe, by Cupids beautious mother,” the reader had to know that Cupid (or Eros) was born of Venus (or Aphrodite), the goddess of beauty and love, who in turn rose from the sea's white foam where Uranus's sex organs had fallen. The creative power and physical passion then swept in with such force no one could withstand them. In the final three lines the alert reader could be expected to perceive that May Day was to be kept a holy day but would have to be quick and something of a classicist to know that by “Cithareas powre” Morton invoked the Ionian Island of ancient Cythera, site of a center of the cult of Aphrodite, and still quicker to understand that Morton was proposing another such center at Merry Mount.

This reading of Morton's allegory makes it closely resemble Botticelli's as depicted in The Birth of Venus (Uffizi, Florence): in the painting the goddess of love rises up newborn from the white foam of the waves and is blown by spring winds on the shore as a symbol of generative power. Once deciphered, “The Poem” confirms Morton's deep interest in what Edgar Wind called Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958).⁸ Like Sir Thomas More in Utopia (1551), Morton defended pleasure; and like Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine Neoplatonist who influenced Botticelli, he manifestly believed voluptas should be reclassified a noble passion. Like other Renaissance men with a taste for bacchic mysteries, he spoke in riddles and deliberately composed “enigmattically” because he believed, with Dionysus, that “the divine ray cannot reach us unless it is covered with poetic veils.” These poetic veils were what Pico della Mirandola, another fifteenth-century Florentine Neoplatonist, called “hieroglyphic” imagery: All pagan religions had them, he maintained, to protect divine secrets from profanation. These were the “hidden misteries” the host of Merry Mount flaunted before the Saints.

Morton's use of hieroglyphics also ironically brought him closer in feeling and thought to the “Salvages” he invited to the revels. Old World and New World pagan entered into communion with the beyond through figurative speech, rites, songs, and dances and not through denotative language, ratiocination, and three-hour sermons. Above all the dance, hated by the Saints as barbarous madness, brought Morton close to his Indian neighbors. The fusion he sought between Old and New World paganism became visible around the Maypole as hand reached out to hand and rhythms of breath and blood within matched vibrations from the wilderness without—suddenly man and his environment were a harmonious unit.

But the dance was over and so was this great opportunity to see if whites and reds could live with themselves, each other, and the lands. As Morton smilingly confessed, “hee that playd Proteus, (with the helpe of Priapus,) put their noses out of joynt, as the Proverbe is.” As legend has it, Proteus could change himself into any shape he pleased, but if caught and held, he would foretell the future. Caught and held, Morton warned carnal white and carnal native alike that the Puritans would cut off their ears and worse, “if you be one of them they terme, without.” So it came to pass that when the future marched forward with Endicott's remorseless stride, carnality was burned and butchered, from Block Island and Mystic across the continent and another ocean to My Lai, that small hamlet in “Indian country” by the South China Sea.

Happily, the victory of gloom over jollity was not irretrievable nor maybe even irreparable. Paradoxical encouragement being better than none at all, we can be heartened by a victory that proved that not even all the afflicted Saints could stop the formation of a countertradition, a tradition fittingly rooted in the emotions driven underground and surfacing periodically as invasions of Merry Mounters, familists, Ranters, millenarians, anarchists, Flower Children, and others from the remote recesses said to be the lurking places of nymphs and fauns. And at their best, Morton's children have paid heed to the continuing invitation of the first Americans: “The lands wait for those who can discern their rhythms.”

Notes

1. Following the lead of the Puritan captain's descendants, the spelling of his surname was changed after 1724 to Endicott, as it appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story and in these pages. Lowell retained the old spelling in the first of his trilogy The Old Glory (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1965). When Endecott and the Red Cross was finally staged, Lowell explained to Richard Gilman that it had to do with basic American experience, more particularly with “the tensions and antinomies rising from the hidden painfulness of our origins, the contradictions of our freedom and self-definition, the losses that all aggressive gains entail” (New York Times, May 5, 1968). Michael Kammen quoted Lowell and celebrated him for this “movingly bifarious view of the North American experience” and for setting Morton and Endicott “as archetypal American rivals, libertine and Puritan, Dionysiac and Apollonian, the establishmentarian and the non-conformist”—People of Paradox (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 111. Largely absent from this enthusiasm for antinomies and paradoxes was the dimension of power: who coerced, deported, or exterminated whom? Or more directly, “our” origins, “our” freedom? Whose? The victims'? The painfulness of “our” origins was not in fact hidden from Morton or the Indians.

2. Of all Hawthorne's many critics, Frederick C. Crews, in The Sins of the Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), has seen most clearly that the whipping-post metaphor expressed the novelist's recognition that the Puritans, in trying to exclude sensual pleasure their lives, had readmitted it in the form of sadism. On the historical dimension Hawthorne manifestly set his forest drama of jollity versus gloom within two hostile, incompatible views of nature and wildness, the one going back through the children of Pan to the Greek classics and the other through the Saints to the Old Testament Hebrews—for a remarkable essay that traces these benign and malign traditions into our period, see Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), pp. 3-38.

3. The 1883 edition of Charles Francis Adams, Jr., appeared in Publications of the Prince Society, XIV. It is invaluable for both biographical and textual data, on which I have drawn freely, and for the inadvertent evidence the introduction and notes provide of the continuity of Indian-hating—editor Adams's view of the “savages” was of a piece with his great-grandfather's and with Bradford's. With malice aforethought, Governors Thomas Dudley and Bradford, among others, circulated the rumor that Morton was under “foul suspicion of murther” in England—this calumny was finally put to rest by Charles E. Banks, “Thomas Morton of Merry Mount,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, LVIII (December 1924), 147-193. For Samuel Maverick's positive views of Morton and his book, see “A Briefe Description of New England and the Severall Towns Therein” (1660), New England Historical and Genealogical Record, XXXIX (1885), 40. Two modern works contain thoughtful discussions of Morton: William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956); and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). On the heinous “crime” of selling arms to the Indians, see Neal Salisbury's “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” William and Mary Quarterly, XXXI (January 1974), 41, and also his “Conquest of the ‘Savage’: Puritans, Puritan Missionaries, and Indians, 1620-1680,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1972. As early as 1650 the Reverend John Eliot advocated arming Red Puritans so they could defend themselves against “savages”; in the 1660s the commissioners of the United Colonies actually allocated missionary funds for the purpose. Providentially, Indians might have arms after all, so long as they enlisted in the life-and-death struggle of “civilization” against “savagery.”

4. John Cotton successfully opposed the veil requirement. It does not follow, however, that Endicott's patriarchism, though characteristically forceful and forthright, was aberrant. Winthrop berated Anne Hutchinson for transgressing the Fifth Commandment (to honor parents) by casting reproach on “the Fathers of the Commonwealth.” When she contested his assertion, he expressed reluctance “to discourse with those of your sex.” In her church “trial” John Cotton admonished her sisters in the congregation not to be misled by her, “for you see she is but a Woman.” In 1637 the Cambridge Synod actually allowed that women might meet, “some few together,” but condemned larger meetings of women as “disorderly, and without rule.”

5. Bradford's “Wickedness Breaks Forth” was dated 1642—Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. 316-23. For Freud's discussion of the barriers without which sexual instinct “would break all bounds and the laboriously erected structure of civilization would be swept away,” see A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York: Permabooks, 1955), p. 321; see also Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).

   Biographical details in the text come from two filiopietistic marvels: Lawrence Shaw Mayo, John Endecott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936) and Stephen Salisbury, Antiquarian Papers: Memorial of Gov. John Endecott (Worcester, Mass.: Chas. Hamilton, 1879). Illuminating for Endicott's attitude toward women is Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1636-1638, ed. Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (Boston: Prince Society, 1894). John Winthrop's writings quoted or cited in the text are easily located by date in Winthrop Papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943) and Winthrop's Journal, ed. James Kendall Hosmer (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908).

6. Out of place here, any serious analysis of the origins of the war and of English tactics and strategy must start with the contemporary narratives of John Mason, John Underhill, Philip Vincent, and Lion Gardiner, conveniently assembled by Charles Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War (Cleveland: Hellman-Taylor Company, 1897).

7. After the slaughter at Fairfield swamp, John Winthrop wrote William Bradford of “the lords greate mercies towards vs, in our preuailing against his, and our enimies; that you may rejoyce, and praise his name with vs.” His concluding remarks suggested that those who threw themselves into such violent delights were refreshed but likely to become addicts, vengeance junkies:

   Our people are all in health (the lord be praised) and allthough they had marched in their armes all the day, and had been in fight all the night, yet they professed they found them selues so fresh as they could willingly haue gone to such another bussines.

   [July 28, 1637]

   Just this kind of refreshment had been promised by the Reverend Thomas Hooker's anthropophagous send-off: “they should be Bread for us.” With the slaughter of Indians, the Saints swallowed at one sitting the carnality of wilderness creatures and their own inadmissible fantasies and yearnings. They rose up with new powers that would help make these Englishmen into Americans, as Richard Slotkin has argued persuasively in Regeneration through Violence.

8. Morton's royalist libertarianism had virtually a point-to-point correlation with the radical views of the group (1649-51) contemporaries called Ranters. Both were in fundamental opposition to the body-denying Protestant ethic and both threw Dionysiac orgies with plenty of sack or beer, lascivious songs, and in the words of a Ranter critic, “downright bawdry and dancing.” As Christopher Hill has observed, Ranters may or may not have taken some ideas second-hand from Italian Neoplatonism. Morton, I have ventured, probably drew directly on the latter; he evinced values associated with the aristocracy but possibly was influenced as well by the underground, lower-class radicalism from which the Ranters emerged. Though Morton was dead and there is no evidence Ranters knew of his New English Canaan, Hill's discussion of the political links between Ranters and Royalists in the 1650s underlines the affinities—World Turned Upside Down: Radical ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972), pp. 161, 273-275, 294, 332. Very likely Morton's admiration for the Indians' communalism made his economic views more radical and more like the communism of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, than HIll may have imagined: The Indians, Morton marveled, “love not to bee cumbered with many untensilles, and although every proprietor knowes his owne, yet all things (so long as they will last), are used in common amongst them. … Platoes Commonwealth is so much practised by these people”—New English Canaan, p. 177. Cf. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652) in George H. Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941), pp. 580-585. And for radical views comparable to Morton's on tyranny and hypocrisy, see Tyranipocrit (Rotterdam, 1649) in George Orwell & Reginald Reynolds, eds., British Pamphleteers (London: Wingate, 1948), I, 81-112.