Just in time for the United States’ controversial 250th anniversary, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, two ships, Helps us realize that any country that can’t agree on its origin story is destined for divisive times.
two ships is about the complex, combined legacies of the landing of the Mayflower, which carried Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which reached Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it is not the facts of these two trips, but the meaning conveyed in them, that has made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, ‘Mayflower’S The travelers were Separatist Puritans, opposed to the rule of the English King James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, in which all people were (theoretically, at least) equal before God.
In contrast, the European inhabitants of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of both ships depended on who was invoking them and when. It is not surprising that the metaphor was used most intensely during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or “slave-ship”, as it was commonly called, was condemned as having infected America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds states that Frederick Douglass often resorted to the “two ships” metaphor, while Lincoln avoided it in hopes of preserving the unified ship of state. Meanwhile, the southern descendants of the Cavaliers called for The Mayflower emphasized the intolerance and “brutal, tyrannical” character of the Puritan people. In a comment that matches our own times, Reynolds says:
It did not matter to the South that… By the middle of the nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious sects,…, some of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is inherent in cultural memory, especially when it is exacerbated by sectional or political bias. To the southern people, Mayflower Puritanism, which gave rise to radical movements like abolitionism, now poses a serious threat to the Union.
In a brief but fascinating digression into the unexpected power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s love of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, the Scarlet LetterAnd, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, it strengthened its nostalgia for a richly imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, who is not a fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “has done infinite harm; possibly more than any other man who has ever written…”
two ships Through Close Reading an Allegory is a dazzling survey of nearly three centuries of American history. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and a range of European immigrants, were retreating toward a constellation of racial solidarity that the Mayflower celebrations helped solidify.”
By the turn of the 20th century, the image of the Mayflower was politicized and commercialized in the sale of Pilgrim hats and Black Friday. The powerful metaphor of two ships hidden in the fog.
However, seven years ago 1619 project White Lion – Commissioned “The Slave-Ship” and brought it to the center of the debate about slavery’s place in the national story. 1619 project Used to be Blamed for its historiographyAnd it lies outside the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; Still, the reappearance of the White Lion seems too important not to be acknowledged, at least in this book.
I think she’s reading the criticism two ships This would be an excellent way to celebrate this special Fourth of July. It is wise for all of us to be more aware of how Americans have understood, misunderstood, and often stereotyped each other. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the more cynical descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it nice to think so?”
