A revelatory deep history of American division, through the prism of the two ships whose widespread use to define that division has been lost to memory but whose legacy endures

In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America’s strife could be traced back all the way to the arrival of two ships less than a year apart—the ship that brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, bringing the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620. Frederick Douglass used the two ships to frame the conflict in four major speeches, and he was hardly alone.

In a deeper sense, David S. Reynolds shows us in this magnificent book, those two ships stood for two quite distinct realities that were born in conflict in England and brought to America. The names for the two sides of that conflict, in both countries, were the Puritans and the Cavaliers, names born in the bloodshed of the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell’s coup d’etat over Charles I and Charles II’s Restoration. The Virginia colony, founded by royalists, was steeped in the ideas of divine right, which flowed down in rigid patriarchal hierarchies. Plymouth Colony was founded by dissenters to the King and his church, who, while hardly perfect, carried the seeds of a more egalitarian political vision.

Two Ships is a story of ideas and their uses, of the way ideas become myths and then become weaponized, and then discarded. These two ships of 1619 and 1620 largely lay dormant for two hundred years, until they erupted into the battle of images and words that marked the roiling fight over slavery that ultimately led to war. There was a long stretch of time in America, Reynolds shows, when everyone knew what Cavaliers and Puritans meant, who was who, and what the stakes were. It was North versus South, but more deeply, it was about whether social hierarchy was the natural order of things. Both words were used as both praise and epithet.

But then, after Reconstruction ended and America descended into the long night of Jim Crow, the metaphor of the two ships went to sleep as well. The meaning of the Mayflower and of Thanksgiving changed as they became mainstream ideas nationwide, which is to say touchstones of white culture. If their status as cultural touchpoints before the Civil War tells us something vital about the dynamics of that conflict, their forgetting afterward tells us much about why the road to true equality has proved so stony. By dredging up these two ships, the great David S. Reynolds gives us a chance to make the same use of them that Frederick Douglass and his contemporaries did—to challenge us and to give us hope that we are up to the task.