The New English Canaan
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| Written by: | Thomas Morton (colonist) |
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| Central Theme: | |
| Synopsis: | The memoirs of Thomas Morton |
| Genre(s): | Memoir |
| First published: | 1637 |
| More Information | |
| Source: | Read The New English Canaan here |
In the history of banned media within the American times, before Finn and his huckleberries, preceding the Potters... when Holden had not yet come through the rye, and the Brave New World was a twinkle in Hux's eye...
...there was The New English Canaan.
The New English Canaan, sometimes referred to as simply New Canaan, is the title of a set of memoirs written by colonist Thomas Morton and published in 1637, first printed in 1632 and consisting of three separate books; the books were collected as The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton and republished by The Prince Society of Boston in 1883, with introduction and notes by editor Charles Francis Adams, Jr. The books are Morton's magnum opus, based on the notes of his legal suit against the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Puritan political powerbase, which sentenced him to exile after he erected a maypole to celebrate the May Day festival with America's Native tribes; the Puritan settlers regarded it as decadent and pagan, and chopped the maypole down before arresting Morton for "supplying guns to the Indians".
The three books contained a thorough denunciation of Puritan government in the colonies and their policy of land enclosure and genocide of the native population; though still unambiguously acting as a colonialist and loyalist to the British monarchy of the time, Morton regarded the "newly-discovered" North America and its native inhabitants as a "new Canaan" under attack from the "New Israel" of the Puritans. Morton explicitly considered the third book of his New English Canaan as a manual on "how not to colonize", and called for colonists to "demartialise" and embrace a multicultural New Canaan that was more akin to the settlement of Merrymount (which he was the founder of).
This eventually lead to its ban for being "a harsh and heretical critique" of established customs and power structures - making it the Ur Example of a literary work being specifically Banned in America.
Much of the work also concerns the commercial potential of North America; Morton considered the Native peoples of far nobler culture than the Puritan, and that they that could be "further civilized" into permanent settlers, e.g. by converting them to his liberal form of Christianity and teaching them to how to preserve food through gifts of free salt.
Morton's The New English Canaan has been described as "an important work of early American environmental writing", and is considered a critical piece in establishing the archetypal "cavalier vs. Puritan" dichotomy that would come to underscore political relations in America, even to this day; the many controversies of his lifetime also led Harrison T. Meserole to describe Morton as "America's first rascal".
Nathaniel Hawthorne based his story "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" from the 1837 short story collection Twice-Told Tales on Morton's career, as did J. L. Motley with his 1849 story "Merry Mount"; the former inspired a 1933 opera with libretto, written by Richard Stokes with music by Howard Hanson, which was briefly revived in 2014.
Thomas Morton is a central character in Robert Lowell's play Endecott and the Red Cross, and The New English Canaan served as a source for the script along with Hawthorne's story; Philip Roth references Morton and the colony of Merrymount in his novel The Dying Animal.
- Banned in America
- Noble Savage: Morton's opinion of all Native American peoples.
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