The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England

Abstract

The Trials of Thomas Morton examines the life of Thomas Morton, an Anglican lawyer and trader who established the Ma-re Mount settlement, near modern-day Quincy, Massachusetts, in the 1620s. After freeing the servants under his command, Morton and his company erected an eighty-foot maypole and embraced Old English traditions, which unsurprisingly vexed his pious neighbours. Morton was exiled from New England three times, and as the book's title suggests, he faced legal trials in both England and New England. Morton's drinking, dancing, and cohabiting with and selling guns to Indigenous people caused problems, but it was “his skills as a lawyer and writer” that posed the greatest threat to his “Puritan Foes” (208).Peter C. Mancall uses Morton as a lens to explore the multiple visions for a New England that vied for dominance in the early seventeenth century. Blending chronological and thematic narratives, the book's six chapters weave together a picture of both Morton's life and New England's complex cultural, political, and religious landscape. Morton understood that New England “could have a different future once the Pilgrims and Puritans lost their authority” and when “the authority of the Massachusetts Bay Company disappeared, a replacement would need to be created” (131). The book's central premise is exploring the replacement vision that Morton offered. Mancall convincingly argues that Morton's seminal work, New English Canaan (1637), was “unflinching in its dissent against the dissenters” and vital to Morton's legal argument that Massachusetts Bay authorities had “exceeded the authority of their original charter” (174, 208).From start to finish, The Trials of Thomas Morton offers fresh approaches to reframing the well-told tale of life in seventeenth-century New England. For example, in the prologue Morton's story is told through the eyes of former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who exchanged a lengthy correspondence about Morton and his views. Given that there is no extant archive of Morton's papers, Mancall has worked hard to piece together a rich narrative of his life. Mancall carried out extensive archival research on Morton's early life in England, notably regarding his failed marriage to Alice Miller, the ensuring legal battle, and the false murder charges brought against Morton. Mancall's deep dive into Morton's connection to Sir Ferdinando Gorges is also of particular note. Gorges, who “posed more of a threat to early English colonial ventures than almost anyone else on either side of the Atlantic,” believed that “Morton was the partner he needed to advance his American agenda” (51).Throughout the book, Mancall uses the term “Ninnimissinuok” to describe “the indigenous Algonquian-speaking residents of southern New England” (21). This nomenclature, which Roger Williams first recorded in 1643, gained traction largely owing to Kathleen Bragdon's Native People of Southern New England (1996). Mancall offers the following explanation in an endnote: “The label Ninnimissinuok includes multiple groups, including the Nipmuck, Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Massachusetts … before the arrival of the Europeans the local Natives referred to themselves as Nínnuock, Ninnimissinnûwock, Eniskee-tompaūwog, which signifies Men, Folke or People” (endnote 4, 232). While the term is still used today by Narragansett Peoples to mean The People or Indigenous Peoples, Mancall could go further to clarify it, perhaps including an explanation in the main text of the opening chapter, “Homelands,” rather than in an endnote.Using his consummate knowledge of the period, Mancall has successfully written a well-researched and readable book about a complex historical moment, which is no mean feat. Scholars interested in seventeenth-century New England will find this book a useful addition to the already rich existing literature, and scholars of legal history will also welcome this contribution. Though it is not a formal study in Atlantic history, Mancall's work deftly grounds Morton's story in a transatlantic context. Given Mancall's accessible writing style and the additional features such as a timeline, The Trials of Thomas Morton is also suitable for undergraduate students interested in the period. No contemporary portrait of Morton exists, but Mancall has done well to include a range of nineteenth-century images of Morton (190–91), seventeenth-century maps (41, 44–45), and images of key manuscript sources, such as the Massachusetts quo warranto case of 1635 (127).As the “Note on Sources” at the end of the book acknowledges, Jack Dempsey's Thomas Morton of “Merrymount”: The Life and Renaissance of an Early American Poet (2000) is the only other recent full-length study of Morton. While there have been a smattering of journal articles and book chapters that focus on specific elements of Morton's life, (notably Michael Zuckerman's “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” New England Quarterly (1977), 255–77), Mancall's comprehensive book-length study is long overdue. Mancall's publication is timely amid the ongoing 400th anniversaries, including that of Plymouth's founding (2020), Morton's first brief trip to New England (2022), and the settlement of Ma-re Mount (2024). As scholars continue to move away from the puritan New England narrative, Mancall's message is clear: Morton's vision for New England was one of several options on the table for building a “New” England in the seventeenth century.