The Pilgrims at 400: Granite Principles, Marble Men

As America marks another Thanksgiving, the Plymouth Colony is long gone, but the values it represented still bind us together.

A n 81-foot-tall granite colossus, the National Monument to the Forefathers, sits on an ordinary side street in Plymouth, Mass. If not for a few faded signs, you wouldn’t even be aware you were approaching it. Then, suddenly, it springs into view: A giant statue of a woman, “Faith,” standing atop a pedestal made of four smaller statues with marble reliefs at their feet. The monument looks toward England and the Plymouth affordable-housing offices. Built in the 19th century to commemorate the arrival of the Pilgrims to America, it is a disorienting paradox: It has the trappings of an almost-ostentatious grandeur, from its name to its colossal size, yet obscurity rings it. Plymouth Rock, on the waterfront, gets the crowds and the commemorations; the National Monument to the Forefathers gets the occasional tourist group or lonely visitor. But, then, the colossus among the ordinary is a persistent theme within the American story.

The monument lists the names of Mayflower passengers and includes a quotation from Plymouth governor William Bradford, but the granite figures overshadow the text. Faith stands atop the monument pointing to the sky. The four figures at its base represent other virtues of the Pilgrim enterprise — Liberty, Morality, Law, and Education — and each bears allegorical emblems. Liberty carries a sword in one hand and a broken chain in the other, while on Morality’s lap sits a tablet inscribed with “God.” The marble reliefs underneath the figures highlight four pivotal scenes from the Pilgrims’ voyage. The two under Morality and Liberty portray the departure from Europe and the arrival in the New World, respectively. Beneath Law, Pilgrims and Native Americans sign a treaty. Beneath Education, the signing of the Mayflower Compact is represented. All four are images of transition — from one continent to the next, from one political and legal condition to another.

The monument was designed in the mid-1850s by Hammatt Billings, the Boston polymath who also illustrated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Fundraising for it began in the years before the Civil War, and the cornerstone was laid in August 1859, at an event attended by dignitaries from across the country. But the war interrupted construction, and the completed structure was not dedicated until 1889, 30 years later.

*    *    *

The result does not give a perfect window into how the Pilgrims saw themselves when they landed in the New World 400 years ago. Instead, it offers a 19th-century view of their legacy. New Englanders in the 1800s embraced a cult of the Pilgrims, portraying them as founders of what would become the United States. In a famous 1820 oration, Daniel Webster called Plymouth “the spot where the first scene of our history was laid.” Virginia’s Jamestown, built by tidewater adventurers, might have been the first English settlement chronologically, but Webster and other New Englanders sought to make Plymouth (and Boston) first in principle.

History’s commemoration here bears the hints of political theory, or at least political apologia. While Webster’s 1820 speech on the Pilgrims celebrated “civil and religious liberty,” it also turned to broader conditions that at once supported such liberties and could also be advanced by them. He argued that the relative economic equality of the Pilgrims laid the groundwork for a democratic society, as the continued diffusion of property was essential for the continuance of republican self-government. To Webster, the Pilgrim project was partly about defending liberty, but it also demanded the promotion of the general welfare, virtue, and religious devotion.

An emphasis on the context of liberty also informs the Monument to the Forefathers. The statue of Liberty sits at the right hand of Faith, after all. The other sub-statues of Morality, Law, and Education keep Liberty company and serve as supports for Faith. The core of the Pilgrims’ visionary experiment demanded broader institutions of ethical foundation and a social commonwealth. In an 1853 address, Massachusetts senator Edward Everett argued that this experiment “united religion and liberty, morals and law.” As James F. O’Gorman observes in “The Colossus of Plymouth” — perhaps the most thorough academic history of the monument — Everett’s remarks anticipated Billings’s design almost perfectly. (Education alone was missing from Everett’s speech.)

Webster, Everett, Billings, and others argued that at the core of the project of American liberty was also support for morality and religion. They turned to the voyage of the Pilgrims as exemplifying the greater duties that they believed liberty served. By their account, history made articulate the aims of the American experiment: The Pilgrims came to the New World out of religious devotion, and the political edifice they created, the supposed cornerstone of the American republic, was a means to the end of that devotion.

This appeal to history might have seemed particularly urgent in the 1850s. As debates about slavery grew more contentious, sectional tensions escalated throughout the decade. Invoking some deep bond of history — President Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” — could help restrain such tensions. Speaking at the cornerstone event, Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, who would later serve as Lincoln’s treasury secretary and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, appealed to sectional unity explicitly, calling for the construction of another monument at Jamestown to assert Americans as “brethren of a common Union.” He ended his speech with an allusion to a famous phrase by Daniel Webster: “‘Liberty and Union’ one and inseparable now and forever.” Barely a year later, the Civil War broke out.

*    *    *

In his recent book, What Is Political Philosophy?, Charles Larmore argues that for a liberal, pluralistic society, history assumes an important role. Such a society resists founding its political order on a rigid doctrine, and, while it appeals to “thin” values such as freedom of association, it also needs a thicker set of bonds to create a sense of peoplehood, one of the preconditions for political legitimacy. Larmore writes that while this “common life” might appeal to language and geography, “it will certainly and most importantly involve a shared historical experience,” which acts to unify a diverse populace.

As the past year attests, historical narratives can themselves be contested. Emphasizing 1607, 1619, 1620, 1776, or 1787 as a year of “founding” has significant intellectual consequences. Even if one avoids a narrative of history that ignores either the vices or virtues of a national past, the question of how best to balance the two will remain, continuing to provoke controversy. And, as the Pilgrim monument illustrates, historical commemoration can act as a vehicle for advancing certain substantive claims.

Still, it’s possible to see in the voyage of the Mayflower a lesson in pluralism and compromise. Pilgrim separatists and “strangers” — those who did not subscribe to separatist theology — both sailed on that ship. They had to come together for the Plymouth Colony to have a chance of being successful, and even then needed help from the Native Americans. The establishment of Plymouth was a perilous enterprise. About half the Pilgrims died before the first Thanksgiving in 1621. In the Mayflower Compact, stranger and separatist both pledged to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic” and to “frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony.” From its very beginnings, the Plymouth commonwealth was a body politic built from heterogeneity.

Even as proponents of the Pilgrims-as-founders thesis appealed to the specificity of New England, they also offered the Pilgrims as more capacious forefathers. In a letter promoting Billings’s design for the monument, Everett argued that the work would signal “the co-operation of the descendants of the Pilgrims in every part of the Country and of all who are now in the enjoyment of the goodly heritage for which . . . we are so largely indebted to the Pilgrim Fathers.” The “goodly heritage” of the Pilgrim experiment embraces both the Pilgrims’ direct descendants and those who have other lineages. Chase, for instance, offered the Pilgrims as prefiguring the pioneers heading westward: “There was in 1788 to be seen wending its way from among the hills of Berkshire towards the setting sun a train of rude wagons, in which, as in the Mayflower of 1620, were garnered the destinies of the mighty West.” Many since then have seen in the voyage of the Mayflower an anticipation of the waves of immigration that have perpetually changed the United States — of sojourners setting out for a new land. (There is, of course, a crucial difference between immigrant and Pilgrim; immigrants seek to join an existing political order, while the Pilgrims sought to found a new one. But such blurriness is not uncommon in historical allusions.)

The Monument to the Forefathers is meant to offer a presentation of the goods within Everett’s “goodly heritage.” This is not to deny the legacy of pain, cruelty, and wickedness also found within that heritage. The arrival of the English led to conflict between native tribes and European settlers. The story of the American republic includes the enslavement of both Native Americans and Africans, expropriation of land, and mass slaughter. And while 19th-century proponents of pluralism might have appealed to the Pilgrim narrative, the Pilgrims themselves were not particularly devoted pluralists; to take just one example, Plymouth Colony imposed restrictions on Quakers and Native Americans. Even as devoted an advocate of the Pilgrim-founding thesis as Webster could not deny the dark parts of American history: His 1820 speech on the Pilgrims also lamented the “contamination” of the slave trade. Hagiographic history, he implied, cannot entirely obscure the “smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs.”

If history often does play a legitimating role in a pluralistic society, attention to it can at once recognize its wrongs and offer a more inclusive account of the body politic. Both separatist Pilgrim and stranger, slave and slave-owner, played a role in building the American republic — and we Americans have inherited their wrongs along with the nobler parts of their legacy. Especially in a society as multiethnic as ours, questions of identity often intertwine with those of history. Celebrating the nation’s “goodly heritage” could be a way to create a bond across identities. Perhaps the leading advocate for a national Thanksgiving holiday, the influential editor Sarah Josepha Hale, argued that a festival of common gratitude and fellowship could be a way of unifying the country. As she wrote to Lincoln in the fall of 1863, months before he established the federal holiday, Thanksgiving could be a “National and fixed Union Festival.”

Ultimately, this appeal to historical founding was not enough to forestall conflict. It was not invocations of the Pilgrims or memory’s chords alone that saved the Union; it also took the blood spilled in the fields of Antietam, Vicksburg, and Gettysburg. Convictions — that the Union was worth preserving, that slavery must be extirpated — played a central role, but flesh and force were required to actualize them. The sacrifices the war demanded were justified not only by appeals to abstract procedure, but also by appeals to substantive commitments and duties. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by Julia Ward Howe’s electric pen, echoes with the lines, “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free / While God is marching on.”

*    *    *

The National Monument to the Forefathers rises on a large, grass-covered hill. By November, the scattered trees on the hill are mostly bare. When you stand close to it, the monument has the almost baffling magnitude of a project that took generations to build. Time has worn down its reliefs. The wind and the rain have erased the faces of the men signing the Mayflower Compact and embarking on a voyage to a new continent, leaving only the marble shadows of history. But the granite figures remain clear and imposing. Faith still stands, reaching toward the sky.