SOURCE: “Bradford's ‘Ancient Members’ and ‘A Case of Buggery … Amongst Them,’” in Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Stanford University Press, 1992, pp. 223-246.

[In this excerpt, Goldberg examines Bradford's treatment of sexuality, gender, and race in the process of “inclusion and exclusion” by which he defined the community depicted in Of Plymouth Plantation.]

I move from Landa now to William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation to pursue further these paths of negation and their relation to representations of sodomy. From many perspectives Bradford's text could seem out of place in this discussion, and indeed the introduction of an Anglo-American text in the context of Spanish-American texts poses great problems, and not merely those of national, chronological, and geographical difference. Such issues could be explored, but to do so might deflect the focus of this inquiry too far afield; it might also serve the purposes of the enforcement of disciplinary and nationalist differences which are no part of my design. I choose to place Bradford after Landa because his text allows us to see further—and perhaps in an extreme way—the productive relations between the negation of sodomy and the incoherent refashioning of European identity in the New World. What makes Bradford's text of particular interest is that for him the sodomite is not an Indian, but an inhabitant of Plymouth. In Bradford's text the accusation of sodomy, no longer deflected, realizes what has also been the case in the Spanish texts I have been looking at, the nonidentity of the European, the divisions within a supposed (proto)national identity that facilitate the various phenomena of crossing and cross-identification that are also stigmatized under the name of sodomy.

What is at issue in Bradford, and some of the ways in which his text can be considered next to Landa's, are suggested by Wayne Franklin's account in Discoverers, Explores, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America.¹ Franklin is interested, as his title suggests, in acts of textualization. He sees acutely that Bradford's work was (like Landa's) composed in retrospect, and is not simply the year-by-year chronicle that it appears to be. (Indeed a comparison of Plymouth Plantation to that part of Mourt's Relation written by Bradford would show how much Bradford suppresses and compresses in his later account of events.) Against those who read Bradford as enunciating an ideal,² Franklin finds instead the pathos of its lack as Bradford's true contribution to the making of America. The combination of forward-moving chronicle and backward-glancing composition that produces Bradford's text, Franklin argues, offers a “counterpoint between the ideal and the real” (150) written along the axes of inclusion and exclusion; in attempting to represent the community of Pilgrims as insulated and unified in its goals and beliefs, Bradford's story is continually undone by all those forces represented as outside that exclusive sphere. By the end, Franklin writes, Bradford “is forced to see how blurred are the lines of inclusion and exclusion, how hard it is to attribute inner tensions solely to figures who presumably are outside the colony” (151). Franklin thus points to divisions in Bradford's text and to its multidirectionality.

As the representative moment for his reading, Franklin chooses the late chapter in Plymouth Plantation in which Bradford lamentingly records the decision to move to Nauset and the abandonment of the “ancient mother” (370) church at Plymouth. The moment, as Franklin finely notes, is one in which demarcations are blurred: “Having defined itself by a series of ‘removals’ … the church has found that the ritual of departure, invented at first for the sake of preserving the ideal, now has become in America a primary means for its dissolution” (166). Franklin writes about the Nauset removal and cognate moments in Bradford with great sympathy and identification. The pained realization of failure, for Franklin, opens the vista of “competing views” (180) rather than the exclusivity to which Bradford clung. From Bradford's pathos, however, Franklin fetches an even more ideal notion than that of the exclusive community, the community made of its differences, irreconcilable and progressive. “Opposition itself is what organizes Bradford's prose” (180), Franklin writes; “opposition itself” translates into an “abundance of centers in New World experience … rather than any old scheme of cultural domination” (181). The end of Bradford's text serves an emblematic function for Franklin; the final page of Plymouth Plantation records Edward Winslow's departure for England, never to return (“which has been much to the weakening of this government” [385]), and below it, the years 1647 and 1648 inscribed with no entries beneath them. From such “blankness” Franklin derives Bradford's “positive insight” (177) that history is always the history of loss, and that from it the historian can fetch “the only abiding terrain of wonder, the human spirit” (178) that survives loss, if only in writing it. For Franklin, finally, there are no blanks in Bradford's text.

The proof of this is what Franklin terms the “rogue's gallery” of grasping newcomers and strangers, “along with worse figures like Weston, Morton, Allerton, Lyford, and Thomas Granger” (172) that are represented in Bradford and who point to a future unimaginable from the narrow perspective of Plymouth. In celebrating the diversity that can be read in Bradford (despite his designs), Franklin tacitly endorses the exclusions upon which his list rests; there are no women named here, no Indians either, and Franklin fails to note their omission even as he celebrates the pluralism of Bradford's text. Moreover, the final figure on the list, the “bugger,” Thomas Granger, is treated as if blandly equivalent to the other men named. Yet Bradford devotes a merciless paragraph to Granger, recording his death, over which he presided. However much he is “in” Bradford's text, that difference cannot be ignored. If Granger should be read, as Franklin suggests, in conjunction with those on his list of rogues in Bradford, he needs also to be considered with the “blanks” in Bradford's text, in relation to those who do not make it onto the list. My purpose in the pages that follow is not to suggest some monolithic identification between sodomites, women, and Indians in Bradford. Each is accorded a different representational status, as I will suggest; yet there are also convergences and crossings that need to be taken into account. A consideration of these can go further than Franklin's “multiplicity” and “opposition” do to suggest how divided Bradford's text is. From these convergences we can take stock of the fierce negations in Bradford's text—and what they produce—too easily glossed over in Franklin's idealizing reading. Thus, rather than reading Bradford from the vantage point of the Nauset removal, the pages that follow are conducted from the site provided by the execution of Thomas Granger.

Franklin's reading of Bradford occurs in a chapter that derives its title, “Like an Ancient Mother,” from the lament over the Nauset removal. From it, Franklin's notion of ideal and real is fetched, and the possibility that however bodily separate its members are, the church remains one, an ideal that can be said to continue to animate those dispersed bodies. Reading the passage, it's not hard to see how that analysis could be made:

And thus was this poor church left, like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children, though not in their affections yet in regard of their bodily presence and personal helpfulness; her ancient members being most of them worn away by death, and those of later time being like children translated into other families, and she like a widow left only to trust in God. Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor.

(370-71)

For Franklin, this passage offers a “benchmark from which Bradford's most important historical measurements are run in the book. The ancient mother church is still a point of uncorrupted ideals” (168). If the origin has been lost, the future has not, and the dispersed community will expand beyond its original design. The ideal will be located elsewhere, but it will not be lost in the realized multiplicities that follow.

Such a reading responds to the pathos of the passage but not to antagonisms that can also be read in it, and not merely, I would argue, in some “counterpoint” of “real” and “ideal.” Rather, these oppositions are more entangled: the “ideal” is an ideological production. One can see this if one asks (as Franklin does not) why the church is represented as a woman, and what that gendering has to do with the relations between men that the passage also imagines and depends upon. Such questions are related to the “rogue's gallery” of “outsiders” that has no space for women in it, but also and fundamentally to the all-male community that animates Bradford, the “ancient members” that are Bradford's signal point of attraction and identification.

In the passage, the “ancient members” (I will have more to say about the locution), the first settlers, are pitted against those that came after, not only the newcomers, but also their own children.³ A fierce antagonism between generations operates in Bradford as one of the dividing lines within the community. “Translated” names obliquely the regular practice of putting out children to be raised by other families, a division within the patriarchy that virtually operates to redraw class lines (it was not only the children of poor families who became servants in others' houses) and that ensures the division of labor (children are a commodity in this system) and the increase of wealth finally lamented.⁴ Having crossed class lines, the children of the founding fathers are also allied with the so-called strangers (many of whom remained apart from the community), or the newcomers, or those who arrived on their “particulars” and who did not become incorporated within the “general” body. Despite all these removals, of children and ancient members, the widowed mother-church is represented as yet married—to God. Thus, an ideal of the family and of the enclosed community is preserved—as an ideological construct at some distance from and yet as the sustaining rhetoric for what actually happened at Plymouth. As Bradford records, the early attempt to form extended households—so that unmarried men, or men who arrived without their families, were incorporated into families—eventually had to be abandoned. That initial arrangement “farmed out” all single men—in the name of the family. Promoting this ideal, Bradford's prose gains resonance from biblical citation and paraphrase. What palpably holds the passage together is an ideal of union despite which and out of which these abandonments are recorded—an ideal of union between men represented through the ideal union of the mother-church with God.

Hence, Bradford's lament in the “ancient mother” passage, structured as it is by the breaking of the mother/child bond, by divisions of age and class, by its yearnings for the community of “ancient members,” cannot be read without considering questions of sexuality and gender. The “ancient mother” in this passage—the woman—is represented as abandoned, and to serve as an ideal from which one departs never to return. The pathos (from Franklin's perspective) of this historical plot (the triumph of capitalism) is, after all, based in a paradigm of marriage and procreation in which the men venture out and leave their wives and mothers behind. That movement is virtually enacted in the passage when the “ancient mother” is transmuted into the “ancient members”; the pathos quickly becomes one of a division between older and younger men, the Pilgrims and other men, a pathos generated by the yearning for the ancient members.

One of the differences between the settlement in Plymouth and the earlier exploits of conquistadores lies precisely in the fact that these founding fathers came with their families and servants. Yet, while Bradford records tensions between the old comers and the newcomers, between the general and the particular, family life is hardly his concern except in terms of questions of property; women appear remarkably infrequently in his account.⁵ When they do appear it is in moments like this one, recording the death of the first governor of Plymouth, John Carver, “whose death was much lamented and caused great heaviness amongst them, as there was cause. He was buried in the best manner they could, with some volleys shot by all that bore arms. And his wife, being a weak woman, died within five or six weeks after him” (95). Carver dies as a strong man—although ill, he puts in a hard day of work in the fields and in the blazing sun, suddenly to be felled; his death requires a quasi-military ceremony and causes a lamentation which, however generally it is presented, seems retrospectively to involve only the men in the community. The neutral “they” and “them” so characteristic of Bradford's prose become “all that bore arms” (the trusted men, those inside the community). Carver is an isolated individual, with his own first name, and he is lamented by a community of men who have their arms and their ceremonies. His wife's death is an afterthought, a response to his, and a sign of her “weakness.” She has no part in the production of the manly ideal and the community of men around Carver—no place in Bradford or in Franklin. Unthinkingly, for them history is only the story of what men do; the purple passage about the mother-church is a late admission of a principal exclusion in Bradford's text—an exclusion, as I've been suggesting, that sustains the production of the ideal all-male community.

Elizabeth Carver or the ancient mother-church are put into Bradford's text only to be put out of them; if these passages adhere to the pattern that Franklin finds—of exclusions that are inclusions—they do so in a way that radically calls into question the “multiplicity” he celebrates. Real women are translated in that late passage into a trope of ideal femininity, a phantasmatic female that secures male/male arrangements and an all-male history. Written under the sign of an ancient mother, these male arrangements are secured beneath a spirituality that is nominally female and which serves a normative protoheterosexuality that barely obscures the fact that Bradford's attention is always on other men, whether the rogues or his divided fellow members—on other white men, that is, since Bradford's text excludes Indians as much as it can.

Unlike most other accounts of the settlement of North America, Bradford's text has no space for even a minimal ethnography; Indians figure only in the spheres of trade and war, treaties and betrayals; in this Bradford's text represents a kind of limit case in New World writing. Revisionist historians like Francis Jennings and Neal Salisbury have begun to write the other side of the story that Bradford fails to tell, and have seized upon his suppressions and misrepresentations to make comprehensible from the Indian side the story of relations that Bradford offers.⁶ Such revisionary history is not (or need not be) merely in “counterpoint” or contributory to the great American multiplicity that Franklin reads.⁷ The armed band shooting off their guns at Carver's death might be for Jennings or Salisbury a trope for the murderous impulses behind English settlement. Another late moment in Bradford—another purple passage, but not among those listed as memorable at the end of Samuel Eliot Morison's edition of his text—records that genocidal impulse, the burning of the Pequot Indians at Mystic:

All was quickly on a flame, and thereby more were burnt to death than was otherwise slain; It burnt their bowstrings and made them unserviceable; those that scaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their repiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

(331)

A page later, Bradford slips, recording the beheading of Sassacus, the Pequot sachem, done he says first “to satisfy the English” and then, immediately after, “or rather the Narragansetts” (332), at this point the English allies and here visibly scapegoated for English atrocities. But also, in this slippage from English to Indian, an admission of identification; after the ritual holocaust (like the passage about the ancient mother, resonant in its biblical allusion), the enemies who were “enclosed[d] … in their hands” are literally in Bradford's hand; momentarily, the English are their savage counterparts.

My point here, in moving from Anglo women to Indian men, is not to suggest that they are identical in Bradford's text, except in the single regard in which I have been considering them: as those who must be effaced in order for history to move forward as the exclusive preserve of white men. While real white women barely put in an appearance in Bradford's text, they are “saved” by him in the figuration of the mother-church (and this, in turn, saves male/male relations from sexual stigmatization); Indians, on the other hand, appear more often, especially in the opening and closing chapters of the book—as helpers or hindrances, providing food or beaver pelts to the Puritans, who are always represented as innocent peacemakers; although there is occasional sympathy for Indians (when they are dying thanks to plagues believed sent by God, for instance), they are never “saved” by any idealizing trope; they remain, for Bradford, “savages.” Despite differences in the representational status of Anglo women and Indian men, it is worth pointing to the ways in which they are joined (a connection not noticed by Jennings or Salisbury, although it is central to Ann Kibbey's discussion of the Pequot War)⁸ to take a full measure of Bradford's genocidal text. In Bradford's description of the bloody massacre at Fort Mystic (one that featured the slaughter of women and children, as Kibbey notes), an impulse buried in his initial description of the New World as “vast and unpeopled” (26) begins to be realized—the impulse to make it unpeopled;⁹ there, as throughout, others—the rogues, never the Puritans—are blamed for what is done to them, other Englishmen like Weston or the supposed gun-running Morton of Merrymount, or the Indians themselves as savage betrayers of Puritan peace and civility. The slip of the pen of English to Narragansett quickly covers over what the text never more openly admits, its own savagery, “removals” and blanks that cannot be accommodated to Franklin's benign reading of them.

These lethal energies against women and Indians can be found even in so ideal a moment as the “ancient mother” passage, deflected onto the bodies of other white men, in that case, the next generation. That this is related to the divided constitution of Plymouth is suggested by the “providential” story Bradford tells about the crossing on the Mayflower, when a “lusty” young man refuses to help those who are sick and helpless: “It pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown overboard. Thus his curses light on his own head, and it was an astonishment to all his fellows for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him” (66). Two pages later, Bradford records that only one passenger died in the crossing, “William Butten, a youth, servant to Samuel Fuller, when they drew near the coast” (68), and the death “before they came half seas over” of the “lusty” young man has been expunged. The nameless young man is not the named youth—the designation of his master further assures that. Similarly, the “Civil Body Politic” (84) compacted on the Mayflower in the face of mutiny was signed only by those who represented the “better part” (84), the “ancient members.” They have their dutiful servants, others' children, single men, housed under their roofs; nameless dissolute young men have no place in this compact except insofar as they are willing servants of their masters. One consequence of these arrangements (fearful to be named, Bradford would write) is just that division of the society between hierarchically disposed male bodies that, Alan Bray has convincingly argued, facilitated male/male sexual behavior, and the bodies of “lusty” and rebellious young men on whom the sin of sodomy could be attached.¹⁰ No wonder then that age and generational tensions mark Bradford's text.

It is thus worth pausing over the nature of the all-male ideal that Bradford espouses, before we consider further the ways in which such dissolute young men are attached to those whom Bradford would expunge. Plymouth Plantation opens by situating the notion of “removal” (to Amsterdam, to Leyden, to Plymouth) as a strategy for narrowing the perimeters around the community, for ensuring the separateness of “the better part” (4). Theirs is the history of a true church whose removals made it possible for “the truth” to “spring and spread” (3). What necessitates removal to America is the fear of the “dissolution” and “scattering” (24-25) of the chosen seed, the “sowing” of the seeds of error, a worry manifest in what is said to be happening to the dispirited and wayward youth in Leyden. Bradford's terms—seed, fruit, sowing, scattering, and dissolution—are fetched from the Bible; they are also insistently sexual. So read, they can help us understand both the energies that animate Bradford as he regards the “ancient members” (in this context, it's hard not to hear the sexual meaning of the term), but also the lethal energies unleashed on Thomas Granger. One might well wonder why a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boy caught having sex with a mare should figure as the last on Franklin's list of who are the “worst” in Bradford (this does not misrepresent Bradford in the least) and what he might share with Weston (the backer that failed Bradford), the “atheist” Morton (whose crime seems to have been his attempt to form a more egalitarian community), or Allerton, Bradford's partner who cut his own deals, or the backsliding minister Lyford. One answer lies in seeing that there are networks of connection between these allowable figures (the excluded who can be included) and those who do not even figure in this list, women and Indians. By pursuing these connections, we can come closer to understanding the function of sodomy in Bradford and its relation to the ideal of community that animates his text.

Consider the case of Lyford, the minister offended by Puritan exclusivity, the rule of the so-called “better part”; “the smallest number in the Colony … appropriate the ministry to themselves” (177), Lyford is discovered to have written in an intercepted letter, and his wife is called upon to give the clinching evidence against her husband. “She feared to fall into the Indian's hands and to be defiled by them as he had defiled other women” (185). The good wife here (a woman entirely complicitous or represented as being so) is admitted into the community in order to voice Lyford's identification as an Indian, to represent the Indian as a fornicator bent on the capture and rape of white women. Lyford's willingness to extend the community of believers beyond the limits of tolerability is signaled by the case mounted against him, of his use of his ministry as a way to the bed of other women, usually serving women, but, in the most fully detailed instance, the future wife of one of his parishioners: “Lyford had overcome her and defiled her body before marriage”; even worse it seems, “though he had satisfied his lust on her, yet he endeavoured to hinder conception” (187). Lyford's religious “crimes” are translated into sexual ones, fornication and adultery, but in “hinder[ing] conception,” his crime could also fall under the label of sodomy (in the broad sense of the term, as any form of sexual activity without procreation as its ostensible aim).¹¹ The last charge, which seals the case against him for Bradford—it is the worst that can be said about Lyford—is also palpably excessive.

Yet it is how Lyford can come to be on a list that ends in Thomas Granger. Such associations can be found throughout the text. Take Ashley, for instance, a worrisome partner for Allerton, Bradford opines, since he had a history of living “among the Indians as a savage” and going naked (242); when his financial abuses were found out, he also was discovered guilty of “uncleanness with Indian women” (258). If the “rogues” are associated with Indians and women (condensed into the figure of the promiscuous Indian woman), this also links them to sodomy. Thus, Morton's threat to the Puritans' “lives and goods” is represented as even more fearsome than that of “the savages themselves” (230). If the proof of his profligacy is the allegation that his followers (lower-class men whom Morton rescued from being sold into slavery) take “Indian women for their consorts” (227),¹² Morton's “School of Atheism” implies even worse deeds. Just as Lyford's “bad” religion translates into sodomitical sex, “atheism,” as Bray points out, is a charge regularly made against sodomites. In Protestant England, Catholics or Catholic sympathizers were so charged; in Puritan New England, the Anglican Morton is redubbed an atheist. Beyond the explicitly named debauchery of Indian consorting (a “savage” debauchery that could itself fall under the broad label of sodomy), “worse practices” are hinted, “the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians,” the “fairies, or furies” whirling about their “idle or idol maypole” (227), as Bradford puts it in prose whose doublings and allusions—in its refusals to name more directly—circle about the unnameable crime, and about the maypole erected in defiance of the ancient members. Such locutions only imitate what Richard Slotkin has read in the multiply named pleasures of Merrymount—Marrymount, where whites and Indians joined; Marymount, where high church and “pagan” rituals mixed; and Maremount, evoking, as Slotkin concludes, “the image of sodomy, or buggery, a crime that troubled New England not a little (by Bradford's account).”¹³ And which found its only detailed representation in Thomas Granger, “discovered by one that accidentally saw his lewd practice towards the mare” (355).

Granger is thus the worst of these unclean members, the site towards which these representations move. Tensions of age, race, class, and gender fasten on his body to unleash homophobic energies that serve the all-white male ideal in Bradford. Why the threat should be crystallized there—how it is that Granger is even admitted into Bradford's text—can be further understood if we look at another of the purple passages in Bradford, a very late (probably the last) retrospective addition to Bradford's manuscript. On one side of the page, a letter jointly penned by John Robinson, the leader of the church in Leyden who never joined his congregation in Plymouth, and by William Brewster, whose death is lamented by Bradford in the chapter immediately following the one devoted to sodomy. “We are knit together as a body” (34), the letter declares; on the facing page, Bradford replies:

O sacred bond, whilst inviolably preserved! How sweet and precious were the fruits that flowed from the same! But when this fidelity decayed, then their ruin approached. O that these ancient members had not died or been dissipated (if it had been the will of God) or else that this holy care and constant faithfulness had still lived, and remained with those that survived, and were in times afterwards added unto them. But (alas) that subtle serpent hath slyly wound himself under fair pretences of necessity and the like, to untwist these sacred bonds and tied, and as it were insensibly by degrees to dissolve, or in a great measure to weaken, the same. I have been happy, in my first times, to see, and with much comfort to enjoy, the blessed fruits of this sweet communion, but it is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay and want thereof (in a great measure) and with grief and sorrow of heart to lament and bewail the same. And for others' warning and admonition, and my own humiliation, do I here not the same.

(34-35)

The intensity of male bonds in this passage is unmistakable. Women have no place here, not even figuratively (once the “ancient mother” becomes the “ancient members,” she disappears). The “blessed fruits of … sweet communion” may look like a procreative metaphor, but these are sweets and fruits that flow between men, ideally between the “ancient members,” who, in this fantasy either never would die or would be replaced by newcomers identical to the old. This is that fantasy of the seed and of the truth that opens Bradford's book, a fantasy about the spirit that has not been expended in a waste of shame. If this sacred bond looks like marriage, it is worth recalling that Bradford's first act as governor of Plymouth, duly recorded just beneath the description of the death of Carver and his wife, was to reinstitute marriage as a secular relation, taking it out of the hands of the church; the bond that ties men together is propagated in fruits that are not the children of heterosexual procreation but an overflow from member to member, a preservation of the chosen seed, here sadly dissolved and disseminated. Rather than spending their seed upon each other, those who have betrayed Bradford's vision have sowed seeds into the void. The death of the “ancient members” marks the end of the fantasy of the preservation of the “better part.”

What part that is is suggested by another of Robinson's letters, the one read out to the Pilgrims before their passage across the Atlantic; here are its opening lines:

Loving and Christian Friends, I do heartily and in the Lord salute you all as being they with whom I am present in my best affection, and most earnest longings after you. Though I be constrained for a while to be bodily absent from you. I say constrained, God knowing how willingly and much rather than otherwise, I would have borne my part with you in this first brunt, were I not by strong necessity held back for the present. Make account of me in the meanwhile as of a man divided in myself with great pain, and as (natural bonds set aside) having my better part with you.

(55)

The “better part” is a presence made in absence, an affection carried by a letter that attempts to overstep the limits represented by “natural bonds,” the ties to women. (“We are well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country” [34], Brewster and Robinson write, in a phrase that foretells the “ancient mother” trope.) This is what Franklin idealistically termed the eternal spirit, but it is more exactly the materiality of the letter; Robinson is not divided between body and spirit but between part and part. One part is the “natural” bond of home and kin; his “better part” is on the page, but it was realized too in the “Civil Body Politic” compacted on the Mayflower and signed by the “better part” (84). This vision of “loving and Christian friends” bound together is further conveyed in another letter—from Charles Gott, founding the first Congregationalist church in New England. “Every member (being men) are to have a free voice,” he writes (248); among the separatists, every old member, being a man, has a voice so long as he is among the better part. “I may say, as the eunuch said,” Gott begins another declaration; as the eunuch, he locates himself, dismembering the members and severing the “natural” bond to women in order to make “free” male members—free to have relations with each other that are nominally desexualized and are resexualized, nominally, in the very words on the page, in their loving exchanges, member to member.

The sexuality that flows at such moments in the representation of the ideal male community suggests how close sodomy is to this discourse and why, when sodomy “broke forth,” as Bradford puts it (351)—when it became visible—it was violently repudiated. The fundamental nonrecognition in Bradford's text, I would argue, is the proximity of the ties that bind these men together and the possibility of literally enacting them. Let me be clear here: I am not suggesting that Bradford is secretly homosexual, or latently so. Nor am I framing this as the accusation voiced by a late-seventeenth-century Englishman who wrote that “there be some of the Brethren that do love to embrace their likeness, (to wit, a Beast,) choosing rather to have familiarity with a Beast or a handsom Boy, than use their own wives.”¹⁴ Rather, Bradford's text is (to follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's use of the term in Between Men) eminently homosocial, and it preserves its fantasy of all-male relations precisely by drawing the line—lethally—between its sexual energies and those it calls sodomitical. (It is this that makes a text like Bradford's foundational for the national imaginary upon which the U.S. Supreme Court depended in Bowers v. Hardwick.) The burst of energy in Bradford's evocation of the “sacred bond,” like that in so many other of his purple passages, comes against the other more usual impulse in his prose: the desire not to say, the desire to efface which is variously aimed at women, Indians, and sodomites. “I omit,” “I have been too long,” “etc.” are the frequent marks in a text in which the writer rarely inhabits an “I” (more often a “they”; and “William Bradford” appears in this text as another—the Governor—or as the signatory of letters included in the text). Bradford writes in a plural “general” voice. “Etc.” is the mark inserted in the letters he so frequently cites, with the aim of letting others speak—but only so far. Announcements of omission or overstepping the limits of what he would tell appear as he dilates on his “rogues,” and he stops himself to keep his prose from becoming dissolute (this happens twice in his pages on Morton). “To cut things short” (167), this, despite its prolixity, is the desire of Bradford's text. This desired cut is exactly the place of meeting between the holy eunuch and the condemned sodomite.

Always extending himself, Bradford would, if he could, not tell anything. The case of Thomas Granger, and his unspeakable sin, is, Bradford writes, “horrible … to mention” but must be told since “the truth of the history requires it” (355). The truth of the history, as I am reading it, is the entanglement of the “ancient members” with and the desire to separate from the figure of the sodomite who represents at once the negation of the ideal and its literalization. Even the mention of Granger, Bradford claims, goes only so far: “I forebear particulars” (355-56). His acts are not described, just the satisfaction of their punishment. “I forebear particulars”: it could be Bradford's refrain—“particulars” are also how he names all those who are not part of the “general,” all the dissolute members that Bradford would cut off. Granger's execution is recorded in the middle of Bradford's 1642 chapter, devoted to the “breaking out of sundry notorious sins,” drunkenness, incontinence, uncleanness, and “that which is worse, even sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name)” (351). His “buggery,” as I've been suggesting, is the dense site of a series of crossings and displacements in Bradford. It's to those now that I turn.

First, the relation of sodomy and buggery needs to be discussed. Legally, sodomy and bestiality were synonymous, both “fearful to name,” both warranting death. However, in New England, a distinction was made between male/male sexual misconduct and having sex with an animal.¹⁵ As Robert Oaks remarks, “Puritans were less resistant to punish buggery with death than they were sodomy” (70). (Bradford's list of crimes thus arrives at buggery last, as the worst.) This inconsistency has been variously explained—usually by asking which activity was more likely to have been practiced in the period and thus more in need of policing, and by pointing to the fears of monstrous offspring that such matings were thought to produce.¹⁶ Rather than asking the question about which sexual activities were more common in New England, it seems to me more useful to ask what the body of a man caught sleeping with an animal could serve that a man sleeping with another could not, why one body would be destroyed, while the other could be preserved. Here the notion of monstrous births seems worth pursuing; in imagining that possibility, “buggery” is given the potential to realize—literally—the debasement of procreative sexual behavior against which sodomy in general was measured. By killing someone for an act that was believed capable of bearing fruit, the tacit relation between prohibited and metaphorically idealized male/male relations could remains undisturbed. Thus, the body of the “bugger” could serve as the site for the assaultive energies against “sodomy,” and at the same time preserve ideal male/male relations untouched by the crime—could, by displacing male/male sodomy onto male/animal buggery, fail to bring sodomy into relation with the overflow of spirit and seed Bradford favored.

The punishment of an interspecies crime rather than one between men insists upon the “unnaturalness” of sodomy, and thus its lack of relation to bonds between men. Granger, undistinguished in his punishment from that meted out upon the animals, is, in effect, not granted membership in the human race. His punishment is the one specified in Leviticus, but it can't help but recall Balboa's mode of dealing with the Panamanian “sodomites,” allowing his dogs to rend their bodies. And it suggests that in equating Granger with his animal partners, Bradford's racist energies fasten on his body too. Bradford, after all, believes that Indians are “wild beasts,” “savage and brutish men” (26). In his bestiality, Granger momentarily—and finally—steps into that blank in Bradford's text reserved for the bodies of Indians.

But Granger's act is with a female of the species, a mare, and the crossing of species serves to mark a gender crossing as well as a racial one. To see that, we need to recall that Granger's story surfaces only midway in Bradford's chapter. Bradford opens his chapter by lamenting the appearance of sodomy “here,” but by the end of a paragraph “here” becomes “in this land” (351), and the lament seems, a page later, to have been occasioned by a “letter from the Governor in the Bay … touching matters of the forementioned nature” (352). “Here” becomes “there,” and it appears that Governor Bellingham's case of “uncleanness” (353) is motivating Bradford, not Granger's case at all. Retrospectively, they will be connected (explicitly so, as we will see momentarily). The case in Massachusetts Bay involved what would, in modern terms, be thought of as rape—two female children were said to have been violated numerous times over the course of a couple of years, and by several different men. Appeals were sent to Plymouth and elsewhere (there was no statute that covered the case) and opinions were solicited; “sodomy” seemed a capacious enough category under which the case might fall, and Bradford polled various divines (the opinions of three are recorded in his text). “Besides the occasion before mentioned in these writings concerning the abuse of those two children,” Bradford finally admits, “they had about the same time a case of buggery fell out amongst them, which occasioned these questions, to which these answers have been made” (355). Granger's case and the Bay case are considered together. Much as Bradford has attempted to displace Granger's case, and to act as if the outbreak of sodomy really hasn't happened at Plymouth, he finally admits otherwise. But displacement is still taking place: Granger's buggery is being thought of in relation to a crime against women.

In their opinions, the learned divines keep measuring the Massachusetts case against their own. They are divided by many issues, particularly, as Bradford summarizes the documents, whether death is warranted for crimes of bestiality and sodomy “if there be not penetration” (354). In that case, there should have been no question what punishment was apt for the rape of the two girls; that's not how the Plymouth minister John Rayner understood the issue, however: “because there was not the like reason and degree of sinning against family and posterity in this sin as in some other capital sins of uncleanness” (Morison, 405). Sodomy and buggery, when penetration can be proved, are capital sins; rape is “uncleanness,” a lesser charge. The “logic” here is the same that led Bradford to regard Lyford's unprocreative adultery as more horrific than a “natural” adulterous act. Raping girls is less criminal than any sexual act between men or between a man and an animal. Thus the men charged in the Bay case were whipped severely, and one of them had his ears mutilated. They did not receive Granger's punishment. Crossing species—sleeping with a female horse—Granger's case is nominally sodomitical but also, and more significantly, a violation of the procreative act between sexes. However awful the Bay case was, at least it recognized that the female body was a site of procreation—such is Rayner's opinion: I need hardly point out how this hideous misogyny countenances rape and yet “saves” women for their “proper” procreative role. The Bay case therefore was not a case of sodomy. Granger's was and deserved death. But it deserved that punishment precisely because it represented the worst male/female sexual behavior.

Thomas Granger thus is a transfer point for energies directed against Indians and women; his crossing of species is also a racial and gender crossing. His death along with his barnyard companions would seem to mark an absolute point of termination (the polluted animals, following the dictates of Leviticus, were not even allowed to serve as food—this could be related to Chanca's discussion of the economies of cannibalism, the question of which bodies are too degraded to be eaten). But, as Bradford puts it, Granger's case “fell out amongst them” and it remains to be said that his case is theirs. However much Granger displaces the anxieties about male/male sodomy, he also is a locus for them. This explains why the learned divines were so troubled about questions of penetration. To understand this, we need to notice yet another retrospective recontextualization of Granger in Bradford's text. For, after describing Granger's death, Bradford backtracks to a summary of his examination. When Granger is questioned, his story is linked to one told by someone else “that had made sodomitical attempts upon another”; both said they learned such wickedness “in old England. … This youth last spoken of said he was taught it by another that had heard of such things from some in England when he was there, and they kept cattle together” (356). As usual, Bradford forbears particulars; here he seems to be conflating a March 1642 sodomy trial with Granger's September 1642 case. The earlier case had decided that the two men involved, Edward Michell and Edward Preston, had been engaged in “lewd & sodomitical practices tending to sodomy.”¹⁷ Public whippings were their punishment, to be witnessed by their townsmen, and by John Keene, a boy they had attempted, who was not found guilty, but not exactly innocent either (“in some thing he was faulty”). Michell had also attempted to “abuse” Lydia Hatch, and she in turn was said to have shared a bed with her brother. She too was whipped, the brother banished from the community. These are all acts “tending to sodomy,” acts in which penetration was not proved; none of these “sodomitical practices” (whether male/male or male/female—and incest seems to be included here) led to the death penalty. “Normal” sodomy, practices “tending to sodomy,” were part of the usual fabric of sociosexual life.

The men, Bradford reports, confessed that they learned their crime when “they kept cattle together” (Bradford thus conflates their sodomy with Granger's buggery, misrepresenting the differences in their fates). Once, as Bradford tells the story, that was what all the Puritans did. “They were not acquainted with trades nor traffic,” Bradford writes of those English who originally removed to Amsterdam, “but had only been used to a plain country life and the innocent trade of husbandry” (11). They all started as Thomas Grangers. For Granger was, after all, a quite ordinary English boy, indeed one of those farmed-out children upon whom Bradford's ideal community rests, “servant to an honest man of Duxbury, being about 16 or 17 years of age. (His father and mother lived at the same time at Scituate)” (355). Granger's case testifies to the unspeakable continuity between Bradford's ideal and the unmentionable horror of sodomy.

No wonder, then, for all its deflections and despite the condensations upon Granger's body as the site of all that must be repudiated, the question that Bradford keeps asking in his 1642 chapter—in both its opening and its closing pages—is, how could this happen here? The initial answer is supernatural: Satan, most incensed by so righteous a community, plagues them with the worst of sins (351-52). But this is immediately replaced with a natural explanation—like waters that have been dammed up and which will have out, so too with wickedness despite the severity of laws and their enforcement (352). The natural becomes social, and it is yet another social explanation that Bradford himself favors—the very enforcement acts to reveal what elsewhere would be hidden. There is not more sodomy among them, it is simply more visible thanks to the intensity of scrutiny. Bradford all but admits that the righteous community produces sodomy.

Alan Bray has remarked how Bradford displays the characteristic Elizabethan belief that sodomy is something which anyone is capable of doing, an eruption in “our corrupt natures, which are so hardly bridled, subdued and mortified” (351). Incipiently, Bradford (and Bray following him) reads sodomy as the repressed, as a component inherent in human sexuality. Dammed up, it will out.¹⁸ Yet, Bradford's view is insistently social and it seems worthwhile taking that seriously; not, obviously, to endorse his analysis, but because it suggests the social conditions through which sodomy comes to be that which is discovered as the repressed, conditions in which repression is invented. “They are here more discovered and seen and made public by due search, inquisition and due punishment; for the churches look narrowly to their members” (352). The final locution connects of course to the object of Bradford's most rapturous desire, the ancient members to which he is always looking. Not surprisingly, then, it has its locus in the love letter from John Robinson that serves as the founding document of Plymouth. Robinson preaches the necessity of “watchfulness” (56): “Let every man repress in himself and the whole body in each person” (57). Repression here is a means of production; sexuality is not inherently within, it is produced as that which is within, the unseen that corresponds to what is seen. The gaze of members upon members produces what must be repressed—by inquisition and punishment when made visible, but “ideally” never made visible at all: this invisibility preserves the “ancient members” from sodomitical penetration; this invisibility ensures the life of sodomites as well.

Thomas Granger is killed as a sodomite but the chapter does not end with his death: it is part of the mechanism for the production of sexuality. Hence, the end of the chapter swarms with a multitude of bodies, those of the strangers, the profiteers, the servants, represented as those who have diluted the community of first comers. They are said to be the origin of sodomy, the outsiders who have insidiously undermined the true members of the body politic. This is the import too of the letter from Massachusetts Bay which asks for advice about three things, not only their case of “uncleanness,” but also what is to be done about “the Islanders at Aquidneck” (the “heretics,” including Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson),¹⁹ and about the beaver trade. These are only apparent nonsequiturs. So-called “heretics” and Indians occupy the same discursive space in colonial writing, as more than one historian has noticed.²⁰ What has further to be remarked is the insistent sexualization of the connection. The heretics are represented as “sowing the seeds of Familism and Anabaptistry” (353) and spreading “infection”; the Massachusetts Bay colony fears that “the Indians will abuse us” in trade (353). In other texts, this sexual language implicates the bodies of women; in Bradford, the language is that of the sodomitical body with its bad seed, infection, and abuse.

Bradford's answer to the multiple query from Boston is epitomized in his decisively singular reply about the “heretics”: “We have no conversing with them, nor desire to have, further than necessity or humanity may require” (354). “Necessity” makes clear, in its understated way, that the community cannot be sealed off; it explains why there is room for the “rogues” in Bradford. Morton may be sent off, but Allerton brings him back: the lapsing Lyford is given more than one chance. And Allerton, of course, the figure who dominates page after page of Bradford's text, is the only one who is never directly accused of sexual crimes. The reason is not far to seek. He was one of the “ancient members,” a signer of the Mayflower Compact; moreover, he was married to William Brewster's daughter. With Allerton, Bradford repeated a relation he celebrates in the eulogy of Brewster that fills the chapter after the one devoted to sodomy. Allerton was Bradford's right-hand man, as Brewster had been when he served the chief secretary of Elizabeth I: “[Secretary Davison] esteemed him rather as a son than a servant, and for his wisdom and godliness, in private he would converse with him more like a friend and familiar than a master” (360). Such are the proper connections between “ancient members,” and the fallen Allerton never falls so far as to be connected with stigmatized forms of male/male familiarity. But humane treatment has its limits, and Thomas Granger is beyond the pale.

Who was Thomas Granger? The court records tell what Bradford omits: “late servant to Love Brewster” (Shurtleff, 2:440). Love Brewster was one of two sons—the other was named Wrestling—that came over on the Mayflower with their father, William Brewster. Love and Wrestling: the names are too allegorically perfect to describe the tensions between generations, or the sacrifice of Granger made in the name of the love between men. “Your loving friend, William Bradford” (355), so the Plymouth Governor signs his letter to his fellow leader of the rival colony, who signs himself “Your loving friend, Richard Bellingham” (353).

Is there penetration here? Penetration is supposedly requisite for the death penalty in cases of sodomy, but not in Granger's case. Hence the “sad spectacle” that Granger's death offered this community of loving friends eyeing each other: “For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus xx.15; and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great and large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them” (356). The large pit: the holes in Bradford's prose. The spectacle: they watch those brought before Granger's face, those animals that he had been seen to penetrate. Because in “that carnal knowledge of man or lying with man as with woman,” Rayner writes, “it was a sin to be punished with death (Leviticus xx.13) in the man who was lyen withall, as well as in him that lieth with him. … His sin is not mitigated where there is not penetration.” Because bestiality and sodomy are fully analogous, and “if a woman did stand before or approach to a beast for that end, to lie down thereto (whether penetration was or not) it was capital.” Because in these cases—when men lie with men as with woman, when a woman looks to an animal as she might to a man—it is “equivalent to penetration” (Morison, 404). Strange equivalence that must deny these equivalences, but no stranger than the gaze of the ancient members upon each other, or upon the bugger, Thomas Granger. “One wicked person may infect many,” Bradford intones, and all must take care “what servants they bring into their families” (356). There is no stopping this wickedness, however, for its origin is not where Bradford puts it, outside the community, outside the pale of humanity. There always is penetration.

Notes

1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Citations appear parenthetically in the text.

2. A tradition enshrined in Samuel Eliot Morison's edition of William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), or its abbreviation in Francis Murphy's Modern Library edition (New York: Random House, 1981). I cite page numbers from Murphy's more widely available text except for some materials from Morison's appendixes omitted in Murphy. One sign of how Morison reads Bradford is the list of “Quotations” provided at the back of his edition, purple passages that are no doubt thought to be inspirational. Murphy concludes his introduction by hailing Bradford as “the first in a long line of American writers … who grasped the imaginative possibilities of the essential American myth: the story of a people who set themselves apart from the rest of the world and pledged themselves together in self-sacrifice and love” (xxiii-xxiv).

3. Bradford's abiding interest in the “First Comers” can be seen in the records he kept of their genealogical histories (see Morison edition, appendix 13, 441-48), and his purpose in writing Of Plymouth Plantation was to preserve the past for these future generations.

4. On the practice of putting out children, see Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 75-78. Morgan reads the practice as designed to ensure the creation of distance between parents and children, to guard against too much affection; this view is endorsed by John Demos in A Little Commonwealth (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 71-75, who tentatively suggests that the “ancient mother” passage in Bradford may relate to family tensions that were displaced into neighborly disputes about property (189).

5. This contrasts with the virulent misogyny in, for example, John Winthrop's Journal or the various accounts centering on Anne Hutchinson and her followers; on this, see especially Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New York: Vintage, 1987).

6. See Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), and Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). One limit to this undeniably valuable work is its blindness to questions of gender and sexuality; the remediation offered, the setting straight of the historical record, still operates within the confines of war and trade and towards a reversal of accounts like Bradford's.

7. Although that is the way in which James Axtell shapes his “moderate” ethnohistory; see, for example, “A Moral History of Indian-White Relations Revisited,” in After Columbus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 9-33, in which exception is taken to the “extremity” in Jennings and Salisbury; or “Colonial America Without the Indians,” in After Columbus, 222-43, in which a vision of the cooperative Anglo-Indian venture is offered that mutes the genocide unflinchingly faced by Jennings and Salisbury.

8. See Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapter 5 passim, especially 105-10.

9. Perhaps even more horrific is the juxtaposition of Bradford's account of the compassion of Plymouth for the Indians killed by a smallpox epidemic in 1634 (302-3), and its representation not merely as God's pleasure, but, as the English settlers wrangle over the spoils, of the land as “the Lord's waste” and rightfully belonging to Plymouth since “it was they that found it so … and have since bought it of the right owners” (316).

10. See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), chapter 3 passim, especially 67-80.

11. For this broad definition and its significance for the American colonial situation, see Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 31-65.

12. For an account sympathetic to Morton, see Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 3-61; Drinnon sets Morton's relations with Indians in contrast to the repressions of Puritan life, and pronounces sexual behavior with Indian women “good clean fun” (57). More puritanically, Neal Salisbury attempts to “save” Indian women from the charge of promiscuity (see Manitou and Providence, 160).

13. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 61. In “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England,” Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 268-81; reprinted in Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, eds., The American Man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), from which I cite. Robert Oaks also associates the “worse practices” with homosexuality, opining their likelihood in an all-male community (58). This rather flattens the notion of sodomy, and fails to see its connections with the variety of practices associated with Morton in Bradford. Oaks thinks the “homosexuality” at Merrymount may have been either “situational” or a matter of “preference”—either compelled or freely chosen, alternatives that only appear, I believe, to cover all the possibilities in that dichotomy, and that depend moreover on the quite problematic notion that any man in the period would have self-identified as a homosexual.

14. Cited in John Carnup, Out of the Wilderness (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 45.

15. The situation in New England was not the same as in Virginia; the first death penalty for sodomy was administered in Virginia in 1624; in New England, in 1646. For particulars, see Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History, 16-23. Two buggery executions took place in New England in 1641; others occurred in 1646, 1647, 1654, and 1662.

16. See, for example, Oaks, “Things Fearful,” 70-71, and Bradley Chapin, Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 128. Both authors think that the horror of bestiality was connected to the belief that monstrous offspring could come from such unions.

17. I cite the case as transcribed in Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac, 84-85, derived from Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, 11 vols. (Boston: William White, 1855-61), 2:35-36.

18. See Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 25-26. In Facing West, 28-29, Drinnon finds the metaphor of damming in Freud, and treats Bradford's text as presciently modern in its articulation of repression.

19. As might be expected, Hutchinson's name never appears in Bradford; when Williams's does, Bradford expectedly writes: “I shall not need to name particulars” (286).

20. See Drinnon, Facing West, 55, indebted, as he notes, to Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (New York: Viking Press, 1973). See also Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 24. It is of course Kibbey's important recognition, in the texts she studies, of the ways in which this equation implicates the bodies of women.