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Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America
by David S. Reynolds
A revelatory history of American division through the prism of two ships, whose widespread use to define that division has been lost to memory despite their enduring legacy.
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.
"A highly recommended must-read, with great insights into American history and ideology." —Library Journal (starred review)
"An exploration of the contending cultures of North and South, long before the Civil War began...Reynolds charts the differences, setting those two ships on an inevitable collision course." —Kirkus Reviews
"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.
This information about Two Ships was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. His other books include Beneath the American Renaissance, winner of the Christian Gauss Award; John Brown, Abolitionist; Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson; Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America; and Lincoln's Selected Writings. He is also the author of Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, the basis of the documentary Lincoln's Dilemma and winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize.
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