#88 The Pilgrims Play For Keeps
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2022
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
By fall 1622, the new settlers sent by Thomas Weston – except those who were sick and remained in the care of the Pilgrims — left to settle in Wessagussett, twenty-two miles to the north of Plymouth at the site of today’s Weymouth. It was in fact a great location for a settlement with one important qualification: It was decidedly in the territory of the Massachusetts tribe, and by no means unoccupied or abandoned as Patuxet had been. This would turn out to be a catastrophic decision, and yet it would paradoxically lead to a more durable peace for the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the tribes following Massasoit at Pokanoket. But only after the Pilgrims made gutsy decisions and acted boldly.
Along the way Squanto would die under mysterious circumstances, and a miracle of healing would change everything.
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Selected references for this episode
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War
John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty
Edward Winslow, Good News From New England
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 88. |
| 0:10.8 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on September 13, 2022, in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:19.4 | If you are new to the podcast, we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. |
| 0:29.4 | If you deem us worthy, please subscribe in your favorite podcast app and follow us on Twitter or Facebook, if you do that sort of thing, of course. |
| 0:39.1 | And by all means, send emails to the History of the Americans at gmail.com. |
| 0:46.1 | We have double cliffhangers at this point in the history of the Americans, one of Massachusetts |
| 0:51.2 | and one in Virginia. If you listen to the last episode, you know that the |
| 0:55.8 | Paramount Chief of the Powhatan Confederacy of Bacanacanah has triggered his surprise attack on the |
| 1:02.7 | English in Virginia, a war he has been planning for eight years or more. On the day the sky fell, March 22nd, 1622, Indian warriors had killed at least |
| 1:15.5 | 347 settlers, including women, children, and servants, roughly a third of the non-Indian population |
| 1:23.4 | of Virginia. At the end of that single day, the survival of any English settlement in Virginia |
| 1:29.6 | was very much in doubt. We shall resolve that cliffanger in a future episode. Three episodes back, |
| 1:38.3 | the pilgrims confront the enemies within, we saw that the pilgrims had a treacherous but essentially bloodless 1622. |
| 1:48.5 | They had learned that Squanto was playing a double game, building a personal following among the |
| 1:54.5 | tribes in the region by claiming that only he could prevent the pilgrims from killing them all. |
| 2:00.8 | He had tried to trick the pilgrims into a preemptive attack by claiming that the Massachusetts |
| 2:05.8 | tribe to the north had teamed up with Massachusetts' Wampanoags to wipe them out. |
| 2:12.4 | The pilgrims in Massachusetts had uncovered the conspiracy, and there was no war, but William Bradford refused to extradite Squanto as called for in the treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, and that led to a crisis in their relationship. |
| 2:27.9 | At the same time, their duplicitous lead investor, Thomas Weston, had sent a big batch of new settlers, mostly |
| 2:35.3 | strangers rather than religious separatists, and demanded that the pilgrims feed them |
| 2:41.1 | from their meager stores until they were able to establish their own colony. |
| 2:46.8 | We concluded that episode as follows, quoting me. |
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