Thomas Morton

Thomas Morton (born c. 1575–79—died c. 1647, Province of Maine [U.S.]) was a contrarian and nonconformist businessman and an early British settler in colonial America. He authored New English Canaan, which ridiculed the strict religious tenets of the Pilgrims and the Puritans and became the first book banned in the United States.

Morton arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 as one of the owners of the Wollaston Company, which established a settlement at the site of modern Quincy. In 1626, when Wollaston and most of the settlers moved to Virginia, he stayed on and took charge of the colony and named it Merry Mount (originally Ma-re-Mount or Mount Mar-re and also known as Merrymount). Inevitably this free-living, prospering, sharp-tongued Anglican conflicted with his pious neighbors. Morton erected a maypole, encouraged conviviality and merriment, wrote bawdy verse, poked fun at his saintly neighbors, conducted religious services using the Book of Common Prayer, monopolized the beaver trade, and sold firearms to Native Americans. The Pilgrims cut down the maypole in 1627, arrested Morton, and exiled him to the Isle of Shoals, whence he escaped to England. He returned within two years and was soon taken into custody again (1630) and his property confiscated.

Exiled back to England, Morton collaborated with the enemies of Massachusetts in an attempt to get the charter of the Puritans revoked and wrote an account of the colonies, New English Canaan (1637). Divided into three volumes, the work illustrated Indigenous culture and New England’s flora and fauna, and it provided history and criticism of Puritanism in which Morton described the settlers as religious fanatics who treated Native Americans with cruelty. Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford, decried the work as:

an infamous and scurrilous book against many god and chief men of the country, full of lies and slanders and fraught with profane calumnies against their names and persons and the ways of God.

The Puritans later banned New English Canaan making it the first book to be banned in the lands that would become the United States. On returning to Massachusetts in 1643, Morton was imprisoned again, fined, and exiled to Maine.

Morton has persisted as the epitome of the anti-Puritan; he appears as a character in a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Maypole of Merrymount,” two novels by John Lothrop Motley, Morton’s Hope (1839) and Merry Mount (1849), and an opera, Merry Mount (1934), by American composer Howard Hanson.