Queer Ancestor Spotlight: Thomas Morton and Merrymount

At the time of publication we’re a few a days out from the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. This is a federal holiday with its own convoluted history involving colonialist myth-making, erasure of indigenous history and experience, and the materialist bonanza known as Black Friday. Since this holiday has been linked to harvest festivals of the earliest American colonists, the Pilgrims who landed in what is today Massachusetts, I decided to share the story of a European colonist with markedly different views of indigenous Americans who also founded a short-lived colony where “pagan rites” and same-sex activity were alleged to have been celebrated, and who wrote what is widely considered the first book banned in America.

A 19th-century engraving of Cpt. Miles Standish and his men observing the “immoral” behavior of the Maypole festivities at Merrymount

Thomas Morton was born around 1579 in England. We was a lawyer, writer, social reformer, and early colonist in what is now the New England area of the United States. After a brief trip to the American colonies in which he complained about the intolerance of the Puritan settlers, in 1624 he became a senior partner in a Crown-sponsored trading venture with Captain Richard Wollaston, an English sea captain and pirate.

Along with 30 indentured men, they established a colony they named Mount Wollaston. Morton immediately began trading liquor and firearms with the local Algonquian tribes, which was illegal under the laws of the surrounding Plymouth Colony. In 1626, Morton encouraged a rebellion against Capt. Wollaston after discovering he had been selling indentured servants into slavery in the Virginia colony. After Wollaston left for Virginia, leaving Morton in charge, the colony was renamed to Merrymount.

Morton was a much more liberal leader than his contemporaries. In addition to making anyone who resided there free men he also maintained close relationships with the surrounding indigenous communities. In 1627, Morton made the decision to commemorate the renaming of the colony by holding a May Day celebration and erecting an 80-foot high pole, covered in garlands and ribbon, and topped with deer antlers. During the several days of celebration men and women from the local indigenous communities were invited to join. Some accounts claim the residents danced in a manner evocative of Ganymede and Zeus, figures that were often used to represent same-sex coupling.

This behavior scandalized and enraged the conservative Puritans. The governor of the nearby Plymouth colony, William Bradford, went so far as to declare Morton a "“lord of misrule.” Despite condemnation from local religious authorities a second May Day celebration was held in 1628. The following month, the Plymouth militia lead by Myles Standish, marched on the town. They used Morton’s sale of firearms to the surrounding indigenous communities as a pretense for his arrest, chopped down the Maypole, and renamed the colony Mount Dagon after the Philistine god whose idol was destroyed by the Christian God in the Book of Samuel.

Morton was tried, sentenced, and returned to England. While in exile from the American colonies he worked to get the Massachusetts Bay colonies’ charters revoked. The briefs he compiled for his failed lawsuit would be compiled in his book, The New English Canaan, a three-volume work of history, environmentalism, satire, and poetry. This book documented the history and beliefs of the indigenous Americans, the flora and fauna of the New England area, and the ways the Puritan settlers were despoiling the area. He described the indigenous communities as a nobler culture than the settlers and compared them to a "“new Canaan” under attack by the “new Israel” of the Puritans.

Morton attempted to have the book published in England in 1633 but was prevented from doing so. In 1637 he eventually found success in Amsterdam, although the English government succeeded in destroying most copies. The remaining copies were condemned by the Puritans, leading The New English Canaan to be widely considered as America’s first banned book. In fact, this book and his attempts to have the Plymouth Colony’s charter revoked would lead to his arrest on charges of sedition when he returned to New England in the late 1640’s.

After a short imprisonment in Boston, Morton’s health began to fail. He was granted clemency and moved to Maine where he eventually died in 1647 at the age of 71. His legacy, and that of Merrymount, would continue to be subjects of ridicule until Nathaniel Hawthorne published his short story The May-Pole of Merry Mount in 1832. In addition to painting the residents of Merrymount in a flattering light in comparison to the strict orthodoxy and tyranny of the Puritans, this short story also introduces the description of the colony’s residents as a “crew of Comus”, a reference to a mythological figure whose ceremonies feature men and women exchanging clothing, further cementing an association with queerness and gender transgression into the mythology of Merrymount.

The location of Merrymount is now a neighborhood, using the same name as the colony, in Quincy, Massachusetts.


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