Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock.(Book Review)

Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. John Seelye. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock is John Seelye's intellectual history of this mythical landing place. As it was for Michael Kamman in Mystic Chords of Memory, the past for Seelye, who teaches American literature at the University of Florida, is a tool of the ever-changing present. Plymouth Rock, therefore, is an idea as much as it is a boulder. His exhaustive text, 645 pages, often gets away from the Rock, even from Plymouth, because the story he tells is one of a shifting New England as the region's brightest minds and most eloquent speakers fought to forge a regional identity at a time when political and social forces were chipping away at New England's, or more closely, Massachusetts's, self-identified moral supremacy. The reader must be willing to go on this meticulous journey with Seelye. He is in no hurry to get from the late eighteenth century to 1920, the tercentenary of the Pilgrim's landing.

In his pursuit of the meaning of the rock, Seelye traces nearly a century and a half of Forefathers' Day speeches about the landing and the meaning of the Pilgrims' struggle in which speakers often employed the Rock as a metaphor and physical fact. Orators, especially Daniel Webster, claimed their fame speaking on, both literally and figuratively, the boulder. During the turbulent Jacksonian Era, the political and moral center of the nation strayed from New England. Men like Webster evoked the moral sensibility and stoicism of the Pilgrims to reassert the region's primacy, a dominance that even Seelye sometimes seems to affirm. Later, abolitionists read the rock as a symbol of breaking from the tyranny and yoke of oppression and discrimination of the English of the seventeenth century. After helping to free the slaves of the South, the rock became an icon of muscular Christianity and westward expansion. And in the twentieth century, the freedom-loving spirit of ...