Mayflower

Cotton arrived with the manpower and equipment required to extract the Rock, like a bad tooth, from the pier. But as Cotton and the Sons of Liberty attempted to load the Rock onto an awaiting wagon, disaster struck. The Rock broke in half—a metaphor, some sages insisted, for the looming split between the American colonies and Britain. Cotton and his men left the bottom, and presumably Loyalist, half of the Rock in the ground, and lugged the other piece to the town square, where they deposited it beside a newly raised liberty pole.

    An 1853 daguerreotype of Hedge’s Wharf in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a group of citizens stand behind the exposed portion of Plymouth Rock
    The Pilgrims were once again relevant, but so were Benjamin Church and Mary Rowlandson. Updated editions of their books appeared as their struggle against the Indians came to represent the colonists’ fight for independence. As it turned out, Church’s grandson, also named Benjamin Church, was found guilty of secretly abetting the British during the siege of Boston. The region’s Native Americans, on the other hand, proved more loyal to the cause of American liberty and freedom. An Indian from Rhode Island named Simeon Simon, who was reported to be a direct descendant of Massasoit, fought beside George Washington for all eight years of the Revolution.
    In the early days of the war, the Old South Church in Boston was taken over by the British military. After the British evacuation of 1776, several volumes in Prince’s church-tower library, including Bradford’s manuscript, were discovered missing and assumed lost. But this did nothing to slow the rise of the myth of the Pilgrim Fathers. In 1802, John Quincy Adams, who had been educated in the Dutch city of Leiden while his father served as an ambassador to Holland, gave an address at the annual Forefathers’ Day celebration in Plymouth. Instead of the Rock, the intellectual Adams was more interested in the Pilgrims’ contribution to American government. In his remarks, he looked to the Mayflower Compact as the document that foreshadowed the flowering of American democracy. “This is perhaps the only instance in human history,” Adams intoned, “of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government. Here was a unanimous and personal assent by all the individuals of the community, to the association by which they became a nation.”
    Eighteen years later, Daniel Webster was the keynote speaker at a bicentennial celebration of the Pilgrims’ arrival in the New World. Webster’s speech, in which he looked to Plymouth Rock as a symbol of the imperishable ideals upon which the new nation had been founded, was widely reprinted and helped give the Pilgrims truly national recognition. In 1834, the piece of the Rock at the town square, which had been significantly reduced in size over the years by hammer-wielding souvenir hunters, was moved to the front of the newly built Pilgrim Hall, a Greek Revival structure that has been called America’s first public museum. Once again, disaster struck. After being loaded onto a cart, the Rock was passing by the town’s courthouse, when a linchpin jiggled free and the Rock fell to the ground and broke in two. With the help of some cement, the Rock was put back together and mounted in front of Pilgrim Hall.
    The proud descendants of the Pilgrims were not the only Americans struggling to create a new and seamless version of a fractured past. The Native inhabitants of southern New England, such as the Mashpee Wampanoags on Cape Cod and the Pequots in Connecticut, had become infused with a renewed sense of identity and purpose. In 1833, the Pequot Methodist minister William Apess traveled to Cape Cod and helped spark a protest against the taking of Indian land by local white inhabitants that became known as the Mashpee Revolt. In 1836, Apess delivered a lecture in Boston titled “Eulogy on King Philip,” in which he claimed King Philip’s War was “as glorious as the American Revolution.” Even though both the Pequots and the Mashpees had fought on the side of the English in the conflict, Apess chose to remember differently and portrayed Philip as the leader of a pan-Indian struggle for freedom.
    Apess’s remarks reflected a nationwide reassessment of King Philip’s War. In 1814 Washington Irving had