All history is political... Bradford vs. Morton at Plymouth Colony

[Pholus]

So a few years my over religious, conservative (teabagger?) sister who does genealogy hit the proverbial gold mine and linked our family to the Mayflower. And, like all good accomplishments in our family, it seems to have been cheapened down to left vs. right politics (or in other words another round in the unending war of me vs. all my much older siblings).

See, it appears our family decended from John Billington, the "knave" of Plymouth Colony who was the first European hung in the new world. He was not a Pilgrim but rather one of the "Strangers" who helped the puritans pay for their trip to the new world. My sister seems to want to use it to explain all the strife in our family in that there was "bad blood." Obviously her much less religious, liberal, scientist baby brother had to get all those less than respectable ideals from somewhere and apparently where better than some kind of original sins of the father?

A few years back (right around the time the discovery was made) I was looking into this and I read Charles Mann's 1491 article in "The Atlantic" as well as a bunch of other references. One of the things I came across (I thought it was in the Mann article but was wrong) was that one of the things Billington was unhappy about was the grave robbing that got the colonists through the first winter. I had told my 87 year old mother (a DFL new-dealer) about it but it was a curiosity at the time and I forgot the reference. So this week (after five years) I get an email from my sister asking for the reference ("just to complete a bit more of the research") and implying that it was just too bad that we had to be related to a dark member of the Plymouth Colony.

I thought about it a minute and said that while I couldn't remember the reference off the top of my head I'd get it but that she shouldn't feel bad at all. I continued (innocently at the time but evilly in retrospect) that while Billington seems like a bad sort, you have to take William Bradford's word on it since he wrote the only history. He had an agenda to portray the epic struggles of the Puritans against all odds and that might color some events including the character of those who opposed him (Billington wrote a letter to the Crown trying to get Bradford removed as governor). I told it strained my credulity that Bradford reported that just among the men in 50 people in families (the strangers) that you'd just happen to have picked a rapist/adulterer, a murderer, a zoophile AND a heathen dedicated to celebrating pagan Roman gods in drunken sexual orgies with the indians. I was wrong about the timing of the last (that was Morton, who came two years later than the Mayflower) but to me it raises a question of whether Bradford may have been justifying why his enemies should be despised! I finished by saying that considering the Puritans hanged Quakers who came back after being expelled as heretics (and that from my naive viewpoint they should be playing for the same team) wasn't it at least possible that Bradford would have a motive to paint his opponents badly in the only written history of the era by way of justification?

I didn't get a response but in talking to my mother yesterday I found out that my sister is somehow troubled about being related to a sinner besides my mother and I. My mother, who is kind of fed up with her other children's incessant right wing politicizing of everything (BTW why are conservatives as a movement evolving into something like hard-line communists where you're either in the party or automatically an enemy of the state?) pulled up that perhaps Billington was upset about the grave robbing bit and other unchristian acts of the puritans. So that little innocent email from my sister was trying to see if I could back up the statement, obviously to confront my mother if I couldn't. And I not only demurred on the immediate response but also (by way of trying to make her feel better) probably rubbed more salt on religious people in general as represented by the Puritans since I basically said that they'd lie if the circumstances were right.

This brings me to Morton, who I have not yet had an opportunity to read. I understand his accounts run basically 180 degrees to Bradford's narrative since he wrote "New England Canaan" to shut down the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Considering the title of the book, Morton seems to have been REALLY trying to provoke the Puritans -- their new exodus had a victim in the native peoples and so he used their self-view to criticize them. Has anyone here read his accounts and are they worth reading?

Anyway, how funny. Now I can't escape an alternate picture that my ancestor was not as evil as he is portrayed. Perhaps he was trapped in a theocratically driven crazytown and spoke his mind one too many times. Goodness knows that this is what I would do if trapped there (thank God for being able to pick up and move several states away). It tracks, given that my siblings would seem ready to burn me at the stake (or at least follow through on their threats to shoot me with one of their many, many guns) just for the sin of being educated and disagreeing with them. I know they'd write about *that* event differently than I might!