(1589-1657)
[Footnote 15: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
[Illustration: Seal of Massachusetts. [TN]]
Greatness is not allied to rank alone, nor is heroism to blood. The
noblest of the Pilgrims of Plymouth was sprung from the people. For
generations the little farming village of Austerfield, a royal manor of
the West Riding of Yorkshire close to the Nottingham line, had known the
family of Bradfurth or Bradford as a race of tenant-yeomen who, besides
tilling the lands of the Mortons, possessed also a freehold of their
own. But no man or woman of the Bradford name had given it prominence or
worth until, on March 19, 1589, William Bradford was born in that
low-roofed farm-house on the great plain of York. Puritan writers speak
of Austerfield as a "profane and irreligious" village in which was to
be found "no bible and a careless priest." Whatever the facts, the
environments, undoubtedly, were not such as would suggest the making of
a leader or the development of a religious nature. But we are assured
that, before the age of twelve, the boy William Bradford, brought up in
that Austerfield farm-house "in the innocent trade of husbandry,"
displayed alike a thoughtful temperament and "a pious mind." At sixteen
he fell, in some unknown way, under the influence of one of the
much-maligned Puritan preachers of Scrooby, a Nottinghamshire village
but a few miles from Austerfield. As a result he gave up his
farming-life, left his Austerfield home, and in the face of bitter
opposition, distrust, censure, and persecution, joined the Puritan
church and settlement at Scrooby, established there by William Brewster,
the postmaster of Scrooby and a prominent leader in the new sect of
dissenters from the English church, known first as separatists and,
later, because of their frequent changes and wanderings, as Pilgrims.
From his earliest association with this feeble and despised communion,
William Bradford was zealous in his readiness to stand boldly for his
faith, whatever the risk involved. He was one of the first to appreciate
the real meaning of the struggle; he saw that dissent implied not alone
a religious opposition, but a political defiance as well, and that its
followers, braving the will of England's royal bigot, James Stuart, and
denying his assumption of the divine right of kings, would ere long do
open battle in the cause of the people against despotism, and stand for
that deeper question of liberty which the Pilgrims of Scrooby and Leyden
first fully grasped.
Bradford was one of that venturesome company which, in 1607, embarking
at Boston, in Lincolnshire, sought to flee from English tyranny, and
find a home in Holland. They were betrayed, turned back, and imprisoned.
The next year this young eighteen-year old enthusiast escaped from his
jailers, and made his way to Amsterdam. Here he apprenticed himself to a
silk-weaver, and became an efficient member of the association of
English exiles in Holland.
Upon his coming of age in 1610, he sold off the Austerfield lands that
had descended to him upon the death of his father, and entered upon an
unsuccessful business investment in Amsterdam. This failing, he joined
himself to the Pilgrim colony that Brewster and Robinson, the Pilgrim
preachers, had established at Leyden.
When those far-seeing reformers awoke to the fact that an
English-speaking community in Holland must, in time, become Dutch in
manners, speech, and life, and looked across the western ocean with the
dream of founding a religious republic of English-speaking folk in the
New World, Bradford was one of the most earnest in adopting and carrying
out their views, and was one of that famous company which, on September
16, 1620, sailed from Plymouth in England, to cast anchor, three months
later, in the harbor of the new Plymouth in New England.
It has been said that if William Brewster was the Aaron of the Plymouth
enterprise, William Bradford was its Moses. Certainly he was, almost
from its inception, its leader and deliverer. It was his brain that
conceived and his hand that executed that memorable compact which the
forty-one earnest men signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, as she rode
at anchor in Provincetown harbor--"the first instrument of civil
government ever subscribed as the act of the whole people." It was into
his hands, when Carver, the first governor, died of sunstroke in the
spring of 1621, that the colonists gave the guidance of their affairs,
electing him governor of the Plymouth colony on April 21, 1621--"the
first American citizen of English race who bore rule by the free choice
of his brethren." More than this, we may look upon William Bradford, so
says Mr. Doyle, the English historian of the Puritan colonies, "as
heading that bead-roll of worthies that, from his day, America has never
wanted--men who, with no early training in political life, and lacking
much that the Old World has deemed needful in her rulers, have yet, by
inborn strength of mind and lofty public spirit, shown themselves in all
things worthy of high office."
Certainly William Bradford showed himself worthy the trust and
confidence of his fellows. For nearly forty years he filled the office
of governor of the Plymouth colony. His hand guided it through the
perils of its early years, his brain planned that systematic development
of its slender resources that made it the one successful episode in
America's beginnings. His treatment of the Indians was always firm but
friendly; his dealings with the grasping "London adventurers," whose
greed would have seriously crippled the colony had it not been for his
restraining hand, were courteous but convincing; it was Bradford who led
the colony from the unsatisfactory communism of its first years to the
system of individual property that, from 1623, held sway, and turned an
uncertain venture into a career of industrial prosperity. Always
tolerant, never injudicious, and alike pure-minded, liberty-loving,
courageous, and wise, no hand could have better guided than did his, or
have more systematically shaped, the destinies of the infant State. The
testimony of contemporaries and the judgment of historians unite in
crediting to William Bradford that rare combination of intelligence and
industry, of judicial and executive ability, by which a small and
obscure band of persecuted fugitives laid in an unexplored wilderness
the foundations of a great and prosperous commonwealth.
His methods were as simple as was his own noble nature. Each advance was
the outgrowth of his own observation and the colony's necessities, and
while the corner-stone of the community was religion, he stood himself
for religious liberty, and never permitted the zeal of his associates to
degenerate into intolerance and persecution. While other of the early
American colonies were narrow, bigoted, and vindictive, it is to the
credit of the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth that the cargo of the Mayflower
contained no seeds of persecution, and throughout the long
administration of Governor William Bradford the colony he guided had, in
his time at least, a clear comprehension of the meaning of religious and
political freedom, and did not descend into the harrying of so-called
heretics, the scourging of Quakers, nor the burning of witches. Whatever
intolerance of this sort may, at a later day, have stained the records
of the colony, was of foreign growth and contrary to the heritage of
charity left by William Bradford.
[Illustration: A Puritan Christmas.]
This willingness to serve, to spend and be spent, is apparent throughout
the whole story of Bradford's life. It displayed itself in the boyish
spirit of renunciation that led him to join the Scrooby society, and
held him loyal to his association even through imprisonment and
persecution, through exile, flight, and emigration. Again and again
through his long service as governor of the Plymouth colony, he wished
to lay aside the burden, but always yielded to the wishes of his
comrades. Elected by the suffrages of his associates, he himself
restricted his own authority by the formation, in 1624, of the
governor's council of five members, increased in 1633 to seven, in which
the only privilege held by the governor was a double vote. In 1624 he
with seven of his associates assumed, what was for that day and the
uncertainties involved, a great risk, and bought out the "London
Adventurers" who had so feebly backed the colonists. In 1629 he obtained
a patent that conferred upon himself, his associates, and assigns the
title to the whole Plymouth tract, and in 1640 he conveyed this valuable
title to the colony, reserving only his personal proportion as a
settler.
It was this unselfishness of disposition, this loyalty to
duty--accepting honors as trusts and burdens as obligations--this union
of justice and faith that made William Bradford great and kept him
noble.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all," even as had that great
American of two centuries later, Bradford could keep the even tenor of
his way in the midst of obstacles and discouragements. Unmoved by the
ingratitude of Weston, the insolence of Morton, the treachery of Oldham
and Lyford, and the selfishness of Allerton; calm amid the controversies
brought about by the arrogance of the greater colony of Massachusetts
Bay, the encroachments of the French in Maine, and of the Dutch on the
Connecticut, he could yet, when occasion demanded, display that stern
justice that meted out the extreme penalty of the law to offenders, and
condemned to death Billington, the first murderer in the colony, and
Peach, the assassin of a defenceless Indian.
William Bradford is one of the most interesting figures in the history
of New England. He is the noblest of the Puritans--a type of their best
element, an exponent of their highest effort, a pioneer in their
struggle for liberty for justice, and for law. The boy who could brave
opposition and contumely for conscience's sake, could also be of
gentlest manners and serenest mood when called to lead and govern those
who put their trust in him; the same native courage and independence
that held him loyal to his convictions in his early years made him, when
responsibilities multiplied and burdens were laid upon him, the very
staff and hope of the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth.
He combined with executive ability other notable gifts. Though bred to
the soil in an age when the farmer was a drudge and had no ambition
beyond his crops, he yet, when opportunity offered, applied himself to
study with such good results that he was learned in Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew, and conversed in French and Dutch. He was acquainted with the
history and philosophy of his day, was deeply versed in theology, and
even attempted poetry. He wrote much and well. His most important
production was his "History of the Plymouth Plantations"--a detailed
chronicle of the history of the Pilgrims from 1608 to 1646. Carried away
from the old South Church by British soldiers, it was completely lost,
until almost providentially discovered, though partially destroyed, in
the shop of a Halifax grocer, and to-day it tells us almost all that we
know of the Plymouth settlers, from the day when they left Lincolnshire
till they became a prosperous commonwealth in America.
Of this important contribution to American history, Mr. Doyle, the
English historian, says: "Gratitude is quickened when we compare the
simple, vigorous, and picturesque chronicle set before us by Bradford,
with the tedious and pedantic writings from which so much of the later
history of New England has to be extracted.... His work is in the true
sense scholarly. The language is like the language of Bunyan, that of a
man who trained himself not merely to speak but to think in the words of
Scripture. Every expression is simple and effective, never far-fetched,
never mean nor common. The substance is worthy of the style. Faults no
doubt there are ... yet with all its defects Bradford's writings still
remain the worthy first-fruits of Puritan literature in its new home.
They are the work of a wise and good man, who tells with a right
understanding the great things that he and his brethren have done."
The wise governor was loyal to his colony to the last. He resisted the
ambition to take larger holdings of land and become great estate owners
that influenced Standish and Brewster, Alden and Winslow, and other of
his Mayflower companions, drawing them away from Plymouth to the broader
acres at Duxbury and Scituate and Marshfield. The governor deplored this
withdrawal as a desertion on the part of his old friends, and a menace
to the welfare of the colony. He lived on in Plymouth, where his home on
Leyden Street, still standing, gradually outgrew its early primitive
dimensions as became the house of the governor of Plymouth. Here he died
on May 9, 1657, "lamented by all the colonists of New England as a
common blessing and father to them all," and the only special memorial
that tangibly recalls his fame is the unpretentious obelisk on Burial
Hill.
As Miles Standish and John Alden had a romance in their lives that has
made them historic, so this Puritan governor of Plymouth had his. His
first wife, gentle Dorothy May, was drowned in Cape Cod harbor while her
husband was away exploring the new-found coast. He had married her in
Leyden in 1613 and less than three years after her death, on August 14,
1623, he married Mistress Alice Carpenter Southworth, who in earlier
days, it is alleged, had been young William Bradford's "dearest love."
She came across the sea--at his call--a widow, to marry the widowed
governor of Plymouth and thus complete the unwritten romance begun in
his earlier years.
A self-made man, a scholar of repute, a writer of renown, an upright and
fearless magistrate, a model citizen, a courageous leader, gentle, just
and generous, practical and wise, William Bradford stands in history as
the essence and exponent of what was best in the Puritanism of his day,
the architect and builder of a God-fearing, independent, and progressive
community that, throughout the ages, remains the most notable because
the most typical of the foundation-stones that underlie the mighty
structure of the Republic of the United States of America.
[Signature of the author.]