SOURCE: “The Theology of History in Of Plymouth Plantation and Its Predecessors,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 1975, pp. 47-66.

[In the essay below, Hovey explores the theological themes of several early colonial histories in order to demonstrate how Bradford follows, adapts, or abandons those themes in his own history. Hovey considers Bradford's literary technique in addition to his theological concerns to explicate his developments in historiography.]

When William Bradford in “about the year 1630”¹ began to write his full scale history of Plymouth Plantation, several carefully written historical relations of the first settlement in New England had already appeared in print. “A Brief Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England” (1622) covered the years of exploration from 1607 to the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620, “Mourt's Relation” (1622) continued the history to the autumn of 1621, and “Good News from New England” (1624) by Edward Winslow brought this three-part record to an end in the autumn of 1623. All three of these short accounts, as well as Purchas His Pilgrims, in which they were all reprinted in abridged form in 1625, were cited as references by Bradford as he came to tell of the years they covered. Besides supplying him with information which he felt free to summarize, they also served as models of historiographical technique. In fact, however, none of them suited his purpose, for he did not intend to write another short relation but, rather, something of much greater dimensions, an “Ecclesiastical History of the Church of Christ at Plymouth in New England,” as his nephew titled it.² For such a purpose Bradford naturally took earlier church histories, especially Foxe's Acts and Monuments,³ as his models and made ecclesiology share with historical fact the center of his attention.

Nevertheless, though they are not church histories and give much more attention to fact than doctrine, the early relations are theologically oriented works. They were written by pious men who regarded all human action as relating in some way to God. It is natural, therefore, that fundamental aspects of the relationship between God and man in history underlie all of them. These fundamentals also underlie Of Plymouth Plantation, though they are partly concealed by the more obvious polemics of Bradford's ecclesiastical historiography and the portrayal of the distinctive practices of the Pilgrim church. In order to discriminate carefully these various and fundamental aspects of the relationship of God and man in Bradford's history, I intend to examine individually each of the early relations, determine the purposes for which it was written, isolate its particular and relatively simple theological theme, and show how its theme forms a part of the more complex theology of history found in Of Plymouth Plantation.

Before beginning, however, it is necessary to note that while the early accounts of New England are theologically oriented, their authors are also very much concerned with human causality and the material world. As David Levin has written of Of Plymouth Plantation, “it is Bradford's Puritan piety that obliges him to examine worldly causes, … to describe fully the objections … and the fears” of the Pilgrims, and to discern “no necessary conflict between economic and pious motivation.”⁴ Much the same can be said of the three earlier accounts. In discriminating, therefore, the theological themes in these accounts and in Of Plymouth Plantation, as much attention must be given to their authors' handling of human motivation, emotion, and economics as to their explicit references to divine agency. For this reason I shall attend equally to the roles given to man and to God in these works and show as specifically as possible how the two are fused in each into a single theology of history.

I. “A BRIEF RELATION OF THE DISCOVERY AND PLANTATION OF NEW ENGLAND”: GOD'S INSCRUTABLE WILL AND THE UNCERTAINTY OF ALL HUMAN THINGS.

The “Brief Relation,” “set forth Anno 1622 by the President and Council for New England” (B, [William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation,] 81), was written to serve two purposes: to vindicate the Council from certain “injurious aspersions”⁵ and to encourage more people to settle in New England. By recounting the many discouragements suffered in the first voyages to New England under the Council's auspices, the anonymous author seeks to convince the reader that the Council's efforts deserve sympathy rather than criticism, and by ending the whole happily he intends to awaken interest in the project. Unfortunately the two purposes cannot be reconciled, and the author is forced into a non sequitur. If, as he first discouragingly states, Captain Dermer, the last explorer of New England, died after being forced to escape from Indians who betrayed and “suddenly set upon him,” how can he then encouragingly conclude that Dermer “made the peace between us and the savages,” thereby opening the way to “a peaceable plantation”? Bradford was quick to point out this discrepancy. Giving more details of Dermer's unsuccessful dealings with the Indians, he concluded, “By all which it may appear how far these people were from peace, and with what danger this plantation was begun” (B, 83). If we disregard, therefore, the unconvincing conclusion, the “Brief Relation” gives us no more than the vindicatory history of a business venture which consisted entirely of a series of “disasters, calamities, misfortunes, oppositions, and hindrances,” as the author himself summarily says.

Of Plymouth Plantation also contains just such a history. More of Bradford's work is devoted to the Pilgrims' financial and legal difficulties than to any other topic. From chapter five, in which the Pilgrims seek their first patent, to the annals of 1642, in which Bradford promises to tell us of the final breaking off with the last adventurer, business matters dominate the history. To give such “a particular relation of all acts and orders in the courts …, of the annihilating old patents and procuring new; with the charge, pains, and arguments, the reasons of such changes, all treaties, consultations, orations, and dissentions about the sharing and dividing those large territories” of New England, would, as Captain John Smith wrote, yield “such a volume as would tire any wise man but to read the contents.”⁶ Agreeing with Smith, some modern readers, including William Haller, find the financial and legal history contained in Of Plymouth Plantation tiresome. Bradford himself repeatedly admits that it is “long and tedious” (B, 322).⁷ Yet he includes it for a purpose. He wishes to reveal the “simple truth of things … which hung in expostulation … many years” and were “a long time … folded up in obscurity” (B, 238, 233). Bradford, like the author of the “Brief Relation,” intends to vindicate himself and his business partners from “the clamours and aspersions raised and cast upon them hereabout” (B, 310), and believes that a “clearing of the truth” (B, 256) will provide that vindication.

The author of the “Brief Relation,” in the course of his vindication, also raises a theological question which is equally important to Bradford and to him: How could so worthy a work as the settlement of New England and the conversion of the Indians meet with such ill success in a world overseen by God? The author offers two answers, one from the perspective of God and the other from that of man. “The best designs,” he states at one point, “do oftentimes carry with them the most impediments, whether it be that God will have it so to try our constancy, or otherwise to make us know, that it is he only that worketh after his own will, according to the time he hath assigned.” This is the first answer: the misfortunes of worthy ventures like that of the Council for New England are simply inexplicable. They are expressions of God's pure will, which we can attempt variously to interpret, but which teach us no more than that God controls the universe and that he would have it so. Of course sometimes God's will acts as inscrutably for men as against them. Thus, while the author of the “Brief Relation” says of one event that “it pleased God to take from us,” of another event he says that “it pleased God to give” to us. Bradford employs this same answer to the problems of history throughout Of Plymouth Plantation. He wishes, for instance, that “it had been the will of God” that the original members of the Plymouth church “had not died or been dissipated” (B, 33) but realizes that, “seeing it is the will of God thus to dispose of things, we must labour with patience to rest contented till it please the Lord otherwise to dispose” (B, 180—letter of Roger White).

The second answer is the human counterpart of the first. “In all human affairs,” the “Brief Relation” states, “there is nothing more certain, than the uncertainty thereof.” This notion of the mutability of man is given vivid expression throughout the “Brief Relation” in the portrayal of the emotions of the members of the Council in response to the return of their various expeditions. The first bad news of an expedition “abate[d] the rising courage of the first Adventurers,” but at the arrival of good news “we all waxed … confident of the business.” As the result of more bad news “some grew cold, and some did wholly abandon the business,” yet later “there were of us who apprehended better hopes that might ensue.” Such a picture of human emotion is also to be found in Bradford's history, where the Pilgrims are alternately portrayed as grieved or comforted. Indeed, group sorrow and joy are practically the only emotions which Bradford presents at all, and their alternation merely proves the same moral as that of the “Brief Relation”: “It shows us the uncertainty of all human things and what little cause there is of joying in them” (B, 177). Many such pessimistic morals are to be found in Of Plymouth Plantation, and lead from a disillusionment with the world to a disillusionment with man in general and then to a mistrust of men in all varieties: “So uncertain are the mutable things of this unstable world” (B, 119) becomes “so vain is the confidence in man” (B, 94), which in turn is translated into “‘Put not your trust in princes,’ (much less in merchants)” (B, 101), and “even among friends men had need be careful whom they trust” (B, 239). Thus, when princes, merchants, and even friends forsake and betray us, men in general fail us, and death reigns over the whole mutable world, what can we say but that “man's ways are not in his own power. … Man may purpose, but God doth dispose” (B, 180).

This proverb sums up and relates the two complementary answers which the author of the “Brief Relation” gives to the historical question which confronted him. Bradford's history, however, is neither so brief nor so simple, and in consequence raises more questions. The inscrutable will of God and the uncertainty of all human things serve Bradford as only partial solutions to the many problems to be found in his history. Yet insofar as Of Plymouth Plantation, like the “Brief Relation,” is the vindicatory account of a business venture, divine will and human change provide a complete explanation.

II. “MOURT'S RELATION”: GOD'S PROVIDENCE OVER MAN AND MAN'S FAITHFUL RESPONSE.

The work which is generally called “Mourt's Relation” consists of three main parts, as the original title brings out: “Relation or journal of the beginning and proceedings of the English plantation settled at Plymouth in New England. … As also a relation of four several discoveries. … With an answer to all such objections as are any way made against the lawfulness of English plantations in those parts.” Bradford described the two narrative parts of this three-part work as “a journal made by one of the company, and some other passages of journeys and relations already published” (B, 84). Bradford himself was evidently the “one of the company” that wrote the “Journal,” Winslow was evidently the author of the four short “Relations of Discoveries,” and Robert Cushman the undoubted author of the expository “Answer to Objections.”⁸ As a work of historiography the “Journal” is the only part of “Mourt's Relation” which merits attention. Although clearly based on a diary written at the time of the happenings it relates, it is not that diary itself, for a foresight of succeeding events is to be found in the accounts of the first days. In the account of November 27, for instance, Bradford states that “some of our people that are dead took the original of their deaths here” (Y, 139), yet these deaths did not occur until January. Such comments must have been edited into the original journal by Bradford to prepare it for publication.

Likewise, much must have been edited out, if the original diary kept some record of every day, for over a third of the days during the period covered in the “Journal” go unmentioned. Most of these fall between the five major episodes, and probably contained little of interest. Yet comparison with Of Plymouth Plantation shows that some interesting and important events did take place which have been purposely suppressed. The most notable of these suppressions is that, as Bradford states in his later history, “in two or three months' time, half of the company died, especially in January and February” (B, 77). Despite the fact that deaths are foretold, only one person in the “Journal” accounts of January and February is mentioned as on the point of death and none as dying. The reason for this deceptive omission can be found in the overall purpose of “Mourt's Relation.” It, like the “Brief Relation,” is written to encourage further settlers to come to New England, as Mourt makes clear in his introductory letter to the reader. As the author of the “Brief Relation” does not deny the discouraging truth that Captain Dermer was attacked by Indians, neither do Mourt and Bradford in “Mourt's Relation” deny that “some” settlers have died (Y, 111). Yet in both works these truths are disguised in one way or another in order to present future plantation as a hopeful enterprise.

The only other notable subject suppressed in the “Journal” is the Pilgrims' peculiar religious identity. This is done first of all by the omission of Sunday entries. Bradford speaks of only six Sundays in the whole five months covered in the “Journal,” and four times writes about a Saturday and then the succeeding Monday without a word about the intervening day. When a non-religious event occurred on a Sunday Bradford did not omit it, but of religious observations on the Sabbath he says no more than that they kept a meeting (Y, 178), rested (Y, 161), and sent the Indians away (Y, 189). Along the same lines, the extensive contrast of the “godly” Pilgrims with the “profane” ship's crew drawn in the part of Of Plymouth Plantation covered in the “Journal” is hardly to be found in the earlier work. Where it can be found, as in Bradford's statement in the entry for Christmas day that of the Pilgrims “no man rested all that day” while “at night the [ship] master caused us to have some beer” (Y, 169), he is merely stating facts. He by no means intends to show the conflict between Separatist and Anglican practice which he emphasizes in the well-known Christmas anecdote in Of Plymouth Plantation (B, 97). Besides the general silence of the “Journal” on the subject of Sabbath observances and its failure to discriminate the godly from the profane, there is no mention made in it of the Pilgrims' special religious mission. In fact, it is not clearly mentioned in any part of “Mourt's Relation.” This is natural, since the work was designed not just for other Separatists, but for a larger audience of prospective settlers. Furthermore, it had to be acceptable to the President and Council for New England, to whom it was ingratiatingly addressed (Y, 114-15). In a work designed to please such an audience Bradford could not feel free to portray the Pilgrim church fully, and therefore, while saying nothing of the planting of a church, he focuses instead upon the establishment of a civil government.

The exclusion of the church from the “Journal” does not, however, mean the exclusion of God. He acts in it just as he did in the “Brief Relation.” Again his inexplicable will is well documented: “It pleased God that Mistress White was brought a bed of a son” (Y, 148); “It pleased God that the next day … the wind came fair” (Y, 163), etc. But another property of God not mentioned in the “Brief Relation” appears in the “Journal.” That property is his providence. Providence is, of course, an aspect of God's will, but it is an explicable one. As God once willed all to exist in creation, he now in general wills all, and especially man, to be preserved and provided for by his providence. Whenever the Pilgrims, therefore, are preserved or provided for, Bradford need not ascribe the event merely to God's will and pleasure. For this reason he writes in his “Journal” that “after many difficulties in boisterous storms, at length, by God's providence … we espied land,” and that “it was God's good providence that we found this corn, for else we know not how we should have done” (Y, 117, 141; my italics.) It is not simply God's will that is revealed in these acts, but his will as it is explicable in the concept of providence.

Providence operates in Of Plymouth Plantation in the same way that it does in the simpler “Journal.” The divine deliverances from the dangers of the sea, from the Indians, and from want and sickness found in the earlier work are multiplied in the later, and to them are added deliverances from the treachery of faithless Englishmen. But another side of providence is revealed which was not touched on in the “Journal.” Although in general providence can be said to be the will of God operating for the good of all men, more narrowly speaking it only operates to preserve and provide for good and faithful men. Far from preserving bad men, it hinders and destroys them. For this reason, when Bradford describes the untimely death of “a proud and very profane young man,” for instance, he calls it “a special work of God's providence” (B, 58). In the “Journal” Bradford had prudently refrained from separating the goats from the sheep, but in Of Plymouth Plantation he felt free to show the destructive as well as the preservative aspect of providence.

Nonetheless, Bradford generally maintains that, unlike God's blessings, “God's judgments are unsearchable” (B, 177), and is therefore reluctant to read them into his history (B, 177, 290, 346). While such pious letter-writers as Sherley, Winthrop, and Winslow, for instance, explain epidemics as indubitable manifestations of divine wrath (B, 235, 249, 287), Bradford declares them only to be the will of God, without presuming to explain further (B, 95, 260, 270). The wisdom of his reluctance is best seen in the accounts of the Pilgrims' conflicts with their avowed friends. Providential complications come especially to the fore in the Connecticut river dispute. The Pilgrims claimed that they had been “upon a barren place [i.e., Plymouth] … by necessity cast” and therefore had thought that they “might with God's good leave take and use” what was “the Lord's waste” on the Connecticut (B, 282-83). Later, having been displaced against their will from the Connecticut, some of the Pilgrims saw the “crosses” experienced by their displacers “as a correction from God for their intrusion, to the wrong of others, into that place” (B, 290). The no less pious displacers, however, claimed that “God by his providence cast” them in the Connecticut valley, warned the Pilgrims to “abuse not God's providence in such allegations” against them, and might well have suggested that it was not necessity but God's providence that cast the Pilgrims in a barren place (B, 282). Bradford resolves the conflict between the two providential interpretations by refusing to see the difficulties of the displacers as providential at all. By leaving misfortunes to God's inscrutable will and only claiming blessings as providential, at least among the godly, he obviates conflicting interpretations of providence.

Just as God's inscrutable will is evident in the “Journal,” so too is its complement, the uncertainty of all human things. So long as God's will is incrutable man's life must be uncertain, a series of hopes disappointed and fears proven false. But when God declares his will in his providence to be for the preservation and provision of good and faithful men, the fulfillment of human expectations is given a measure of certainty. Moreover, the providential God can be influenced by the faithful man, for the greater faith the greater good providence. This is why worship, unmentioned in the “Brief Relation,” finds a natural place in the “Journal.” In this work worship appears as the response of faith to providence. As Bradford portrays it, worship is of two kinds. The first and dominant kind consists of giving thanks to God after a deliverance. The other and less common, though more interesting, kind of worship consists of seeking God in the face of present necessity or God's apparently adverse will.

There is only one example of this second type of worship in the “Journal.” It is occasioned by “necessity calling them to look out a place for habitation” (B, 64). In answering this necessity it is clear, as Bradford relates, that the Pilgrims simply considered the pros and cons of various sites, voted on them, and let the majority rule. In the midst of this rational parliamentary procedure they “called on God for direction” (Y, 167). By the inclusion of this statement Bradford seems to dignify the whole, as if reasoning were calling upon the Lord and deciding by vote were following his direction. In fact, this is essentially the case, for reasoning and rational decision constitute as much a part of this act of worship as the invocation of God. Robert Cushman explains the theory behind what Bradford depicts here in practice in the “Answer to Objections” included in “Mourt's Relation”:

Whereas God of old did call and summon our fathers by predictions, dreams, visions, and certain illuminations, to go from their countries, places and habitations, to reside and dwell here or there … according to his will and pleasure; now there is no such calling to be expected for any matter whatsoever. … Though then there may be reasons to persuade a man to live in this or that land, yet there cannot be the same reasons as the Jews had; but now, as natural, civil and religious bands tie men, so they must be bound, and as good reasons for things terrene and heavenly appear, so they must be led.

(Y, 240-41)

In the Christian era, Cushman argues, persuasive reasons constitute the only call men are to expect from God, and the only direction he gives is that they should use their heads. Bradford, therefore, by presenting the various arguments pro and con, establishes the Pilgrims' calling to the site of their plantation and, by showing how rationally they decided in answering that calling, can legitimately claim that they followed the direction of God.

The attempt to seek God which led to a much more important decision, that of emigrating to New England in the first place, dominates the whole first book of Of Plymouth Plantation and is told in much the same way as the later seeking in the “Journal.” In both cases the whole process follows a single pattern and order: the premise of a necessity, the establishment of a reasonable calling, the call upon God for direction, and the decision on a probable course of action. Bradford fleshes this pattern out with reasons, which though apparently gratuitous, actually serve a theological purpose. In order to show that the Pilgrims' calling “might expect the blessing of God” (B, 27), he must, according to Cushman's dictum, prove it to be reasonable, and in order to show that in their decision on a course of action they may confidently “rest herein on God's providence” (B, 31), he must, for the same reason, prove it to be probable.

The decision to go to America is not the only decision portrayed as a seeking of God in the first book of Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford also describes two solemn meetings on days of humiliation at which sermons were preached on Bible texts relevant to the decisions at hand. These formal meetings clearly have the same purpose as the less elaborate ones before the decision to go to North America and, in the “Journal,” before the decision to settle at Plymouth. They give full institutional form to the act of seeking God in the same way that the thanksgiving day celebrations give institutional expression to the act of thanking God. Days of humiliation are also mentioned in the second book of Bradford's history but not just in connection with needed decision-making. Two such days are occasioned, not by necessities as such, but by the adverse will of God. When faced with urgent necessities men can decide on a course of action to avoid or alter them, but when God determines to send famine or plague no human determination can hope to circumvent them. In such cases, as Bradford shows when he describes the visitations of 1623 and 1633, men can do no more than “humble themselves and seek the Lord” (B, 260).

The account of the drought of 1623 is particularly interesting because it portrays most clearly Bradford's full understanding of God's providence over man and man's faithful response:

Notwithstand all their great pains and industry, and the great hopes of a large crop, the Lord seemed to blast, and take away the same, and to threaten further and more sore famine unto them. … Upon which they set apart a solemn day of humiliation, to seek the Lord by humble and fervent prayer, in this great distress. And He was pleased to give them a gracious and speedy answer, both to their own and the Indians' admiration that lived amongst them. For all the morning and greatest part of the day, it was clear weather and very hot, and not a cloud or any sign of rain to be seen; yet toward evening it began to overcast, and shortly after to rain with such sweet and gentle showers as gave them cause of rejoicing and blessing God. … And afterwards the Lord sent them such seasonable showers, with interchange of fair warm weather as, through His blessing, caused a fruitful and liberal harvest, to their no small comfort and rejoicing. For which mercy, in time convenient, they also set apart a day of thanksgiving.

(B, 131-32)

In this episode Bradford depicts a complete though short cycle of history: (1) a divine threat, “upon which” (2) men seek God, then (3) a divine blessing in “speedy answer” to that, “for which mercy” (4) men thank God. Each movement in the cycle is presented as a response to the former. The two acts of worship are given their full institutional expression, and the acts of providence are given their characteristically Bradfordian colors, the first of them being attributed only to God's “seeming” wrath while the second is attributed without reservation to God's blessing. The whole of Of Plymouth Plantation can be seen as a series of similar cycles of history, even though individual cycles are seldom revealed in their entirety. Bradford leaves them in partial obscurity because, as he sees it, the correspondence between human worship and divine providence in history is contantly interrupted by inscrutable acts on God's part and variability on man's. The cycle gives history in his view a measure of order, but it cannot explain everything.

III. “GOOD NEWS FROM NEW ENGLAND”: MEANS HUMAN AND DIVINE.

“Good News from New England,” which was “put forth in print by Mr. Winslow at the request of some friends” in 1624 (B, 96), was intended, as its postscript makes clear, to serve as a sequel to the two earlier relations. Like the “Brief Relation,” the “Good News” sought to vindicate the colonial enterprise from “vile and clamorous reports” (Y, 277), like “Mourt's Relation” it had to please the Pilgrims' patrons, the President and Council for New England, and like both it hoped to encourage serious-minded settlers to come to New England. Quite unlike them, however, it opens with an explicit statement of the theological thesis which the ensuing narrative is to support. In his dedicatory epistle Winslow states that, in the following history, one “may behold the good providence of God working with [the investors] in our preservation … as also in giving his blessing so powerfully upon the weak means we had … beyond expectation” and therefore “as God hath wrought with us in our beginning on this worthy work … so he will by us accomplish the same … if we neglect not the means” (Y, 271-72). The thesis, as here stated, expressly enunciates the idea of the responsiveness of man to God and God to man which underlies Bradford's “Journal.” Winslow goes on to illustrate this idea in his account of the deliverance from the drought of 1623, which he presents in much the same cyclical way as Bradford. This deliverance is but the second of two which comprehend the providential preservations mentioned in the thesis. The account of the first illustrates the other important idea which is alluded to in his thesis and given considerable attention throughout the “Good News,” the idea of means. As he mentions the “weak means” of the Pilgrims in his thesis, so in the later account he speaks of their “small means” (Y, 335). As in the one place he says that men must “neglect not the means,” so in the other he says that God “ordained … a special means” (Y, 335). To understand the “Good News,” and with it Of Plymouth Plantation, we must determine exactly the significance of these means, of which the Pilgrims have characteristically little and which, while ordained by God, must not be neglected by man.

The year after the publication of Winslow's work John Robinson published a collection of essays, Observations Divine and Moral, in which he included one essay entitled “Of Means.” In this essay Robinson succinctly states the Puritan notion of means which he shared with and perhaps taught to Winslow and Bradford.⁹ Robinson begins with a definition: “Means are so called of the middle place which they hold, between the efficient and final causes; serving the one for the furthering, and achieving of the other. And so all creatures, whether persons, or things, come under this account, in respect of him, from whom, and for whom all things are.”¹⁰ To Robinson, as to most of the Englishmen of his day, the natural world attested to God in two primary ways. In that it was created it attested to a Creator, and in that it continued to be preserved, to a Preserver. As the preservation was considered the working out of God's providence in the world, so the creation seemed but the means by which God achieved the ends of his will towards man and all things. The whole created world served, therefore, as “glasses wherein to see God's helping hand” (R, 142), for, inasmuch as it was a means, it not only implied its end or final cause but also its beginning or efficient cause, God the Creator.

Of course, Robinson argued, God is “able without means to do whatsoever he doth, or can do by them. … Neither … hath the Lord ever done greater works than those, which the hand of his power hath wrought … immediately” (R, 141). What Robinson categorizes here as immediate acts of God he describes in an earlier essay as “supernatural, and miraculous events; which are, as it were, so many particular creations, by the immediate hand of God” (R, 18). Yet, while Robinson admits the possibility and previous occurrence of miracles, of other creations beyond the creation, he gives no examples of them and shows little interest in them. The same is true of Winslow and Bradford. Cushman goes perhaps farther than Robinson's other disciples when he denies the possibility of modern miracles altogether: “As the miracle of giving manna ceased … so … there must not now any extraordinary revelations be expected” (Y, 240). Whether or not Bradford and Winslow believed that miracles ceased with Biblical times, the world which they portray in their histories is devoid of miracle. The Pilgrims are not preserved by new-created manna showered on them by the immediate hand of God, but by the shellfish found in Cape Cod Bay, which are part of God's age-old creation. Surprisingly enough it is Cushman that wrote, “if ever we make a plantation, God works a miracle” (B, 56). Yet what he meant by miracle Bradford explicates as “the providence of God beyond man's expectation” (B, 54). Defined as such, there is much of miracle in Bradford's history. There is much that occurs beyond human expectation, but there is nothing that occurs in which the means are not known and ordinary.

It is not, however, necessary to relate all means to a divine efficient cause. Most of those mentioned by Winslow and Bradford are the means which men employ for human ends. Unlike God, man can do nothing without the use of means: “Though [God's] power be not bound to means,” Robinson writes, “yet his will binds us to such” (R, 142). One of God's reasons for limiting us to them is “to stir up our diligence” (R, 142). “To neglect them,” Robinson says again, is

either desperateness, when a man is without hope of good by them; or presumptuous tempting of God, when he expects good without them; or sloth, when he will not trouble himself with them. With all which, unthankfulness to the Lord is joined, who provides them as helps against our infirmities: and therewith profane sauciness also, if with the contempt of the means which we have, we long after such as we have not.

(R, 142)

What Robinson almost seems to say is that there is no greater sin than the neglect of means, for it comprehends all others—disobedience of God, tempting of God, despair, sloth, unthankfulness, and profane sauciness. On the other hand its opposite, diligent care for means, is a great virtue, as Winslow makes clear in the thesis of his “Good News”: “As God hath wrought with us in our beginning of this worthy work … so he will by us accomplish the same … if we neglect not the means.” So great a virtue is attentiveness to means that in exercising it, Winslow implies, men can claim that God is working with them, that man's means are also God's means.

That human means can be identified with divine means and were in fact particularly identifiable in the whole enterprise and early history of the New England plantation is exactly what Winslow wished to demonstrate. In building their fort, for instance, the Pilgrims intended to provide a means for their defence in general. But since the fort was no sooner finished than it served to avert an Indian attack, Winslow makes clear that God intended the fortification as the means for their defence against this attack in particular. Similarly, in applying what “raw and ignorant means” they could to the sick Massasoit (Y, 321), the Pilgrims intended merely to cure him. But since the curing of Massasoit brought about the discovery of the plot against the Pilgrims, Winslow claims that God intended the curing as the means by which the Pilgrims should be saved. In both of these cases the Pilgrims were attentive to the means for achieving their own human ends, yet God, who could foresee more than they, used these same means for his own different though consonant ends. Even when men's ends are apparently at variance with God's, Winslow shows how their means may nevertheless subserve his purposes: Tisquantum's “ends were only to make himself great in the eyes of his countrymen. … Yet was he a profitable … instrument” to the Pilgrims (Y, 289-90). Even “that self-love wherewith every man, in a measure more or less, loveth and preferreth his own good before his neighbour's” (Y, 346), the self-love which motivates Tisquantum to help the Pilgrims just as it motivates the Pilgrims themselves to give up their experiment in communism, appears to be a means to God's end of giving the English an inheritance in New England.

It is in his conclusion to the “Good News” that Winslow makes most plain the identifiability of human and divine means:

When I look back upon our condition, and weak means to preserve the same, I rather admire God's mercy and providence in our preservation, than that no greater things have been effected by us. But though our beginning have been thus raw, small and difficult, as thou hast seen, yet the same God that hath hitherto led us through the former, I hope will raise means to accomplish the latter.

(Y, 372)

In his first sentence Winslow speaks of the human means by which the plantation preserved itself, yet he ascribes the preservation to God. In his second sentence he speaks of the divine means which he hopes God will raise, yet, as the following sentences make clear, he expects these means to come from men:

Not that we altogether, or principally, propound profit to be the main end of that we have undertaken. … Yet wanting outward means to set things in that forwardness we desire, … I thought meet to offer both to consideration, hoping that where religion and profit jump together (which is rare) in so honorable an action, it will encourage every honest man, either in person or purse, to set forward the same, or at leastwise to commend the welfare thereof in his daily prayers to the blessing of the blessed God.

(Y, 372)

The chief means which Winslow hopes God will raise must come from the pockets of men of means. In the plantation of New England “religion and profit jump together,” God's means and man's means are the same though their ends may be at variance.

Though cash, and with it more investors and settlers, are what Winslow primarily hopes to raise with his “Good News,” he also asks for prayer. According to Robinson's categories there are two kinds of means available to men: “natural means,” which include money, material, and labor, and “supernatural means, prayer and the like” (R, 143). Since every means has its appropriate occasion men are to exhaust the natural means “upon earth [before] desiring to see a sign from heaven” (R, 142). Thus men must “mingle [their] own sweat with faith” (R, 142) and not rely on prayer to plant and tend their crops. Yet when drought, for instance, comes, as it did in 1623, and no natural means can diminish it, supernatural ones are appropriately depended upon. On this occasion, therefore, Winslow depicts the Pilgrims as performing a strenuous “exercise” of “fasting and prayer” for “some eight or nine hours” (Y, 349) with the result that it rained for two weeks. It is not, then, just out of a desire to give his fund-raising plea a more pious appearance that Winslow asks “at leastwise” for prayers if cash is unavailable, for prayers had already proved productive means to the Pilgrims.

The belief that the English plantation in America was one of those “rare” enterprises in which human self-interest subserved divine ends was not peculiar to Winslow or the Pilgrims. The settlers in Virginia were convinced of it as well.¹¹ Both groups believed in this manifest destiny in North America chiefly because that destiny had already been evidenced in the success of the English plantations. It was not success simply, however, which they gave as grounds for their belief, but success against odds, success in spite of their weak means. In “Good News from New England,” Winslow repeatedly mentions the “weak” or “small” means of the Pilgrims, partly because he wishes more and better means to be sent them, but also because, in his opinion, their success despite weak means proved that God had helped and worked with them “after a more special manner than others” (Y, 354). Robinson states the theory behind Winslow's historiographical practice: “When men make wars they get the powerfullest helps they can, therein bewraying their own weakness: whereas God, on the contrary wanting no man's help, oft times makes choice of weak means, as needing none” (R, 141-42). Weak means had proved successful in the plantation of New England; therefore, Winslow reasoned, God must have chosen and honored the first settlers and made them an example to those overly proud of greater means. In a world devoid of miracles, God can still be seen in the success of weak means.

The identifiability of human and divine means in the planting of New England, the necessity of attentiveness to supernatural as well as natural means, and the success of weak means as a sign of divine involvement are all ideas in which Bradford, no less than Winslow, believed. But the fund-raising “Good News” was occasioned by a situation which no longer existed when Bradford began writing Of Plymouth Plantation. The effect of this change and of the larger objectives of the later history is especially clear in the way Bradford limited the identification of the ends of men with those of God. Bradford freely ascribed single actions both to human and divine agency and often enough saw men as instruments of God, even though they, like Squanto, might seek their “own ends” (B, 99). Yet God in Of Plymouth Plantation is shown not only to use human means for ends different from those of his human agents but sometimes for ends directly opposite to them. Thus the “fruit” of the persecution of the Separatists in England was not their decrease but their increase (B, 14), and the attempt of Lyford and Oldham to draw away some of the Pilgrims “produced a quite contrary effect … than these adversaries hoped for. Which was looked on as a great work of God, to draw on men by unlikely means” (B, 164). Similarly Bradford would not say, as Winslow had, that in the plantation of New England “religion and profit jumped together.” Although this might have seemed true at first, it certainly had ceased to seem so when Bradford began his history. Profit-seeking proved to be the “root of all evil” not only to Weston (B, 119-20) and Allerton (B, 239-40) but through them to “many with them” and especially to “this poor Plantation” (B, 230). Likewise it was profit and prosperity that led to the baneful removals from Plymouth and the division of its church. Profit plays an ambiguous role in Bradford's history, but more often than not it works against, rather than for, religion.

If Bradford differs from Winslow in the extent to which he identifies human and divine means, he does not differ from him or from their pastor in believing in the necessity of the attentiveness to natural and supernatural means. It is this belief which leads Bradford in the second book of his history to record how the Pilgrims in America “plant corn, build houses, treat with savages, govern the unruly, chaffer with the company in England,” as William Haller describes it.¹² If Bradford seems in doing this to have ceased to write like “the Puritan saint” of the first book and become more like “the energetic, executive, alert, practical, shrewd American, in a word the Yankee,” as Haller says, it is not due to any change of belief,¹³ for the Yankee creed of “mind the main chance” is but a secularized version of an idea which Robinson clearly enunciated in his essay “Of Means”: “When God purposeth good to … a man … he commonly provides him means accordingly: which when opportunity serves, he expecteth he should use … which to neglect, is to disobey a kind of real calling from God” (R, 142). The fact is that the Pilgrims had been taught to regard the main chance as a kind of real calling from God before they left the Old World, and the greatest Puritan saint among them, John Robinson, was as much a Yankee as any of his American disciples. As Max Weber first pointed out, it is in the idea of calling that the Protestant, and especially the Puritan, ethic approaches most closely to the spirit of capitalism.¹⁴ Robinson did not teach that Puritan saints were called to use only supernatural means, while the profane masses depended on natural ones. Though he considered the one kind of means lower than the other, the appropriate employment of each was a virtue: “in the careful use of natural means we show most wisdom, … and of supernatural means, … the most grace” (R, 143). In a world in which food was not expected to fall like manna immediately from heaven, it was important for Bradford to be just such “a realist” as “the author of Robinson Crusoe”¹⁵ and as sinful for him to neglect planting corn as to neglect praying.

Bradford also follows Winslow in emphasizing how extremely weak the Pilgrims' means were. To make this emphasis, however, he employs literary techniques for which there is little example in the “Good News from New England.” From the beginning to the end of Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford uses pathetic language, and preeminently the word “poor,” to characterize the Pilgrims: “poor and peaceable souls” (B, 4), “the poor servants of God” (B, 6), “this poor persecuted church” (B, 324), “this poor people” (B, 66), “this poor Plantation” (B, 239), etc. Bradford further brings out their pathetic condition by contrasting the Pilgrims to the rich, as exemplified throughout his history by the Anglican bishops, and to the “lusty,” i.e., strong, as exemplified by various sailors and settlers, or by comparing them to a number of biblical and historical sufferers. In these ways Bradford magnifies the weak means of the Pilgrims in order to show that their success was entirely of God. What he says of their living on despite hunger and hard labor in particular he implies of their success despite weak means in general: “It is not by good and dainty fare, by peace and rest and heart's ease in enjoying the contentments and good things of this world only that preserves health and prolongs life; God in such examples would have the world see and behold that He can do it without them” (B, 329). With words such as these Bradford turns the whole of his history into an example of what Robinson had written in “Of Means”: “God often useth means very weak and base, not because he wants better: but … for his own glory … in bringing to pass what he will by them, as he told Gideon, the people were too many for him to save Israel by” (R, 141; Judges 7:2). Robinson's very words may well have been in Bradford's mind when he applied the same biblical verse to the Pilgrims as they set out in a single ship for America. “And thus, like Gideon's army, this small number was divided, as if the Lord by this work of his providence thought these few too many for the great work He had to do” (B, 53).

IV. SUMMATION.

The three different aspects of the relationship between God and man in history which have been distinguished in the preceding sections were seldom distinguished in actual historiographical practice. In each of the three early relations one of them clearly dominates, but the others are not for that reason absent. In Of Plymouth Plantation, moreover, none of them dominates, and Bradford makes no attempt to draw fine lines between God's inscrutable will, his providence, and his means, or to divide man's life into mutability, worship, and use of means. On the contrary, Bradford, instead of trying to bring out the differences between these aspects of God and of man, combines them in such a way as to create a single impression of God and of man. Bradford wishes to show that in history God in all his aspects is sovereign. It is this single Sovereign who wills death and life, success and failure, according to his good pleasure, who in his providence preserves the faithful and punishes the wicked, and who created the world as a means to his ends and continues to raise up means and instruments out of it for human good beyond expectation. At the same time that God is sovereign in history, Bradford shows how man can learn to work with him. Admitting the overall uncertainty of human things, man can still come into dialogue with God in worship, and God can adopt man's means as his own when they are properly employed. In his history of the first settlement in New England Bradford provides an example of how man works under, yet also with, the Sovereign of history in all that he does.

Because of the fundamental unity of Bradford's pictures of God and man some subjects, though discussed separately in my three sections, actually serve a common purpose. Bradford's rhetorical devices, for instance, the many moralizing sayings on the uncertainty of man, the rhetorically heightened language in which providential deliverances are often described, and the pathetic terms, contrasts, and comparisons by which the insufficiency of the Pilgrims' means is magnified, illustrate different aspects of man's relationship to God, yet give the history as a whole a single emphasis. They all underline the fact that man is weak, but God is strong. Similarly, Bradford's detailed account of the financial and legal difficulties of the Pilgrims, his care in presenting the reasons for their decisions, and his attempt throughout his history to show their attentiveness to means all help to give Of Plymouth Plantation a decidedly mundane and practical character. That most of Bradford's rhetoric should be used to exalt God's majesty while much of the content consists of the realistic detail lamented by William Haller and others is an apparent paradox in Of Plymouth Plantation which I have tried to ground in the ideology to which Bradford was devoted.

Of Plymouth Plantation is not just the product of a single man, but of a school of thought. The ideas of man's relationship to God to which it gives historiographical expression were those of Robinson, Cushman, and Winslow, as well as Bradford. They were taken for granted in the congregation at Leyden no less than in the one at Plymouth and were shared more or less by most of the Puritans in England and many of the English investors and settlers in all of the American colonies. Bradford was not the first to put these ideas to use in a historical work on the first English settlement in New England, but he had more freedom in doing so than any of his predecessors. Not only were the three early relations limited in length, they were also limited by their various purposes of vindicating the colonial enterprise, pleasing the Governor and Council for New England, encouraging new settlers and investors, and concealing the specific religious identity and mission of the Pilgrims. From these limitations Bradford was altogether free in writing Of Plymouth Plantation. He likewise had the advantage of retrospect. He could see acts of providence more clearly than he had when he wrote his “Journal,” discriminate human and divine means better than Winslow in the “Good News,” and, in general, correct and improve upon all that had been written before him. The result of these advantages and of Bradford's own individual skill is a work in which the presentation of the complexity of man's relationship to God in history far exceeds, while it follows, its predecessors.

Notes

1. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1952), p. 351. All subsequent citations from this work are identified in the text with a “B” followed by the page number.

2. Alexander Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth (Boston, 1841), p. 7. All subsequent citations from this work are identified in the text with a “Y” followed by the page number.

3. See Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 13-16, 32-33, and Robert Daly, “William Bradford's Vision of History,” American Literature, 44 (1973), 557-69.

4. David Levin, rev. of A Loss of Mastery, by Peter Gay, History and Theory, 7 (1968), 389-91. Professor Levin, to whom I am particularly indebted for my general understanding of Bradford, has further developed this idea in “William Bradford: The Value of Puritan Historiography,” in Major Writers of Early American Literature, ed. Everett Emerson (Madison, 1972), pp. 11-31.

5. A briefe Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England (London, 1622). This very short work is unpaginated. Subsequent quotations are attributed to it in the text without signature. Spelling and capitalization have been modernized in this and all other early texts cited.

6. Captain John Smith, Works. 1608-1631, ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham, 1884), II, 783-84.

7. See Alan B. Howard, “Art and History in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 28 (1971), 256.

8. The whole narrative part of “Mourt's Relation” is usually attributed jointly to Bradford and Winslow (B, 64 note) following Young (Y, 115 note), who also identifies Robert Cushman as the author of the “Answer to Objections” (Y, 249 note). But the part of Of Plymouth Plantation in which Bradford states that the “Journal” had a single author was not available to Young. This single author must be Bradford, since Winslow was not on the minutely-described first discovery. A further indication that Bradford wrote at least the first half of the “Journal” is that the central narrative strand of that part of the work, which relates how the later deaths resulted from wading in cold water (Y, 120, 138, 139, 170), is concluded by the story of Bradford's own near death from that cause (Y, 174). His authorship of the second half is indicated by the use of the name “Squanto” instead of “Tisquantum.” “Squanto” is the name used by Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation, while “Tisquantum” is that used by Winslow in the “Good News from New England.” The use of the latter name throughout the four “Relations of Discoveries” is, on the other hand, a good indication of Winslow's authorship. Furthermore, all four “Relations of Discoveries” share certain conventions, such as the concluding praise of God for bringing the travellers safely home (Y, 213, 218, 223, 229). This convention is also found in the “Good News” (Y, 290, 309, 342), but not in the “Journal.” Stylistic considerations also point to Bradford as the author of the “Journal” and Winslow of the “Relations of Discoveries” (cf. Y, 115 note).

9. See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939; rpt. Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 234-35. The close relationship of Bradford's historiography to some of Robinson's other essays in Observations Divine and Moral has been brought out by Jesper Rosenmeier, “‘With My Owne Eyes’: William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation” in Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst, Mass., 1972), pp. 91-93.

10. John Robinson, Observations Divine and Moral (1625), p. 141. All subsequent citations from this work are identified in the text with an “R” followed by the page number.

11. See Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 115-22.

12. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1957), p. 191.

13. Haller, p. 191. See Howard, p. 240.

14. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1930), pp. 79-128.

15. Haller, p. 191.