How the Pilgrims Redefined What It Means to Move Across the World

On a sandy stretch of land along Massachusetts Bay, people pretending to be my ancestors dress in antiquated clothing and welcome visitors into their rude wooden huts. They call this tourist trap “Plimoth,” misspelling it for added authenticity. None of the structures are original; the buildings are miles distant from the historic site they imaginatively re-create. As a child, I was impressed with the smoke and the sparks of the blacksmith’s forge, the weathered grays of the thatched and shingled roofs, and the reenactors gamely sticking to their seventeenth-century parts.

As clever as the reenactors were, though, the most important truth about Plimoth wasn’t something you could learn on the tour. The English village at Plymouth was reconstructed to mark the first spot in New England where Europeans placed a permanent settlement, a monument to a fixed population.

But what the reenactors cosplaying Pilgrims don’t tell you is that of the millions of Americans who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, almost none of them live anywhere nearby. The real significance of Plymouth is captured not by the name of the town but by the name applied to the separatists who landed there. They were called Pilgrims because they had chosen to set out on a journey, a remarkable act for their day and age.

The Pilgrims first left their homes in Nottinghamshire, crossing the English Channel to Leiden, in Holland, and then, in 1620, moved again, this time crossing an entire ocean and settling in Plymouth. Over the next two decades, tens of thousands of other Puritans would follow them, in a movement known to historians as the Great Migration. But at the time they left their homes, there was nothing great about migration. In fact, moving from one place to another was downright suspicious.

In early-modern England, every person had a proper place, tied to their land, their employment, and their family. Families were responsible for the care of their members, and if they were unable to provide for them, communities assumed the burden. To move away from home was to abandon your responsibilities and, worse yet, to challenge the proper order of society. But by the sixteenth century, the burgeoning population had produced a glut of labor in rural areas, forcing landless workers to search for seasonal work elsewhere or to find some other means of sustenance. Most migration in England had been local; now growing numbers of destitute laborers journeyed far from home, many landing in towns and cities.

These masterless men, unmoored from patriarchy and place, didn’t fit into the carefully ordered hierarchies of English society. Settled populations saw them as a direct threat to public order. Migration was disreputable, a course pursued only in desperation. “Vagrants, begone!” enjoined a London schoolboy in a 1675 oration, lamenting “that such a verminous brood should swarm and poyson our streets.”

A new and sinister word entered the English language to describe this mobile vulgus, or moving crowd—this dangerously rootless mass of ordinary people, with its quicksilver moods, which had dared to leave its proper place. They were known as the “mobile,” and then the slang of fashionable Londoners contracted that into the “mob.” The authorities responded to the tide of vagrancy with harsh laws, to push migrants back into their proper spots in the social order. Men caught far from their homes could be put to work, or else jailed, impressed into the navy, or transported to the colonies. Women and children were to be returned to their husbands and fathers, or to the places of their birth.

So, as the seventeenth century dawned, and some Puritans contemplated leaving their homes and their communities for a new world, they were uneasy. English Protestants took a dim view of itinerancy, associating it with Catholic pilgrimages and urging instead a spiritual (and literal) stillness. Puritans were already regarded as slightly suspect for their habit of gadding about to nearby towns to listen to prominent preachers and mix with like-minded reformers. Now they were planning to migrate not just across a county for a Sunday afternoon but across an ocean for good. How could they pursue their project of creating godly communities, forged with unity and cohesion and love, by abandoning the places to which they belonged? How could they claim to be a holy congregation, when they behaved like a mob of shiftless vagabonds? What was godly about leaving home? To answer those questions, Puritans created, as the historian Scott McDermott has argued in his book, The Puritan Ideology of Mobility, a whole new way of thinking

In 1630, a fleet of eleven ships set sail for Massachusetts Bay, led by John Winthrop. The sermon he famously delivered on the voyage is best known today for likening the Puritan enterprise to a city upon a hill, subject to the scrutiny of the world. But while that phrase is often invoked, the core message of the sermon has largely been lost. “Wee must be knit together, in this worke, as one man,” Winthrop told the colonists, or else all would witness their failure. For Winthrop, as for many other Puritans, being “as one man” was more than a figure of speech. If communities were corporate bodies, they reasoned, then they should obey the same principles as actual, non-metaphorical bodies. Galenic medicine taught that a human body needed to be properly proportioned, its humors held in balance. Communities, it followed, likewise required careful tending. “There is noe body but consists of partes and that which knitts these partes together, giues the body its perfection,” Winthrop explained. Love had knit Christ and his church into one body, and now it would knit the colonists together in their new project.

Here was an answer to the critics who took the Puritans leaving their proper place as a confession of error and inadequacy. They were not fleeing England but choosing to depart, because England had grown disordered and distempered. In their new colony, they could produce a properly balanced body politic, to serve as a model for restoring England’s health. Migrating across the Atlantic did not mean abandoning their responsibilities like impecunious vagrants; in Winthrop’s telling, migration was a fulfillment of their duty as Christians, an act of love and caring. They were not a mob, after all, but a cohesive congregation. Leaving their established homes behind and moving someplace new was not just a respectable behavior but a desirable one. Mobility was good. Or, at least, this particular act of mobility.

Winthrop intended to justify his own departure from England—and the broader Great Migration of Puritans to Massachusetts Bay that brought twenty thousand people across the ocean between 1620 and 1640—as an exceptional circumstance. He had no desire to license people to pick up and leave whenever they pleased; the whole point of the migration was to create a healthy, cohesive body and to preserve its integrity. He imagined a new England, just as sedentary and stable as the old. But revolutionary ideas have a habit of twisting back upon their authors in ways they least expect. Just a few years later, when the prominent minister Thomas Hooker requested permission to relocate with his congregation from Massachusetts to what would become Connecticut, Winthrop was distinctly unamused. “They ought not to departe from vs,” he complained, “be-inge knitt to vs in one bodye.” Here was the same objection raised against Winthrop leaving England, now employed by Winthrop to object to Hooker leaving Massachusetts.

But Hooker turned Winthrop’s logic against him. Leaving a community, he later explained, needn’t be treated as an extraordinary act, an attack on social cohesion. All sorts of people left their communities. “Solomon sent ships to Ophir, which returned not by the space of some years,” he wrote. “All states may be compelled to send some men to Sea for trafick; sometimes by way of just war, and yet no prejudice done to any rule of Christ, or Church-order in that case.”

Hooker, of course, wasn’t proposing to take a little cruise down to Ophir. He was moving away for good. But, he insisted, the basic logic held. If people could depart on a voyage because it served the greater good, then “upon the same ground the Church may send out some…to begin plantations, in case the body require it.” And, as McDermott argues, there were many reasons for Hooker to believe that the body required it. His community felt squeezed for resources, without enough land to farm or to graze its cattle. Hooker himself chafed under Winthrop’s autocratic approach to governance, doubting whether the reign of a single magistrate was compatible with the rule of law. The body politic was again distempered; setting out for Connecticut was a means of bringing it back into balance.

Entirely against his will, Winthrop had conferred upon the people of Massachusetts a profound right: the freedom to leave. If moving from England to Boston could be godly, then so could moving from Boston to Ipswich, or to Hartford. The colonists he’d settled refused to stay put. In 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties codified this understanding into law, promising that every man “shall have free liberty…to remove both himself and his family at their pleasure” from the colony. That might not sound like much: If you don’t like it, you can leave. But it was likely the first time anywhere in the world that this individual freedom was put into writing and defined as a fundamental right.

The Puritans were hardly the first to conceive of the freedom of movement as a central human liberty. In classical times, Epictetus imagined a slave envisioning his freedom with the declaration “I go where I will.” But a philosophical right was not the same as a legal one. While the laws of some nations acknowledged a right to depart, it was at best a qualified right—usually recognized only negatively, as in England, by the designation of large categories of individuals who required affirmative permission to leave the state. As the European powers sent forth their colonial tendrils, trading and settling wherever they desired, though, their theorists also rushed to discover a moral right to migration, a liberty for European empires to intrude wherever they liked, grounded in natural law. Francisco de Vitoria declared that his fellow Spaniards had “a right to travel into the lands in question and to sojourn there.” Hugo Grotius announced that the Dutch “have the right to sail to the East Indies, as they are now doing.” These, however, were rights that served the interests of the state. In Massachusetts, the Body of Liberties translated the idea of a national right to intrude into a personal, individual liberty—not a right asserted by the power of the state, but a right asserted against the power of the state. A resident of Massachusetts could just pick up and go whenever he pleased, and no one could stop him.

No longer would people belong to a place simply because they had been born to it. And if people could leave whenever they chose, then the decision to remain became an equally active choice. Though, in many ways, the freedom to leave would prove to be the foundational American liberty, in early colonial Massachusetts it had more immediate effects. During the seventeenth century, as England was torn apart by bouts of civil war, the Bay Colony remained remarkably cohesive. Massachusetts had more than its share of struggles over politics, ideology, theology, and scarce resources, but it also had a means of resolving them. The freedom to leave provided a safety valve, bleeding off the pressure of open conflict. If people were discontented with their own community, they could either relocate or decide that, on the whole, they’d prefer to stay put despite their dissatisfactions. Either way, putting the decision into the hands of an individual transformed them from passive victims of fate into active agents of their own destinies.

Mobility also opened the door of economic opportunity. In new towns, there were fortunes to be made by the rich and well connected, but even those who arrived as indentured servants often succeeded in carving out farms of their own. As families of settlers came off the boats during the Great Migration, they paused in the port towns and then set out to join in the division of Massachusetts’s abundant land, there for the taking just as swiftly as its Native inhabitants could be dispossessed. They seized on their freedom to move toward opportunity. But the right to leave, they soon discovered, is not the same as the right to belong.

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From Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Appelbaum. Copyright © 2025. Available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.