As a Mayflower descendant, I’ve been interested in learning more about the Pilgrims’ first years in Massachusetts, particularly given the sanitized version I learned in elementary school in Rhode Island. As a country, we’re still a long ways from acknowledging the real story — to the extent that the real story can be discerned through all the myths — but an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal takes things a few gigantic steps backwards.
Eric Metaxas (never heard of him) titles his piece “The Miracle of Squanto's Path to Plymouth.” The first part we already know, although I’m not sure Metaxas had it quite right in his piece. But Squanto was kidnapped in the early 1600s by English “traders,” taken to Europe where he learned English, eventually making his way back to Massachusetts. When he returned to his home, however, he discovered that the Patuxet had been wiped out, most likely by smallpox. Which, in the view of Metaxas, was a miracle because it led Squanto to make contact with the Pilgrims — who providently decided to settle pretty much on the bones of Squanto’s people — when the Pilgrims were on the verge of being wiped out themselves. It was also a miracle that Squanto had been kidnapped and that he learned English, apparently. Without his assistance, the colony likely would have returned to England after a winter that decimated them by half. Well, that wouldn’t have done, would it?
Metaxas concludes:
So the question is: Can all of this have been sheer happenstance, as most versions of the story would have us believe? The Pilgrims hardly thought so. To them, Squanto was a living answer to their tearful prayers, an outrageous miracle of God. ...
Indeed, when Squanto died from a mysterious disease in 1622, [Governor William] Bradford wrote that he wanted “the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in heaven.” And Squanto bequeathed his possessions to the Pilgrims “as remembrances of his love.”
These are historical facts. May we be forgiven for interpreting them as the answered prayers of a suffering people, and a warm touch at the cold dawn of our history of an Almighty Hand?
Even considering that I literally would not be here had things gone otherwise, what kind of twisted a version of God does one have to believe that divine intervention set in motion the literal elimination of one set of people — specifically sparing one to rescue a group of invaders — all so that they could go on to dispossess an entire continent?
But, even in 2015, and in the face of efforts to get people to acknowledge the darker side of the Pilgrims’ tale, I guess if you believe that it was a moral imperative to the universe that Europeans should also get North American, it all makes perfect sense. And then there’s that whole slavery thing, started here a year before the Pilgrims set foot in Massachusetts; I guess Metaxas would conclude that was all part of the Plan as well.