New Light Wanted on the Old Colony

Abstract

IT is amazing that professional historians have consistently neglected the Old Colony of New Plymouth which, after all, is the oldest New England colony and the first English colony after Jamestown. Why? I suppose the reason is that there has been so much flapdoodle about the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers that professional historians have turned elsewhere, to the lush if somewhat sulphurous fields of Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven; to Rhode Island, popular today because of her fancied contribution to democracy and her real contribution to religious liberty; to unraveling the complicated skein of colonial Maine; or to outlying English colonies such as Newfoundland. There is no over-all history of Plymouth colony worthy of the name. Roland G. Usher's, the best, was a tercentenary affair in I920 and contains only one chapter on the history of the colony after the death of Governor Bradford. Osgood has one good chapter on the political institutions. Andrews' account is superficial, inaccurate, and biased because he felt he must carry a torch for the Church of England. Palfrey, who wrote a century ago, is the latest historian to tell us anything about what happened in Plymouth colony after i650. The result of this neglect by professional historians has been that journalists, orators, and, above all, popular illustrators have presented a false picture of the Old Colony. The Mayflower Descendant magazine published about one hundred wills and inventories of Plymouth-colony people in its first twelve volumes, but nobody seems to have paid any attention to them except the late Dr. Usher and myself. These inventories prove that the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers dressed exactly like other