[In this excerpt, Levin considers the relationship between Bradford's Puritanism and his historiography, discussing the author's reconciliation of economic and spiritual goals in his work, and arguing that Bradford's faith encouraged him to study history.]

Famine once we had, wanting corn and bread,
But other things God gave us in the stead,
As fish and ground nuts, to supply our strait,
That we might learn on providence to wait;
And know by bread man lives not in his need,
But by each word that doth from God proceed.
But a while after plenty did come in,
From His hand only who doth pardon sin.
And all did flourish like the pleasant green,
Which in the joyful spring is to be seen.
…
Another cause of our declining here,
Is a mixt multitude, as doth appear.
Many for servants hither were brought,
Others came for gain, or worse ends they sought;
And of these, many grow loose and profane,
Though some are brought to know God and His name.
But thus it is, and hath been so of old,
As by the Scriptures we are plainly told. …

Bradford, “Some Observations of God's Merciful Dealing with us in the Wilderness” (1654)

I

In the body of tradition that stands between modern readers and the best literary works of seventeenth-century New England, William Bradford holds an honorable place both as a political leader and as a writer. Three hundred and fifty years after the founding of Plymouth, we respect him as the faithful governor of Plymouth during the colony's first decades and as the writer whose unfinished history Of Plymouth Plantation helped to give the tradition literary form. It is in Bradford's history that we read of “pilgrims” who obey their calling to leave the known European world for a wilderness, seeking comfort in the Biblical reminder that heaven is their dearest country. It is Bradford's history that appeals to law as the true foundation of liberty, and to “the simplicity of the gospel, without the mixture of men's inventions,” as the right model for worship. It is Bradford's history that unites religious, political, and aesthetic value by celebrating “the primitive order, liberty, and beauty” of the first Christian churches.¹

Bradford's literary reputation rests entirely on the history that he began to write ten years after the founding of Plymouth. His awkward verses and his long, skillfully written dialogues defending Congregational church government against Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and Presbyterian theory and practice have not gained admission to our literary anthologies. It is his admirable prose style, his role as governor, and his representative quality as one of the mildest and most magnanimous of Puritan spokesmen that have won him his honored place in our literary history. Thousands of students who never see the entire volume Of Plymouth Plantation know Bradford as the writer, formerly a participant in the historical action, who “cannot but stay and make a pause” to reflect, in the most famous of all his passages, on “this poor people's … condition” during their first wintry days on Cape Cod; there “all things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face,” and “which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects.” The Bradford modern readers know best is the participant who writes that he respected some newcomers' conscientious refusal to work on Christmas Day—until he found them playing games. (He then told them that it was against his conscience for them to play while others worked.) The Bradford we all know best is the Old Founder who laments the dispersal of original church members and the decline of their original commitment to maintaining one loving, covenanted community.

Yet the distinction between Bradford the eminent colonial leader and Bradford the writer can too easily be blurred in a way that underestimates the achievement of Bradford the historian. The few commentators on Bradford's “conscious art” tend naturally to concentrate on his literary style rather than on his historical imagination.² Historians of history and literature, moreover, are inclined to emphasize changes, development, and differences in the ways of writing history, especially when they address a contemporary audience about seventeenth-century historians who had no great influence on the development of the art, the science, the profession. In explaining strange ways to modern students, it is only reasonable to concentrate on differences between the Puritans and ourselves, to show what was “puritan” about them. The very nature of the subject seems to impose a condescending perspective on the study of old histories. It is so important to notice predestination, Providence, and authorial piety that one has little chance to look for much complexity in the individual Puritan's work. And if one does write at some length about Bradford or Cotton Mather, one is tempted to concentrate on the historical facts and the author's remarkable character.

Students of literature need also to pay some attention to the substantive value of the histories they study. The question that has too rarely been asked about Bradford and others is not how Puritanism limited their histories but what good it might have done a historian to be a Puritan. What does Bradford the historian understand, interpret, portray in a way that no other historian has surpassed? Bradford was a Puritan not only when he committed narrow-minded errors but also when he acted meritoriously and wrote perceptively. His Puritan preconceptions gave him some special kinds of historical insight. The literary value of his book depends as much on the quality of his historical intelligence as on the virtues of his style. As an interpreter of Puritan piety, for example, he seems to me a better historian than George Langdon, Peter Gay, or John Demos, all of whom have written more effectively than Bradford about other qualities in Puritan life. Anyone who doubts Bradford's value as a historian needs only to set Of Plymouth Plantation beside George Langdon's recent history of the colony. Mr. Langdon's excellent book repeatedly uses Bradford's information, and he often follows Bradford's interpretations, but he never treats Bradford as a fellow historian.

The mistake of much commentary—an error more damaging to literary evaluation than to historical narrative—is to treat Bradford only as an example of piety but not to stress the achievement of Bradford the historian in portraying Puritan piety. Bradford's purpose in the first book of his history seems to be to represent the Pilgrims' sufferings in a way that will show how frequently circumstances allowed them nothing else to rely on except their piety. In a very early scene, for example, he dramatizes their predicament under an English authority that refused to let them stay as they were, but also refused to let them emigrate. To show the full range of Bradford's use of piety here, I shall have to quote at unusual length.

When the first boatload of emigrant men boarded a Dutch ship near Hull for the voyage to Holland, the sudden appearance of hostile English authorities forced the Dutch captain to “hoise sails, and away.” Bradford shows us the plight of both the separated groups of Pilgrims from the point of view of the men being carried to sea

in great distress for their wives and children which they saw thus to be taken, and … left destitute of their helps; and themselves also, not having a cloth to shift them with, more than they had on their backs, and some scarce a penny about them, all they had being aboard the bark … and anything they had they would have given to have been ashore again; but all in vain, there was no remedy, they must thus sadly part. And afterward endured a fearful storm at sea, being fourteen days or more before they arrived at their port; in seven whereof they neither saw sun, moon nor stars, and were driven near the coast of Norway; the mariners themselves often despairing of life, and once with shrieks and cries gave over all, as if the ship had been foundered in the sea and they sinking without recovery. But when man's hope and help wholly failed, the Lord's power and mercy appeared in their recovery; for the ship rose again and gave the mariners courage again to manage her. And if modesty would suffer me, I might declare with what fervent prayers they cried unto the Lord in this great distress (especially some of them) even without any great distraction. When the water ran into their mouths and ears and the mariners cried out, “We sink, we sink!” they cried (if not with miraculous, yet with a great height or degree of divine faith), “Yet Lord Thou canst save! Yet Lord Thou canst save!” with such other expressions as I will forbear. Upon which the ship did not only recover, but shortly after the violence of the storm began to abate, and the Lord filled their afflicted minds with such comforts as everyone cannot understand, and in the end brought them to their desired haven, where the people came flocking, admiring their deliverance; the storm having been so long and sore, in which much hurt had been done, as the master's friends related unto him in their congratulations.

But to return to the others where we left. The rest of the men that were in greatest danger made shift to escape away before the troop could surprise them, those only staying that best might be assistant unto the women. But pitiful it was to see the heavy case of these poor women in this distress; what weeping and crying on every side, some for their husbands that were carried away in the ship … ; others not knowing what should become of them and their little ones; others again melted in tears, seeing their poor little ones hanging about them, crying for fear and quaking with cold. Being thus apprehended, they were hurried from one place to another and from one justice to another, till in the end they [the authorities] knew not what to do with them; for to imprison so many women and innocent children for no other cause (many of them) but that they must go with their husbands, seemed to be unreasonable and all would cry out of them. And to send them home again was as difficult; for they alleged, as the truth was, they had no homes to go to, for they had either sold or otherwise disposed of their houses and livings. To be short, after they had been thus turmoiled a good while and conveyed from one constable to another, they [the authorities] were glad to be rid of them in the end upon any terms, for all were wearied and tired with them. Though in the meantime they (poor souls) endured misery enough; and thus in the end necessity forced a way for them.

(pp. 13-14)

To avoid becoming tedious, Bradford says, he will omit “many other notable passages and troubles which they endured and underwent in these their wanderings,” but he understands that he “may not omit the fruit that came hereby,” and he saves it for the conclusion of his chapter:

… by these so public troubles in so many eminent places their cause became famous and occasioned many to look into the same, and their godly carriage and Christian behaviour was such as left a deep impression in the minds of many. And though some few shrunk at these first conflicts and sharp beginnings (as it was no marvel) yet many more came on with fresh courage and greatly animated others. And in the end, notwithstanding all these storms of opposition, they all gat over at length, some at one time and some at another, and some in one place and some in another, and met together again according to their desires, with no small rejoicing.

(pp. 14-15)

This eloquent passage has been justly praised for its embodiment of the Pilgrim spirit in images of departure, peril, and arrival that foreshadow both the voyage across the Atlantic and the Christian's journey to heaven. The intervention of Providence draws as much modern notice, if less praise. What I wish to stress in addition is Bradford's attention to worldly as well as Providential cause. Bradford's refusal to see any conflict between Providential and natural causes has admirable as well as regrettable consequences. It requires him to look into the natural and human means through which Providential will usually works. In a North Sea storm the Lord may quiet the waves in answer to faithful prayers, but in narrating human events the Puritan historian must attend to the earthly causes by which “necessity forced a way” for the Lord's covenanted people. Bradford shows us the Pilgrims' misery, but also the logic of their emancipation (what else could be done with them?), the psychology of their victory (their cause became famous, and many more came on with fresh courage). Both examples of deliverance merit the “admiration” of the people, and it is Bradford's Puritan piety that obliges him to examine worldly causes and forbids him to “omit the fruit that came hereby.”

Throughout the history, moreover, Bradford's piety functions not chiefly to attribute all causes to Providence but rather to motivate a full report and a strict inquiry into historical complexity. Commentators too often notice his partisanship and his early allusions to Providence, and then cite the doubts he later expressed as he lamented the decline of piety in the second decade after the founding of Plymouth. It is hard for us to believe that historians who portrayed God as their people's faithful shepherd would reveal much doubt in their study of His interventions in history, and we find it easy to emphasize such striking passages as the lament in which Bradford, troubled by the exposure of shocking enormities in 1642, guesses that the Devil may mount especially powerful assaults among God's covenanted people. In truth, the Puritan was expected to be always alert for ambiguity in the historical revelation of God's will. From the opening pages of the history, Bradford depicts the saints in considerable perplexity.

Before considering several examples, I must insist that Bradford's portrayal of Puritan uncertainty is a historical interpretation of great importance, an interpretation that follows from his own inquiry into the significance of events. This valuable interpretation thus follows from his piety, his special way of seeing, his interest in discovering the Providential design in history. It will not suffice to portray him occasionally as a writer whose puzzled comments exemplify uncertainty about a particular phenomenon. We must recognize that he himself portrays the Pilgrim community in its perplexity. He recognizes the faithful search for God's will as the major quest of the pilgrim's life.

At the very beginning of his history Bradford shows us his conviction that after Satan had failed to destroy the faithful with burnings and open warfare “in the days of Queen Mary and before, he then began another kind of war and went more closely to work … to ruinate and destroy the kingdom of Christ by more secret and subtle means, by kindling the flames of contention and sowing the seeds of discord and bitter enmity amongst the professors and, seeming reformed, themselves.” In his account difficulties pursue the Marian exiles to the continent; and the effort of Puritans to hold firm against seductive pleas for retention of “divers harmless ceremonies” is described as a lengthy battle continuing several years until the poor people are enabled by “the continuance and increase of these troubles, and other means which the Lord raised up in those days, to see further into things by the light of the Word of God.” It is only those believers who “saw the evil” in Anglican ceremonies who, according to Bradford, at first shake off “this yoke of antichristian bondage”; they join “as the Lord's free people” in a church covenanted to walk not merely “in all His ways made known” but also in all His ways later “to be made known unto them.” Bradford reports that division occurred almost at once, and that one of the two congregations fell afterwards “into some errors” in the Netherlands and “there (for the most part) buried themselves and their names.”

Even though in doctrinal agreement, the covenanted remnant to which Bradford devotes the rest of his history spends great quantities of time and intelligence studying worldly evidence to find God's will. Bradford the historian shows us that the Lord's free people regarded their new covenant as a genuine liberation, and he is happy to narrate the debates through which (they trusted) God's ways were later to be made known to them. It is respect for the difficulty of knowing that leads him to record the arguments for and against emigrating from Holland to America. Just as he sees it is no marvel that “some few shrunk” at the first conflicts in England, so his piety leads him to describe fully the objections to the great emigration and the fears of good men as the negotiations proceed after the crucial decision has been made. He knows that “in all businesses the acting part is most difficult, especially where the work of many agents must concur. …” It is no disgrace that good Pilgrims doubt the validity of the calling to emigrate or that the courage of faithful men like Robert Cushman fails for a while on the English side of the Atlantic. The Puritan's liberation frees him to struggle in the world for the glory of God. Some saints are braver than others. The doubts, fears, perplexities, and follies of good men can only add to the glory of the God that has brought the community through the dangers they feared.

This attitude allows Bradford to shape his narrative so that the most persuasive of worldly arguments against proceeding with the colonial adventure lead to a convincing restatement of his Providential theme. He can thus show conscientious men arriving at the conclusion that their best and only hope lies in reliance on Providence. His arrangement has a convincing tenor even for skeptical readers, because his representation of the contrary arguments is both generous and reasonable, and because it is informed with sound political knowledge. When King James tells the Pilgrims' agents that the Crown cannot officially grant them liberty to worship in their own way in America, but lets them know that he will “connive at them and not molest them” so long as they behave peaceably, many of the Pilgrims fear (Bradford says) that they should not risk their estates and their lives on such vague assurances. With extremely skillful use of indirect quotation, Bradford dramatizes the most forcible arguments on both sides in a way that leads us through intricate political understanding to dependence upon Providence:

Yea it was thought they might better have presumed hereupon without making any suit at all than, having made it, to be thus rejected. But some of the chiefest thought otherwise and that they might well proceed hereupon, and that the King's Majesty was willing enough to suffer them without molestation, though for other reasons he would not confirm it by any public act. And furthermore, if there was no security in this promise intimated, there would be no great certainty in a further confirmation of the same; for if afterwards there should be a purpose or desire to wrong them, though they had a seal as broad as the house floor it would not serve the turn; for there would be means enow found to recall or reverse it. Seeing therefore the course was probable, they must rest herein on God's providence as they had done in other things.

(pp. 30-31)

II

The great value of the Puritan historian, then, is that he can show us piety functioning uncertainly but faithfully in the world, along with other motives. In his portrayal of John Robinson and William Brewster, Bradford achieves one of the best versions we have of the Congregational pastor's and elder's relation to their flock, and he deliberately introduces his characterization of Robinson for its representative social value. Sweetened by twenty years of nostalgic recollection, Bradford's portrait begins with Robinson's “able ministry and prudent government” and with the

mutual love and reciprocal respect that this worthy man had to his flock. … His love was great towards them, and his care was always bent for their best good, both for soul and body. For besides his singular abilities in divine things (wherein he excelled) he was also very able to give directions in civil affairs and to foresee dangers and inconveniences, by which means he was very helpful to their outward estates and so was every way as a common father unto them. And none did more offend him than those that were close and cleaving to themselves and retired from the common good; as also such as would be stiff and rigid in matters of outward order and inveigh against the evils of others, and yet be remiss in themselves, and not so careful to express a virtuous conversation.

(p. 18)

The pastor teaches, so that his people grow “in knowledge and other gifts and graces,” and he governs, so that disagreements and offenses are “ever so met with and nipped in the head betimes, or otherwise so well composed as still [to preserve] love, peace, and communion.” Bradford thus helps us to enter a world in which there is no necessary conflict between economic and pious motivation. Perhaps one reason we find it difficult to enter such a world without the help of such a historian is that our own view of religious motivation is narrower than his.

Bradford, of course, wanted his narrative to record a valid model of Congregational church government (and to justify his generation) for an uncertain posterity, as well as to achieve an accurate, coherent history and to celebrate the glory of God. He frankly believed, and we ought gratefully to concede, that these different purposes are often served by the same methods. John Robinson's place as the admirable Congregational pastor would not be so effectively achieved in these pages if it depended solely or even primarily on the moving paragraph that I have just discussed. Even in 1630, about fifteen years before he actually wrote the bulk of his narrative, Bradford finishes that paragraph by foreshadowing Robinson's death: dearly as the people loved Robinson while he was alive, they “esteemed him … much more after his death, when they came to feel the want of his help and saw (by woeful experience) what a treasure they had lost. …” Robinson will figure throughout the rest of his life as a major character in the narrative, and much of the narrative that Bradford will later write as annual chapters dramatizes the congregation's painful failure “to find such another leader and feeder in all respects.”

What brings to life the Robinson of Bradford's laudatory rhetoric is the abundant circumstantial evidence of his continuing influence in the rest of the history. Bradford shows Robinson debating with an Arminian professor in Leyden, preaching “a good part of the day very profitably” on the eve of the Pilgrims' departure from Leyden, falling down on his knees and tearfully commending his people to God as their ship prepares to sail. But the chief material of Bradford's historical success in this central characterization is the rich, incontrovertible supply of Robinson's letters. Bradford's judicious, extensive quotation reveals John Robinson as a forceful negotiator on economic and other issues and as an adviser on community government even after the congregation has emigrated to America. Robinson's moral power stands out most admirably in a letter to Bradford more than three years after the founding of Plymouth, when the pastor rebukes the colonists for having killed several Indians; Robinson understands at least some feelings of colonists and Indians alike, and the breadth of his understanding makes his rebuke and his prudential warning all the more persuasive:

Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had killed any! Besides, where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom staunched of a long time after. You will say they deserved it. I grant it; but upon what provocations and invitements by those heathenish Christians [that is, not members of Plymouth Plantation or the congregation]? Besides, you being no magistrates over them were to consider not what they deserved but what you were by necessity constrained to inflict.

(pp. 374-75)

Several of the long letters that Bradford copies into his text impress the reader as footnotes to the narrative, and S. E. Morison, in the best recent edition of the book, relegates many of the letters, including the one that I have just quoted, to an appendix. It seems to me very important, however, to consider all the letters as part of Bradford's narrative. Although a few of them do serve chiefly as documentation, many others deepen the characterization, build the larger structure, and provide unique narrative details. Only through a letter of Robinson's does Bradford let us see Captain Miles Standish's usual humility and meekness as civil traits that probably issue “merely from an humane spirit” rather than from Christian grace. Robinson's fear that under provocation Standish may lack Christian “tenderness of the life of man”—and his warning that “It is … a thing more glorious, in men's eyes, than pleasing in God's or convenient for Christians, to be a terror to poor barbarous people”—these help to characterize both Robinson and Standish. Only through one of Robert Cushman's many fine letters does Bradford first show us that the treacherous preacher John Lyford was sent to the colony at the insistence of several English stockholders, and that the two Pilgrim agents in England reluctantly consented to this arrangement with the express understanding that Lyford “knows he is no officer amongst you.” And it is one of Robinson's early letters that shows us the ideal of the church covenant: “We are knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves straitly tied to all care of each other's good and of the whole, by every one and so mutually.”

As the narrative develops, these apparently small matters grow in significance. The letters of Robinson and Cushman show us the complexities of negotiations for the original voyage to Plymouth. They also establish the pattern of governmental affairs for the first decades of life in America. Instructions received in good faith must be loosely interpreted or flatly disobeyed by agents under the immediate pressure of unforeseen decisions—sometimes apparently dishonest and evidently self-interested—made by the Englishmen who control the money on which the whole enterprise depends. Bradford, who as a participant had actually been with the colonists, uses the letters in his history to show us a remarkably complete picture of all four groups: the colonists, the agents, the investors (Adventurers), and (after the founding of Plymouth) the prospective colonists who never did manage to leave the Netherlands. His choice and placement of the letters not only give us essential information but convey the genuine plight and the vivid feelings of men caught in their historical situation. Each of the main figures in this correspondence speaks in his own characteristic language, and Bradford's shrewd arrangement of the inconstant Adventurer Thomas Weston's letters among those of Robert Cushman, John Robinson, and Bradford himself demonstrates brilliantly that character and circumstance make up the essential substance of early colonial history. Weston's blustering accusations that the colonists have let him down appear in the record only after we have seen, through the death of half the colonists in the first winter, how utterly unjust those accusations are, and how desperately the colonists need the help that he has promised but has failed to deliver.

Throughout the first fifteen years of colonization, it is not only the content but the actual historical importance of slow communication that gives the letters their greatest value in Bradford's history. The letter of Weston to which I have just alluded was dated (as Bradford carefully notes) July 6, 1621, and addressed to Governor John Carver. By that time Carver had been dead for more than two months, and his successor William Bradford did not receive the letter until November 10. Letters arrive belatedly, and their contents show that correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic have contradictory expectations of one another. Letters prove to be important not only for what they say but because they were often the essential stuff of the colonists' experience. Eagerly awaited from England, they name new conditions imposed by the Adventurers or announce the French capture of a shipment of American furs from Plymouth. Intercepted by Governor Bradford on their way from Plymouth to England, the Reverend Mr. John Lyford's letters reveal his plans to destroy the Adventurers' confidence in the infant colony's religious and political government, and when he insists that he has been completely loyal to the colonists his own letters are suddenly produced in a grand confrontation to expose him. Letters about his scandalous conduct in Ireland arrive too late to serve as warning. It is letters, too, that bring chilling news of 50 percent interest rates in the early years, and even chillier news a decade later—when colonists awaiting supplies receive instead word that their ship has been sent on a disastrous fishing expedition, and when the Adventurers belatedly confess that for years they have kept no clear records of thousands of pounds of furs and other goods received in payment from the colony.

As evidence from the letters has already suggested, Bradford, in delineating the Pilgrims' struggle against adversity, gives close attention to the diversity of human character. He also displays abundant evidence that the Pilgrims found it difficult to know human character. The Puritan saints who act in this history believe that men are divided into the elect and the damned, but they know that they themselves are often unable to perceive the distinction. They know, too, that an elected Christian can behave incomprehensibly. They do not really understand the character of Robert Cushman, their own agent and friend, or that of Isaac Allerton and James Sherley, until it has been revealed through action, and even then their knowledge is inconclusive. Roger Williams remains a mystery to Bradford long after error has led Williams out of Plymouth and into trouble elsewhere; yet Bradford can thank God for Williams's teachings and can “hope he belongs to the Lord.”

It is to Bradford's credit as a narrator that his consistent efforts to justify the Pilgrims and to dramatize their sufferings fill his pages with the bewildering actions of a succession of confidence men. Reading character is an essential quality in any successful colonizer and in Puritan religious life. Bradford's Puritan insistence on justifying his evaluation for the reader assures us of plentiful evidence from the letters of these men themselves, and his sympathy with the community that he portrays as their victim gives memorable power to the difficulties of all colonization. We can see in his account numerous practitioners of Simon Suggs's famous dictum: It is good to be shifty in a new country.

In portraying these confidence men, Bradford as narrator once again not only exemplifies but perceptively requires us to observe important qualities in seventeenth-century Puritanism: the passion for fairness and the liking for scenes of confrontation. The passion for justice (mixed though it often is with self-justification and even self-righteousness) flows powerfully through the letters about misunderstandings, and the combination of open rebuke with recapitulation of evidence sometimes makes the letters themselves serve as confrontations. A number of scenes in the history, moreover, represent Puritan leaders, armed with evidence or at least with the conviction that they must speak out for the truth, directly confronting their antagonists. In Leyden, John Robinson confutes an Arminian professor in public debate of theological issues. In New England, Pilgrims march to demand that Indian leaders verify or deny rumors of a plan to murder Squanto and attack the English settlements; and several of the rogues who figure so entertainingly in the narrative eventually appear in New England to face the indignation of their victims. The most celebrated of these scenes is of course the attack on Thomas Morton's “pagan” colony at Merrymount, but the most important is the “trial” of John Lyford, the preacher who betrayed the colonists in 1624.

Lyford's story gains force through his pretentious hopes of replacing John Robinson, whom Bradford has already characterized as the ideal Congregational pastor. Bradford shows us how the actual scene of the trial was prepared, through the interception of Lyford's letters to England and the concealment of their discovery until they could be revealed as a public denunciation of his claims to be the Pilgrims' loving friend and pastor. (These letters, by the way, also disclose that Lyford had been intercepting Bradford's letters.) The incident would be impressive enough if Bradford had merely dramatized the revelation, Lyford's confusion, and Lyford's confession and repentance. Bradford's account deserves especial praise because it shows how lenient Puritan justice could often be and because it emphasizes the political consequences. Even at this point, the Plymouth authorities and the congregation are willing to accept Lyford's repentance—until he writes yet another secret letter against them. Then Lyford's wife reveals that he has betrayed her, too, and belated reports from London declare that his original departure from Ireland had been precipitated by the discovery that he had seduced a young parishioner who had sought his counsel before her wedding. Bradford, of course, does not underplay this denouement, but the justification for his attention to the Lyford story has other, historically more significant grounds: his next chapter argues that the banishment of John Lyford provoked a majority of the original Company of Adventurers to break off their relationship to the colony.

As a judge of the diverse characters who enliven his history, Bradford, though often magnanimous and often puzzled, is by no means timid. He roundly condemns the behavior of Weston, Allerton, Lyford, Morton, Sir Christopher Gardiner, and others. But his high standards do not stifle his interest in reading character, and the variety itself supports two of his chief historical observations: (1) that other colonies perished while the religious colony at Plymouth survived, and (2) that the growing proportion of nonreligious settlers in the Plymouth colony reduced the original congregation's influence and its commitment to unity.

III

The perplexity that Pilgrim leaders feel throughout Bradford's history as they struggle to understand character and circumstance seems to me more important than the persuasive theories of lament and decline with which several scholars have tried to explain Bradford's composition of the book. Bradford began writing the history in 1630, the year that the Massachusetts Bay colony was founded by a large group of influential English Puritans. Some scholars believe that the likelihood of Plymouth's being overshadowed by the populous new colony may have moved him to write the first fourth of his narrative in 1630, almost twenty-five years after the first specific event in which he had participated, and that the decline of the original congregation's exemplary unity may have prompted him to resume writing again and to compose the last three-fourths of the narrative in the years between 1645 and 1650. (By 1646 he had reached only the year 1621.)

My own view is that although Bradford does lament evidence of decline in the 1640s, and although these passages are among the most famous that he wrote, the pattern of his historical organization is perennially dialectical, cyclical, alternating, as in the early passage that I have quoted on the departure from England for the Netherlands. Success is followed by failure, safety by danger, disaster by fortunate escape and recovery. Financial tormentors among the colonial agents and Adventurers seem to succeed one another; Weston is followed by Allerton and Sherley in bitter correspondence with the colonists about the debt that seems to grow larger with each payment.

Difficulties exist from the beginning, then, and successes increase along with losses throughout the decades of the history. Insofar as there is a clear direction in the entire narrative, that too is ambiguous. It is a dual story of flourishing growth “from small beginnings” and of decline from original purity. That, in Bradford's view, is the pattern of all Christian narrative. The same historian might consistently see both threads in the pattern, but he might at different times concentrate on one or the other. Only with the millennium would the larger pattern be clear to human eyes. Bradford tells us in 1646 that when he began writing the history he did not see how near was the downfall of English bishops, and we can see for ourselves in the section composed in 1630 (and in the verses he wrote in 1654) that he felt as much encouraged as threatened by the friendly settlements in Massachusetts Bay.

It is in this context and with an eye toward the occasional pessimism of old age that we should consider Bradford's comments on the execution of young Thomas Granger (along with several animals) in 1642 for sodomy. Although apparently only the third capital sentence in twenty-two years, this gruesome episode leads Bradford to consider possible explanations for the recent growth of outrageous crimes in Plymouth. Rather than cite these passages as sufficient evidence of a controlling historical disappointment, we must notice the chronology of composition. Bradford did not write the last three-fourths of the history until after the events of 1642 and the death of his old friend William Brewster. Granger's execution had occurred several years before Bradford wrote optimistically of the perplexity into which the colonists had been thrown by news of John Robinson's death in 1626:

… it could not but strike them with great perplexity, and to look humanly on the state of things as they presented themselves at this time. It is a marvel it did not wholly discourage them and sink them. But they gathered up their spirits, and the Lord so helped them, … as now when they were at [their] lowest they began to rise again, and being stripped in a manner of all human helps and hopes, He brought things about otherwise, in His divine providence as they were not only upheld and sustained, but their proceedings both honored and imitated by others. As by the sequel will more appear, if the Lord spare me life and time to declare the same.

(p. 181)

Bradford and other Puritan historians recognized that belief in Providence raised as many difficulties for them as it solved. Indeed, there is one moment in which two sets of Congregationalists in Of Plymouth Plantation see Providence on opposite sides. In 1635-36, a group from Plymouth and a rival group from Massachusetts Bay enter conflicting declarations that Providence has entitled them to the same land on the Connecticut River. “Look,” says one Congregational group to the other, “that you abuse not God's providence in such allegations.” The Plymouth group agrees to negotiate only on condition that Thomas Hooker's invaders first grant Plymouth's right to the land, and then the sale is accepted. Where, then, a reader might ask, does the Providential choice finally rest? Plymouth's Providential title is acknowledged, but those who acknowledge it gain the Providential consolation of actual possession.

Knowing that Providence sometimes favored the saints by granting them prosperity did not blind Puritan historians to the wondrous ambiguity of even that blessing. Perhaps the best illustration of how Puritan beliefs encouraged rather than discouraged the study of historical evidence is Bradford's account of the prosperity that came from wampumpeag in 1628. His description of prosperity leads to a puzzle. The trade in wampum makes the Narragansetts and Pequots rich along with the English, and Bradford suggests that it may soon cease to be profitable.

In the meantime [however], it makes the Indians of these parts rich and powerful and also proud thereby, and fills them with pieces, powder and shot, which no laws can restrain, by reason of the baseness of sundry unworthy persons, both English, Dutch and French, which may turn to the ruin of many. Hitherto the Indians of these parts had no pieces nor other arms but their bows and arrows, nor of many years after; neither durst they scarce handle a gun, so much were they afraid of them. And the very sight of one (though out of kilter) was a terror unto them. But those Indians to the east parts, which had commerce with the French, got pieces of them, and they in the end made a common trade of it. And in time our English fishermen, led with the like covetousness, followed their example for their own gain.

(p. 204)

It is these reflections that introduce the most famous rogue in the history, Thomas Morton of Merrymount, whom Bradford excoriates for selling arms to the Indians.

Prosperity, moreover, has a major role in causing conflict among the Pigrims themselves. Although Bradford is naturally troubles by the events, he seems to have a clear understanding of their causes, economic and social, and he presents them unmistakably as natural consequences of human actions in a world that is just as complex for Pilgrims as for others:

Also the people of the Plantation began to grow in their outward estates, by reason of the flowing of many people into the country, especially into the Bay of the Massachusetts. By which means corn and cattle rose to a great price, by which many were much enriched and commodities grew plentiful. And yet in other regards this benefit turned to their hurt, and this accession of strength to their weakness. For now as their stocks increased and the increase vendible, there was no longer any holding them together, but now they must of necessity go to their great lots. They could not otherwise keep their cattle, and having oxen grown they must have land for plowing and tillage. And no man now thought he could live except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep them, all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over the Bay quickly and the town in which they lived compactly till now was left very thin and in a short time almost desolate.

And if this had been all, it had been less, though too much; but the church must also be divided, and those that had lived so long together in Christian and comfortable fellowship must now part and suffer many divisions. First, those that lived on their lots on the other side of the Bay, called Duxbury, they could not long bring their wives and children to the public worship and church meetings here, but with such burthen as, growing to some competent number, they sued to be dismissed and become a body of themselves. And so they were dismissed about this time, though very unwillingly. But to touch this sad matter, and handle things together that fell out afterward; to prevent any further scattering from this place and weakening of the same, it was thought best to give out some good farms to special persons that would promise to live at Plymouth, and likely to be helpful to the church or commonwealth, and so tie the lands to Plymouth as farms for the same; and there they might keep their cattle and tillage by some servants and retain their dwellings here. And so some special lands were granted at a place general called Green's Harbor, where no allotments had been in the former division, a place very well meadowed and fit to keep and rear cattle good store. But alas, this remedy proved worse than the disease; for within a few years those that had thus got footing there rent themselves away, partly by force and partly wearing the rest with importunity and pleas of necessity, so as they must either suffer them to go or live in continual opposition and contention. And other still, as they conceived themselves straitened or to want accommodation, broke away under one pretence or other, thinking their own conceived necessity and the example of others a warrant sufficient for them. And this I fear will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord's displeasure against them.

(pp. 252-54)

Clearly, then, the Puritan historian was able to recognize a pattern that has become common in our secular history. Mobility and prosperity harm the community. New remedies bring on new diseases. Throughout the history, Bradford also records a dialectic in which the chosen people (acting out Christian typology) struggle to find God's will as they move between the perils of disease and remedy, prosperity and adversity, friend and enemy. In the long passages I have cited here the people are often trapped in a logical predicament that finds superb expression in the coordinate antitheses of Bradford's rhythmic syntax. That admirably flexible instrument is capable of showing us the Puritan's ideal community, the covenanted church “knit together as a body,” the pilgrims whose “dearest country” was in heaven, and the pious but inevitably troubled reality in the actual country of the New World, where complex historical forces transform church and commonwealth.

Bradford's style also serves him admirably in many pages of circumstantial description. Though often abstract, and though occasionally confused by ambiguous pronoun references, his prose has a tough particularity that regularly grounds his typology in explicit Biblical references and specific facts of New England life. His typological reading of the smallpox epidemics that devastate Indian nations but pass over the English would be much more vulnerable to criticism if he had not balanced it with a sympathetically detailed picture of the suffering Indians, and with some effort to explain the terrible consequences:

… they fear [smallpox] more than the plague. For usually they that have this disease have them in abundance, and for want of bedding and linen and other helps they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep. The condition of this people [in Windsor, Connecticut] was so lamentable and they fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, no not to make a fire nor to fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make fire, they would burn the wooden trays and dishes they ate their meat in, and their very bows and arrows. And some would crawl out on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by the way and not be able to get in again.

(pp. 270-71)

An amazing hurricane; a dying sailor cursed by his own shipmate for expiring too slowly; a fatal shoot-out over fur-trading rights in the Penobscot River; a rogue whom the Indians (with Bradford's consent) capture when he loses control of his canoe as he tries to shoot at them—these and other phenomena come through to the modern reader with equal vigor and detail.

It would be foolish to claim that Bradford's history is faultless. The book is marred at times by an appalling indifference to the Indians and by the kind of narrow perspective and partisanship that one might expect of the “puritanical.” But it is an admirably faithful work as well as an eloquently “mythical” statement about plain pilgrims on a journey through the world, and its continuing value depends as much on Bradford's historical intelligence and skill as on his celebrated modesty and style. It gives the best picture that I know of Puritan piety in action in the New World, and it owes much of its success to the obligations imposed on every believer by that piety: to search faithfully for an understanding of God's revealed will in the ambiguous evidence of the historical world.

Notes

1. Quotations from Of Plymouth Plantation in the text are from the Samuel Eliot Morison edition, used with his permission.

2. Since these remarks were written, Alan Howard, in an article cited in the bibliography to this chapter, has moved to avoid that distortion.

Bibliography

Editions

History of Plymouth Plantation. Edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Knopf, 1952. Reprinted, New York: Modern Library, 1967.

History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. Edited by Worthington C. Ford. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.

Scholarship and Criticism

Bradford, E. F. “Conscious Art in Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation.” New England Quarterly 1 (1928): 133-57.

Gay, Peter. A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

Grabo, Norman S. “William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation.” In Landmarks of American Writing, edited by Hennig Cohen, pp. 3-19. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Howard, Alan B. “Art and History in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 28 (1971): 237-66.

A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth: Mourt's Relation. Edited by Dwight B. Heath. New York: Corinth, 1963. Another edition: Edited by Henry Martyn Dexter. New York: Garrett Press, 1969.

Kraus, Michael. The Writing of American History. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953.

Langdon, George D., Jr. Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620-1691. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966.

Murdock, Kenneth B. Literature & Theology in Colonial New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949. Reprinted, New York: Harper, 1963.

Rosenmeier, Jesper. “‘With My Owne Eyes’: William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation.” In Typology and Early American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972.

Smith, Bradford E. Bradford of Plymouth. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951.