Both the Forest and the Trees: In the Wilderness with the Pilgrims

Abstract

Both the Forest and the Trees: In the Wilderness with the Pilgrims Ann Marie Plane (bio) John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. x + 447. Maps, illustrations, notes and index. $30.00. John G. Turner begins his new book on Plymouth Colony by invoking two popular narratives. In the first (which “Americans learn . . . when they are children”), key elements combine: “a ship, a compact, a rock, a winter of death and disease, a harvest, and a Thanksgiving turkey meal” to make “a heartwarming story about two peoples feasting together instead of fighting each other” (p. 1). The second narrative offers “an alternative, more dispiriting history.” Here, “the Pilgrims made a treaty and alliance with the Indians, then took their land and killed or enslaved those who resisted.” In this darker version, “Late November is a time for mourning, not a time for giving thanks” (p. 1). Turner introduces each tale as a straw man; each is based on beliefs that the author promises to complicate and deepen. And in the 360-plus pages that follow, Turner weaves together a capacious synthesis that incorporates scholarship from a wide range of eras and approaches, rereading primary sources and using key anecdotes to flesh out his tale. This book focuses on the Christian liberty sought out by English colonists in Plymouth and the ways their insistence on such freedoms led them to deny others (dissenters, political dissidents, and Indigenous peoples) various forms of liberty. There is much to admire in this synthesis of Plymouth Colony’s history; in the end, though, Turner’s narrative would have benefitted from greater precision. For a book about Christian liberty, surprisingly little is said about the theology of this complex subject. At the same time, while Turner cites a wide range of scholarship, his account needed to grapple more thoughtfully with the implications of those interpretations, an observation especially true for the most recent historiography on Indigenous peoples. Finally, while Turner doubtless intends his book to appeal to a broad range of readers, including non-scholars, the level of detail may prove intimidating to some, despite the narrator’s engaging and sometimes joyfully irreverent voice. [End Page 406] Turner’s two simple stories, while intended as mere sketches of popular views, offer a useful starting point for this review, as they highlight two dominant historiographical strands animating New England colonial history. Let us call these (1) the classic New England paradigm and its modern cousin, (2) the revised New England paradigm. In the classic paradigm, the historian’s gaze focuses on the sociopolitical structures of colonial New England, which was often envisioned as the most English of all the English colonies. Of course, many schools and methodologies fell under this classic model, which has exercised hegemonic dominance on historical interpretation for most of the modern era. In the revised paradigm, New England is envisioned as a region dominated by Indigenous polities as well as external global structures; expansionist English colonialism plays an important role, but in some histories, authors try to center Indigenous epistemologies. Here I think of the works of Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008) and Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (2019) or Kathleen M. Bragdon, The Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (1996) and its sequel, The Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775 (2009), which attend to Indigenous language, concepts, social organization and values. In the new paradigm, both colonizer and colonized are entitled to equal status as protagonists. Revisionists emphasize Indigenous agency, Atlantic World economies and contexts, and the politics of intercultural negotiation and resistance. These two scholarly poles each offer their own evidentiary imperatives, narrative lines, and exemplary tales—and each represents different parts of the elephant that is New England. The trick for the present-day scholar of colonial New England is to maintain a firm hold on all these contexts, remembering that New England is never just a “little England.” As I argued in my first book, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (2000), even...