Earlier this evening my friend told me how he was flummoxed over why the settlers from the Mayflower have such a prominent place in American consciousness, ie with regard to Thanksgiving. Reflecting on what I know about the history of Europeans in what eventually became the United States, I too became curious.
Sure Roanoke went under, but the Jamestown colony was the first permanent English settlement in America. The Plymouth colony is a relatively late establishment by comparison. What aspect of their role in American history makes the pilgrims celebrated as they are? Freedom to practice their religion? The fact that they survived as they did?
History is written by the winners/survivors. The colony in Plymoth produced more offspring than Jameston did and thus made it appear (in a literary sense) that they founded the good ole US of A.
There’s more to it than that. The Plimoth colony and surrounding towns grew during the 1620’s, but starting with the Arbella in 1631 there was an enormous influx of Protestant Puritans from around East Anglia, motivated by the English civil war. This was the first growth of anywhere near this size in the new world.
With the end of the war in about 1640, the tables were turned, and it was the “second sons” of southwestern England that came flooding into Virginia, lured by land given away by, what was his name, Berkely? Something like that.
The Pilgrims were pretty meek folk, but the Puritans were very vigorous about religion - and not free religion, either. Freedom of religion didn’t really appear until much later, as colonies tried to accomodate each other for the sake of unity.
The Plymouth Colony has the back story of people coming to the U.S. because they were persecuted for their religion in Europe. And they came to the U.S. ostensibly to find a place where they would be free to do so.
The Jamestown settlers tend to be portrayed as people who came for economic reasons, which isn’t nearly as compelling.
Also the Pilgrims wrote the Mayflower Compact which was an important document in the establishment of self-government among the British colonies of North America.
According to the PBS TV show Secrets of the Dead, after the American Civil War school textbooks (written by northerners) played up the Plymouth (Massachussetts) colony and downplayed the Jamestown (Virginia) colony. Also Plymouth was protestant and Jamestown (and its financial backers) was largely catholic.
I think you’re quite wrong about the settlers and backers of Jamestown, Virginia being largely Catholic. They were predominately Church of England. (Another citation.) Colonists in 1607 were required to take an oath of allegiance to the king and against the pope.
In 1641 a decree declared that adherents of the pope in Virginia were to be fined 1,000 pounds of tobacco if they attempted to hold office. The following year all priests were given five days to leave the colony.
Lord Baltimore attempted to plant a Catholic colony in Virginia in 1629-30 and failed. He and Lord Calvert succeeded two years later with a charter for Maryland, the first Catholic colony in English America.
The Pilgrims and Puritans came with the intention of settling permanently in America and farming small plots of land that they would work themselves. The early Jamestown settlers were more aristocratic and came with the intention of either finding gold or conscripting indentured servants or slaves to work huge farms for a few years, after which they would sell out and return rich to England. Finding anybody to get their hands dirty and do real work proved to be a serious problem during the early Jamestown years.
The Pilgrims, then, were closer to the later American ideal of hard-working, self-sufficient immigrants working their own land. They were a better role model. The early Jamestown settlers were closer in spirit to the Spanish who colonized the more southerly portions of the Americas.
