OPINION:
Thanksgiving is a federal holiday in the United States. The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, in what is today the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, celebrated the original Thanksgiving after their first harvest in the New World in October 1621. The celebration lasted three days, and 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims attended.
Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the planting of Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims fled England as separatists: They denied the validity of the Church of England and wished to practice their faith in their own way. The Pilgrims were, above all else, a religious people. For the Pilgrims “thanksgivings” were days of prayer on which they thanked God for His blessings.
The Pilgrims also were a people committed to law. “Law” has been defined in many different ways by many different people throughout history. The dominant view today seems to be that law is the reflection of social, political and economic interests.
For the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, law was both the memorialization of their commitment to the Word of God and an instrument for exercising social control so as to implement that commitment. The following epigraph appeared at the bottom of the Pilgrim’s 1658 revised code of law’s title page:
“Be subject to every Ordinance of Man for the Lord’s sake. 1 Peter 2:13.” The code opened with an “Address” by the legislature to the inhabitants of Plymouth that reaffirmed the government’s commitment to Plymouth’s religious foundations and to the use of law to effectuate those foundations: “God gave them right judgments and true Laws … grounded on Principles of Moral Equity, as that all men, Christians especially, ought always to have an eye thereunto, in the framing of their Political Constitutions … which hath its Original from the Law of God.”
Religious references were strewn throughout the early laws of Plymouth Colony. A 1632/3 law about the need to fortify the fort, for instance, was justified on the basis that “Christian wisdom teaches us to depend upon God in the use of all good means for our safety.” Prior to the enactment of a legal code in 1636, the Pilgrims used the Scriptures, the Mosaic Code in particular, as legal writ.
Plymouth’s courts frequently punished sinful behavior. The available records suggest that sexual misconduct was the most common offense. For example, in 1641, Thomas Bray, a single man, and Anne Linceford, the wife of Thomas Linceford, were convicted of adultery and “uncleanness” for which they were publicly whipped and required to “wear (while they remain in the government) two letters, viz., an AD for Adulterers, duly, upon the outside of their uppermost garment, in a most eminent place thereof.”
Plymouth Colony’s courts tried individuals for non-sexual offenses against God, too. At least 11 men and one woman were executed for murder. The first was John Billington, one of the original Mayflower passengers, who had been convicted of shooting a neighbor “with a gun, whereof he died.”
After the leaders of Plymouth Colony had consulted with Gov. John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony about whether Billington “ought to die, and the land purged of blood” as the Bible had commanded, Billington was hanged. Significantly, at the time of Billington’s sentencing, murder had not yet been made a capital statutory crime and Billington was sentenced to death solely on the basis of Scripture.
The Pilgrims, of course, used law to regulate the more mundane aspects of life as well. For example, a law enacted on March 29, 1626, prohibiting houses in the colony from being covered with “any kind of thatch as straw, reed, etc.” was designed to reduce the risk of fire destroying the settlement, while a July 1, 1633, law forbade inhabitants from pulling up footpaths “for driving of cattle or the like” because residents needed functioning walkways.
A 1637 law established “Ducksborrow” as a township, and a 1651 law required coopers to make full-sized casks. Many other examples could be cited. Indeed, quantitatively speaking, more laws were enacted by the Pilgrims that addressed the day-to-day activities of life in Plymouth Colony than memorialized the Pilgrims’ commitment to eternal glory in the afterlife, but the latter was unquestionably more important, qualitatively speaking, than the former.
In the oft-quoted words of a young William Bradford — the man who would become the longest-tenured governor of Plymouth Colony and the person whose journal would help to mythologize Plymouth’s history — “to keep a good conscience, and walk in such a way as God has prescribed in his Word, is a thing which I must prefer before you all, and above life itself.”
Happy Thanksgiving.
• Scott Douglas Gerber is a law professor at Ohio Northern University and an associated scholar at Brown University’s Political Theory Project. He is currently writing a book about law and religion in Colonial America.
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