The Pilgrims Were English Ethno-Nationalists

America wasn’t ‘founded by immigrants’ but by English settlers who carried their culture across the Atlantic and established a new nation.

fter winning the New York City mayoral election earlier this month, Zohran Mamdani declared “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and as of tonight, led by an immigrant!”

It’s become commonplace among liberals to say things like this. They have gone far beyond the “we’re a nation of immigrants” trope, such that we now routinely hear assertions that “America was founded by immigrants” or “America was built by immigrants.”  

But of course the truth is quite nearly the opposite. America was actually founded and built by seventeenth-century English colonists and settlers who, arriving in a largely depopulated wilderness, were so anxious about retaining their English cultural identity and folkways it would not be too much to call them ethno-nationalists.

This is especially true of the English colonists we most associate with Thanksgiving — the Puritans of New England, or Pilgrims. For decades now American schoolchildren have been given a potted history of the Pilgrims and our early colonial history that goes something like this: Seeking the freedom to worship God according to their conscience, the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in England and landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, almost perishing that first hard winter. But the local natives helped them, Squanto the friendly Indian taught them how to plant corn, and in the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims and the Indians celebrated a great feast of friendship.

It’s not that this narrative is untrue, exactly, just incomplete. By the time the Puritans decided to sail for the New World in 1620, they had already fled religious persecution in England a decade earlier and secured religious freedom in the Netherlands. Once it became clear that King James I was going to continue Queen Elizabeth’s policy of religious persecution of Puritans and other separatists, a group of English Puritans from East Anglia moved to Holland in 1608, settling in the city of Leiden the next year. Leiden was then a growing industrial center where the Puritans were able both to support themselves and worship free from persecution.

But after about a decade in Leiden they began to fear that their situation in Holland was untenable. In addition to economic and political concerns, there was growing anxiety about retaining their English identity and religious traditions in a foreign land. William Bradford, a founder of Plymouth Colony who sailed on the Mayflower, wrote about the “the great licentiousness of youth” in Holland, and decried the “evil examples” and “manifold temptations of the place.” Nathaniel Philbrook, author of the 2006 bestseller on the Pilgrims, Mayflower, has said, “Their biggest concern after a decade in this foreign land was that their children were becoming Dutch.” In addition to losing their Puritan religion, they were afraid they would also gradually lose their English culture.

So the Pilgrims did not sail to America in search of religious liberty, but in search of something more. Edward Winslow, also a founder of the Plymouth Colony, wrote that God had given them “much peace and liberty” in Leiden, and they hoped to find “the like liberty” in the New World.

The “like liberty” they sought was not simply freedom from religious persecution by the state, which they had secured in Holland, but liberty in a place where they could be fully Puritan and fully English, and pass their religious and cultural ways on to their posterity.

This they did with gusto once they were established in New England. The Puritans were not just English, they were self-consciously English, hyper-English. As the historian David Hackett Fischer explains in his magisterial 1989 book Albion’s Seed, the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, being separated from their English homeland by a vast ocean, feared what Cotton Mather called “Criolian degeneracy.” A mood of cultural anxiety persisted in Massachusetts, where the Puritan colonists, fearing the loss of their identity, preserved the folkways of the mother country and in some cases modified or exaggerated them in accordance with Puritan beliefs. For centuries after their arrival in America, they referred to themselves simply as “the English.” Writes Fischer:

Change of any sort seemed to be cultural disintegration. In consequence, the founders of Massachusetts and their descendants for many generations tended to cling to the cultural baggage which they had carried out of England. This mood of cultural conservatism created a curious paradox in colonial history. New settlements tended to remain remarkably old-fashioned in their folkways. They missed the new fads and customs that appeared in the mother country after they were planted. They tended also to preserve cultural dynamics that existed in the hour of their birth. It was as if they were caught in a twist of time, and held in its coils while the rest of the world moved beyond them.

In everything from how they dressed, spoke, recreated, engaged in economic activity, and even how they laid out their villages and settlements, the Puritans of New England reflected not merely English folkways and practices but specifically those of East Anglia, from whence most of the Puritans came in the great migration of the 1630s.

The economy of colonial Massachusetts, for example, was remarkably similar to that of eastern England, consisting of farm towns that mixed animal husbandry and field crops, with commons for pastures and meadows. They did this despite readily available raw resources available for the kind of extractive economies developed by the Dutch in New Amsterdam and the French in Quebec: timber, fur, and fish. It’s not that the Puritans didn’t also deal in these products, but their economy was based on the agrarian ways of eastern England, which they re-created in the New World.

They even reproduced the middling social strata of eastern England from which most of them had come, comprised of the lesser gentry, yeomanry, farmers, artisans and tradesmen. These groups tended to be more numerous in eastern English counties than other parts of the country, and so they were overrepresented in Massachusetts relative to the other colonies and settlements of British America. But rather than mimic the entire social order of their English motherland, the Puritans excluded from Massachusetts extremes of rank, both the aristocracy and the vagrant poor (including convicted felons).

By doing so, writes Fischer, they “deliberately attempted to preserve the system of social ranks which had existed within the small villages of East Anglia … These people lived, worked and worshipped together, in ways that were bound by ancient customs of stratification, which had existed from ‘tyme out of mind’ in East Anglian communities.”

That’s why their form of government at the local level, the famous New England town meeting, was not a Puritan invention for the exigencies of colonial life in the New World. It was an importation from England — again, specifically from East Anglia, where communities had governed themselves through a system of town meetings and elected officials or “selectmen” for centuries. What we often think of as a venerable American tradition that embodied the principles of self-government, including the writing down of constitutions, was in fact an ancient tradition carried from East Anglian communities and transplanted to the newly established towns of Massachusetts.

No wonder then that the settlers of the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies thought of themselves as English — so much so that they sent men back across the Atlantic to fight in the English Civil Wars of the 1640s. A significant part of Cromwell’s army was made up of Puritan colonists from America. Of course they would not call themselves “American” for generations to come, because in their minds they were simply Englishman from across the sea.

As for the first Thanksgiving, which by 1676 had become an annual domestic festival in New England, it wasn’t quite the live-and-let-live multicultural event we were taught in school. As I mentioned above, when the Puritans landed at Plymouth in late 1620 they discovered a mostly depopulated wilderness. The native Wampanoag people of coastal New England had been reduced by the spread of infectious disease in the preceding four years by about 90 percent, from some 20,000 subjects to about a thousand. Their leader, Massasoit, made an alliance with the Plymouth Bay colonists out of necessity, as the Wampanoag were too few to resist the hostile Narragansett to the west and needed an alliance with the newly-arrived Pilgrims.

That alliance lasted for a half-century, but during those decades there was no “assimilation” of the Puritans to Wampanoag ways, or even to the folkways of other British colonists that settled other regions of the Atlantic seaboard. The Puritans were jealous of their East Anglian customs and culture, and they preserved them (in sometimes modified forms) for centuries.

In light of all this, we should of course reject the liberal claim that America was “founded by immigrants.” But we should also reject the claim increasingly heard on the right, that America is a “creedal” nation, not a people but a set of abstract ideas that anyone, from any part of the world, can simply adopt and become American.

That’s not how the Puritans of New England — or the Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Quakers of Pennsylvania — understood themselves and their errand into the wilderness. They did not come here as immigrants but as Englishmen, and the societies they built were self-consciously, exaggeratedly English. The immigrants who arrived later assimilated into a thoroughly English mainstream culture and society that had been modified to the exigencies of life in the New World, and that in time would be called American.

So let’s have no more nonsense about immigrants “founding America” or rapturous declamations about the blending of many different cultures in our founding. The English and the English alone created America, as only they could have done. Four centuries later, we are still profoundly indebted to the English folkways that first shaped and later defined our distinct American culture and way of life. It is our sacred patrimony, for which we Americans should be profoundly grateful this Thanksgiving.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/11/26/the-pilgrims-were-english-ethno-nationalists