Two Ships

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans on both sides of the slavery divide liked to say that the country's quarrel began with two ships. The White Lion landed the first enslaved Africans at Jamestown in 1619. The Mayflower reached Plymouth Rock the following year with the Pilgrims. Frederick Douglass and many of his contemporaries used the pairing as shorthand for a North and South that seemed to have been set on different paths from the start. David S. Reynolds takes that popular image seriously and asks what it really stood for. His answer reaches back to the English Civil War and its two camps, the Cavaliers and the Puritans. Virginia was settled by royalists who held to divine right and to rigid, patriarchal hierarchies. The Plymouth colonists were dissenters from the crown and its church. They were far from flawless, but their outlook held the beginnings of a more egalitarian politics. Reynolds shows how these opposed inheritances shaped the battle of words and pictures over slavery, and then the war itself, so that the real question at stake was whether social hierarchy was the natural order of things. The book also follows what happened once the metaphor faded. As Jim Crow settled over the country, the two ships dropped out of public argument. The Mayflower and Thanksgiving were recast as comfortable, apolitical symbols. Reynolds suggests that their central place in the prewar debate reveals something important about the Civil War, and that their later disappearance helps explain why the road to genuine equality has been so hard. By recovering these rival images, he invites readers to use them as Douglass and his generation did, as a way to understand American division and to face it.