Operation AXIOM

Three hundred ninety-five years ago to the day, 21 December 1620, the Brownist Separatist colonists rightly revered in American history as "the Pilgrims" came ashore from the Mayflower at Plymouth, Massachusetts, to the Plymouth Bay Colony, or New Plymouth. The Pilgrims were not the first New World colonists in what is today the United States: the Spanish settlement at today's Saint Augustine, Florida had been established in 1565. They weren't even the first English colonists: Jamestown & Hampton, in Virginia, had been settled in 1607 & 1610, respectively. No, what set the Pilgrims apart was their motive: the free exercise of religion. As non-conforming Dissenters who defied the Act of Uniformity, the Brownists were persecuted by the Anglican Church almost as fiercely as were Catholics in Elizabethan & then Jacobean England. They had previously found religious refuge in the Dutch Republic (itself still embroiled in the Eighty Tears' War against the Habsburg monarchies of both the Spanish Empire & the Holy Roman Empire), but feared the loss of cultural identity as they, & especially their children, were being assimilated into Dutch society.

In the twenty-first century, the self-proclaimed "smart" people look down their noses at the free exercise of religion. (I use that phrase because those are the words of Amendment I of the United States Constitution, contrary to President Obama's & Secretary Clinton's claims that Americans enjoy only the "freedom to worship".) This was no fit of pique by the Pilgrims, no refusal to "play nice" with others. Crossing the Atlantic in the early seventeenth century was not a lark, & there was nothing easy about establishing an entirely new settlement out of the North American wilderness, especially not beginning in the teeth of a New England winter. Almost half of the original colonists died that first winter. But it is not just their determination to honor God as their consciences demanded that has endeared the Pilgrims to generations of patriots, no. A month before the landing at Plymouth, as the Mayflower sat off of today's Provincetown, Massachusetts, the colonists drafted & signed the Mayflower Compact, another in the link of governing documents that inspired our great republic's foundational charters—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation & Perpetual Union, the aforementioned Constitution. We honor the Pilgrims because in so many ways they were the model for the Framers of the Revolutionary era, the men who first secured for us the blessings of liberty, not quite two centuries before we were born.

The Mayflower Pilgrims landed at Plymouth (maybe, but probably not at Plymouth Rock, of which they made no mention) on 21 December 1620, three hundred ninety-five years ago today.