SOURCE: Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. “Thomas Morton, Historian.” The New England Quarterly L, No. 4 (December 1977): 660-64.

In the following essay, Kupperman contends that though the accuracy of Morton's comments in New English Canaan regarding the Pilgrims' treatment of the Indians have been discounted because of his conflicts with the Pilgrims, careful study of his observations shows them to be similar to those of modern historians and demonstrates that his insights about early New England life should be taken more seriously.

Although the record of English treatment of the American Indians during the earliest years of colonization is dismal, historians have always been glad to point to one bright spot—the record of Plymouth colony. John Demos, the social historian of seventeenth-century Plymouth, writes of the “impressive” record of forty years of “peace, even of amity” between Pilgrims and Indians.¹ Howard Peckham speaks of the Pilgrims as “good neighbors,” because...