In this chapter, the mythology of the redeemer nation is explained with reference to seventeenth-century Puritan sermons, poetry and prose. Key writers here are William reinterpretation of the nation's exceptional destiny is used to focus a discussion of the role of exceptionalism in the rhetoric of the Revolutionary period. Immigration There is a key difference between the Puritan colonies at Boston and at Plymouth in terms of their mission in the New World. Although both colonies were settled

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... by members of the Congregationalist church, John Winthrop and the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Company were "non-Separating" Congregationalists whilst William Bradford and the settlers at Plymouth were "Separating" Congregationalists. What this meant was that the Separatists intended to make a permanent and lasting colony in the New World rather than a temporary refuge from the difficulties and persecutions they had endured in Europe. Bradford had no intention of developing a perfectly reformed church, to be a model to the imperfectly reformed churches of England. And so, when members of the Plymouth church make reference to Old Testament precedent in describing aspects of their experience in the New World, this reference is quite different in tone to that used by the Massachusetts colonists who represented themselves as necessarily repeating the sacred history of the Israelites. In his history Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford describes their safe arrival at Cape Cod only to be confronted by an all-encompassing wilderness: 1 Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah [the peak from which Moses saw Canaan] to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects". 1 Bradford certainly believed that God watched over the Plymouth settlers and that God motivated the migration but he did not present the settlement as a necessary stage in salvation history, nor did he extrapolate from scripture a future destiny for the colony. Robert Cushman, one of the founders of Plymouth, gives extensive reasons for the fundamental differences between the removal of the Jews, described in the Bible, and seventeenth-century New World migration. First, he argues, the means by which men are called upon to migrate are very different: in biblical times, God summoned men by dreams, visions, predictions to travel from country to country and town to town according to the divine will but now the ordinary examples of scripture, "reasonable and rightly understood and applied" call and direct the migrants. 2 More significantly from the point of view of exceptionalism, Cushman argues that New England is fundamentally unlike Canaan, the promised land given by God to the Jews. Canaan was ... legally holy and appropriated unto a holy people, the seed of Abraham, in which they dwelt securely, and had their days prolonged, it being by an immediate voice said, that he (the Lord) gave it them as a land of rest after their weary travels, and a type of eternal rest in heaven. 3