The Puritans, however, came to the Americas a decade later, in greater numbers, and with far more institutional resources at their disposal. “Pilgrims and Puritans get blended into one big origin story, when in fact they are different peoples with different colonies, patents, and perspectives.” They boarded the Mayflower, not because of continuing religious troubles in the Netherlands, but because of the economic hardships they faced there. The Pilgrims separated from the Church of England and fled to the Netherlands because of religious persecution in England. Blurring the line between those groups is often part of the American mythologizing of that period. When Van Engen teaches Puritan literature, he often begins with an explanation of the differences between Pilgrims and Puritans. “The Pilgrims and Puritans are fascinating,” Van Engen said, “but when we celebrate them as the people who came here for freedom, we lose sight of the unfreedom that they also caused.”Ī History of American Puritan Literature refocuses the scholarly conversation on the complex relationships Puritan writers had with their historical moment. Slavery existed in the north as well as in the south, and the slave trade was enormously important to New England’s economy. New England was still not the land of the free, as it was later portrayed to be. The language of liberty was very important to them, but it was a specific kind of liberty they pursued. “The Pilgrims and the Puritans have featured in those stories about United States’ national origins because starting with the Pilgrims enables us to tell a story of the nation that's all about liberty and not about slavery,” Van Engen said.ĭespite this cultural legend, the Pilgrims and Puritans were directly involved in the slave trade. New nations require origin stories, founding myths that explain what makes them unique on the global stage. His latest work builds on a book published last spring, City on the Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, in which Van Engen argues that Pilgrims and Puritans are often used to illustrate a simplified version of the history of European imperialism.
“The Puritans did not come here with a sense of themselves as particularly exceptional, and certainly not with a sense of America as particularly exceptional,” said Van Engen. They came with an ideal of restoring the church to its original purity, Van Engen argues, but they did not come to the Americas with the intention of starting a new nation or setting themselves apart from the world.
As colonial settlers, they had a complicated and often violent relationship with Native peoples. They took part in the Atlantic slave trade and had close economic relationships with both England and the Caribbean. A History of American Puritan Literature(Cambridge University Press) resituates Pilgrim and Puritan literature within the historical context of the 17th-century Atlantic world, arguing that it is impossible to understand what Puritans were doing in this period without first considering their participation in colonial systems. Looking past that mythology is the subject of a new book co-edited by Abram Van Engen, associate professor of English at Washington University, and Kristina Bross.
That idea would become more prominent as the United States came into being and searched for a founding mythology. When the Mayflower landed 400 years ago, in 1620, the Pilgrims on board did not consider themselves to be establishing a new country.
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