Thirteen years after Jamestown, the Mayflower arrived in present-day Massachusetts. Its passengers included religious Separatists seeking the freedom to build a community according to their beliefs, as well as other migrants pursuing opportunity. Before going ashore, adult male passengers signed the Mayflower Compact, agreeing to form a civil body politic and enact laws for the common good. The document was limited in participation, but it became an enduring symbol of government by agreement. The settlers entered a region recently devastated by epidemic disease.
Plymouth itself occupied the site of Patuxet, a Wampanoag community whose population had been destroyed by epidemic. The colony’s survival depended heavily upon Indigenous knowledge and diplomacy.
Tisquantum, commonly called Squanto, interpreted and taught the newcomers agricultural practices; Ousamequin, the Pokanoket sachem remembered by the English as Massasoit, pursued an alliance serving Wampanoag strategic interests. The 1621 harvest gathering later remembered as the “First Thanksgiving” was not the simple national origin story created in later centuries. It occurred within a political relationship between peoples facing unequal futures. Cooperation existed, but so did expanding settlement, land pressure and mistrust. Within decades, war would engulf the region.
COMPANION STORIES
Jamestown and Plymouth should be read together. One began chiefly as a commercial venture; the other carried a powerful religious purpose. Both depended on Indigenous peoples. Both claimed lands already inhabited. Both developed institutions that influenced America. And both contained contradictions that would persist: liberty beside dispossession, self-government beside exclusion, opportunity beside coerced labor.
“The colonies planted possibilities-and contradictions-that America would inherit.”
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