William Bradford
Bradford / Biography Notes
Was a religious separatist = PILGRIM
Sailed on the Mayflower
Was supposed to go to Virginia
Ended up at Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Helped to create the Mayflower compact = the first effort to establish formal self-government in the New World
Helped to explore the coast
Landed at Plymouth Rock
Eventually became the Pilgrim Governor of Plymouth
Lived to see the Pilgrim Ideal weaken
Carefully studied the Bible
Bible references / allusions echo through his history of Plymouth Plantation
Began history of Plymouth Plantation in 1630
Finally published in 1856
Saw the Separatists as God’s elect = as a chosen people
Believed that Quakers and Indians were instruments of the “Antichrist”
Believed in providences = divine interventions
Bradford / Reading Notes
A non-fiction historical account
Original document
See the summaries in the “Colonial Introduction” and in the “Bradford Introduction”
Reasons for going to America
Biblical origin of the name “Pilgrim”
Four “providences”= divine interventions in the affairs of men
The death of a boorish seaman
The man overboard
The wind coming up to get them out of the shoals
Obtaining seed for next year’s planting
First reference to Indians
Understanding the reasons for the Mayflower compact
Information about Thomas Morton
Information about Roger Williams
Military agreement between the Pilgrims and Puritans
Bradford / Historical Facts
1.) Bradford gave several reasons for the Pilgrims’ decision to migrate to the New World:
Fear that renewed war between the Spanish and the Dutch would result in a Spanish victory and great suffering for Protestants living in the conquered Netherlands
Belief that scandal and dissension, which had marred the unity of other Protestant groups in the Netherlands, might spread to them and pollute them
Concern over the shrinking of the Pilgrim congregation, with the death and aging of many of the original members, and belief that if their diminished group remained in the Netherlands, it would be absorbed by the dominant Dutch culture and religion—the eventual fate of every other English Separatist group that chose to remain in Dutch exile
Economic hardships that had forced some to abandon the group in the Netherlands and that created special difficulties for younger members of the congregation
The lure of licentious Dutch life that threatened to subvert Separatist youths
The desire to convert New World heathens to Christianity
The belief that Christ, scorning the sinful Old World, would make the New World the site of his second coming
2.) In spite of its place in American history, the Plymouth settlement was in many respects a failure. Unlike Boston, it lacked a deep-water harbor suitable for sea-going vessels. It had not river that led into the interior and gave easy access to the Indians and the fur trade. And the farm land around Plymouth was poor, supporting little more than subsistence farming—partly because the soil was thin and rocky and partly because the Indians of the region had exhausted the soil by their continuous growing of corn.
3.) Bradford’s words may be seen as reluctant acknowledgement that the Pilgrims erred in selecting Plymouth as their settlement site. Such an error is significant to a people who yearned for confirmation of their belief that they were directed by God to establish a flourishing New Jerusalem in America.
4.) Historians have long recognized that the Pilgrim Colony was more democratic than the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. The right to vote, for example, was less restricted at Plymouth than at Boston. Nonetheless, Bradford and the other leaders of the Plymouth colony, like most Christians of their day, believed that God had set some men over others and that each should serve in his ordered place.
Bradford / Other Literature
1.) Bradford’s history also follows the patterns and conventions of Renaissance travel literature in describing:
The fierce storms of an ocean voyage
The outbreak of dissension among the voyagers
The confrontation with strange peoples
The settlers’ struggles to survive in a hostile land
2.) The myth making efforts that other cultures applied to the creation of epics were applied by Pilgrims and Puritans to the writing of history. Like traditional Old World epics, Bradford’s history:
Explains the origins of a people
Describes their wanderings, struggles, and triumphs
Emphasizes the power and cruelty of their enemies
Demonstrates the superiority and eventual triumphs of a people who are oppressed and suffering
3.) The Plymouth colonies are the subject of numerous American myths and folk tales the describe such events as the landing on Plymouth Rock, the first planting of corn, the first Thanksgiving, and the courtship of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. Such myths and legends rose and became important in American culture and they:
Grew with the surge of patriotism that came with the American revolution
Spread widely with the beginning of mass journalism and the popular, illustrated press in the 19th century America
Evoked such literary works as “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858), which Longfellow began in 1857, shortly after reading the first complete edition of Bradford’s history (published in 1856)
Helped to unify a nation of increasingly diversified people
4.) Compare Bradford’s description of the events at Merry Mount with the descriptions written by Thomas Morton and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Bradford / Textual History
1.) Bradford gave reasons to explain why he wrote his history of Plymouth:
To record the experiences of the Pilgrims and how the magnitude of their achievement
To identify God’s grand design for the Pilgrim saints and confirm their place among the elect
To justify the acts of the Pilgrims and demonstrate the wisdom of the course they had chosen, thus answering complaints made by investors and other critics who charged that the Plymouth colonists failed to pay their debts and practiced false religion
To discourage the dispersal and dissolution of the “Pilgrim family” gathered at Plymouth by reasserting unifying ideals of the first settlers, the “old comers”
To show “new comers” to Plymouth the debt owed to God for preserving the first settlers
2.) Bradford did not begin writing his history of Plymouth until 10 years after it was settled. It is noteworthy that in the same year, 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established at Boston, a few miles to the north of Plymouth, and the Puritan “Great Migration,” the largest colonizing effort in the history of the English people, was well under way. There is the suggestion that Bradford began to write the story of the small Plymouth Colony because he wanted to establish its place in world history before it was overshadowed by the Mass. Bay Colony to the north.
3.) An odd history of the manuscript of “Of Plymouth Plantation”:
Written from 1630 - 1650
Descent to Bradford’s heirs after his death
Deposit in the Old South Church in Boston around 1728
Disappearance at the end of the 18th century, probably during the British occupation of Boston during the revolution
Discovery in the library of the Bishop of London in 1855
First publication in complete form in 1856
Return to America in 1897 and its deposit in the Massachusetts State Library in the Boston State House
4.) Bradford’s text has three AIMS (purposes, intentions, etc.):
It serves as a MODEL for the kind of theologically based government the Separatists tried.
It attempts to provide a coherent and accurate HISTORY of the founding of Plymouth at a time when thousands of Puritans (who were Congregationalists and not Separatists) were migrating to New England and imperiling the experiment and its role in the English Reformation.
Bradford’s insistence on the role of piety or faith even in the face of doubt.
The concept of Providence, the belief that God’s plan is present in all action, history, and events.
The reality that it is impossible for humans who live in the world to know God and understand his signs, no matter the extent of their faith.
Bradford / Writing Techniques
1.) Throughout his history, Bradford employs images of suffering in describing the Separatists and he often refers to them as “poor”:
Poor and peaceable souls
Poor people in their sickness
Poor people’s present condition
A great mercy to his poor people
Entertained according to their poor ability
He does this because it:
Conveys his sense of the Pilgrims’ isolation and vulnerability
Reveals his belief that the physical dangers experienced by the Pilgrims were emblems of the spiritual dangers that threatened them
Helped to explain why he and other Pilgrim leaders felt so strongly the need to maintain group unity and cohesion, even at the expense of personal liberty
Or are they merely rhetorical flourishes?
2.) It is
likely that Bradford adopted a plain style not merely for its adherence to
Puritan esthetics but also as a conscious, rhetorical device to suggest that he
himself was truthful, sincere, and guileless
3.) Bradford was not the objective historian of the 18th century. Writing in the 17th century, he followed an earlier tradition and wrote as both a recorder of events and as a hagiographer, commenting and glorifying the saintly lives of the Plymouth Pilgrims:
He selected details and episodes that would show divine purpose and emphasize the Pilgrims’ importance and virtue
He recorded the presence of God, reported providences, and emphasized the piety of individuals rather than the details of their everyday lives
He organized episodes into providential history rather than sequential narrative history, because his aim was not to explain the full sequence of events but to show the divine patterns of the cosmos and confirm the Pilgrims’ world view
Bradford / Providences
1.) To the Pilgrims, providences were examples of God’s direct action in the world. GENERAL PROVIDENCES (such as the rising and setting of the sun, the changing of the seasons) worked for the general good of mankind. SPECIAL PROVIDNENCES worked for the good of the elect few, either in providing painful but necessary lessons or in bringing special benefits.
2.) Howland’s rescue is a special providence. It indicated to the Pilgrims that God approved of their decision to go to the New World. Also: symbolic implications--concern with jeopardy and salvation, death and resurrection.
3.) The Puritans’ and the Pilgrims’ self-serving interpretations of God’s providences are frequently cited to support the charge that the Puritans and Pilgrims arrogantly equated God’s purpose with their own. The counter-argument is that providences were cited less to confirm the Puritans’ and Pilgrims’ virtue than to show the individual’s helplessness and to reinforce the doctrine that the best hope of mankind is to rely on the benevolence of God.
Bradford / The Indians
1.) The Pilgrims carried with them to the New World the prejudices toward non-Christians that Europeans had developed in centuries of confronting Orientals. In 1537, Pope Paul III issued a papal bull declaring that the Indians were not “dumb brutes” but were human beings capable of receiving Christianity.
2.) The early images of New World Indians were of monsters, giants, pygmies, wild men, and creatures.
3.) Some modern readers have criticized Bradford for showing an “appalling indifference to the Indians.” He described them as savage and brutish men, like wild beasts, savage barbarians, and as satanic.
4.) Bradford believed the Indians were satanic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Indians were seen as NOBLE SAVAGES, who were naturally good, possessed of virtues that civilized men had lost.
5.) Both John Smith and William Bradford report thefts of Indian corn. Note the assumption of superior rights by both the Jamestown colonists and the Pilgrims.
Bradford / The Land
1.) Bradford described the American wilderness as “hideous and desolate,” full of “wild beasts and wild men” and he believed the wilderness was a place of trial and testing rather than a place of ease and plenty--or of social and economic opportunity. Compare this view of the wilderness with Smith and others.
2.) Bradford and other colonial New Englanders often spoke of America as a New Eden, a New World Jerusalem where the teachings of Christ would prevail and the millennium would take place.
3.) But for Bradford, divinity lay in the congregation, in the “church,” not in the land itself. The idea that the forest or wilderness was divinely anointed and therefore redemptive was foreign to Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims. They believed instead that they themselves brought godliness to America, that Christian virtue was not inherent in the American land, or in its riches, or in its distance from Europe. They believed that Christian virtue lay only in a united body of true believers, in the saints.
4.) Contrast that idea to the later belief that America was itself divine and redemptive, a land of goodness where men living in freedom and amid natural riches could approach a state of perfection--as Crevecoeur suggested in Letter #3.
Bradford / Discussion Questions
1.) How did reading this text alter your preconceived views of the Pilgrims? For example, what surprised you or what insights did you gain about these people and their way of life?
2.) What images of America and its inhabitants does Bradford’s text present to the reader? That is, Columbus described America as a land of plenty and its inhabitants as docile and primitive. Consider the words Bradford chooses, and explain how his writing characterizes what he finds there.
3.) What aspects of daily life under the Plymouth experiment does Bradford believe are most important to his audience, and who can you tell?
4.) What is the relationship of the individual to the community in Bradford’s ideal? In Plymouth’s reality?
5.) To what extent does the reality of the New World in Book II match Bradford’s utopian vision expressed in Book I? What is the nature of the discrepancies, and how does he reconcile them with his world view?
Primary Source: The Prentice Hall Anthology of American Literature
Date Revised: 16 September 2010 10:39 AM