William Bradford (1590-1657)

William Bradford's life displayed a mixture of the commonplace and the extraordinary that was characteristic of the Puritan experience. Bradford was the son of a prosperous farmer in Yorkshire, England. His father died when William was a baby, and the child was raised by his grandparents and uncles. It was assumed that the young man would take over the family holdings when he came of age; in keeping with this expectation, he received no higher education but instead was taught the practical arts of farming. Despite his lack of formal training (or perhaps because of it), Bradford was to become a successful, longstanding Colonial governor in the New World, dealing out justice and settling disputes of all kinds. He would also write the first history that depicts America as a unique social experiment.

Bradford might have become the prosperous Yorkshire farmer he was prepared to become if he had not taken a radical step when he was twelve years old. Inspired by his reading of the Bible and by the sermons of a Puritan minister, he joined a small group of Nonconformists despite the vehement objections of his family and friends. The group could not worship publicly, so they met furtively in a private house in the nearby town of Scrooby. Seven years later, under increasing pressure of persecution and fearful that they would be imprisoned, the Scrooby group crossed the North Sea to Holland. There, Bradford set up a weaving business. He also married Dorothy May, a young woman who was a fellow emigrant from England, and the couple had a child. In 1620, after ten years in Holland, the group was aided by London profiteers and merchants, who lent them a ship and crew as an investment, and the Nonconformists sailed for the New World.

For Bradford, the hardships of the ocean voyage did not end with the landing at Plymouth. In December, while the Mayflower was anchored in Provincetown Bay, Bradford and other men took a small boat ashore to scout for a place to land and build shelter. When they returned, Bradford learned that his young wife had fallen or jumped from the ship and was drowned. The act may well have been suicide. Dorothy Bradford had been on the crowded ship for more than two months, and when land was finally sighted, she did not see the hoped-for green hills of an earthly paradise. Beyond the ship lay only the bleak sand dunes of Cape Cod. That bitter winter, half the settlers were to die of cold, disease, and malnutrition.

The following year, Bradford was elected governor of the plantation at the age of thirty-one. "Had he not been a person of more than ordinary piety, wisdom, and courage," the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather later recorded, "he must have sunk" under the difficulties of governing such a shaky settlement. But, Mather continued, Bradford had been "laying up a treasure of experience, and he had now occasion to use it." Bradford proved an exemplary leader, and he went on to be elected governor of the Colony no fewer than thirty times.

In 1630, Bradford began to write a history of the Plymouth Colony from its beginning. He continued writing an annual account of the settlement until 1647. His record, Of Plymouth Plantation, was not composed for immediate publication or to attract more colonists, like many other early Colonial accounts. It was written for posterity, although by the end of his life Bradford's dreams of that posterity had been shattered.

As the years passed, the plantation, at Plymouth prospered economically. Beaver pelts from the Indians brought good money in England, and eventually the plantation managed to pay off its debt. But as the group prospered and grew, it also became more diffuse and less pious. Despite Bradford's efforts to hold it together, the Plymouth Colony gradually disintegrated as a religious community. The ideal of the "city on the hill," the Pilgrims' dream of an ideal society founded on religious principles, gradually gave way to the realities of life in the New World. Bradford's record of this grand experiment ends in disappointment. When more fertile areas for settlement were found and when Boston became a more convenient port to England, Plymouth lost much of its population— especially its young people. "Thus was this poor church left," Bradford wrote in 1644, near the conclusion of his history, "like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children. She that had made so many rich became herself poor."

The first nine chapters of Bradford's history were copied into the Plymouth church records, but the entire manuscript was later lost. Most likely it was carried back to England as a souvenir by a British soldier during the Revolutionary War. The soldier might have sold it for a few cents to a bookseller in London. It was almost a century later that Governor Bradford's vellum bound volume was discovered in the library of the Bishop of London. Of Plymouth Plantation was first published in 1856 by the Massachusetts Historical Society. After long negotiations, the manuscript was finally returned to the United States in 1897. It can be seen today in the State-house in Boston.