American Fun by John Beckman Read Free Book Online Page B

Morton’s safe return to England, where he anticipated getting a fair legal hearing. Only when he had secured his house and property did he offer himself up without (he boasted) “the effusion of so much noble blood.” In September, with Morton on a boat home, Standish felled the Maypole with a still-ringing slam.
    EARLY IN THE SUMMER of 1630, as the English
Arbella
bashed the Atlantic swells—leading ten other vessels and seven hundred passengers in the first strong wave of the Great Migration—John Winthrop, a wealthy Puritan whom the king had appointed governor of theMassachusetts Bay Colony, stood firm on its pitching decks and regaled his congregation with the first great sermon of American exceptionalism. He was forty-three years old. He had high-arched eyebrows, a sundial nose, and a pointed shovel of a beard. His message was even nobler than the Mayflower Compact. “We must be knit together in this work as one man,” he intoned. Detailing his vision of the glorious new colony, he entreated them to join in “brotherly Affection” and to rise above their “superfluities.” He urged them to come together “in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality” and, best of all, to “delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together,” et cetera. To this end, as a chosen people, in the eyes of God and all the world, they should become “as acity upon a hill.”
    When the fleet hit Salem on June 22, Winthrop’s inspired flock gotcracking. One of their first tasks, upon settling in Boston, was to burn Morton’s Merry Mount to the ground. Then they paved the region under a Puritan empire that expanded and fortified with impressive speed, joining forces with the Separatists in 1648. For more than a century their City upon a Hill imposed its message throughout the Northeast. Song was silenced, dancing forbidden.The American Self was menaced from all sides—by threats of the stocks, dunking pools, whipping posts, ear-cropping, branding, banishment, public execution, and eternity in the Hands of an Angry God. Indians, of course, were the hardest to reform. During King Philip’s War of 1675, for instance, when Plymouth’s colonists faced shameful defeat by the martially more skillful Wampanoags, they exacted their revenge against all native peoples by burning the peaceable “praying towns” (which they had vowed to protect) and by impressing other communities’ women and children as slaves.
    In Boston’s early years, Morton kept making his presence known—escaping from his jail cell, returning to America from his exile in England, but the dispersal of his merry, merry boyes and the spread of law throughout New England had reduced his threat to a ghostly legend. He was apprehended in Boston in 1644 for the publication of
New English Canaan,
distinguished ever since as America’s first banned book. He was jailed for one year without charges or trial and eventually released for general infirmity. He was ultimately exiled from Massachusetts and died in Maine in 1647. He left more than twelve thousand acres of land to his cousins, as well as the island ofMartha’s Vineyard, but nobody can prove it was his to give. In any case, the cousins never claimed it.
    But shining from the shadows of Winthrop’s City upon a Hill came glimmers of lingering American fun. The maskers had to keep a low profile. Writing in his diary on March 10, 1687,Samuel Sewall relates a sermon byCotton Mather, “sharply against Health-drinking, Card-playing, Drunkennes, Sabbath-breaking, &c.” Two months later he shows the latest Thomas Mortons pushing back: “It seems the May-pole at Charleston [Massachusetts] was cut down last week, and now a bigger is set up, and a Garland upon it.”

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Jack Tar, Unbound
    O N NOVEMBER 27, 1760, something remarkable happened. Twenty-five-year-oldJohn Adams walked into a bar. America’s grand story seldom pauses for such events. Yet the arrival of this