The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England

Abstract

The Trials of Thomas Morton examines the life of Thomas Morton, an Anglican lawyer and trader who established the Ma-re Mount settlement, near modern-day Quincy, Massachusetts, in the 1620s. After freeing the servants under his command, Morton and his company erected an eighty-foot maypole and embraced Old English traditions, which unsurprisingly vexed his pious neighbours. Morton was exiled from New England three times, and as the book’s title suggests, he faced legal trials in both England and New England. Morton’s drinking, dancing, and cohabiting with and selling guns to Indigenous people caused problems, but it was “his skills as a lawyer and writer” that posed the greatest threat to his “Puritan Foes” (208). Peter C. Mancall uses Morton as a lens to explore the multiple visions for a New England that vied for dominance in the early seventeenth century. Blending chronological and thematic narratives, the book’s six chapters weave together a picture of both Morton’s life and New England’s complex cultural, political, and religious landscape. Morton understood that New England “could have a different future once the Pilgrims and Puritans lost their authority” and when “the authority of the Massachusetts Bay Company disappeared, a replacement would need to be created” (131). The book’s central premise is exploring the replacement vision that Morton offered. Mancall convincingly argues that Morton’s seminal work, New English Canaan (1637), was “unflinching in its dissent against the dissenters” and vital to Morton’s legal argument that Massachusetts Bay authorities had “exceeded the authority of their original charter” (174, 208). From start to finish, The Trials of Thomas Morton offers fresh approaches to reframing the well-told tale of life in seventeenth-century New England. For example, in the prologue Morton’s story is told through the eyes of former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who exchanged a lengthy correspondence about Morton and