Thomas Morton, a trader and lawyer, emigrated from England to the Plymouth Colony in the company of a Captain Wollaston in 1624. Those dour Puritans who knelt in thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock before marching forth to conquer the wilderness and its native inhabitants with Bibles and guns weren't the only pilgrims to seek spiritual freedom on the New World's shores. "Or, as the Puritan Gov. John Endicott chopped down His prosperous, easygoing colony attracted escapees from the harsh, hunger-ridden regime of the Plymouth plantation. They welcomed their old nemesis back by throwing him into a dank dungeon all winter long. Thomas Morton was born in 1576 in Devonshire, England, a part of the country that still bore remnants of Merrie Old England’s pagan past. Just a few leagues up the Massachusetts coast from Plymouth's fortress of fundamentalist conformity, a poet and lawyer named Thomas Morton founded a colony that, had it survived Puritan persecution, might have spawned a far more Earth-friendly and egalitarian history of America than the one that's come down to us.Morton, a senior partner in a Crown-sponsored trading venture, sailed to New England in 1624 with a Captain Wollaston and 30 indentured young men.
Thomas Morton, (born c. 1590—died c. 1647, Province of Maine [U.S.]), one of the most picturesque of the early British settlers in colonial America, who ridiculed the strict religious tenets of the Pilgrims and the Puritans.. Morton ran a free and easy settlement, with the English settlers mixing freely with the Indians and quite a good time apparently being had by all. The newly rising Puritan Roundheads, struggling with the old-guard Royalist Cavaliers, would soon win the Civil War that not only decapitated the English Crown (laying the groundwork for the American Revolution) but also persecuted and destroyed the remaining vestiges of Merrie Olde England's pagan past.An aging, disheartened Morton set sail one last time for the fertile wilderness he loved, only to find his Indian friends decimated by the white man's guns and diseases and the Puritans' hold on New England stronger than ever.
What do we know about the early life of Thomas Morton of Merrymount---about his English birth, education, mind and personality, and about his American life among Native peoples, as a natural historian and poet who acted and spoke for mutual respect on the colonial frontier? Wollaston to "Merry Mount" — or "Ma-re Mount," punning on the Latin word for "sea"), and threw a merrie olde pagan MayDay party to help woo Indian wives for his young bachelors. Thomas Morton (c. 1579–1647) was an early colonist in North America from Devon, England. When Wollaston began seeking more profits by selling off the indentured servants to hard labor on the Virginia tobacco plantations, Morton persuaded the remaining servants (it wasn't hard) to reject their harsh master and throw in with this visionary as free members of a colony that would trade and live in harmony with the local tribes.It didn't take long for the free-thinking Morton to draw the ire of the nearby Puritans. On May 1, 1627 Morton erected a Maypole with much frolicking going on around it. William Bradford wrote with horror in his The Puritans made good on their "woefull" threat — motivated, later historians suggest, as much by Merrymount's challenge to their fur monopoly as by its defiant heathenism. the proud Maypole, scattered Merrymount's inhabitants and destroyed His health broken, Mine Host of Merrymount finally died in 1647 in Maine, as far away from the "precise Separatists" as he could get.Two centuries later, another rebel against rule-bound conformity, Nathaniel Hawthorne, immortalized the seminal struggle among New England's first settlers between pagan freedom and fundamentalist rigidity in a still-popular tale, "The May-Pole of Merry Mount." in London, so he marooned him on a desert isle till an English Morton had no compunctions about trading guns to his Indian friends, whom the Puritans viewed as hostile savages.