representative institutions, leading to democratic freedoms, and the use of slave-labor, the
`peculiar institution' of the South, as it was to be called. It is important to bear in mind that large
numbers of black chattel slaves did not arrive in North America until the 18th century. All the
same, the bifurcation was real, and it eventually produced a society divided into two castes of
human beings, the free and the unfree. These two roads were to be relentlessly and
incongruously pursued, for a quarter of a millennium, until their fundamental incompatibility
was resolved in a gigantic civil war.
The very next year occurred the single most important formative event in early American
history, which would ultimately have an important bearing on the crisis of the American
Republic. This was the landing, at New Plymouth in what was to become Massachusetts, on
December 11, 1620, of the first settlers from the Mayflower. The original Virginia settlers had
been gentlemen-adventurers, landless men, indentured servants, united by a common desire to
better themselves socially and financially in the New World. The best of them were men cast in
the sturdy English empirical tradition of fair-mindedness and freedom, who sought to apply the
common law justly, govern sensibly in the common interest, and legislate according to the
general needs of the Commonwealth. They and their progeny were to constitute one principal
element in American tradition, both public and private-a useful, moderate, and creative element,
good for all seasons. The Mayflower men-and women-were quite different. They came to
America not primarily for gain or even livelihood, though they accepted both from God with
gratitude, but to create His kingdom on earth. They were the zealots, the idealists, the utopians,
the saints, and the best of them, or perhaps one should say the most extreme of them, were
fanatical, uncompromising, and overweening in their self-righteousness. They were also
immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous. They and their progeny were to constitute the
other principal element in the American tradition, creative too but ideological and cerebral,
prickly and unbending, fiercely unyielding on occasions to the point of selfdestruction. These
two traditions, as we shall see, were to establish themselves firmly and then to battle it out,
sometimes constructively, occasionally with immense creative power, but sometimes also to the
peril of society and the state.
The Mayflower was an old wineship, used to transport barrels of claret from Bordeaux to
London. She had been hired by a group of Calvinists, all English and most of them from London,
but including some who had been living in exile in Holland. Thirty-five of the settlers, who were
led by William Bradford and William Brewster, were Puritan Nonconformists, dissenters whose
Calvinist beliefs made them no longer prepared to submit to the episcopal governance and
Romish teachings (as they saw it) of the established Church of England. They were going to
America to pursue religious freedom, as a Christian body. In this sense they were not individuals
but a community. They were also traveling as families, the first colony to sail out on this basis.
They obtained from the Virginia Company an 80,000-acre grant of land, together with important
fishing rights, permission to trade with the Indians, and authority to erect a system of self-
government with wide powers. They brought with them sixty-six non-Puritans, and the settlers as
a whole were grouped into forty-one families. Many carried books with them, in addition to a
Bible for each family. The captain, Miles Standish, had Caesar's Gallic War and a History o f
Turkie. There were enough beds, tables, and chairs carried on board to furnish a score of family
huts, plus dogs, goats, sheep, poultry, and quantities of spices, oatmeal, dried meat and fish, and
turnips. One passenger, William Mullins, brought with him 126 pairs of shoes and 113 pairs of
boots. Others, carpenters, joiners, smiths, and the like, brought their tools of trade.