Plymouth and Jamestown: American Ideologies in Current Society

The American beliefs that many United States citizens have in current day are not too far off to the ideologies that both Smith and Bradford had back in the early 1600s. The ideologies Smith had were more towards determination for any task at hand, while Bradford was a more religious man than anything else. The reason this proves to be true is because a big reason the U.S. is like how it is today is because it was labeled as a land of opportunity. A large majority of the people that immigrated to the states back then were looking for a chance in a change of their current lifestyle, whether it be for a better job or for land, or to have the freedom of religion that not a lot of countries at the time had. These beliefs are shared with many people in current time as a way of living especially with the religion aspect of Bradford’s ideas.

John Smith’s ideology was determination and good leadership as it describes him on page 64 General History of Virginia, “Smith helped to obtain food, enforce discipline, and deal with the local Native Americans”. This brought a measure of order to the loose pilgrims and his arrangements with the Indians prevented starvation and his dispersal of the state from Jamestown brought down the amount of deaths. He was more of a strict leader because he knew he needed the men in Jamestown to be strong-willed in order to survive. Numerous colonists died early on in Jamestown in light of their relations with the Native Americans, the environment and because the pilgrims did not know how to survive on their own. An example from the text to back this statement up would be on page 67 from the same source as before, “our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades so strained and bruised us and our continual labor in the extremity of the heat had so weakened us”. Another quote that could be used to support this claim is from page 67 also proclaiming, “by the unskillful presumption of our ignorant transporters that understood not at all what they undertook”.

The beliefs that Bradford had were more or less revolving around the idea of God having everything under control and man should be dependent on God entirely for salvation. An example for this would be on page 72 from of Plymouth, “So they committed themselves to the will of God and resolved to proceed”. Which is pretty much showing that they put all of their faith into God in hopes that it would lead them to success entirely off of praying. I believe this would be a reason that they had such a rough start since they put all of their faith into God when in reality they should’ve also believed in their own willpower. Another example from the text is also on page 72 “being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven”. This is why when the pilgrims landed in Plymouth, many of them were exhausted from disease and the lack of food aboard. The journey was very lengthy and they were low on supplies, and over the course of the winter the colony lost almost half of their people due to disease and starvation.

The ideology that many Americans share today are both similar to Smith’s and Bradford’s in that citizens usually either have determination or are religious or both. Using the text to support the claim that they had determination, on page 73 of the same source, “ without any grudging in the least, showing their true love unto their friends and brethren”. Deciphering this quote will show you that even through the hardships they still had teamwork to make their way past those struggles. The reason that this is relevant to today's society is because people learned from Plymouth and Jamestown and take away the knowledge from that. The information taken from those two events are interwoven in the day to day life of Americans.

This will be a brief summary of the arguments written throughout this essay. The most important piece of this was the thesis where it talks about how the ideologies that both Smith and Bradford had back in the early 1600s were similar to present day America. This is proven to be correct from the fact that without the determination that people have, nothing could be accomplished seeing as no one can complete everything by themselves and need teamwork to do tasks. All in all, the nature of their ideologies still reside in present day America.