Puritans on Trial Jenny Hale Pulsipher (bio) Peter Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. 288 pp. 19 b/w illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00. Abram Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 392 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00. The United States' political and cultural divisions in the spring of 2020 are stark, and this division has been aggravated by the politicization of a global pandemic. In the past, crises like 9/11 drew the country together, creating unity through a shared response. This is not one of those times. It is a good time, however, for two books that offer a centuries-long overview of another cultural and political divide. Peter Mancall's The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England and Abram Van Engen's City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism address the historical and historiographical battle between the Puritans of New England and their foes. Thus, these books cover the historical figures of John Winthrop and Thomas Morton and their respective political, religious, and cultural contexts as well as the popular, academic, and political figures who used Winthrop, Morton, and their writings to characterize the nation's founding. Both books are engagingly written, insightfully argued, and offer fascinating, sometimes rollicking, tours through the ways Puritans have been characterized—and caricatured—over time. Caricature is a key word here: Most of those who harnessed Winthrop's and Morton's lives and writings unabashedly trimmed and tucked those stories to support their chosen narratives of progress or declension. Mancall and Van Engen provide close-up views of this cultural battleground and, in the process, offer rich historical and historiographical detail and considerable food for thought. Peter Mancall's book concerns Thomas Morton, an English lawyer and colonial promoter who ran afoul of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonists in early seventeenth-century New England. Morton is probably best known as the "lord of misrule" who raised a maypole in his settlement near [End Page 367] Plymouth and led drunken revels involving his own men and local American Indians. These antics (among other things) led Plymouth authorities to arrest him and ship him back to England, a heavy-handed response that has fueled sympathy for Morton and antipathy for his opponents ever since. Morton was also the author of New English Canaan, a book he penned to support the colonization project of Ferdinando Gorges and to skewer the Puritans who stood in the way. Throughout New English Canaan, Morton conflated the Plymouth and Massachusetts groups. Morton called both of them "cruell schismaticks" and considered them equally hostile to the English state church (Morton, p. 13).1 Mancall, on the other hand, distinguishes the two groups, explaining that while both were part of the puritan movement, the Plymouth "Pilgrims" were separatists and the Massachusetts Puritans were reformers. Throughout his book, Morton aimed barbs at Puritans in general and in particular, gleefully dubbing height-challenged Myles Standish "Captaine Shrimp" (p. 147). Morton was clearly having a great deal of fun, but Mancall reminds us that he was also engaged in deadly serious political theater aimed at undermining the legal standing of the Puritan settlements. Mancall's book begins and ends with historiography, tracing how Morton and his book played out in American history, always as a foil to the Puritans. Mancall explains that the Puritans fared better than their foes in American cultural memory through the start of the nineteenth century. When Morton was remembered at all, it was as "a miscreant who needed to be brushed aside for the colonies to succeed" (pp. 14–15). Morton's New English Canaan, first published in 1637, was extremely rare, but one copy was handed down in the Adams family, and they were instrumental in its early-nineteenth-century emergence from obscurity. An abridged edition of Morton's account, possibly edited by John Quincy Adams, appeared in the 1810 Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. In its preface, the editor decried...