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MYTHOCLAST: PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS

In England, there was a offspring class of the Catholic-light religion promulgated by King Henry VIII, after Rome refused to go along with his nasty habit of divorcing and/or beheading a succession of wives. This group was harassed because it refused to conform to Henry’s refusal to conform to the Pope’s decree. They decided to leave England and join up with others of the same disposition in the Netherlands. Finding Holland equally inhospitable, they agreed to try living in the New World.

Their little ship was headed for what was to become North Carolina, but was thrown off course, and they found themselves on the coast of an area they would call “New England.” Before going ashore, they signed what is known as the “Mayflower Compact.” This initial document was to lock in the same religious intolerance from which they fled in Europe—along with a host of other intolerences. After several bad seasons, they began to get a lock on the survival thing, and set up a celebration with the native folk. Ultimately, with unknown/unseen and virtual weapons, they began to decimate the “ignorant savages” and encroach upon their “lebensraum” (living space).

This group was followed by other, equally intolerant settlers. Eventually, they were able to push the recalcitrant savages sufficiently out of the way to form thirteen royal colonies, covering almost the entire eastern seaboard of a goodly portion of the northern part of the new continent. During the colonies’ expansion, they had siphoned off about four per cent of the huge Atlantic slave trade, most of which cargo was dispersed among the expansive other Americas. This bondage was not of much use in the north, so most of it was concentrated in the southern colonies, which thrived upon the riches of King Cotton. Northern ports served as embarkation points for the “black gold.” The emptied ships were loaded with West Indies’ rum, and continued their nefarious triangle to Europe, Africa and the Americas.

In time, these colonies became restive, and felt put-upon by far-off England. After several instances—provocative and otherwise—the colonies got together and drew up an indictment and unilateral assertion of separation from the crown. Of course, the king did not take kindly to this rebuff by his remote subjects. After England’s defeat, with the aid of an old enemy, France, the colonies sought to draw up a mutual governing pact. However, they were faced with an impossible obstacle. Their pact was to become the broadest statement of liberal governance previously unimagined. Replete with individual freedoms theretofore unknown in human history, the document separating them from England specified as its justification the natural freedom of mankind. The southern colonies would have none of that anti-labor gibberish. So, in order to ensure the establishment of a mutual government, the colonies decided to ignore the matter of southern bondage, and not mention it in the final drafts.

That failure to resolve the problem came back to haunt them almost a century later, when it cost half a million lives in order to mend the rift. It took fully another century for the slow-grinding, legal machinery to recognize the humanity of the bondage survivors.

Oddly enough, although the original settlers professed a desire for religious freedom, and the colonies’ compact enshrines in law the fact of relitious freedom—but excludes religion from government itself—today, there are those who use that freedom as a bludgeon in attempting to curtail the freedoms of others of whom they disapprove.

THIS IS QUITE INTERESTING!