The Lord Of Misrule (Throwback)

By the time his book went to press in London, on November 18, 1633, Thomas Morton had been exiled from the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts. His crimes: drinking, carousing, and — crucially — building social and economic ties with Native people. His book outlined a vision for what America could become. A very different vision than that of the Puritans. But the book wouldn't be published that day. It wouldn't be published for years. Because agents for the Puritan colonists stormed the press and destroyed every copy. Today on the show, the story of what's widely considered America's first banned book, the radical vision it conjured, and the man who outlined that vision: Thomas Morton, the Lord of Misrule. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline http://plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 1:02Speaker 01

  In the year since the incarnation of Christ, 1622, it was my chance to be landed in the parts of New England where I found two sorts of people: the one Christians, the other infidels. These I found most full of humanity.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  It's the 1630s, and a man named Thomas Morton sits down to write a book, a book that almost changed America's origin story.

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  If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor?

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  Morton journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean to New Plymouth, Massachusetts.

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  The more I looked, the more I liked it.

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  Except the pilgrims had gotten there first and had already set up one of North America's first European colonies. And Morton, by the time he writes his book, had already been kicked out of New England twice.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  The separatists, envying the prosperity and hope of the plantation at Merrymount, conspired together against mine host.

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  The book tells his story.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  And made up a party against him, and mustered up what aid they could, accounting of him as of a great monster.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  On November 18th, 1633, the book went to the press in London.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  The title of that book was New English Canaan.

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  As it's being printed.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Full of lies and slanders and fraught with profane columnnes against their names and persons. And ye ways of God.

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  The agents of the New England people go to the press.

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  And they literally stopped the publication of it.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  And they destroy it.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Sometimes we look at the past and we think it's all inevitable. What happened had to happen. And we forget how much individuals shaped what happened.

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  This is Peter Mankell.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  I'm a historian of early America at the University of Southern California.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  And he wrote a book called The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Central characters in this story, in the national story, are the pilgrims who go to Plymouth and the Puritans who go to Massachusetts Bay. And I think like anyone raised, reading American history, they had this very privileged position in American myth, American lore. And it was often tied in with the idea that, especially with the pilgrims, that they have come seeking religious freedom.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  A lot of us know that story isn't as clean as the textbooks say it is. But we're rarely taught just how contested the vision for early America was. Even the pilgrims and Puritans themselves disagreed about how to colonize America. There was and is no single story of the birth of this country. And the book that Thomas Morton wrote offered a very different version of what that very bloody beginning could have looked like.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  What became the very destructive relations between Europeans and Native Americans didn't have to happen.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  They died on heaps as they lay in their houses.

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  People chose that course to happen.

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  For in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left alive to tell what became of the rest.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  These were choices, not the sort of unmovable laws of history.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Choices we are still reckoning with.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Way before today's book bans, way before laws restricting what history can be taught in schools, there were people in America trying to suppress ideas and silence dissent. And at its core, it was a battle over what narrative and whose story would define what America is. The English colonists who arrived on Massachusetts shores went to great lengths to make sure their version of America would win. But one man, an outlier named Thomas Morton, stood in their way. This is a story of what could have been, a different version of America. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the story of what's widely considered

• 5:50Speaker 02

  to be America's first banned book, the man who wrote that book, and the people who tried to stop him.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  This is Samuel Choi from San Diego, California. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.

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• 7:04Speaker 00

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• 7:32Speaker 02

  Part one, Ghosts of the Clearing.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  It is a warm night in Massachusetts. The year is 1628.

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  A group of men from one of England's first permanent American colonies, New Plymouth, are out on a hunt.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  They methodically cut through the shrubs, trees, and bushes in their way. They step over creeks. Their cotton shirts and pants are damp from the summer humidity.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  They're armed with at least one sword and probably guns. They were sent by their leader, William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, to find a gathering of people, a threat, deep in the woods.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  As they journeyed deeper into the forest, the Christian men from Plymouth prepared themselves for what might await. Then I am afraid of evils come. Comfort me, but shall we be dead in myself? I am dying. William Bradford had warned them about what they would find, a rebel community led by a man named Thomas Morton, someone who Bradford later called...

• 9:01Speaker 07

  Lord of Misrule.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Lord of Misrule.

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  Maintained, as it were... A school of atheism.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  This is scholar Sarah Rivet, reading Bradford's exact words describing Thomas Morton and his followers.

• 9:16Speaker 07

  And after they had got some goods into their hands, and got much by trading with the Indians,

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  they spent it as vainly in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in great excess.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  After hours of searching in the darkness, they finally arrive at a clearing. In front of them stood the rebels they were looking for. And they are shocked by what they see.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  They encountered crosswinds and many fierce storms by which the ship was mud-shaken and her upper works made very leaky.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Eight years earlier, in 1620, about 100 colonists from England arrived in Massachusetts on a cramped wooden ship.

• 10:33Speaker 07

  Which is the Mayflower.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  The Mayflower.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Having thus passed the vast ocean and that sea of troubles, they now had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain and refresh their weather-beaten bodies.

• 10:48Speaker 07

  They arrive initially at the tip of Cape Cod. And a group of explorers from the ship go out and they explore the region.

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  This is...

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  Paula Peters.

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  She's an independent scholar who's studied and written extensively about the early history of Massachusetts.

• 11:10Speaker 07

  My traditional name is Sankwaben. I'm a citizen of the Mashpee-Wampanoag tribe.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Paula says that these English colonists from the Mayflower soon found a place to settle.

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  They've encountered a village that is empty.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  The pilgrims who survived the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean were now determined to create a foothold in the Americas. They called their settlement

• 11:39Speaker 02

  New Plymouth.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  The primary vision was religious. They fled from England due to religious persecution. Pilgrims were similar to Puritans, English Protestants who viewed the Church of England as corrupt. And members of both groups came to Massachusetts. But while Puritans thought they could reform the church from within, the pilgrims were more radical. The pilgrims were largely considered separatists. And by separatist, it means that they wanted to separate out from the Church of England.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  The leader of the pilgrims was a man named William Bradford.

• 12:29Speaker 07

  William Bradford was one of the leaders who had left England because of the tyranny of the king.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Bradford was 30 years old when he landed on Massachusetts shores. He was a stern, religious man who believed that he was on a holy mission.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Bradford doesn't like misrule. Bradford likes rule.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  He came from a wealthy, land-owning family in England. And at a young age, he became inspired by Puritan beliefs. He dedicated himself to the settlement of Massachusetts. He became New Plymouth's governor and documented it all.

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  And we know that because William Bradford, who's the governor and great historian of early Plymouth, writes his history.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  The place they fixed their thoughts upon was somewhere in those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which were fruitful and fit for habitation.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  These words are from William Bradford's book, Of Plymouth Plantation.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Though devoid of all civilized inhabitants and given over to savages who rage up and down, differing little from the wild beasts themselves.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  The pilgrims, when they come over, in their rhetorical construction of their arrival, depict themselves as entering into a wilderness.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  What could they see but a desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?

• 14:19Speaker 03

  And as Bradford would later write about it, they enter into this wilderness, a word he uses more than once, where they're surrounded by hideous beasts and hideous men. So they create this rhetorical moment of descending into this dark wilderness place, filled with menace.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Though that's not true.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  For thousands of years, the area around New Plymouth had been inhabited by native people called the Wampanoag. What you're hearing is their music.

• 15:12Speaker 07

  There are about 2,000 Wampanoag, and that's a branch of the eastern Algonquian. And they had lived there for over 10,000 years, according to archaeological records. There were at least 69 coastal and inland Wampanoag villages that were thriving.

• 15:35Speaker 07

  Their livelihood consisted of farming and fishing.

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  And they had a complex cosmology that included responsibility to all living beings.

• 15:45Speaker 07

  The coastal villages were places where families spent the summers. It was where they did their planting and then whatever they harvested from that would be what would get them through the winter. It was a really vital place.

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  But then.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  In 1616, there was a plague.

• 16:21Speaker 07

  It spread terribly quickly from coastal villages in Maine all the way to the tip of Cape Cod.

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  When Bradford and his crew arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower, they literally had to clear skeletons of native people from the land because so many died in this plague.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  The plague was said to have been brought by European traders and it devastated the Algonquin people, including the Wampanoag.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Tens of thousands of eastern Algonquin died as a result of the plague.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  It became known as the Great Dying.

• 17:02Speaker 07

  When someone became ill, the families all gathered around that person to pray over them. So that probably made it spread even more quickly. The people just died so quickly that they couldn't even bury their dead.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  So this is what the pilgrims witnessed when they arrived.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  They go to a place that is already settled. There are cornfields right there. There are other Europeans who have described this place as a settled place. What a great port this would make if we could eventually come and take this place.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  The pilgrims met the surviving community of the Wampanoag people. They saw their villages. They knew this was their land, yet.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  The English see them as impermanent.

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  Impermanent.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  The pilgrim construction of this is that they are agents of a divine plan. They believed in predestination.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  For whatever reason, God has sent them out into the wilderness. And they're to go into this place. And they are to live their life as they believe God is telling them to live it.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Religion was not the only thing that inspired people to take on the long, treacherous trip from England to Massachusetts. Some came to pursue their desire for bounty and wealth. Even in its infancy, the business of America was ultimately business.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  About half of the colonists who've gone there aren't going there for religious reasons. They're going there to make money.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  And the money was in the fur trade.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Europeans are obsessed with fur and what you can do with fur. And they're particularly interested in beaver. So there's sort of basically around this time, a real demand for beaver pelts in England and across much of Europe.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  In 1624, an English colonist arrived in New Plymouth, seeking to make his fortune in the fur trade. His name was Thomas Morton.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  He's probably born somewhere in the west country of England in the middle of the 1570s. We know that he trained for the law, and he is a lawyer. He doesn't make much of a mark in the historical record until he appears around 1620 in a legal case.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  That legal case is complicated, full of drama, and extremely petty. Basically, Morton started representing a rich woman whose husband had just died. He was hired to kind of sort out her estate. At some point while representing her, he starts a relationship with her and eventually they marry, which meant that as her new husband, he had access to the money her late husband left behind. Her children were obviously not very happy about that.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  I mean, they're really at each other. There are allegations of people, you know, shooting weapons and yada, yada, yada. I mean, the level of animosity is very high.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Morton battled her children in court for years.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  And what it tells me about Morton is that Morton doesn't shy away from a fight. And that seems to be the personal characteristic that I take from this legal case that then becomes important through the rest of his life.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  The case was still ongoing in 1622, but Morton was gone. And not long after, he shows up in New Plymouth.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Maybe he's on the lam, right? Maybe he says, okay, it's time for a new phase of my life.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Morton was pushing 50 at this point, which for the 1600s is very late to start over. So Morton doesn't waste time. Almost as soon as he arrived.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Morton leaves the cluster of pilgrims and he goes down to a sort of failing little trade post.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Morton would later call this trade post Marymount.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  And so he moves in to this tiny little, this little, it almost feels like a clearing in the woods, you know, where they probably thrown up a few, you know, ramshackle cabins. And he gathers a few men around him as far as we can tell, all men, and not very many, like half a dozen guys.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  They're not very far from New Plymouth.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  And they decide they're going to make their fortune on the fur trade.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Morton basically becomes the leader of Marymount and immediately makes decisions that show he was different from the pilgrims.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  What Morton figures out very quickly is that he can't succeed unless he establishes really good relations with native peoples. And though he is not. An unreligious person, religion does not seem to be at the forefront of his vision. At the forefront of his vision, and this may sound rather vague, is this idea of respect.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Morton seemed to fundamentally respect the native community he was trying to do business with. The pilgrims, on the other hand.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  They were not as eager to embrace positive relations as Morton seemed to be.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, he was certainly not happy about Morton's approach.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  He singles out Morton for his, what Bradford sees as overly friendly relations with indigenous peoples.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  In order to maintain this riotous prodigality in excess, Morton, hearing what profit the French and the fishermen had made from trading guns, powder, and shot to the Indians, began to practice it hereabouts, teaching them how to use them.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  And one of the reasons that Morton comes to the attention of the pilgrims is he's competing with them for basically the supply of beaver to be found in southern New England in the 1620s.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  And here I must bewail the mischief that this wicked man began in this district, and which, continued by men that should know better, has now become prevalent, notwithstanding the laws to the contrary.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Bradford viewed Morton as a sinful, godless man, who was basically a traitor. But he was also just afraid. The pilgrims were vastly outnumbered by the native people.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  And so when Morton is arming local natives with guns, this to the pilgrims just adds to their sense of doom.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Initially, Bradford sent a letter to Morton requesting he stop trading with the native people. According to Bradford, this is how Morton responded.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  He answered as haughtily as before that the king's proclamation was no law, and asking what was the penalty. That if they came to molest him, let them look to themselves. He would be prepared for them. So they saw there was no way but to take him by force. They resolved to proceed.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  When I am afraid of evils to come, come for me by showing me that in myself I am dying.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Coming up, the pilgrims arrive on Merry Mount.

• 25:15Speaker 07

  This is Deanne calling from Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Yellicott Willam clan of the Bunnarang people. You're listening to Throughline from NPR. Hey, it's Rund. Before we get back to the show, I want to take a quick step back and talk about what makes Throughline and everything you hear from NPR possible. It's you. Think of NPR as civic infrastructure, freely available to everyone. We can do this all thanks to your support. So on behalf of the whole team at Throughline, thank you for diving into history's incredible and complex stories with us each week. And a huge thank you if you already support this work through NPR Plus or by donating to

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• 27:09Speaker 01

  On the latest Planet Money podcast, protesters in France are asking their government for more money for schools and for pensions.

• 27:15Speaker 07

  No, why not? There is a bunch of monna in the world. Don't say there is no money. There is so much money.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  She's right, there is money, but maybe not for France. Why does the market seem to be turning on France? And what can the rest of us learn from this? Listen to Planet Money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On NPR's Wild Card podcast, Esther Perel says confidence isn't about thinking you're perfect.

• 27:40Speaker 07

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• 28:00Speaker 03

  Part two.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Seventeenth century troll.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Bright were the days at Marymounts, when the maypole was the banner staff of that gay colony. They who reared it, should their banner be triumphance, were to pour sunshine over New England's rugged hills and scatter flower seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. Nathaniel Hoffer.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  The pilgrims, you know, getting word of shenanigans taking place at Merrymount, arm people to go into the town to arrest Morton and his fellows.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  And they are ready for what they think is going to be a battle.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Drinking merry, merry, merry boys. They show up. Making garlic sprouts, bottles of... They find that these seven men are inebriated. Uncomforted heads and fear no hearts. The curse could be lifted to keep it warm. The only blood that is shed that day is when one of Morton's followers, standing up.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  One was so drunk.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  You can sort of imagine them standing up as these pilgrims are coming.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  So drunk that he ran his own nose upon the point of the sword that one held before him.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  There is no violence that takes place, but when the pilgrims get there, they find that not only have they erected this maypole, which they find offensive, they find salacious poems about, about the pilgrims, mocking the pilgrims.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  What kind of stuff is he saying about them? Like, what, what, what, what did he find worthy of, like, making fun of?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  He mocks their, their seriousness.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Captain Shrimp.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  He mocks what he sees as their inability to enjoy life's pleasures.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Troubling their brains more than reason would require.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  He's, he's messing with them. He's, he's, he's having sport with them.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's trolling them. He's like a 17th century troll.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  He's trolling them.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  They arrest them. It's unclear what happens to the guys, you know, the other guys. And they take Morton and they put him on this place called the Isle of Shoals, which is off Portsmouth.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  A remote island.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  The exile.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  And he waits.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  A ship's gonna come, pick you up and take you back to England. You're gonna go to jail. Much to the pilgrim's disappointment, I have found no record of him being tried, going to jail. Instead, nope, Morton comes back.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Back, first to Marymount, then to Boston.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  He said, I'm gonna try my luck with these people. And then he infuriates them for different reasons.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  And they torch his house and kick him out. In case you're counting, this is the second time Morton was exiled.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  So he's what, 50?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Wow. So he's not like some kid, swashbuckling kid. He is a grown man. A grown man who ticked off the pilgrims and got sent away. But he's also not done with them.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  He goes back to England. And he starts to write a book.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  In the year since the incarnation of Christ, 1622, it was my chance to be landed in the parts of New England where I found two sorts of people.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  This is when he'd start to write New English Canaan.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  The more I looked, the more I liked it.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  It's what you might call a travel narrative, which at the time was popular for people who had traveled to the New World.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  It says, I went to this place.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  I met these people.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Here's what I saw.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  And he divides New English Canaan into three books. So the first book is devoted to describing the native people. The second book is describing...

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Describing the natural landscape, but for the purposes of how to turn the land into commodity. So it's almost like he's setting up a sort of missed opportunity that then gets explained in book three, when he kind of articulates the kind of simplification of the pilgrims.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Everyone who wrote these travel narratives was trying to be believed.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  They are writing books describing a world that the vast majority of English people are never going to see, have very little information about, and of which there are these competing claims over time.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  And as for William Bradford and Thomas Morton.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  It's hard to overemphasize how fraught their relationship was by this point.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  And so there's Morton, twice exiled, chip on his shoulder, riding away, trying to set the record straight as he saw it.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  There was a strong sense of historical narrative, a strong sense of, we are making history through this new world endeavor, and we have to record it.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  And he starts by describing who was there first. Morton's experience with the Algonquin people was welcoming.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  If anyone shall come into their houses and there fall asleep, when they see him disposed to lie down, they will spread a mat for him of their own accord.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  He has other moments like this, where he says that, in fact, the Massachusetts have more respect than the English.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  I have found the Massachusetts Indian more full of humanity than the Christians.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  And so he has several ways of kind of having a dig at the pilgrims by presenting the Massachusetts natives as more humble, more charitable, more respectful, and more humane.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  I cannot perceive that the separatists do allow of helping our poor, though they magnify their practice in contributing to the nourishment of their saints.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Other times, it feels like he's just straight up making fun of the pilgrims.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Poking fun is sort of one aspect.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  The setting up of this maypole was a lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists that lived at New Plymouth.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  He's also intensely critical.

• 34:49Speaker 07

  Of what he sees as the pilgrims sternness and kind of overzealousness and rigidness with trying to impose their religiosity on everyone in such kind of stringent ways.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  This harmless mirth made by young men that lived in hope to have wives brought over to them, that would save them a labor to make a voyage to fetch any over, was much distasted of the precise separatists.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  He tagged the government of Plymouth.

• 35:19Speaker 07

  He talks about the government's shambles.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Even the town minister wasn't safe from his wrath.

• 35:24Speaker 07

  Anyone can be a minister, including a cowkeeper.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  The Church of the separatists is governed by pastors, elders, and deacons, and there is not any of these, though he be but a cowkeeper, but is allowed to exercise his gifts in the public assembly on the Lord's Day.

• 35:43Speaker 07

  It's a pretty derogatory, you know, kind of thing to say, where he just says anyone can be in charge.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  And just to be clear, we shouldn't really view Morton as some kind of hero. He was still participating in the colonization of Massachusetts, and he was at his core a businessman. A whole section of New English Canaan is devoted to financial and economic opportunities the New World has. But the book does present a different vision for what the inevitable relationship between colonists and native people could have looked like, a different vision for what would become America's future.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  And that brings us back to London, 1633, when people representing the colonies in New England shut the book down.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  There aren't a ton of details about what happened next, but we know the bookseller, Charles Green, recorded that he'd lost 400 copies of the book. When some few sheets of the said book were printed, it was And those sheets taken away.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  This event is widely seen as the first example in American history of a book being banned or oppressed. But Morton didn't give up. He kept looking for ways to get the book published. And in the meantime, he didn't just try to get back to the colonies. He wanted to take over.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  He is at this point in touch with another group of English people who think that they are the proper owners of New England.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  And so Morton joins the fight from London to colonize the colonizers.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  So what happens is that various people go to court and they try to get patents. They say, okay, this is English territory and can you allocate some of this? And so there are these competing companies.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Remember, Morton is a lawyer.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  A useful lawyer.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  And he's a boss.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  A guy who's spoiling for a fight, who has courtroom experience.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  And so he ends up fighting on behalf of this group, this company, in front of the king's bench.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  One of the highest courts in England.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  And they win.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  The court essentially gives Morton and his allies the rights to colonize New England. The colonists already in Massachusetts basically ignore the court's order. So Morton and his allies decide to take it by force.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  To militarily invade to get rid of the colonists.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  The plan was to get 1,000 soldiers and arms on a boat and send it to Massachusetts.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  There is no doubt that they are literally deadly serious.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  A ship was now in building and near finished.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  An eyewitness account is our only record of what happened next.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  When God, that had carried so many weak and crazy ships thither, so provided it, that this strong new-built ship in very launching fell all in pieces.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  And it sinks in the docks before it ever leaves England.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  And that's it. The invasion fails. But Morton's book is still alive.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Coming up, the book is published and Morton returns to New England for the last time.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  My name is Atal Osama. I'm from Denver, Colorado, and you're listening to Throughline

• 39:44Speaker 00

  from NPR.

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• 40:03Speaker 07

  On a new episode of Your Turn with Alison Aubrey, two dream analysts explain the power of dreams as a guide for self-exploration. Sometimes dreams really contain the secret that we need to overcome difficulties, get unstuck, see a different way, and move forward. All this and more on Your Turn, available on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. I interviewed John Turturro, and he was great talking about learning to be a pickpocket for a new movie and how growing up in a volatile home helped him as an actor.

• 40:38Speaker 07

  My brother said to me once, "I've given you a lot of material."

• 40:43Speaker 07

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  Find it on the NPR app or wherever you listen to Fresh Air. This message comes from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, recognizing extraordinarily creative individuals whose ideas, solutions, and discoveries expand people's expectations of what's possible. Macfound.org.

• 41:12Speaker 07

  Part three, Third Time's the Charm.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  The ship has sunk. Morton lost yet another battle. But he didn't quit. Of course, he didn't quit. This is Thomas Morton we're talking about. Instead, he tried to publish his book a few years later, but this time in a different city.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Morton's book has come out of a press in Amsterdam, sort of evading English authorities.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Now, why Amsterdam? A couple of reasons. One is that Amsterdam was also a publishing center at the time, just like London was. And two, it would be far away from anyone trying to interfere. Morton had reason to be worried. New English Canaan laid out an alternative vision for how European colonists could coexist with Native people. But in the time that it had taken Morton to write and publish the book, relations between Massachusetts' Native communities and their pilgrims had only gotten worse.

• 42:19Speaker 07

  They had fled for religious freedom, but they did not afford that same religious freedom to the Wampanoag or to any of the indigenous people that they met. They considered them all to be heathens, and until they had been converted, they were not valued human beings. So that's where things began to fall apart.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  By the 1630s, English colonists were at war with a neighboring Native people called the Pequot. The war was brutal, and it led to a massacre.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  On May 26, 1637, a group of armed Puritan colonists attacked the village of Pequot people. After killing most of the Pequot defenders, the Puritans blocked the village exits and set everything ablaze, burning everyone alive inside, mostly women and children. The attack killed hundreds. Those who tried to escape were shot. Most of those who survived were sold into slavery.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  And it was around this same time that Morton's book finally reached Massachusetts shores.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Someone gets that book and ships that book over to Boston. So by the time Morton then decides to finally return, the book has gotten there before he has gotten there.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Morton returns to Massachusetts in 1643. He's in his 60s. And what he doesn't know is that the colonists already have his book. In reading it, they come to believe that

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Morton is trying to undermine them, tell the world what terrible people they are, and now they should get rid of them. But they don't quite know what to do with him because publishing this book isn't necessarily a crime. So they put him in jail and they sort of debate, what should we do with this guy?

• 45:02Speaker 03

  They refer to him as old and pathetic, right? He's poor. They say, we could beat him, right? They could literally physically beat him and keep him in jail. But what would be the point? He's this old man with no power. And so they decide, ah, let's exile him again.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Not long after Morton lands in Massachusetts, he's arrested and exiled.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  But this time, rather than send him to England, he goes up the coast to this little place, Acemanticus. There's hardly anyone there.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Which is present day Maine. There, he's surrounded by trees and left to be alone with his own thoughts.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Morton goes there, and that's where he dies.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  But what about his book? What happened to all those original copies?

• 45:48Speaker 03

  We don't know. Most things from 400 years ago don't survive. Let's call it 200-plus books. There are about 20 left today.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Whatever happened to the books? We don't know. But what's for sure is that Morton's ideas were enough to make him a serious threat, so much so that he had to be banished, not once, but three times.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  He is a threat because he represents a different way forward. A way forward that would not have surrounded a village, set it on fire, and shocked people as they came out. That he would have instead sought some other resolution. He has a radically different vision than the pilgrims had. So I think when he shows up again, even though he is, by their own admission, he is not a threat, but he does represent this idea. And that idea is different from their plan of colonization.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  I think that they hope to vanquish his ideas and to do that maybe symbolically by vanquishing his body. Now, they don't say all that, so I'm making certain inferences here. But I think that's the deeper meaning of that last exile. He represents a threat to a community that is still not as secure as it wants to be.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  I think New English Canaan is written with that sense of future generations in mind as much as the present day. And in fact, it is the legacy, more than his contemporaries, that constitutes his readership. Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in the 1830s, is the major popularizer and discoverer of Thomas Morton and his legacy.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  The Scarlet Letter, you remember it? That one book we all had to read in high school. That was by the same guy.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Hawthorne actually wrote an entire story called The Maypole of Marymount, in which he's clearly deeply engaged with the text and sympathetic to Morton's vision.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  This is Sarah Rivet, reading a passage from that story.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  "Old and young were gay at Merrymount. The young deemed themselves happy. The elder spirits, if they knew that mirth was but the counterfeit of happiness, yet followed the false shadow willfully."

• 48:29Speaker 00

  And he describes Morton and Merrymount, in contrast to the pilgrims, as a kind of war, that jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. You know, he really sees this as a deep debate between joy and gloom, between severity and a kind of fuller embrace of humanity and of life.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  And it wasn't just Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1812, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson about Morton's book, saying, "It is whimsical that this book, so long lost, should be brought to me." The two would later exchange a few more letters about the book. The ideas in New English Canaan rippled out for centuries. The poet William Carlos Williams wrote about it, the novelist Philip Roth, and others. The book changes how we understand what we consider to be America's origin story.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  It goes back to the counter-narrative. In the early years of the United States, there was a strong attempt to create a story of the rise of the young nation that was coherent and chronological and began with the pilgrims and the Puritans as a cohesive group. It was consciously constructed as such. And then here's the rise of this great democracy. There are a lot of reasons why that narrative is in place and actually continues to be part of the American story, but it is dangerous. It's a single story. It's never at any point in colonial or early national history was the United States quite that coherent. And

• 50:16Speaker 00

  so Morton's text is a really important counter-voice. No matter what he's saying, he's showing that the 17th century was multivocal, that people disagreed, that there was the possibility for dissent within these communities.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  That this is a very old practice, not just in the world, but in the US, or in what we now call the US, that somehow by banishing the idea, you're protecting the ideal.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Yes, I think that's one of the most important reasons to study Thomas Morton's life. As I mentioned, the Puritans want to banish his ideas. If they can get rid of the book and they can get rid of him, then they can get rid of the idea. That is as ridiculous a concept in the 1630s as it is today. Banning books is such an insult to human intellect, that we are so afraid that someone's going to read something that we don't like, read something about an alternative lifestyle that is somehow not our own lifestyle, or not those of the book banners.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Book banning flies in the face of not only my 21st century idea about why people should be able to read books, but it flies in the face of early Americans' ideas about the importance of ideas and being confronted with them and letting the marketplace of ideas, the discourse of how we do things, sort out the right way forward. Guess what? It doesn't work. Getting rid of the physical manifestation of an idea does not crush the idea itself.

• 52:04Speaker 03

  Morton's ideas don't die. Morton's story doesn't die. New English Canaan, despite the best efforts, doesn't die. It comes back.

• 52:25Speaker 07

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Fatah.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 52:33Speaker 07

  This episode was produced by me.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  And me and? Lawrence Wu.

• 52:37Speaker 07

  Julie Kane.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devon Katayama. Peter. Balanon Rosen. Thomas Lu. Irene Naguchi.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. The episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Thanks to Johannes Dergi, Edith Chapin, Colin Campbell, and Anya Grunman. Thanks also to Neil Strickland, Chris Turpin, Thomas Lu, Peter Balanon Rosen, Devin Katayama, and Lawrence Wu for their voiceover work. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani. Navid Marvi. Cho Fujiwara. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.

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