Who was #ThomasMorton?

He lived during the #Puritan period, but was no Puritan. He was a self-professed "heathen" who joined with the local Native Americans and other English settlers who rejected Puritan values, to openly celebrate #MayDay on top of a prominent hill south of Boston, Massachusetts. Morton also provided weapons to Native Americans to use against the Puritans. Eventually, Miles Standish had Morton banished (to the Isles of Shoals, where he was eventually rescued), and destroyed the Maypole and caused those who sought a different way of life to disperse, or face arrest.

Excerpt from "The Pagan Pilgrim: Thomas Morton of Merry Mount"

Intellectual "heathen" remains an inspiration

by Steve Rasmussen, 2001

"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. 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. They settled and began trading for furs on a spit of land given them by the native Algonquin tribes, whose culture the classically educated, broad-minded Morton soon came to admire as far more civilized and humanitarian than that of his intolerant, brutal European neighbors. 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."

http://www.oldenwilde.org/srasmus/oldentext/merrymount.html

And if you’re not familiar with #ThomasMorton, I couldn’t recommend this podcast more highly:

#HistoryOnFire
(EPISODE 96: The Wildest Man You Have Never Heard Of”

“The name of Thomas Morton has largely been erased from history. Some people could refer to Morton as a victim of the Puritan brand of cancel culture. The Puritan story became mainstream, and Morton’s name disappeared. This episode fixes this mistake.”

#HistoryPodcast

http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/2022/12/6/episode-96-the-wildest-man-you-have-never-heard-of-thomas-morton