The Mayflower's Pilgrim Capitalists (How the pilgrims learned about the failures of socialism)

Reading Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, an account of the voyage of the Pilgrims and the settling of Plymouth Colony, what strikes me most is not simply the extraordinary suffering of those who made the crossing, or how close to failure the entire venture teetered for years, or even the author's recounting of the first celebration we've since dubbed Thanksgiving.

What leaps out from the pages of the history, probably because it's so little a part of the common narrative of the Pilgrims, is a crucial decision by the colony's governor, William Bradford, to change the fundamental organization of Plymouth's economy, a move which secured the colony's future. As Philbrick describes it, after three years in America the Pilgrims "stumbled on the power of capitalism" and in the process ensured the colony's survival.

Of course, for many people, the particulars of an economic system hardly seem like the stuff out of which national myths are made. Instead, the popular retelling of the Pilgrims' tale this time of year typically focuses on their role as separatists who fled England seeking religious freedom, came to thrive in the Dutch city of Leiden but worried that their children would lose their English identity and language, and so determined instead to found a colony in America where they could practice their religion but otherwise govern themselves as Englishmen and women.

The Pilgrims got more than they bargained for in the journey. After a brutal 66-day voyage, the Mayflower reached Cape Cod in mid-November of 1620, too late to build a suitable settlement before the winter set in. Living largely aboard the ship while they built the first structures, the settlers were ravaged by disease that winter, and by early spring, only half of the original voyagers remained alive.

Through the spring and the summer the Pilgrims nursed each other back to health, built their settlement, made friends with local Indians, and planted both native English crops and American seeds provided them by the local natives. That fall, as Plymouth Harbor attracted hordes of migratory birds, the Pilgrims went hunting, accumulating enough meat for a big celebration. When a hundred or so Pokanokets Indians showed up with freshly killed deer to add to the plenty, what started as a traditional European harvest festival became a feast of mythic significance, especially after Bradford and Edward Winslow ended their account of the Pilgrim's first year at Plymouth with the story of that Thanksgiving..

But mythic celebrations aside, the Pilgrims would struggle at Plymouth for two more years, never quite securing their freedom from worry and want until Bradford reorganized their tiny economy. For three years Plymouth had operated like other English colonies such as Jamestown, on a communal system where everyone worked the land and shared the fruits of labor. Now instead, in 1623, Bradford decided that each family should have its own plot of land to cultivate and would get to keep what it produced. By rights, this shouldn't have mattered much to the God-fearing Pilgrims. After all, they were engaged in a heroic endeavor to create a new life for themselves in America and all of them were presumably working as hard as possible to achieve that.

Still, as Philbrick writes, under Bradford's new regime, "the change in attitude was stunning." While previously men had tended the fields while women cared for the children, Bradford wrote that now women and children took to the fields, too, and the colony's output increased sharply. "The inhabitants never again starved," Philbrick relates, and eventually Winslow described Plymouth as a place where "religion and profit jump together."

Despite their devout nature, the Pilgrims weren't abhorred by such comparisons because the nature of religion was changing, too. The Protestant reformer John Calvin had placed work and the pursuit of one's occupation in a new religious context. Whereas under the Catholic Church for more than a thousand years work was something one did to subsist, Calvin argued that work was what God willed the faithful to do, and the worldly success that one achieved through hard work was a sign that one was, perhaps, a member of the elect. So thoroughly did many Protestant sects adapt this ethic that more than 100 years after the founding of Plymouth the minister John Wesley, architect of Methodism in England, would observe that "religion cannot but produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches."

The Pilgrims were followed to New England by waves of Puritans who believed as the Pilgrims did that a man's occupation was his calling in life and that success in one's calling was not to be renounced. It was a very different view of work and prosperity which became, not surprisingly, the ethic that defined the new country where, as Alexis de Tocqueville would later observe, all "honest callings are honorable" and where "the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence."

Not your typical Thanksgiving sentiment, but words nonetheless to contemplate this time of year.

-- Steven Malanga is an editor for RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

In their own words, from journals including Bradford’s, advance landing parties of the Plimoth colonists robbed indian graves and stole corn stores, creating a less than idyllic situation with the locals, from the start. Any subsequent friendliness, an uneasy truce really, was more to the credit of the natives than to the colonists.

The Mayflower ended up at what was to become Plimoth/Plymouth due to a navigational error; they actually were on their way to Virginia, where they had acquired a land charter from The London Company of England, the same group that had settled Jamestown nearly 15 years previously.

The years-lomg communal effort at Plimoth was certainly not an artefact of Jamestown, it was a response to the difficulties experienced in Jamestown, with too many gentry seeking fortune and not enough people to do the hard work of providing food for the winter. Never mind that the colonists in both places were decimated during their first winter in both places, and never mind that the ugly side of human nature was well documented in both as well.

It is Jamestown that has been derided, rightly or wrongly, over excessive preoccupation with capitalistic persuits, and it is Plimoth that has been mythologized as populated by near-saints unconcerned with individual gain.

Regardless, over three years before our mythic “Pilgrim Fathers” ever blundered their way into Cape Cod, after over a decade of struggle and difficulty, the Jamestown settlements had stabilized and prospered enough that the Virginia House Of Burgesses was established in Virginia. This was the first English colonial government.

That is foundational, not some fanciful, sterilized yarn about New England. I just have to assume that the Civil War played some role in ignoring Jamestown, when the national myth was being written. It’s an astounding historical snub, so wrong on so many levels.

Flame away, but the facts are on my side. New England communists, no matter how early they might have been, never have impressed me much. Rough and tumble, capitalist Jamestown is the spiritual forebear of *my* America.

The Miracle of America

from

axes and hoes to high technology;

log cabins to air-conditioned condos;

horsedrawn wagons to autos, planes, and rockets;

scarcity to abundance; &

from tyrannical government rule to individual liberty

HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?

Most of our history books don’t tell us that, in the beginning, the pilgrims established a communal economic system. Each was to produce according to his ability and contribute his production to a common storehouse from which each was to draw according to his need.

The assurance that they would be fed from the common store, regardless of their contribution to it, had a peculiarly disabling effect on the colonists. Taking property away from some and giving it to others bred discontent and retarded employment. Human nature was the same then as now, and before long, there were more consumers than there were producers, and the pilgrims were near starvation. Governor Bradford, his advisors, and the colonists agreed that in order to increase their crops, each family would be allowed to do as it pleased with whatever it produced. In other words, a free market system was established. In Governor Bradford’s own words:

“This had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corne was planted than other waise would have bene by any means ye Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deall of trouble, and gave farr better contente. The women now wente willingly into ye field, and tooke their little-ons with them to set corne, which before would aledg weaknes, and inabilitie; whom to have compelled would have bene though great tiranie and oppression. . . . By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed. . . . and some of ye abler sort and more industrious had to spare, and sell to others, so as any generall wante or famine hath not been amongst them since this day . . . .” (Wm. Bradford, “Of Plimoth Plantation,” original manuscript, Wright & Potter, Boston, 1901)

Those who, today, favor central government planning, common ownership and redistribution of the earnings of others are advocating a system that Americans tried and rejected over 350 years ago. Their wisdom gave birth to the great American miracle!

Are we as wise today?

You Can Do Something About This!

(This message originally published in the mid-1980’s by Stedman Corporation’s Government Affairs & Free Enterprise Education Program – a former NC textile firm. For more essays in this series, visit )

Could you kindly explain to us why this article (which quotes William Bradford and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence) is phony too:

http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Insights/plymouth_experiment.htm

EXCERPT :

But the harvests were not as abundant as they might have been, and Governor Bradford and the leading citizens were troubled. They still depended on trade and supply ships for a significant portion of their provisions, and given the nature of seaborne travel in those days, the arrival of those ships was erratic. They barely produced enough food to sustain themselves, and much of their labor went into hunting and fishing, so as to supplement their own needs and to be able to send some furs and salted fish back to pay the debts owed to their financiers in Europe. So the leaders of the colony gathered together, and after much debate they decided to make a fundamental change in the way their colony was organized. They had found the system of communism to be terribly harmful, and so they replaced it with a system of private property. In 1623 Bradford wrote a lengthy passage into his diary describing their momentous decision to allow, as he put it, every man to work “for his own particular”, to work his own crops on his own land:

“All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves ... This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression. The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst Godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God. For this community was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could, this was thought injustice. … And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them.”

More than a century and a half later, in 1790, an American named James Wilson wrote a treatise titled Lectures on Law. Wilson was a signer of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and was later appointed by President George Washington as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In his 1790 work, Wilson wrote,

“…all commerce [in Plymouth] was carried on in one joint stock. All things were common to all, and the necessaries of life were daily distributed from the public store… . The colonists were sometimes in danger of starving; and severe whipping, which was often administered to promote labor, was only productive of constant and general discontent... . The introduction of exclusive property immediately produced the most comfortable change in the colony, by engaging the affections and invigorating the pursuits of its inhabitants.”

The benefit of private property and the destructive effects of socialism were quickly recognized by the Pilgrims, and they survived because of those discoveries. Those lessons were taken to heart by our Founders and enshrined in our Constitution.

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