December marks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth, the moment habitually yet mistakenly thought of as the beginning of America. The conflation of New England’s history with that of the nation at large, encouraged by generations of Harvard-reared scholars, continues to warp Americans’ understanding of their past. By the time the Mayflower dropped anchor off Cape Cod, the Jamestown settlement in Virginia had survived (barely) for more than a decade, while Spanish settlements at Santa Fe, New Mexico, and St. Augustine, Florida, were far older.
In part, the importance of the Pilgrims has been exaggerated because of the peculiarly American values that they are said to have brought to the New World and spread through the colonies: rigid discipline, austere rejection of earthly pleasures, the fusing of religious impulses with political ideas. All of these indeed distinguished the Pilgrims from other groups of early trans-Atlantic migrants, though the old easy binary between profit-seeking Virginians and pious Yankees no longer commands much respect among scholars.
Yet it is another attribute of the Pilgrim influence that arguably holds even greater sway four centuries after their arrival. Understanding that influence starts with the history of their name. The Pilgrims weren’t called that in their day. Instead, they were known as “Separatists,” for their desire to break completely from the Church of England, rather than cleanse and reform it from within—the approach urged by the more moderate Puritans.
That separatist impulse to leave an established community in protest of its corruption, to choose the remedy of “exit” rather than “voice,” would set the pattern for countless American protest movements to come. The Pilgrims, by word and deed, established separation as an actionable precedent for any American group alienated from the status quo. From colonial times to the present—especially in the Revolution and the Civil War—that secessionist impulse would define American history, and sometimes threaten to overturn it entirely.
While the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving is a familiar story, Americans know little about their pronounced separatism—radicalism, really. The Separatists emerged near the end of the 16th century, as a renegade movement of dissident Protestants arose in the East Midlands of England. Rejecting the state-backed Church of England as too rigid and autocratic, too similar to the Roman Catholicism from which it had itself broken off a few decades earlier, the dissenters started setting up their own illegal congregations. Many were fined for not attending official services, while others were executed for refusing to renounce their heretical beliefs.