Thomas Morton

Thomas Morton, (born c. 1590—died c. 1647, Province of Maine [U.S.]), one of the most picturesque of the early British settlers in colonial America, who ridiculed the strict religious tenets of the Pilgrims and the Puritans.

He arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 as one of the owners of the Wollaston Company, which established a settlement at the site of modern Quincy. In 1626, when Wollaston and most of the settlers moved to Virginia, Morton stayed on and took charge of the colony and named it Merry Mount. Inevitably this free-living, prospering, sharp-tongued Anglican conflicted with his pious neighbours. He erected a maypole, encouraged conviviality and merriment, wrote bawdy verse, poked fun at his saintly neighbours, conducted religious services using the Book of Common Prayer, monopolized the beaver trade, and sold firearms to the Indians. The Pilgrims cut down the maypole in 1627, arrested Morton, and exiled him to the Isle of Shoals, whence he escaped to England. He returned within two years and was soon taken into custody again (1630) and his property confiscated. Exiled to England, he collaborated with the enemies of Massachusetts in an attempt to get the charter of the Puritans revoked and wrote an account of the colonies, New English Canaan (1637). On returning to Massachusetts in 1643, he was imprisoned again, fined, and exiled to Maine.

Morton has persisted as the epitome of the anti-Puritan; he appears as a character in a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Maypole of Merrymount,” two novels by John Lothrop Motley, Morton’s Hope (1839) and Merry Mount (1849), and an opera, Merry Mount (1934), by American composer Howard Hanson.