When servant Dorothy Temple claimed her baby daddy had recently been hung, her master was ordered to support her and her “male bastard.” When he refused, he was put under house arrest. More surprisingly are the instances of unwed mothers. Roosevelt) were so humiliated they named the boy “Benoni,” Hebrew for “child of sorrow.” After being found guilty of pre-marital “carnall copulation” Rebecca Alden (daughter of the famous Mayflower Pilgrim John Alden) and her husband Thomas Delano (ancestor of Franklin D. Even celebrity Pilgrim kid Peregrine White (the only child born on the ship), and his wife Sarah were fined after it was figured out they “fornicated” before marriage.
That was the deal with one of the earliest records, in April 1633 when John and Joan Hewes were put in the public stockade after their pre-marital sex was figured out. The first sign of pregnancy usually meant marriage, but if a new couple had a child a little too soon after the wedding, they were punished as retroactive sinners. Not surprisingly, the most frequent Puritan problem involved girls gone wild – who then got pregnant. Single Pilgrim girls were the most vulnerable to sex troubles. As a previous General Society of Mayflower Descendants historian Eugene Aubrey Stratton makes clear through the original research and analysis of his book, Plymouth Colony: Its History and Its People, 1620-1691 (1986), however, ’twas not long before longing appeared. They were so desperately praying for help to survive that the stability provided by their faith in God only emboldened their promise to live as purely as possible.
One finds that the bedraggled band of fifty or so English and Dutch immigrants who got off the Mayflower with fear and malnutrition had little time or inclination for trouble.
Ultimately, it may perhaps prove that the greater the initial repression the greater the eventual expression.īut some of this stuff is enough to crack Plymouth Rock. It’s enough to leave the most heathen of sinners gulping. In them, one finds eye-popping details of every imaginable sexual encounter. Mencken, “is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”Ĭlearly, Mencken never pawed through the court record of Plymouth Colony‘s first generations of Pilgrims.