William Bradford

Governor

Bradford’s Major Works

1622

• Mourt’s Relation, 1622 (with Edward Winslow)

1630-1650

• History of Plymouth Plantation (pb. 1856)

1648-1652

• Dialogue Between Some Young Men Born in New England and Sundry Ancient Men That Came out of Holland (third dialogue pb. 1871, first dialogue pb. 1920)

1650’s

• Of Boston in New England (pb. 1838)

1650’s

• A Word to New England (pb. 1838)

1669

• Epitaphium Meum

• Born: March 1, 1590
• Birthplace: Austerfield, Yorkshire, England
• Died: May 9, 1657
• Place of death: Plymouth, Massachusetts

English-born American colonist

Bradford was the leader of the Pilgrims once they settled in America, and he was the author of a history of Plymouth Colony, one of the great works of early American literature.

Areas of achievement: Government and politics, literature

Early Life

William Bradford was born in March, 1590 (baptized on March 29), at Austerfield, Yorkshire, England, one of three children and the only son of William Bradford, a yeoman farmer, and Alice Hanson. His father died when he was sixteen months old. Upon his mother’s remarriage when Bradford was four, he was placed in the custody of his grandfather, after whose death in 1596 he went to live with his uncles, Robert and Thomas Bradford. Like his ancestors, William Bradford pursued “the affairs of husbandry.”

At age twelve, Bradford started attending religious services conducted by Richard Clyfton at Babworth, eight miles from Austerfield. The group was made up of Separatists, who believed in the sovereign authority of the Scriptures and the autonomy of each church. The Separatists had spun off from the Puritan movement, which sought reform toward greater simplicity in the worship and practices of the Church of England. When Clyfton’s own congregation split, he took part of the original group to hold services at the bishop’s manor house in Scrooby. William Brewster, who became a mentor and tutor for Bradford, was the local bailiff and postmaster and resided at the bishop’s decaying mansion. John Robinson, who later would be the leader of the group when they went to Holland, was teacher of the congregation. Bradford had only to walk three miles to attend services at Scrooby, which was in Nottinghamshire, 150 miles (241 kilometers) north of London.

The Scrooby Separatists, completely at odds with the national church and fearing further persecution after King James I ascended the throne, sought refuge in the Netherlands. They failed in their first attempt to leave England in 1607, having been betrayed by the ship’s captain. The following year, however, a Dutch vessel took them to Amsterdam, where they stayed briefly before moving to the university town of Leyden. The Netherlands offered the refugees full freedom of conscience. Their new home proved a relief, as Bradford said, from the situation which the Pilgrims (as they were to be called) had faced in England, where they were “hunted and persecuted on every side, so that their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of those which now came upon them.”

At Leyden, the Pilgrims worked as artisans, with Bradford becoming a maker of fustian (a twilled cloth of cotton and linen). While in Leyden, Bradford learned some Latin and Hebrew. Coming of age in 1611, he gained an inheritance from his uncles, which he applied to buying a house; he also became a Dutch citizen. In December, 1613, Bradford married Dorothy May. The Pilgrims, however, were unhappy in their new home for a variety of reasons, chiefly because they were an alien people in a strange land. In 1617, therefore, Bradford was one of a committee to make arrangements to take the congregation to America.

The Pilgrims secured financing for their expedition through a joint stock company formed by English merchants. They also secured a patent from the Virginia Company, which was to prove invalid when they settled in Massachusetts and was replaced a year later with one from the Council of New England. Thus armed, the Pilgrims set out for America. Shares in the company were ten pounds each, with each settler receiving one share free. Bradford was among the 102 persons who crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower and was a signer of the Mayflower Compact in November of 1620 as the ship anchored off the tip of Cape Cod.

The compact, as John Quincy Adams later observed, was “the first example in modern times of a social compact or system of government instituted by voluntary agreement conformably to the laws of nature, by men of equal rights and about to establish their community in a new country.” Bradford led exploring parties, and the colonists chose a site at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. On December 17, 1620, Bradford’s wife fell overboard and drowned, possibly a suicide. In August, 1623, he married Alice Carpenter, widow of Edward Southworth.

Life’s Work

Upon the death of John Carver in 1621, Bradford was elected governor of the colony, remaining in that office until his death in 1657, with the exception of the years 1633-1634, 1636, 1638, and 1644. He received no salary until 1639, when he was paid twenty pounds annually. Bradford virtually dominated the colony’s government, which had no standing under English law and had no charter from the king. Bradford, however, shared executive, legislative, and judicial powers with a court of assistants, which by the 1640’s numbered eight people. The governor and assistants were elected annually by the freemen at large. Beginning in 1638, legislative powers were divided with a lower house of two representatives from each town, starting with those from Plymouth town, Duxborough, and Scituate. Bradford assisted in the codification of Plymouth’s laws in 1636, significant as the first such embodiment of statutes in the American colonies and also noteworthy for setting forth basic rights.

Bradford and his colony faced many hardships. The people who emigrated to the settlement were poor, and for the most part the land was of poor quality. Lacking means for capital investment, the Pilgrims made little progress in establishing shipping and fishing industries. For a while they enjoyed success in the fur trade, but they had to compete with the Dutch, the French, and the English in that pursuit. The colony struggled to pay off its indebtedness. Bradford, believing that the communal system discouraged initiative, had it abandoned in 1623.

In 1627, Bradford, seven other colonists, and four Londoners associated as the Undertakers to pay off the colonists’ eighteen-hundred-pound debt to the English members of the joint stock company, which was then dissolved. Bradford and the other Undertakers were given a monopoly on the fur trade and offshore fishing. Still, it was not until the 1640’s that the debt was paid. Also at the time of dissolving their connection with the English merchants, all property in the colony, real and personal, was divided equally among heads of families and free single men.

Bradford and the Pilgrims had scant troubles with American Indians. The Pawtuxet Indians, who had lived in the vicinity of Plymouth town, had died off from European diseases, principally the plague (typhus) brought over by English fishermen. Two Indians, Samoset and Squanto, who had themselves been to Great Britain and spoke English, served at the outset as vital liaisons with other Indians in the area. Bradford was successful in keeping the friendship of Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags, the only strong tribe in close proximity to the colony.

Indeed, though troops were mustered on several occasions to be sent against the local Native American tribes (for example, during the Pequot War of 1636-1637), the colony under Bradford’s administration contended with no significant Indian hostility. Miles Standish’s butchery of several Massachusetts Indians at Wessagusett can, however, be charged to Bradford’s blame.

The latitude of personal freedom at Plymouth was great in comparison with the Puritan colonies. Although seeking at first to oust dissenters, Bradford came to favor a policy of tolerance, allowing persons of other faiths to settle in the colony. Yet Bradford was thin-skinned with those who put the Pilgrims in a bad light in England, and once, upon intercepting the letters of two such individuals, he forced them to return to England. A major blotch on Bradford’s career was his overreaction to the “wickedness” of the times, especially during the alleged sex-crime wave of 1642. During this brief hysteria, induced largely by anxiety over an Indian crisis, a teenager was hanged for buggery. Otherwise, to the Pilgrims’ credit, there were executions only for murder. In addition to serving as governor, Bradford was a commissioner of the Puritan defensive confederation, the United Colonies of New England, in the years 1647 to 1649, 1652, and 1656.

History of Plymouth Plantation (wr. 1630-1650, pb. 1856) is Bradford’s masterpiece. Probably intended only for the enlightenment of his family, it was not published in its entirety until 1856. For a long time, the manuscript was lost, probably taken out of the country by a British soldier during the Revolution; it resurfaced at the Bishop of London’s Library at Fulham Palace. In the late nineteenth century, as a goodwill gesture, it was returned to the United States. Bradford worked on it at various times, from 1630 to 1650, writing from notes, correspondence, and memory. The work traces the entire Pilgrim story from their English exile to 1646.

Other writings of Bradford include admonitory poems and Dialogue Between Some Young Men Born in New England and Sundry Ancient Men That Came out of Holland (wr. 1648-1652, pb. 1871 [third dialogue], 1920 [first dialogue]). Bradford was also the coauthor with Edward Winslow of the promotional tract Mourt’s Relation (1622) and letters, printed as Governor Bradford’s Letter Book (1794; reprinted in 1968).

Besides his home in Plymouth, Bradford had a 300-acre (121-hectare) farm on the tidal Jones River and scattered real estate elsewhere, which made him the largest landowner in the colony. Bradford died during the evening of the day in which he dictated his will, May 19, 1657. He was buried on the hills overlooking Plymouth. He left four children: John (by his first wife), William, Mercy, and Joseph.

Significance

Bradford’s life epitomized the plain and simple virtues of a people longing to be free. From yeoman farmer in England to artisan in Leyden to immigrant in an unexplored land, he displayed the courage and faith of one who believed that there was a better way. With skill, a sense of fair play, and open-mindedness, he guided his people in founding a successful community, which would eventually grow into some twenty towns. Bradford’s colony was unable to secure a charter, largely because of the lack of resources needed to support a lobbying effort in England. Plymouth Colony would later be incorporated into the royal colony of Massachusetts Bay, an event that Bradford probably would not have celebrated, considering the differences between the Puritans and the Pilgrims. While Bradford discouraged people from leaving the colony to form new settlements, he himself became a suburbanite, tending his farm outside Plymouth.

Bradford’s administration brought peace and stability to Plymouth, and the Pilgrim experience in founding government served as a model for the establishment of other colonies. In Plymouth Colony, under Bradford, there was a rigid separation of church and state as to officeholding, though between them there was a mutuality of action. Bradford’s history of Plymouth exemplifies high standards of clarity and straightforward prose; at the same time, it is enlivened by an understated humor that belies the popular image of the Pilgrims. It is regarded as one of the major works of colonial American literature.

Bibliography

Anderson, Douglas. William Bradford’s Books: Of Plimouth Plantation and the Printed Word. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Anderson argues that Bradford’s history of the Plymouth colony is not a gloomy elegy but a graceful and ambitious work that describes the successful adaptation of a small community of religious exiles to life in a new country.

Bartlett, Robert M. The Pilgrim Way. Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1971. Discusses the Pilgrims only through the early years in America. Though emphasizing the role of John Robinson and religious issues, it probes the thinking and actions of the Pilgrim leaders, including Bradford.

Bradford, William. Of Plimmoth Plantation, 1620-1647: The Complete Text, with Notes and an Introduction by Samuel Eliot Morison. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1856. Rev. ed. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2001. This is the latest edition of the work, which has been reprinted numerous times since its initial publication in 1856. The 2001 reprint includes Samuel E. Morison’s notes and introduction to the 1952 edition.

Dillon, Francis. The Pilgrims. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Popularly written and well researched, this narrative traces the Pilgrim story to the time of the death of Bradford. Views the Pilgrim experience through Bradford’s eyes.

Langdon, George D., Jr. Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620-1691. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966. A scholarly and perceptive examination of the Plymouth Colony until its union with Massachusetts Bay Colony. Emphasis is on the government and institutions.

Pafford, John M. How Firm a Foundation: William Bradford and Plymouth. Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 2002. Examines Bradford’s life in conjunction with the history of the Plymouth colony, from Bradford’s birth through 1691, the year Plymouth became part of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

Runyan, Michael G., ed. William Bradford: The Collected Verse. St. Paul, Minn.: John Colet Press, 1974. Contains the seven items of verse attributed to Bradford. Places the poems in their historical context and in the context of Bradford’s life as well as discussing their literary qualities.

Sargent, Mark L. “William Bradford’s ’Dialogue’ with History.” New England Quarterly 65, no. 3 (September, 1992): 389-422. An examination of Bradford’s Dialogue and its place in the American Colonial canon.

Shurtleff, Nathaniel Bradstreet, ed. Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England. Boston: Press of W. White, 1861. Reprint. 2 vols. Bowie: Md.: Heritage Books, 1998. All of Bradford’s service as governor can be discerned from this collection, which contains the records of the General Court (governor, assistants, and deputies).

Smith, Bradford. Bradford of Plymouth. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1951. The only full-scale biography of Bradford. It is well researched but glosses over many topics.

Westbrook, Perry D. William Bradford. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Examines all of Bradford’s writings from the point of view of literary criticism. Contains a chronology of Bradford’s life.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Seventeenth Century

March 24, 1603: James I Becomes King of England; December 26, 1620: Pilgrims Arrive in North America; July 20, 1636-July 28, 1637: Pequot War.