Introduction: In this article, Melissa Davenport Berry describes how it wasn’t all religion in early America – the pious (dour?) Pilgrims objected to the “licentious” festivities at Thomas Morton’s Merrymount. Melissa is a genealogist who has a website, americana-archives.com, and a Facebook group, New England Family Genealogy and History.

“BRIGHT were the days at Merry Mount, when the May-Pole was the banner-staff of that gay colony! They who reared it, should their banner be triumphant, were to pour sun-shine over New England’s rugged hills, and scatter flower-seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.”

–Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”

As the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts, were building their pious paradise, a Crown-sponsored colony dubbed “Merrymount” was set up for fur trading. Merrymount, now part of Quincy, Massachusetts, prospered in its enterprise – but it was packed with bawdy fellows engaging in debauchery via liquor and ladies.

The Pilgrims built a house of worship, while Merrymount erected a maypole via orders of their leader Thomas Morton, who declared:

“That the first of May at Merrymount shall be kept [a] holy day.”

Morton’s idea of progressive colonization contrasted with the lifestyle of the Pilgrims. As Hawthorne noted, it was a difference of “jollity” (Merrymount) vs. “gloom” (Plymouth).

There are many accounts of this story. The earliest are William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation and Morton’s New English Canaan.

Gov. John Winthrop called Morton “a wicked fellow” and said he was “our professed old adversary, who had set forth a book against us and had written reproachful and menacing letters to some of us.”

Morton’s anti-Puritan book was banned and erased from the annals. Yet despite this, his story and legend live on.

It has been stated by historians that Morton’s account of the Indians in New English Canaan is better than most colonial writers, and his work remains extremely valuable for those researching New England’s earliest inhabitants.

New England author and historian Edward Rowe Snow published an account of Thomas Morton in his newspaper column “Sea and Shore.” I have added sources and notations. All sources can be viewed at Americana-Archives.

This article reads:

In the year 1625 a shipload of Englishmen arrived in Massachusetts aboard the ship Unity and settled at Mount Wollaston. In 1627 the leader of the group, Capt. [Richard] Wollaston, decided to go to Virginia, leaving his partner, Thomas Morton, in charge.

Morton, an expert in classical lore and a poet, had studied law. He knew the immortal Ben Johnson, with whom he had been associated at England’s Mermaid Tavern. In 1629 he married money, borrowed from the lady’s estate, and fled later when asked for an accounting by her sons. [Read the story from Three Hundred Years of Quincy, 1625-1925: Historical Retrospect of Mount Wollaston, Braintree, and Quincy.]

He came to New England with [Thomas] Weston’s company in 1622, and probably went back home the same year, returning to America on the Unity.

[Note: There are discrepancies about what date and what ship Morton arrived on, but William Bradford did record the following passage in Of Plimoth Plantation in 1628:

“Aboute some 3 or 4 years before this time, ther came over one Captaine Wolastone, (a man of pretie parts,) and with him 3 or 4 more of some eminencie, who brought with them a great many servants, with provissions & other implments for to begine a plantation; and pitched them selves in a place within the Massachusets, which they called, after their Captains name, Mount Wollaston. Amongst whom was one Mr. Morton…”

Below is a photo of a marker for Captain Wollaston erected in 1920 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Located at Quincy Shore Road in Quincy, Massachusetts, Wollaston Beach.]

When Wollaston went to Virginia, Morton offered partnership to those who remained, telling them they all would “converse, trade, plante, & live together as equalls,” supporting and protecting one another.

Morton renamed the community Ma-re-Mount, which meant Mountain by the Sea, but the Pilgrims who interpreted it as Merrymount were not far from wrong. When the renaming party was held, an 80-foot pine tree was set up on the hill as a Maypole. Everyone in the neighborhood was invited for the celebration, which was accompanied by the sounds of drums, pistols, cannon, and shouting.

[Below is an illustration from A Popular History of the United States, published in 1876 by Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, New York, of the maypole celebration at Merrymount.]

The Pilgrims soon objected to the licentious parties that Morton carried out under and around the maypole. Bradford called Morton the Lord of Misrule, who was carrying out “ye beastly practices of ye madd Bacchinalians.”

He [Bradford] especially objected to Morton’s group “inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together,” quite heedless of their neighbors to the south in Plymouth.

Nevertheless, in spite of this objection to what was taking place, I feel that the Pilgrims had another purpose in mind. Morton, in spite of all his frolics and dissipations, had a keen business head and was taking much of the beaver trade away from the Plymouth colony.

Morton admitted that one of his men had single-handedly made the equivalent of $5000 in fur trade within a few years, and in 1626 he had almost put the Plymouth group out of business in the region of the Kennebuc.

Morton would also allow outsiders to join his colony, “any, how vile soever, and all ye scume of ye countrie or any discontents,” and the Pilgrims considered that such a community close at hand was a great danger.

The Pilgrims began by sending word along the coast to prepare to unite and suppress Morton. Finally, with all New Englanders in the immediate vicinity united against Morton, Capt. Myles Standish set out with nine men to put Morton out of business.

We can never tell just what happened when the two forces met because both sides left accounts of the battle, and there is a great difference of statement.

Stay tuned for more heated drama!

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Note on the header image: Mayday at Merrymount. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.