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Authors
William Bradford (1590-1657)
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Born in Yorkshire, England, William Bradford was one of the first "pilgrims" to sail across the Atlantic on the Mayflower and settle in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As a teenager Bradford left his family home for Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, where he joined a small community of religious believers who had "separated" from the Church of England. Because English law considered it an act of treason to choose a "particular" over the "national" church, the Scrooby community moved: first to Holland, then to the New World. Bradford was elected governor of the new colony, a position he held until the last five years of his life. He composed two History volumes, the first of which was preserved in the Plymouth church records, the second of which was considered lost until located in the bishop of London's home. The latter manuscript was published in 1856 and returned to the United States by ecclesiastical decree in 1897, where it was deposited in the State House in Boston.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1630-50) is a long and painstaking account of the small settlement at Plymouth and the much larger colonization at Massachusetts Bay ten years later. But Bradford's history is no chronicle, not a mere sequence of "and then, and then" observations and remembrances. He thinks of these events as having a shape and a great overriding purpose.
1. Can you describe the shape and purpose that Bradford sees in the events of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay? At what moments in his account do you see Bradford taking pains to find and explain a reason, and a direction, for various events between 1620 and 1640?
2. In seventeenth-century Puritan thought, prosperity was a mixed blessing, even a paradox. If the colony prospered, and if individuals within the congregations fared well materially, such good fortune could signify righteousness and divine favor; but these colonists took seriously the warnings in the Gospels about the near impossibility of rich people entering Heaven. Bradford sounds elegiac in his account (Book II, Chapter XXII) of the colony growing prosperous and dispersing. The colony has succeeded and is spreading inland--so how can we account for Bradford's melancholy mood?
