The earliest permanent English settlements in what was to become the United States gave us two skeins that twist together throughout our history. The settlers of Jamestown, begun in 1607, by and large wanted to reap the riches of the new world. The Plymouth colonists, settling in 1620, for the most part hoped for a more spiritual harvest. Both included the wise and the foolish, the selfish and the generous.

The Jamestown settlers found that one did not reap riches as automatically as they envisioned. They went through a starving time as the wilderness taught its own brutal lessons. Eventually, the colonists began importing slaves, a practice that haunts us to this day. One can see the seeds of slavery—the desire to want wealth so much as to enslave fellow humans to obtain it for their masters—in the Jamestown settlement. Tobacco would became a cash crop, a crop which has no real value in meeting human need but requires intense labor.

This early settlement became Virginia and gave us founding fathers like George Washington, who courageously led us to victory in the war for American independence, and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. This document declared that all men were created equal, but both Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.

The Plymouth story has been told so many times that it has become a caricature of its original. We have gone from hero worship of the sober pilgrims to outright scorn, reminded today of the white man’s selfish exploitation of the native American. The New England Puritans have a bad reputation: forbidding games, requiring a tedious Sabbath, finally, burning women they claimed were witches.

Neither Jamestown nor Plymouth was an Eden on earth, but the coming to America of religious refugees, which the pilgrims were, foretold a nation which would grow strong by accepting “the wretched refuse” of the old world and giving these castoffs opportunity. New England, with all its faults, developed some of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world. New England also was a seed bed for the movement to abolish slavery.

The strands of Jamestown and Plymouth are woven together in our history, from the hurts of raw greed  to the altruistic impulses that guide our attempts to help others.

We still make those choices today