By: Jonathan Lindberg

In 1620, one-hundred-and-two English dissidents, along with hired sailors and servants, boarded a rickety boat so-named the Mayflower, setting sail for a New World, there to establish a colony based on the idea of religious freedom, or rather, a freedom from a religion controlled and directed by the state.

And so begins the first great American story of immigration, not in New York City or along the Mexican-American boarder, but rather at a desolate, sandy coast known as Cape Cod, at a place the Pilgrims would eventually rename after the English port from which they departed, Plymouth.

Over the past one-hundred-and-fifty-years, the reputations of these first settlers, the Pilgrims, have taken a slow and steady hit. William Bradford, Miles Standish, Benjamin Church, and Josiah Winslow. Hardly the kind of names associated with the foundation of America. Hardly the kind of names we know much about. But such was not always the case.

In the years leading up to the American Civil War of the 1860s, the Pilgrim legacy was one of celebrity. Of Plymouth Plantation, written by William Bradford, was a national bestseller. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned the best-selling poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish. Plymouth itself became a national refuge, a symbol of perseverance and hope in the years of civil strife.

However, somewhere between Abraham Lincoln declaring November 25 National Thanksgiving Day and the recent Native American Activists declaring November 25 a National Day of Mourning, historians are slowly reassessing just how Americans established themselves on this land and what that method of doing so actually means.

In Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking Press, 358 pages), New England Historian Nathaniel Phillbrick seems to have a hard time deciding who in fact the reader should be rooting for. The book itself is a balancing act, depicting on one side the absolute courage of the pilgrims as they wandered blind through the New England wilderness during those first few terrifying days, and then describing the all-out deceit and vindictiveness they used there-after, profiting from the hands-that-helped them, namely the Pokanoket Indians, after that first bleak winter.

Mayflower is what it is, a book of history. Not an all-out indictment of the pilgrims, nor an attempt to wash clean the hands of the Native Americans. Rather, Phillbrick draws a neutral line between the two. All the characters are assembled, well-equipped with their flaws. Phillbrick simply tells their story, offering sympathy to both sagas, the Plymouth Pilgrims and the Cape Cod Indians. As the subtitle to the book indicates, it is the complicated history of their courage, their community, and their war.

Of the three, community is the one spot in which the story lags. In 1623, after two long years of food shortage, the Pilgrims, under the guidance of Plymouth Governor William Bradford, discover the now-staple of contemporary American culture, capitalism. During the first two years, the Pilgrims worked communal farms. The shared food was sparse. Then in 1623, Bradford declared each Pilgrim family responsible for their own food supply and land, and suddenly, the struggling colony flourished. Suddenly, everyone had enough.

Over the next fifty years, the colonists lived in relative peace, slowly weaning themselves from any dependence on the Cape Cod Indians they might have felt, slowly crawling, then walking, then eventually running. Mayflower becomes as much as anything, a story of fathers and sons. Two generations of reversing roles. How the first generation of pilgrims established peace with the Native Indians, and how the second generation did everything they could to break it down.

The story climaxes with the last great war of the Cape Cod Indians, King Phillip’s War, named after the Indian Sachem Metacomet who took on the Christian name Phillip, then took on the colonies. The end result is inevitable, certain defeat, yet this by no means detracts from the story itself, the struggle for survival, which Philbrick tells with marked excellence.

Most of what we know about American history begins and ends with the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620, then a quick catapult to 1776 and the fury of the Revolution. However, the Pilgrims left their mark, just as the Founding Fathers did over a hundred years later. Of the one-hundred-and-two passengers aboard the Mayflower, thirty-five million American descendents exist today. Puts new meaning on the Biblical command, be-fruitful-and-multiply.

And so, this country is their country, much more so now than when they were alive. Sure, Plymouth and Cape Cod have become commercialized, overrun by tourists and traps romanticizing our foundations; however, it is the legacy of the Pilgrims which still remains. Their history is our history, for better or worse.

By: Judge Mark Ward

Each week three-to-five-hundred citizens are called to jury service in Shelby County. Some prospective jurors look forward to their community service and approach the task with enthusiasm. Others see it as forced labor and begrudgingly show up hoping to say the ‘magic words’ to get excused. Most people fall somewhere between these two extremes and, although they would rather not have to serve, do so out of civic duty or because they believe they have no other option.

As one of the judges who preside over jury trials in Shelby County, I am constantly talking with jurors during their orientation. My goal is to explain the importance of the jury in the American system, to encourage jurors to enthusiastically participate in the process with an open mind, and to thank them for their service. What follows is a summary of the thoughts I share with prospective jurors.

If you go back far enough in the annals of history, you will find that people devised different methods of settling disputes and determining guilt or innocence. One method was to place a stone in the bottom of a giant cauldron containing boiling oil and require the accused to dip his arm into the oil to retrieve the stone. The notion was that the innocent would not be burned while a guilty man would. Not surprisingly everyone was found guilty. This ‘caldron’ method was ultimately replaced by the much more sophisticated practice of binding an accused’s arms and legs before dropping him in the largest body of water in the district. If the accused drowned, he was guilty. If he somehow managed to float, he was innocent. Again, most people seemed to be guilty. Time passed and with progress came even more sophisticated methods of administering justice. The most widely known was “trial by combat.” If there was a dispute between citizens or a dispute between the king and a citizen, a representative of each party would simply fight to the death. It was believed that God would intervene in the combat and that the person who survived was innocent, while the person who died was guilty.

By the time of the American Revolution, such methods of administering justice had long fallen out of use and the right of Englishmen to a trial by a jury of citizens was well recognized. Despite this fact, trial by jury was often denied by the crown for those living in the colonies. Denial of a jury of peers allowed the King’s magistrate complete power over the colonists. As a consequence, the founding fathers guaranteed that the right to trial by jury would remain inviolate by including the right in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. In addition, when each state of this union came into existence, they too set forth in their constitutions the right of citizens to trial by jury.

The right to a jury of one’s peers is a bedrock principle of our democratic form of government. It is one of the many checks built into the system to assure that the power of the government is used for right, not to oppress the people. As I write these words, I am confident that there are many people around the world who wished that they lived under a democratic form of government that practiced trial by jury.There will be no jury trials today in China.
We live in a nation that allows its citizens the greatest opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I know of three things that most citizens can do to support their country and this democratic form of government. First, they can vote. They can let their voice be heard in the political arena. Second, they can willingly come forward when called and serve as jurors. Third, they can enlist in the military. To vote, all you have to do is spend some time at your leisure educating yourself on the candidates and/or issues and make an appearance on one day to vote. For jury service, most people in Shelby County are asked to give up no more than five work days in service. This is a great sacrifice of each prospective juror’s time, money and energy. Admittedly, for many it is a great hardship. While recognizing the burden of jury service, one must always keep in mind that on each day a person serves on jury duty, at least one soldier is giving up his or her life to protect and defend the American way of life, its democratic form of government, and, ultimately, the sacred right to trial by jury.

When we consider the burden of jury duty, let us not forget those who have and are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect all of our freedoms, including the right to trial by jury. In addition, jury service has great rewards for those that approach it with an earnest heart. Our system of justice can not function without the input of citizens willing to participate in the process. Citizen participation is what makes us have the greatest system of justice in the world. In most cases, after completing jury service, most jurors walk away with a profound respect for their country and its commitment to the fair and equal treatment of all citizens in the administration of justice. To put it simply, after completing jury service, most jurors have a sense of pride in themselves for doing their duty and in their government for its commitment to seeking justice.

Rightly so. Be proud of your service. As judges who preside over these trials, we salute you.