In They Knew They Were Pilgrims, John Turner turns to Plymouth Colony “as a fresh lens for examining the contested meaning of liberty in early New England” (3). Throughout the book, liberty takes on multiple meanings—Christian liberty, liberty of conscience, political liberty, and liberty of choice. As Turner deftly shows, religious liberty should not really be understood in a given society as either present or absent. It depends on definitions. It is present or absent in multiple ways at once, often under competing meanings that sometimes erupt in violence. When the Pilgrims arrived in the Netherlands, for example, they experienced a form of religious toleration and liberty of conscience that they at first welcomed—since they could find a home there—but which they soon came to see as “both too fragile and too expansive.” Dutch magistrates, who might change their views or be overthrown by the Spanish, tended to defend a range of “private belief and practice, not public worship or dissent.” Yet that range, which enabled the Pilgrims to gather, also seemed to many Pilgrims like too welcoming a platform for “pluralism, libertinism, and licentiousness” (28). Many feared that the Dutch would corrupt their children, and soon a portion of them—slightly more than a hundred—left.

The fate of separatist groups in the Netherlands reveals not only the way that zeal seldom leaves room for compromise (Turner calls English separatists “disunity specialists” [29]) but also how important the particular forms of church discipline and structure could be to individual believers. It is hard to understand what motivated so many English reformers (Pilgrims, puritans, and otherwise) during the seventeenth century without seeing how much ecclesiology factored into their sense of a true church. Every feature of doctrine and discipline was a moral cause, a righteous cause, and the morally righteous asserted the importance of their cause by separating themselves from anyone else who refused to stand up and speak out. When John Robinson, the pastor and leader of the Pilgrims, prohibited his followers from praying and worshiping together with any Christians who remained in the Church of England, William Ames, a leading puritan theologian, called him out for having too strict a position. “Are you more holy than Christ?” he asked (34). Robinson backed down, but the basic impetus remained. In Rhode Island, years later, Roger Williams would follow this separatist zeal to its natural end, refusing to worship with anyone besides his wife, since everyone was too impure.

So, what did these zealous Pilgrims hope to achieve in Plymouth? According to Turner, “The Leiden Pilgrims came to the New World to establish a haven and beacon for separatism, not a bastion of religious toleration and freedom. Their goal was to transplant a congregation, found a prosperous colony, and attract puritans wavering on the threshold of separatism to join them” (118). What they wanted, in other words, was the liberty to practice purity and a purity that would prosper—and both the economic and the religious motives often drove them into curtailing the liberties of others.

Turner's book is particularly good on the slave conditions of New England in general and Plymouth in particular. The stories Turner tells throughout this book are excellent. He focuses the history of the Pilgrims on particular persons—leaders, usually, but also the relatively unknown pulled from an impressive study of the archives. He is not content to speak generally about slavery in Plymouth. He wants to find particular names, particular tales. And so, we hear, for example, about Hope, a Pequot War captive owned by Edward Winslow and sold to John Mainfort in Boston under John Winthrop's direction. Hope “almost certainly died on Barbados” (176), and his story illustrates the unfortunate fate of many Native slaves in New England. So, too, we learn the story of Jether, another “captive Indian boy” passed around among New England worthies—one “among the many hundreds of Native men, women, and children who had surrendered or been captured during the closing months” of King Philip's War (307). Name after name and story after story appear while still hewing to a larger narrative of Plymouth Colony from its origins to its eventual demise and incorporation into Massachusetts Bay.

In pulling these names and stories from the archives, Turner sets accomplishments and achievements next to extreme violence and failure. The Pilgrims in Turner's account turn out to be remarkably human. He neither loves them nor hates them. Instead, he seems to find them fascinating for the very contradictions that defined their course, on the one hand extending forms of political participation further than what existed in England, and on the other hand endorsing forms of slavery and servitude that seemed to trouble the conscience of all too few. In the same way, the Pilgrims and their religious sensibilities could foster “moments of concord and mutual enjoyment” (83) with their Native American allies but could also lead to the ruthless pursuit and massacre of Native American neighbors, often from a rather mercurial interest in their land.

In telling their tale, Turner goes where the evidence takes him and no further, rendering judgments about what actually happened and why based on the best possible accumulation of evidence with a wary eye about how to read the texts. That might not seem extraordinary, since it is, after all, the historian's task. But in the case of the Pilgrims—who have been repeatedly sanctified and demonized for the past two hundred years—it is more extraordinary than it might seem. Turner offers a much more nuanced and balanced reading of the records. This comprehensive, careful, and lively account of their deeds and misdeeds will be the definitive history of the Pilgrims for many years to come.