A book talk with Peter Mancall historian and author of The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England from November 2, 2022.
Overview
From October 1812 to May 1813, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams exchanged letters about Thomas Morton, an Anglican lawyer who had been exiled from New England almost 200 years earlier, once by the Pilgrims and twice by the Puritans. Why, one might ask, did two former presidents think it worth their time to write about a man who was little more than a footnote in American history? Both, it turns out, recognized that Morton, and the book he wrote called New English Canaan, had much to say that remained relevant to any complete understanding of the American past, a subject of enormous interest to both men in their last years.
More About the Book
Adding new depth to our understanding of early New England society, this riveting account of Thomas Morton explores the tensions that arose from competing colonial visions. A lawyer and fur trader, Thomas Morton dreamed of a society where Algonquian peoples and English colonists could coexist. Infamous for dancing around a maypole in defiance of his Pilgrim neighbors, Morton was reviled by the Puritans for selling guns to the Natives. Colonial authorities exiled him three separate times from New England, but Morton kept returning to fight for his beliefs.
This compelling counter-narrative to the familiar story of the Puritans combines a rich understanding of the period with a close reading of early texts to bring the contentious Morton to life. The volume sheds new light on the tumultuous formative decades of the American experience.
About the Author
Peter C. Mancall is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, professor of history, anthropology, and Economics at USC, and the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI). His seven books include:
- Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson - a Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (Basic Books, 2009)
- Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (Penn, 2018)
- The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, his Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale, 2019)
He is currently writing a book called American Origins, which will be volume one of the Oxford History of the United States. In the 2019-2020 academic year, he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.