• 2016 American Election
  • 2016-2017 Trump transition
  • 2017-2021 Trump Presidency
  • about this site
  • AUTUMN IMAGES
  • BIGFOOT/SASQUATCH
  • books of note
  • cinemagic
  • commonplace book
  • cooking for poor poets
  • creepy sci-tech
  • depression
  • Dispatches
  • fictions by S.A. Bort
  • films of note
  • Four Blood Moons
  • FREE JUSTINA !
  • Future Shock
  • global chessboard
  • gratitudes
  • homes and destinations
  • honors of heart, mind and courage from the great OZ
  • let’s dance!
  • liberte!
  • living cheaply with style
  • love & marriage
  • Parkinson Disease Journal
  • people of note
  • po’try by s.a.bort (and others)
  • Readings
  • Scalia cover up?
  • self-improvement
  • songs of note
  • SPRING IMAGES
  • Summer Images
  • TAYLOR CALDWELL
  • TEXAS!
  • the sixties
  • watch your language!
  • WINTER IMAGES
  • word therapy
  • words of note
  • zen of writing

when is a party not a party ?

~ when you're not invited

when is a party not a party ?

Tag Archives: Eden

Taylor Caldwell’s Dialogues With The Devil (1967) #9 of 22

15 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by essaybee2012 in Dialogues With The Devil (1967), evil, God, goodness, Heaven, hell, Lucifer, mankind, Michael the Archangel, Taylor Caldwell

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

adultery, angels, archangels, creation, Damon, death, demons, dreams, Eden, enticements, envy, equality, equity, existence, faith, flesh, forbidden tree, free will, gluttony, grace, greed, habit, happiness, heirarchy of heaven, individuality, injustice, innocence, labor, leisure, lies, Lilith, lust, malice, material needs, mistrust, murder, nature, Pandara, Paradise, penance, piety, repentance, saints, salvation, seduction, sin, sloth, soul, spirit, suspicion, temptation, Terra, theft, theologians, virtue

Jean Jullien, artist

Jean Jullien, artist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Caldwell, Taylor.  Dialogues With The Devil.  New York:  Doubleday & Co., 1967. pp 46-56.]  Please see Taylor Caldwell’s Dialogues With The Devil (1967) #1 of 22 for an introduction to this serialization.

GREETINGS to my brother, Lucifer . . .

We are excessively pleased that you have informed us that you will send Damon to Pandara, to seduce her six women. . . .

. . . we have taken precautions against Damon and Lilith.  Unfortunately, we had to introduce suspicion into that vast paradise.  We should have preferred that entire innocence prevail, but one remembers that Our Father set, in the midst of Eden, a Forbidden Tree.  Suspicion, entering into Pandara, will awaken the power of free will, and a healthy mistrust.

. . . I appeared to the wives of Pandara, the innocent treasures!–and informed them that they were with child, which pleased them mightily.  However, I mourned . . . A beautiful female demon, one Lilith, who destroyed the souls of millions upon millions of other men, would soon enter the azure light of their planet to seduce their husbands and lead their husbands into unspeakable pleasures and lust, thus insuring that for a time, at least, those husbands would forget their wives and abandon their little nestlings.  The husbands would romp with Lilith, neglectful of the duties of hearth, home and bed and field, and they would love her with madness and be so smitten of her charms that they would regard their wives with distaste and possibly revulsion.  Worse still, the harvests would be neglected, the cattle unfed, the roofs unsealed . . .

A woman may forgive her husband a romp in the shadowy forests, but she will not forgive him the sufferings of her children, nor will she forgive the great insult to her own beauty and desirability.  The ladies said to me, “Is this Lilith fairer than I?”  And I replied, “Assuredly, she is the fairest of women, for all she is a demon, and are not maddening women demons?  Though you are lovely to behold, my little ones, Lilith in contrast will cast a dust of ugliness upon you in your husbands’ eyes.  But above all, she will shatter the peace and joy of your planet, and bring age upon your faces, and wrinkles, and dim the green fire of your eyes, and she will bring death upon your children and disease and storms and darkness and furies.”

“What, then, shall we do, to preserve our planet, our homes, our youth, and our life and our children?” the ladies implored me.

“Ah,” I told them, “men are susceptible to ladies of no virtue and no matronly attributes!  They are like adorable children, wanton at heart but in need of protection, and the careful supervision of alerted wives.  They will stretch forth their hands for the flying hair of a woman of no sturdy consequence, and they will dance with her in the moonlight and garland her head with flowers and press their cheeks against her breast, and drink of wine deeply with her.  She will laugh, and sing and play, and a wise matron understands how these things can lure men from their duties.  She will becloud the minds of your husbands so that they will think of pleasure and not the granaries, laughter in the sun and not of weak roofs, roses in the glades and not of wool to be sheared.  There is a certain weakness in men that inclines them to frivolity and dallying, and Lilith will exploit that weakness and entice your husbands from your sides. . . .

“We will be watchful, O, Lord Michael!” the wives promised me . . . is this not better than death and sin and age and disease and sorrow, not to mention the harsh tongues of betrayed wives?  I have observed that men can endure great hardships and adversities with considerable calm, but they cannot endure for long the smite of a woman’s less affectionate remarks, and her acid conversation at midnight when they would prefer to sleep. . . .

I then repaired to the husbands of Pandara, and when they had risen from their knees at my consent, I said to them, “Glorious is your planet, beloved sons of God, my dear brothers, and fair are her skies and rich are her fields and splendid will be your cities.  Handsome are your faces and strong are the rosy muscles of your arms, and your wives rejoice in you.”

“It is so, Lord!” they cried in jubilation, and I smiled at the happiness in their eyes and loved them dearly for the male spirit is a little less complicated than the female and somewhat more naive.  It has an innocence, even in paradise, beyond the innocence of women who, even in paradise, are given to reflection, and are less trusting.

“But alas,” I said to the boys, “your joy is threatened, for you have free will, as you know, and alas again, so do your wives. . . . Men are often slave to habit, virtuous or unvirtuous, but women have few habits at all and so are easily led astray into novelties.  Your wives, though with child, will not always be with child.  They will have moments of leisure.  While leisure for a man is a quiet resting or an innocent pastime or a running after balls or a climbing of trees for the fruit, or just sleeping, leisure for a woman is the veriest temptation. . . . Have you not already discovered this for yourselves?”

. . .

“Your wives will all have dreams very soon,” I told them, “and none of them will be virtuous.  None of them will be concerned for the husband who labors in the fields and the forests and who tends cattle and returns dutifully home to his children and sits soberly on his hearth.  On the contrary!  They will be dreams which I hesitate to speak of, for women’s minds are somewhat less decorous and guileless than men’s, even on Pandara.  The indelicacy of a woman’s thoughts would bring a flame to the cheek of even the burliest man.  You have observed that nature is not always delicate?”

. . .

“And women are far closer to nature than are you, for all you labor in the fields and the forests.  There is a certain earthiness in women which is sometimes an embarrassment to husbands, a certain lustiness of the flesh that is not always easily satisfied.  If I am incorrect, I beg your forgiveness.”

“You are correct, Lord,” said the simple ones.

. . . “For unto your wives there will be sent from the very depths of hell an evil but most beautiful male demon, one Damon.  I know him well!  He has seduced endless millions of women on other planets, as fair and as matronly as your own, and as busy–with dreams.  He is full of novelties and enticements, and adores women and finds them overwhelmingly fascinating–which you not always do.  Their conversation never wearies him; he is attentive and glorious.  As he never labors, except to do mischief, he is not weary at sundown, as you are weary.  As he is a demon and not a man, he does not sleep, and women are notable for being active at night.  And dreaming.  He converses.  You have no idea what a menace to husbands is a conversing man!  But women find it distracting.

“You love your wives.  Soon, they will bear children.  However, when Damon comes to seduce them with fair words, with exciting discourse, with flatteries and ardencies, and will shine the beauty of his countenance upon them and jest with them until they are weak with laughter and adoration, they will forget you and your children, and will race with him to flowery dells and into dim lush spots–and will then betray you for his kisses and his lusts.  Then will your children cry for a maternal breast, and then will there be no dishes upon the table to appease your hungers, and no arms to sustain you in your beds.  You will be veritable orphans, abandoned and alone, left to weep among the wreckages of your households, and the uncleaned pots and the stale bread.  Is that not a fate to weep about, and to pray never afflicts you?”

. . .

. . . Damon has a voice that is irresistible, and what woman can resist a musical voice if it is also masculine?  Damon is all masculinity; he is never weary.  His muscles never ache.  His foot never lags.  He never frowns, if dinner is a little late.  He is also never hungry, as you are hungry, and you know how impatient wives are with the honest hunger of a man.  They remark that men’s bellies seem bottomless.  Correct me if I am wrong.”

“You are correct, Lord,” they said, with dismalness and alarm.

As Damon does not seek a woman with forthrightness, and with sleep in mind thereafter–as you do–he will dally with a woman after love, until she is ready and eager for his embraces again.  Whereas you, my dear little ones, wish to turn on your pillows in preparation for the next day’s work.  Damon never asks, “Do you love me?” as your wives ask, until you yawn for very boredom.  He constantly assures the creature of his immediate affection that never has he loved a woman so before, and how rapturous are her kisses and perfumed her flesh.  Do you say all this to your wives?”

“No, Lord,” they said dolorously.

. . .

. . .

“Be patient.  For one comes who will have all the patience in the world and will never weary.  Not only will he seduce your wives, so that all the horrors I have described will come upon you, but he will bring old age and death to you, and flagging of strength, and disease and pain.  Worse, he will sharpen your women’s tongues, and nothing is more deadly.”

“How can we escape such a dreadful fate?” they cried.

. . . Men are trustful, when it involves women, and that is a momentous mystery which I will not even attempt to explore.  I do not advise distrust as a general climate of the mind.  That can inspire eventual cynicism and lovelessness.  But a reasonable distrust is prudent.  And one knows the weaknesses of women.  Do we not?”

“Certainly!” they exclaimed, positive that they had always known female weaknesses, though the fact had only just occurred to them, alas.

“Then, be watchful for Damon.  Never leave your wives long unguarded, especially in the soft eventides and when the moons are shining.  Do not dally in the fields and the forests and the hills and the meadows as the sun begins to go down.  Do not let anything draw you aside, even if it appears exciting and wondrous and new–and, probably beautiful, itself.  For, if you delay, Damon will appear on your thresholds at home, and you may return to an empty household.  A moment’s delight can cost you a whole life’s industry and hope and peace.  And, again, it will bring you death and suffering.”

. . .

. . .

It is not sensible, as you know, Lucifer, to describe a handsome man to a woman or a lovely woman to a man, human nature being what it is, even on the Eden which is Pandara.

“We will guard our honor and the honor of our households and the safety of our children and the purity of our wives!” shouted the innocent ones, raising their fists high in a solemn oath.  “Ever shall we be watchful of our women, understanding their weaknesses and their frail natures and their susceptibilities to temptation!”

I gave them my blessing and departed.  They have been warned.  Suspicion has been introduced into the turquoise daylight and the silver and lilac nights. . . . In Heaven we are unequally perfect, in accordance with the ability to be perfect inherent in our natures  And that brings me to another subject you discussed in your last letter:  Equality, which pervades hell.

In Heaven, there is Equity, which is an entirely different matter.

. . . The same situation prevails in hell–equality of treatment no matter the soul.  However, in Heaven, as I have mentioned, there is Equity, based on the Natural Law that some men are superior to others, and some angels less than others, in virtue, in devotion, in piety, in dedication, love and courage and goodness.  Equity does not abolish law; it intelligently deals with it, and its inflexibility.

Therefore, spirits in Heaven, angel or man, are rewarded in direct ratio to their accomplishments, which are governed by their will.  Man, as we know, cannot earn merit during his lifetime on the grosser material of the planets, unless he has not fallen.  But fallen men are incapable of earning merit, for their sin has thrown a wall of human impotence between them and their Creator.  Only the Grace of Our Father can give merit to fallen men, and that merit is given by the men’s own acts, through their faith and their desire to receive Grace, through their repentance and their penance, through their acceptance of Grace, itself.  You know this; it is a matter which has enraged you through time . . .

The saved among men, who desired to be saved and therefore had placed themselves in a position to receive Grace, differ enormously in the degree of their natures and their virtues, as well as in their wills and their sins.  A murderer in hell, and a wanton thief, are treated equally with the pains and the uselessness of existence.  But in Heaven a saint is worthier than a man of merely mild virtues, for the saint has labored long and hard in the stony fields of his life and has loved God more than himself, and the lives of his fellow sufferers more than his own.  A man who has valiantly struggled with temptation during his lifetime and has contemplated all the worldly delights you have offered him, Lucifer, and has even desperately yearned for them, but who has gloriously resisted you in his soul and in his living, is worthier of more reward in Heaven than a man who has been merely mildly tempted by you or through some accident has not been much tempted at all, or lacked the terrible vitality to sin, or was afraid of the consequences on his own world.  The first man is a hero; the second man is one who has had little opportunity to be either a hero or a sinner.  Our Father takes note of the human weaknesses of His creatures.  He will not permit you to tempt a man beyond his total ability to resist, but He does permit you to tempt His saints more fiercely and more insistently because they are men of greater valor and nobler mind.  Our Father, as we have observed before, does not create men equal, but He has established Equity, based on the Natural Law which He ordained Himself.  There is no injustice in Him Whom we both love so passionately, and you have never denied your love nor can you destroy it.

Were you the ruler of Heaven the saint and the weaker man would receive equal reward, but that is manifestly unfair.  Archangels, who have vaster powers than angels, are more in possession of free will and therefore the temptation to use that will in defiance of God is infinitely higher in degree than in the lesser angels.  Archangels are given enormous responsibilities and thrones and crowns throughout the endless universes, because of their nature, and it is they who see the Beatific Vision more frequently than the lesser spirits, and the spirits of men.  “To each according to his merits,” is the Law of Heaven, whereas on Terra, and other darkened worlds, there appears to be some mangling of the moral law to the effect that “to each according to his material needs.”  And that, we know, is infamy, injustice, cruelty, and a display of malice to the more worthy. Greed is the ugliest of the detestable sins, for it feeds on its own appetite and is never filled, and its rapacity is increased by its rapaciousness.  It gives rise to the other sins, envy, theft, sloth, lies, adulteries and murder, and gluttony.

There is happiness in Heaven, as you know, but that happiness is in degree, except for the knowing that God loves completely to the extent of an angel’s or man’s worth.  That happiness is compounded by labor, for none are idle in Heaven, and there is a task for all.  That, too, is Equity.

While each task is approached with joy and with the hope–but never the absolute surety–that it will be completed, its completion, when accomplished, leads to higher tasks, worthy of a tempered spirit.  There is always a progression in the Hierarchy of Heaven.  No spirit remains as it was.  And, always, there is a possibility, constantly reiterated, that as the spirit retains its free will, it can will to sin.  This is something the theologians, in their little darkness on their worlds, have never understood or acknowledged–that there is always the hazard that a spirit may fall to you, even in the golden light of Heaven.  For God does not remove free will from His creatures, no matter their degree.  If He did so, He would abrogate their individuality, their very existence, both of which are eternally precious to Him, for they are of His own Nature and Essence.

. . . You have asked me if God pursues the lost soul in your hells.  That I cannot and will not tell you.  Is it possible for the lost to feel repentance?  You have said not–but do you know all minds?

. . .

Your brother, Michael

Taylor Caldwell’s Dialogues With The Devil (1967) #10 of 22

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Pilgrim tenacity and the first Thanksgiving

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in history, Pilgrims, Thanksgiving

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

America, anglicization, beer, Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans (2014), Captain John Smith, Catholics, charity, Chesapeake Colony Maryland, Christian virtues, Church of England, City Upon a Hill (1630), colonial character, Dutch New Netherland, Eden, Edward Winslow, English settlers, enslaved Africans, faith, George Percy, God, J.L.G. Ferris, Jamestown Virginia, John Higginson, John Rolfe, John Winthrop, Kennebec Maine, Leiden Holland, liberty, London alehouses, Malcolm Gaskill, Mary Rowlandson, Mayflower, myth, Native Americans, New England, New Plymouth Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Pilgrims, pioneers, Pocahontas, Protestants, Puritans, Rebecca Rolfe, religion, resiliance, revolution, Richard Frethorne, scripture, secularism, separation of church and state, social relations, Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal, Thomas Eames, tobacco, University of East Anglia - Norwich, Virginia Company, William Bradford

The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/articles/pilgrims-and-the-roots-of-the-american-thanksgiving-1417029561
The Saturday Essay

Pilgrims and the Roots of the American Thanksgiving

English settlers of the 17th century were a diverse lot, and they became Americans despite themselves

Colonial character was driven by a creative tension between lofty ideals and mundane desires. Illustration of ‘The First Thanksgiving 1621,’ after a painting by J.L.G. Ferris.
Colonial character was driven by a creative tension between lofty ideals and mundane desires.  Illustration of ‘The First Thanksgiving 1621,’ after a painting by J.L.G. Ferris.  GraphicaArtis/Corbis
~
By

Malcolm Gaskill

Nov. 26, 2014 2:19 p.m. ET

In the fall of 1621, 50 English men and women and 90 Native Americans gathered at New Plymouth in Massachusetts.  The colonists had arrived a year earlier on a leaky wine ship, the Mayflower, and built a hillside settlement overlooking the ocean, little more than a few wooden huts in a stockade.  The first winter had been terrible:  Half their number had perished from malnutrition and disease.  They had struggled to farm the land, were poorly supplied from England and relied on their Indian hosts for expertise and food.

But in the end, they did it.  According to Edward Winslow, who had buried his wife that March, “Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling so that we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labor.”  The Pilgrims, as they would later be known, celebrated for three days—an event immortalized in American history as the first Thanksgiving.

The story has been heavily mythologized, and the numerous depictions of it that have come down to us are mostly patriotic romances, full of errors about the dress, technology and general atmosphere of the day.  What we most tend to overlook in the Thanksgiving tale, however, is the wider context of settlement.  English colonists—350,000 of them in the 17th century—were a diverse lot, and more English than you might imagine.  Having left the Old World for the New, they clung to their old identities and tried to preserve them.  In this, they failed, and yet from that failure, a new national character was born—the primary traits of which are still visible in Americans today.

The first colonists actually arrived more than a decade before the Mayflower, establishing themselves on the steamy river plantations of Virginia and the rocky coasts of Maine.  The northern colony failed within a year.  The Virginia settlements fared better, and thousands of young, mostly male apprentices poured into the tobacco fields to toil alongside growing numbers of enslaved Africans.  A similar pattern developed in the other Chesapeake colony, Maryland.  In the 1630s, successive waves of Puritan ships reached Massachusetts, their passengers settling in Boston and its satellite communities.

After this great migration came the “great reshuffle.”  Settlers relocated to Rhode Island, New Hampshire and the lush plains of the Connecticut Valley, which in turn attracted newcomers from England.  Meanwhile, the French settled in Canada and the Dutch in present-day New York.  By 1660, there were 58,000 colonists in New England and the Chesapeake, compared with 3,000 in New France and 5,000 in Dutch New Netherland.  Most English migrants—190,000 of them—went to the West Indies, where slave-owning planters specialized in sugar production and sustained New England by importing its food crops.

Virginia began life in 1607, at a quasi-military outpost called Jamestown. Captain John Smith, its leader and savior, described “pleasant plain hills and fertile valleys, one prettily crossing another…a plain wilderness as God first made it.”  But this was no Eden.  Appalling conditions—hostile natives, polluted water and rampant disease—were made worse by infighting and political chaos.

Unable to grow enough food, the colonists faced starvation by the winter of 1609.  They ate vermin and leather—even the starch from their collars. “Nothing was spared to maintain life,” recalled George Percy, “and to do those things which seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them.”  Nine out of 10 died, and the survivors and their often clueless replacements still had to find exports like timber, furs and pitch to pay their way.  In the end, a farmer named John Rolfe cracked the problem with a new strain of sweet tobacco.  A year later, there were wooden vending machines for tobacco in London alehouses.  Virginia was in business.

Colonists always needed more land, but they had to tread carefully.  Rolfe married an Indian princess named Pocahontas, which delighted the Virginia Company.  The union meant ethnic peace in America and made for good propaganda at home.  Renamed Rebecca Rolfe, she was received at the royal court in London, where, Smith noted, those clamoring to meet her “had seen many English ladies worse favored, proportioned and behaviored.”

Pocahontas’s death as she prepared to return home, probably from tuberculosis, destabilized relations with her people, and a dark cloud passed over Virginia.  In 1622, a native uprising killed 347 colonists—a third of all English people in America.  Even those who had come over to spread the gospel hardened their hearts.  Now the English would take what they wanted.  “Our hands, which before were tied with gentleness and fair usage,” remarked the Virginia Company secretary, “are now set at liberty.”

A year later, Virginia was still in a bad way.  A youth named Richard Frethorne begged his parents to bring him home.  “You would be grieved if you did know as much as I do,” he sobbed, “when people cry out day and night—Oh! That they were in England.”  A few months later, he was dead.

Robert Neubecker

~

By this time, 600 miles to the north, Plymouth had been established.  Prospective adventurers had learned from colonists there, and from the disasters at Jamestown, the importance of building colonies on firm foundations of family, authority, law, trade and a division of labor.  Jamestown had underestimated the importance of women, whose work was invaluable and who allowed a colony to grow.  So when the Puritan John Winthrop assembled his first fleet to sail to Massachusetts in 1630, the emphasis was on relocating households, even whole communities.

The first passenger ashore at Boston was a 9-year-old girl, who later remembered a land “very uneven, abounding in small hollows and swamps, and covered with blueberry and other bushes.”  The migrants, ravaged by scurvy, were forced to shelter in burrows that they dug into the riverbank, where they ate fish and dried peas.  From that modest start, however, they not only survived but thrived.

Gradually, across the eastern seaboard, colonies assumed their own forms and flavors.  Massachusetts was repressive and, to England, seemed disloyal.  Connecticut was tolerant, Rhode Island even more so.  Maryland welcomed Catholics, which scandalized the ultra-Protestant Puritans.  Maine seemed godless and ungoverned:  One report alleged that Kennebec fishermen believed that “as many men may share in a woman as they do in a boat.”

There was variety even among the 102 passengers of the Mayflower, half of whom were “strangers” of dubious piety and morality.  The Pilgrims were united by the religious community that they had formed in Leiden, Holland.  The rest, who came from all over England, had little in common.  Regional identities were strong, and there was little love lost between East Anglians and West Countrymen.  And that was just one ship.

Life in the early colonies was unbelievably hard.  Most colonies failed, and even in the promising ones, thousands of settlers died.  Of the 10,000 people transported to Virginia after 1607, only a fifth were still alive in 1622.  Many, in remote plantations dotted along the eastern seaboard, simply disappeared.  Communications were poor and loneliness endemic.  Wolves were a persistent menace, although colonists learned to kill them with fishhooks wrapped in fat.

Even when food was plentiful, it was monotonous:  Settlers mostly ate cornbread and vegetable stew.  Imported beer soured, and domestic brews were impossible without malt.  At first, there were no shops, and Winthrop’s migrants were advised to take everything with them, including window glass.

New England’s soil was stony and hard to plow; crops were ruined by floods and droughts and caterpillars.  The ice and snow exceeded anything experienced in England.  There were few doctors, and remedies ranged from the bizarre to the dangerous.  A Maine man who sucked an infection from his wife’s breast lost his teeth from the arsenic that had been previously applied.

The greatest trial was conflict with Native Americans.  In the 1670s, New England was almost wiped off the map by what was, in proportion, the most devastating war in American history.  Townships were overrun, their inhabitants killed or spirited away.  Twelve settlements were destroyed, and 2,000 colonists died, including one-in-10 able-bodied men.

In February 1676, Thomas Eames, a farmer at Framingham, itemized his losses:  a house, a barn, grain, tools and, at the top of the list, “a wife and nine children.”  That same month, Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife at Lancaster, Mass., was seized during an Indian raid and endured three months of privation in freezing conditions.  She ate “filthy trash” with her captors, whom she called “barbarous creatures.”  Such terrifying experiences make it hard to understand why anyone stayed in America.

But then why had anyone come in the first place?  Their reasons were manifold.  The Pilgrims wanted to worship freely outside the Church of England.  Others wanted to reform English religion.  Most Virginians simply wanted to find land where they could make a living.

All of the colonists were trying to recreate a better version of the Old World rather than inventing something new.  In society and economy, politics and religion, England was changing, many felt for the worse, and nostalgia for a golden age of faith—based on scripture, healthy social relations and charity among neighbors—was a powerful incentive to emigrate.

Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” speech, beloved of modern presidential speechwriters, was more of a reactionary manifesto than a radical one.  It spoke of values that had decayed in English life to be resurrected across the Atlantic.  This was revolution 17th-century style:  a return to the status quo ante.

So the colonists set about building English houses, mixing arable farmland with pasture, approximating English meals and wearing their warm woolens, regardless of the weather.  They behaved, so far as possible, as if nothing had changed.  They imposed familiar hierarchies, enforced English laws and appointed magistrates and constables.

Wherever they went, they anglicized Indian place-names.  Dozens of English towns and villages—Dorchester, Ipswich, Springfield—were reborn in America:  Boston had been, and still is, a small Lincolnshire port.  Long Island became “Yorkshire,” split into three parts or “ridings,” just like the English county.

America was the child, conceived and raised in the image of the parent—an extension of England, not its replacement.  Writing in 1697, John Higginson, a minister at Salem, Mass., desired only “that the Little Daughter of New England in America may bow down herself to her Mother England.”

In the end, however, pretending to be in England, like turning expectantly to a lost golden age, was futile.  Many succumbed to homesickness.  One woman faked an inheritance that, she said, had to be collected in person, just so that her husband would let her go home.  Some returned for good—one in five New Englanders by 1640.

Nor were the English alone in America.  The varied character of their colonies was due not just to the pressures of landscape and ecology but to tense relations with Native Americans and European neighbors.

Failing to retain a recognizably English identity caused anxiety and disappointment.  But from failure emerged something truly striking, a spirit that resonates in America across the centuries.  Colonial character was driven by a creative tension between lofty ideals and mundane desires.  Trying to remain the same, it turned out, demanded a constant effort of industry and reinvention.

The liberties that many migrants felt were being abused at home, by royal contempt for the rights of freeborn Englishmen, ended up being defended in America through the bondage of others—both indentured servants and slaves—and the disinheritance and dispersal of Native Americans.  And for all their inward-looking community spirit, the fortunes of many New England communities depended on their expansion.  The Puritan idea of a “sufficiency”—having just enough land to be comfortable—was compromised by commercial greed and voracious land grabs.

American religion also evolved in a surprising way.  In Philadelphia—“the city of brotherly love”—and other economic centers, Christian virtues were extolled in an expanding world of litigiousness and competition.  The secularism in civil government propagated in Rhode Island has its legacy today in the constitutional separation of church and state, but this coexists with an intense religiosity in politics that the Pilgrim fathers would have recognized and admired.

Still, for all their diversity and contradictions, English migrants to America tended to conform to a single recognizable type:  the intrepid, resilient, undaunted pioneer.  In every colony, similar challenges were met with the same determination and optimism.

Here we might return to Plymouth in 1621 and to the true story of the first Thanksgiving, which is richer and more edifying than the familiar holiday version.  When the Pilgrim William Bradford said, “They began now to gather in the small harvest they had…being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty,” he was bearing witness to the fact that, in their first crucial year, they had barely survived.

The Pilgrims were not typical settlers in the new land, but they still exemplify the extraordinary imagination and belief, fortitude and courage, shown by colonists across early America—qualities shared today by all manner of Americans, regardless of their ancestry.

Dr. Gaskill is professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K.  This essay is adapted from his new book, “Between Two Worlds:  How the English Became Americans,” published this month by Basic Books.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

RECEIVE INSTANT NOTIFICATIONS OF NEW POSTS

Join 81 other followers

What’s being read now

  • No Wind Blows in Favor of a Ship Without Direction?
  • Banned in Bangkok: The Hunger Games and its libertarian themes
  • The Trouble With...Trumples

From newest to earliest

  • The Twelve Days Of Epstein
  • Something Touched Me Deep Inside
  • The last day of Spring / Ten photos
  • Doing the math
  • What five books would you preserve (in case of digital erasure)?

Previous by year

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Categories

Blog Stats

  • 76,046 hits

Blogroll

  • Abe Books
  • AMAC/Association of Mature American Citizens
  • AXS-TV
  • Carter, Sara/Investigative Reporter
  • Catholic Herald
  • diGenova, Joe & Victoria Toensing/Op-Eds
  • Dylan, Bob
  • Film Noir Foundation
  • Gatestone Institute
  • Hanson, Victor Davis/Writer
  • Hemingway, Mollie/The Federalist
  • Hillsdale College/Free online courses
  • Hoover Institution
  • Imprimis/Hillsdale College free periodical
  • Judicial Watch/Tom Fitton
  • KLVZ 810 AM Pop Classics in HD
  • Levin, Mark/Commentator, writer
  • Middle East Forum
  • NeilMed Sinus Rinse
  • Old Farmer's Almanac – Since 1792
  • Premiere Collectibles/signed, just-published books
  • RADIOHEAD
  • Solomon, John/The Hill
  • Souls of Animals
  • Strassel, Kimberley/Wall Street Journal
  • Tea Party
  • Turner Classic Movies (TCM) Database
  • Uncle Sam Cereal – Since 1908
  • Walking Dead
  • Whatfinger
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 81 other followers

LIKE on FACEBOOK

LIKE on FACEBOOK

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: