Was the Mayflower and the Pilgrims just a made up Fairy-Tale?

Question

If they came here to escape the King why did we have to fight for independence?

I asked this question earlier and the answers I got said nothing of the Mayflower and people leaving for religous freedom............so is it all made up about the Pilgrims?

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AsZfFEzlSDR09hzF.B5Cuczsy6IX?qid=20061009113548AAEYIwb

Answer 1

no

Answer 2

The Pilgrims were a group of people who settled first in Holland where they were given religious freedom. The problem was their kids were growing up Dutch instead of English. The Pilgrims decided to move to the new world so they could build an English community with religious freedom. This was in 1620.

By the 1770s the Pilgrims who came here were all dead and gone and even their children were. The colonies were showing a profit and enriching England, but the colonists wanted more. They wanted to be represented in the English government and actually have a say in what taxes were levied on them. This was denied them.

The English government was both greedy and smart. They wanted the colonies to stay colonies so they sent military to occupy them. They also wanted the American colonies to pay for the military that was being sent to occupy them--and a little more for the trouble.

The colonists objected. The objection got ignored. Shots were fired. It turned into war.

Relgious freedom was NOT an issue in the Revolutionary War. It was over the right to representation in the government that taxed them. IF the American colonies had been granted representation and given a way to become an equal voting part of the British Empire, we'd still be British citizens.

Answer 3

Escape from the King? No.

About half the people on the Mayflower were coming here for religious freedom and to escape from the religious freedoms of the Netherlands. Sounds ironic huh. A large group of separatists moved to Leyden - for religious freedom - netherlands was more free than England. But then they worried about thier kids growing up in such a free place, why, their children might leave THEIR church!!! lol SO they, along with a few separatis still living in England came to America.

They only made up half of the people on the Mayflower however. The rest were the crew and many other passengers who were simply adventurers. People trying to make their fortunes in the New world. One of whom, Stephen Hopkins, was on his SECOND trip to the Americas. The first ended with a shipwreck and being stranded in Virginia for almost 2 years.

So, no its not a fairy, tale - look it up if you think it was. They ahve these things called BOOKS that you can READ and find all kinds of stuff in.

:-P

Answer 4

The pilgrims came to the new world to escape the church, not the king. They wanted to worship in their own way. Of course, they didn't want anyone worshiping any other way than their own once they got here, but that's just human nature. My understanding is that they still felt they were loyal subjects of the english king. The fight for independence came about in the next century, when England realized that the colonies could produce quite of lot of raw material - timber, cotton, other textiles, fur, etc. The king ordered that the colonists could trade only with England, not other countries, and then only on terms very favorable with England. After trying to milk the colonies in this manner, the colonists revolted. But this was something like 150 years after the Pilgrims landed.

Answer 5

You mean the people leaving for religious freedom being made up...or the whole thing??? The settlers from the Mayflower signed a document called the Mayflower Compact - "to establish a civil government based upon a majoritarian model and to proclaim the settlers' allegiance to the king."

I looked it up on Wikipedia, hope it helps! They had to sign a Compact with the English government in order to survive in the "New World" I think? =)

Answer 6

Of the course the Separatists, as they called themselves, came here to find a place to worship God free of political interference. But the PC police have deleted any mention of non-Muslim religions in today's classrooms, so naturally you won't hear about that. It may as well be a myth. But the War of Independence was fought over mainly economic issues. The Crown regarded its colonies as a source of raw materials to be shipped to England, made into finished goods and sold back to us at huge profits. This is called "mercantilism". And the British wanted to ship everything in their own ships - both ways. Not in American ships. And then tax the living crap out of everything they could think to tax. So Americans were getting screwed coming and going. On top of everything, the British officials sent over as governors and bureaucrats were for the most part corrupt and incompetent. It came as a great shock to the British upper class that Americans were superior to them in every way. We weren't the peasant-types that they were used to kicking around back home. Americans of that day had an incredible optimism that permeated every level of society, from the poorest to the richest. Eager to make money and get ahead. Impatient. Highly innovative. And ruthless. The poorest man in America saw himself as the equal of anybody, anywhere. The Brits were dumbfounded. We still basically have a class-free society. Anybody can make it if they try. That was never the case in Great Britain. Never will be.

Answer 7

No.it's true.It's just not emphasized enough.Perhaps it has lost it's aura because of the fact that the Pilgrims were running away from government,not to it.

Answer 8

No, there was an actual Mayflower and pilgrims. They set up a colony here.

Here's the story from everyone's favorite historian, Rush Limbaugh:

The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century (that's the 1600s for those of you in Rio Linda, California). The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs.

A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community. After eleven years, about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where they would certainly face hardships, but could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences.

On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible.

The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.

But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford's detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves.


And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims – including Bradford's own wife – died of either starvation, sickness or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats. Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper!

This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments.

Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.

They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well. Nobody owned anything. They just had a share in it. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the '60s and '70s out in California – and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.

Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.

That's right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn't work! Surprise, surprise, huh? What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation!


But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years – trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it – the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild's history lesson If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.

"The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years...that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God," Bradford wrote. "For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense...that was thought injustice."

Why should you work for other people when you can't work for yourself? What's the point?

Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford's community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result?


"This had very good success," wrote Bradford, "for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been." Bradford doesn't sound like much of a Clintonite, does he? Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes. Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph's suggestion (Gen 41:34), Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the "seven years of plenty" and the "Earth brought forth in heaps." (Gen. 41:47)

In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves.

Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you're laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school.

So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the "Great Puritan Migration."