Thomas Morton

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thomas Morton (born probably between 1580 and 1595 in England, exact place of birth unknown; died 1646 or 1647 in Acomenticus, now York , Maine ) was an English adventurer and settler pioneer in New England .

Life

Nothing is known for certain about Morton's origin. What is certain is that he studied law at Clifford's Inn , one of London's law schools. In 1622 he was a member of Thomas Weston's short-lived expedition to the almost undeveloped areas of what would later become New England, where only two years earlier the " Pilgrim Fathers " had founded the first permanent English settlement in the region with the colony of Plymouth . After his return to England he went back to Plymouth two years later in the entourage of a Captain Wollaston.

Unable to get along with the pious Pilgrim Fathers, Wollaston, Morton, and a few other newcomers headed north and established a trading post on the site of what is now Quincy , Massachusetts. Over the next few years, Morton explored the area and established trade contacts with the local Indian tribes. When Wollaston left the post in 1626, Morton took over the management of the small settlement, which probably had no more than six or seven white traders.

In May 1627 Morton erected a maypole in the settlement and baptized the settlement with the name Ma-Re Mount. Many Indians also took part in the exuberant celebrations, dances and drinking parties that he held under the maypole over the next few months. The goings-on were watched with suspicion by the pious and chaste Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth until they intervened in September 1628. Governor William Bradford dispatched an armed team led by John Endicott to Mar-Re Mount, fell the maypole and arrested Morton on charges of selling weapons to the Indians. On the one hand, it may have been the ideological contrast between the cheerful Morton and the ascetic pilgrim fathers that led to this escalation, on the other hand also the competition that Morton represented with the Indians for the pilgrim fathers.

Morton was deported to England, but since, contrary to expectations, no charges were brought against him, he was released and, much to the displeasure of the pilgrims, returned to Plymouth in 1629. In order to force him to conform, Bradford and Endicott then drew up a code of conduct that was to be signed by every settler in the colony, including Morton - Morton refused to sign unless a passage was added to the document stating that there were none in the colony Acts contrary to the laws of the Kingdom of England would be tolerated. Finally, on Bradford's orders, Morton was chained and taken back to England.

Morton was released in England. In 1633/34 he wrote a book about New England, New English Canaan, about his experiences in New England. It was published in Amsterdam in 1637 and is an important source for the beginnings of the New England colonies, especially in his extensive and benevolent descriptions of the Indians. It is extraordinary because it is one of the few documents about colonial New England that was not written from a puritanical perspective. In the title of his work, Morton also uses the trope of New England, often sought by the Puritans, as the Promised Land or New Canaan , but Morton's description of the region is far less theological.

After the outbreak of the English Civil War , Morton returned to Plymouth, meanwhile quite impoverished, and after the first winter set off on exploratory trips northwards. In 1644 he was arrested by the Massachusetts Bay Colony magistrates and charged with treason. In the absence of evidence, he was released after a year and sentenced to a £ 100 fine, which he could not afford. The colony's governor, John Winthrop , wrote that corporal punishment had been waived in his case because Morton was "old and insane," but the term apparently weakened him considerably. Morton was given the opportunity to resign from the colony, and he went to the settlement of Acomenticus in what is now Maine, where he died in 1646 or 1647.

reception

In American historiography, Morton has often been ostracized as an unscrupulous adventurer to the same extent as the pilgrim fathers and puritans were glorified as protagonists and heroic founding fathers of a society from whose spirit the American nation was born.

This allegorical interpretation of the events surrounding the Ma-Re Mount maypole, in all its moral ambiguity, also characterizes Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous short story The Maypole of Merry Mount (1835). Morton's fate has not only been artistically processed in many ways since Hawthorne; the historian John Lothrop Motley published about two novels on Morton ( Morton's Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial (1839) and Merry Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony (1849)).

Only recently has Morton and his New England Canaan been positively reinterpreted as a kind of symbolic figure of a “different America”, especially in connection with his benevolent treatment of Indian culture. His most important advocates include William Carlos Williams , who declared Morton in his work In The American Grain (1925) to be one of the founders of an original American way of thinking and literature, and Richard Slotkin , whose regeneration through violence Morton describes as a prototypical representative of countercultural nonconformity .

Editions of the New English Canaan

literature

  • Donald F. Connors: Thomas Morton (= Twayne's United States Authors Series. 146, ISSN  0496-6015 ). Twayne, New York NY 1969.
  • Michael J. Colacurcio: Godly Letters. The Literature of the American Puritans. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN 2006, ISBN 0-268-02290-9 , pp. 3-33.
  • Jack Dempsey: Thomas Morton of "Merrymount". The Life and Renaissance of an Early American Poet. Digital Scanning, Scituate MA 2000, ISBN 1-58218-209-4 .
  • Peter C. Mancall: The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England. Yale University Press, New Haven 2020, ISBN 978-0-300-23010-9 .
  • Daniel B. Shea: "Our Professed Old Adversary". Thomas Morton and the Naming of New England. In: Early American Literature. Vol. 23, No. 1, 1988, ISSN  0012-8163 , pp. 52-69, JSTOR 25056695 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Carlos Williams : In the American Grain. Essays. New Directions, New York NY 1925, pp. 75-80.
  2. ^ Richard Slotkin: Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT 1973, ISBN 0-8195-4055-2 , pp. 58-70.
personal data
SURNAME Morton, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English adventurer and settler pioneer in North America
DATE OF BIRTH between 1580 and 1595
DATE OF DEATH 1646 or 1647
Place of death Acomenticus, Maine