Why we read original sources

In classical schools such as the one where I teach, we emphasize the reading of original historical sources wherever possible. There is no arguing that the teaching of history is often clouded by myth and hearsay. In our time, "political correctness" also obscures an accurate retelling of the events of our nation's past.

In regard to the observance of Thanksgiving, such myths have been perpetrated at both extremes of the continuum. The original settlers of New England were not always the heroes that American tradition often paints them to be, and the behavior of the native tribes was both more troublesome and also more benign than many of the stories we have traditionally heard.

For those of us who subscribe to Biblical theology, this should come as no big surprise. Both settlers and native inhabitants were plagued with an inherited sin nature. But both were also recipients of God's common grace, and as individuals, both had marks of God's imago dei, the image of God.

In our reading of Governor William Bradford's own journal of the Plymouth Plantation, my sixth graders and I have made these observations:

1.  The Puritan settlers of New England truly aspired to establish Christ's "city on a hill" in their New England colony, but their efforts were often undermined by human greed and foolishness. Their worship of God was sincere, but their attempts to be informed by God's Word were colored by the political climate and culture of the authoritarian and hierarchical culture in which they had been nurtured in seventeenth century England.

2.  Having come as part of a trading company agreement, they were remarkably unreflective about their displacement of the native populations already present in the land they settled. They blindly accepted their trade charter as somehow giving them the right to claim and settle a land that was already occupied by someone else. While some of them treated the native Americans with respect and reciprocity on an individual basis, as a whole they seem to have accepted the notion that these were suspect "heathens," whose presence they were privileged to ignore, in terms of legal rights.

3.  While some of the natives did treat the settlers generously and open-handedly, far more were brutish and individually cruel to the settlers, apparently motivated by both envy and fear. Although they have been painted as idealistically not believing in the possession of private property, it is clear from the historic accounts that the natives who plundered and stole from the settlers were aware that they were taking that which did not belong to them.

4.  The settlers were more preoccupied with competition with other European settlers than with their relationship to the natives. Much of Bradford's journal details conflicts between the Plymouth colony and later arrivals, often of a seemingly petty religious nature. Bradford was quick to identify someof the later leaders as "heathenish Christians," whose effort at colonization were marked by "disorder" and greed.          

5.  Despite many failures, the accounts in Bradford's journal record many times of humbing and repentance, as the colonists tried to make sense of the trials they were suffering on what they believed to be a commission from God. There is also evidence that, in spite of apparent racial prejudice toward the natives on the part of some settlers, the church leaders themselves were concerned about gratuitious violence toward the natives, and spoke out against it in no uncertain terms.

6.  One of the most enightening sections of the journal was Bradford's account of their abandonment of communalism. "The failure of this experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men, proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times - that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it by the community, by a commonwealth,would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.  For in this instance, community of property (so far as it went) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit and comfort."  Bradford goes on to detail all the ills that this approach inflicted on the welfare and general productivity of the colony. "Let none argue," Bradford concluded, "that this is due to human failing, rather than to the commnistic plan of life in itself. I answer, seeing that all men have this failing in this, that God in His wisdom saw that another plan of life was fitter for them."  We would do well to heed this lesson in our nation today!