Plymouth, Yes -- Jamestown, No

In his review of James Horn’s account of “Jamestown and the Birth of America,” a volume entitled A Land as God Made It, Russell Shorto remarks that “[f]or a long time the two stories” – Plymouth and Jamestown – “ran parallel in the national conscience” as the American founding myths, and he wonders why the Jamestown story has almost slipped from sight. (Sunday New York Times Book Review, November 13, 2005, p. 9).

There are reasons why the Southern saga of the founding of America has not retained a primary place in our consciousness, while the New England version has.

It may be that the “cultural ascendancy of the north” gave a tilt toward explaining our origins in terms of New England Puritanism, as James Horn suggests. And it may be that the grittier, “hardheaded” Jamestown record is more in accord with the various forms of “ugliness” Shorto correctly identifies as salient features of modern America.

But when Shorto mentions the “7,000 African slaves up and down the Atlantic coast” by 1680 he approaches what I consider a key reason for emphasizing the New England “myth” of our nation’s origins. Here I am not so concerned about the immorality of slavery as the reason for it. Those 7,000 were overwhelmingly concentrated in the South because they were needed there. They supported a society of gentry who continued the English landholding and class culture they had inherited from feudalism and in turn bequeathed to Confederacy.

I will not elaborate at this point on what I believe to be the hallmarks of Confederacy, such as its top-down style of governing, reliance on class / caste distinctions, transfer of wealth to the gentry, and survival of the poor through client-patron relationships. My point is, the New England story is about the very opposite of that tradition. It is about bottom-up governance. It represents a non-feudal breakthrough. The Puritans in England killed the king, and when the regicides needed to be safe some of them took refuge in New England.

With Confederacy now triumphant politically in America and feudalism on the rise internationally, the stark egalitarian democracy intended and initiated by the founding New Englanders looks more and more like an historical aberration. But I think it was good while it lasted.