Two Ships
Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America
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Two Ships
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About this listen
In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America’s strife could be traced back to the arrival of two ships, less than a year apart—The White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620.
In a deeper sense, David S. Reynolds shows us, in this magnificent book, those two ships, invoked by Frederick Douglass and many others, stood for two quite distinct realities: the Puritans and the Cavaliers, names and ideologies born in the bloodshed of the English Civil War. The Virginia colony, founded by royalists, was steeped in the ideas of divine right, which flowed down in rigid patriarchal hierarchies. Plymouth Colony’s dissenters to the king and his church, while hardly perfect, carried the seeds of a more egalitarian political vision.
These two ships of 1619 and 1620 played a key role in the battle of images and words that marked the roiling fight, and then war, over slavery. As Reynolds shows, there was a long stretch of time in America when everyone knew what Cavaliers and Puritans meant. It was North versus South, but more deeply, it was about whether social hierarchy was the natural order of things.
But then, as America descended into the long night of Jim Crow, the metaphor of the two ships went to sleep as well. The meaning of the Mayflower and of Thanksgiving changed as they became mainstream, apolitical ideas. If the ships’ status as cultural touchpoints before the Civil War tells us something vital about that conflict, their forgetting afterward tells us much about why the road to true equality has proved so stony. By dredging up these two ships’ dueling images, the great David S. Reynolds enables us to make the same use of them that Frederick Douglass and his contemporaries did—to challenge us, and to give us hope that we are up to the task.
Critic reviews
“This is a brilliant conceit, wonderfully executed. By telling the story of the White Lion and of the Mayflower, David Reynolds has found a new and compelling way to explore the infinite complexities of the American story—complexities that shape us still.” —Jon Meacham, author of And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle
“David Reynolds’s eloquent and clear-eyed history of those two ships, the White Lion and the Mayflower, and the metaphors they inspired sheds light on the difficult, painful, contested American past—then and now. A dazzling, beautifully rendered, and wholly relevant book, Two Ships stands tall on any shelf about enslavement, despair, equal rights, and, finally, national unity: a bravura heritage for our times.” —Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith and The Impeachers
“In this brilliant, provocative book, David S. Reynolds resurrects the metaphor of the two ships to offer an origin story of America’s deep divisions. Two Ships marks a major intervention in the study of early American history by explaining how the American people—Black and white, enslaved and free—conceptualized these divisions before, during, and after the Civil War. It’s essential reading for today’s polarized times.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“With his characteristic verve and insight, David S. Reynold recovers the powerful legend of a Puritan New England of freedom pitted against a Cavalier South of slavery in an existential struggle for American identity. In selective, propulsive memories, legends became real enough to justify a civil war that still resonates within our national culture.” —Alan Taylor, author of American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873
“David Reynolds’s eloquent and clear-eyed history of those two ships, the White Lion and the Mayflower, and the metaphors they inspired sheds light on the difficult, painful, contested American past—then and now. A dazzling, beautifully rendered, and wholly relevant book, Two Ships stands tall on any shelf about enslavement, despair, equal rights, and, finally, national unity: a bravura heritage for our times.” —Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith and The Impeachers
“In this brilliant, provocative book, David S. Reynolds resurrects the metaphor of the two ships to offer an origin story of America’s deep divisions. Two Ships marks a major intervention in the study of early American history by explaining how the American people—Black and white, enslaved and free—conceptualized these divisions before, during, and after the Civil War. It’s essential reading for today’s polarized times.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“With his characteristic verve and insight, David S. Reynold recovers the powerful legend of a Puritan New England of freedom pitted against a Cavalier South of slavery in an existential struggle for American identity. In selective, propulsive memories, legends became real enough to justify a civil war that still resonates within our national culture.” —Alan Taylor, author of American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873
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