Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 94.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this on November 2nd, 2022 in Austin, Texas.

We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States

from the beginning without presentism. Spiritual support for this episode was provided by the

cigar vault in Buda, Texas, and my long-departed father on whose birthday I wrote most of

today's script.

This episode is about a happy-go-lucky Englishman named Thomas Morton,

whom William Bradford dubbed the Lord of Miss Rule,

and who would be a thorn in the side of Puritans in New England for more than 15 years. Just to break your interest,

here's how Bradford described Thomas Morton in of Plymouth Plantation, quote. Morton became

Lord of Miss Rule and maintained, as it were, a school of atheism. And after they had got some goods into their hands

and got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it as vainly in quaffing and drinking, both

wine and strong waters in excess, and as some reported, 10 pounds worth in a morning.

They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together,

inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies

or furies and worst practices.

This is a family podcast, so I'll leave it to you to explain any kids in the car what Bradford's

word frisking might have meant. The maypole in question was 80 feet high, and a stagg's antlers adorned the top of it.

Anyway, Morton would go on to write one of the most insightful and sympathetic descriptions

of Indian culture and civilization in the Northeast, a book called New English Canaan,

which is also interlaced with caustic attacks on Bradford and other

Puritans. Nathaniel Hawthorne would write a story about the May Pole at Marymount, Morton's

...