SOURCE: “William Bradford's ‘Dialogue’ with History,” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3, 1992, pp. 389-421.

[In the following essay, Sargent examines Bradford's fictional dialogues between young men of New England and older colonists from Europe, comparing them to Of Plymouth Plantation. Sargent concludes that the dialogues shed light on Bradford's struggles within the Separatist movement as well as his ambivalence about the colonial project in North America.]

When the manuscript of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation was shipped to Boston in 1897, Massachusetts Senator George F. Hoar boasted that the commonwealth had recovered one of its “chiefest treasures.” The text was “priceless,” he proclaimed. There was “nothing like it in human annals since the story of Bethlehem,” for it was the “only authentic history of what we have a right to consider the most important political transaction that has ever taken place on the face of the earth.”¹ Presumably lost during the American Revolution, Bradford's handwritten history was rediscovered in London in 1855, and American and British diplomats spent four decades arguing over who was its proper owner. Queen Victoria, Parliament, the Senate, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the President of the United States all had been among the contenders for the honor.²

The Victorian quarrel over the manuscript contrasts strikingly with Bradford's ambivalence about his text. When he dictated his will shortly before his death in 1657, the governor left behind a number of “smale bookes” but requested “speciall” care only for a collection of poems.³ At some point in 1650 he had rather abruptly stopped writing his record of Plymouth, begun two decades earlier. The narrative concludes with the events of 1646; Bradford reserved space for the affairs of the next two years but did not fill it. Although he picked up the manuscript during his final years, he did so only to edit his work, adding a few sentences or marginal notes to earlier pages rather than launching into new chapters. As Robert Daly observes, the tale that “begins magnificently” with the voyage to America “diminishes into a tedious account of unsorted administrative details and ends, uncompleted, in silence.”⁴

As Bradford's interest in his history began to wane, he shifted to other genres. In the last years of his life he tried his hand at poetry. He also took up Hebrew; some of the empty folios in the brown volume that contains Of Plymouth Plantation eventually became worksheets for his Old Testament translations. And on three occasions he turned to a literary form that had been popular among Elizabethan Separatists—the dialogue. Bradford described the dialogues as transcripts, or the “sume,” of actual discussions between “some younge men borne in New England” and “sundery Ancient men that came out of holland and old England,” though his audience most certainly recognized the presumption of fact as the literary convention it was.⁵ There are no individual voices in the dialogues: the “younge men” and the “Ancient men,” at alternative moments, speak as collective entities.

Only eight leaves from the handwritten manuscript of the first dialogue still exist. In 1680, before the holograph was damaged, Bradford's nephew Nathaniel Morton copied the dialogue into the Plymouth Church Records. As he made his transcription, however, Morton occasionally amended his uncle's prose, disguising Bradford's sharp rejoinders to Boston pastor John Cotton. Since all printed editions of the dialogue have been based on Morton's transcription, Bradford's irritation with Cotton has been hidden from view. The entire second dialogue, unfortunately, has been lost. The small volume containing the “3rd Conference,” also packed with Hebrew exercises, was discovered around 1826 among the remnants of Thomas Prince's “New-England Library,” a collection of books and manuscripts which had been stored in Boston's Old South Church and pillaged during the Revolution.⁶ Taken together, the two surviving dialogues are longer than the last dozen annals in Of Plymouth Plantation, longer, in fact, than the entire first book of the history.

The initial dialogue, composed in 1648, was Bradford's first major literary venture away from his historical narrative, and the experiment hints at many of the pressures that were diverting his attention from the chronicle. Written during the time when Of Plymouth Plantation was starting to unravel into its miscellany of “administrative details,” the first dialogue is usually read as an escape from the complexities of the late 1640s. Most scholars who pay any attention to it at all consider it a nostalgic refuge. In the words of Jesper Rosenmeier, the “energetic actors” and “dynamic drama” of the history give way to the “immovable statues” and “disembodied voices” of the dialogue, which pass over the “severe discords and disappointments in Plymouth” to proclaim the “righteousness of the past.”⁷

Without doubt, Bradford's conference turns wistful on occasion and the ancients can frequently be overbearing, but it should not be overlooked that the dialogue does in fact respond to the demands of its own moment. In 1648 both the principles and the history of Separatism were under attack in England and America, and Bradford's shift from historical chronicle to dialogue implies that he wanted to address his critics directly. That becomes even more apparent when Morton's veneer is stripped away: the unpublished fragment of the manuscript reveals that Cotton's rebukes of Separatism deeply hurt the Pilgrim governor. As he stared down his accusers, he also had to face his own doubts. While the ancients and the young reconsider the value of the Separatist legacy at the century's midpoint, Bradford reopens some questions Of Plymouth Plantation had previously foreclosed. Although he failed to complete Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford's composition of two more dialogues and several poems reflects not an escape from history but a renewed effort to confront it. The first “conference” inaugurates a decade of writing which has too often been dismissed as the tired coda to his historical narrative. If we examine the continuities and discontinuities between Of Plymouth Plantation and the first dialogue, however, we can begin to measure and to appreciate Bradford's success in developing new historiographic strategies for reconciling the New England present and the Separatist past.

I

For years scholars have maintained that Bradford abandoned his history because he was discouraged about the spiritual and economic condition of Plymouth. The colony's troubles during the 1630s and 1640s presumably broke the governor's will to justify the ways of God to his reader—as well as to himself. Robert Daly identifies Bradford as one of the Reformation historians who revived the “Deuteronomic Formula” of Eusebius Pamphilus, fourth-century Bishop of Caesarea. Eusebius argued that the special destiny of the Jews had been transferred to the Christians under Constantine; his desire to read the Old Testament as an allegory on the growth of Constantine's church troubled Augustine, who countered with his own vision of the heavenly City of God. Unlike Augustine, Eusebius held that Christians could expect an earthly reward for honoring their covenant with the Lord. Bradford's first chapters, along with his annals for the years 1620 to 1632, claims Daly, display his loyalty to “Eusebian providential history,” his confidence that the Pilgrims were among those “singled out by God for the last mission—the final reformation of His church”; only “when the earthly evidence will no longer support them” does the governor abandon “both his history and his assertion of his group's special destiny.”⁸ Bradford had a purpose for his text as long as his colony was the vanguard for the great Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay; as soon as the Bay Colony started to dominate trade in the region, as soon as cattle prices fell and settlers left Plymouth for more arable land, however, he could no longer locate his plantation in the cosmology of Providence.

Those scholars who stress the Eusebian strain in Of Plymouth Plantation emphasize Bradford's sorrow over his colony's moral decline and increasing secularization. The second book of the history (especially the unusually brief final chapters) is frequently understood as a requiem for the ideals that brought the first Pilgrims to the New World. Francis Murphy, joining those who maintain that Bradford's narrative actually launched the American jeremiad, asserts that the governor “is 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 to work together in self-sacrifice and love, and who lived to betray that promise by their greed.”⁹

Indeed, many of the final notes in Bradford's history complain of betrayal. Even the annals for the early 1640s begin to predict dissolution. The chapter on 1642 sets aside the “principal things” of the year until after it reflects upon the spread of “wickedness” in town. How could a colony so devoted to the task of preserving “holiness and purity” be overwhelmed by such “notorious sins”? During 1642 Thomas Granger was convicted by the General Court of a “horrible” incident of bestiality, yet Bradford mournfully conceded that well before “this year” there were “many sad precedents and instances” of drunkenness, adultery, fornication, and sodomy. Although he may well have hoped that his lamentations would awaken his colony to godliness, the preacher's jeremiad was balanced by the politician's assessment of demographics. The “mixed multitude” that came out of “Egypt” with the Separatists—the servants, “Adventurers,” and malcontents—had become the majority. The “worser” part of the colony had become the “greater.”¹⁰

In his next two annals, Bradford continued to dwell on the colony's losses. The account of 1643 is largely an elegy for William Brewster and a tribute to the piety and courage of the original settlers who had suffered together through long years of imprisonment, disease, and poverty. By 1644, economic malaise had inspired a “resolution” to relocate the entire colony to more fertile soil at Nauset, on Cape Cod; the move, it was hoped, would stem the flow of the young elsewhere. Bradford was a leader among the majority opposing the plan, but he nonetheless recognized that the debate had merely strengthened the determination of some settlers to leave Plymouth. Since most of the “ancient members” were “worn away by death” and many of the newcomers were off in search of “better accommodations,” the Pilgrim church had become “an ancient mother, grown old and forsaken of her children,” a “widow left only to trust in God.”¹¹

But Of Plymouth Plantation is also filled with reminders of the Pilgrims' heavenly destination—in its first chapters, not just in its final disillusioned notes. After all, even before recounting the voyage to America, Bradford labeled the Separatists “pilgrims,” an allusion to Hebrews, the epistle that recasts the Abrahamic covenant as the Christians' exodus toward an eternal Canaan. For each of his references to Deuteronomy, Bradford more than once invoked the parousia of the New Testament epistles. His elegy for Brewster, for example, seeks reassurance in the words of “the Apostle”: Brewster was not “the worse for any former sufferings,” since he would be “counted worthy of the kingdom of God” and would find “rest” when “the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven, with his mighty angels.”¹² Pursuing this strain, some historians—Perry Miller and Alan Howard among them—maintain that Bradford's world view was not Eusebian but Augustinian.¹³ Yet even though Bradford found consolation by looking toward the City of God, most critics accentuate his despair for the young. As soon as his companions aboard the Mayflower departed for heaven—or for other colonies—Bradford seemed to lose the desire to recount his tale. The last narrative fragment in Of Plymouth Plantation laments Edward Winslow's truancy. Sometime in 1650, not long after protesting Winslow's continued absence from Plymouth, Bradford apparently gave up on his annals and concluded his record with a list of Mayflower passengers.¹⁴

In recent years the final sections of Bradford's history have been read as a gloss on the English Civil War. Viewing the later annals as a mixed expression of joy and consternation over the Roundhead rebellion, Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco maintain that the “history is organized around two themes: the failure of Plymouth to fulfill its original purpose as a selfless community and the concurrent completion of the Reformation through Cromwell's victories in Old England.” These themes, according to Heimert and Delbanco, “emerge almost contrapuntally” and “both contradict and reinforce one another.”¹⁵ Although it received only slight notice in Of Plymouth Plantation, the war nonetheless lingered as a subtext in Bradford's ruminations on America, and Rosenmeier, for one, argues that it actually occasioned the second volume of the history. After composing his first volume around 1630, Bradford had shelved his book for over a decade. His decision, round about 1646, to resume the narrative reflected a new excitement about the future of the Reformation. The calling of the Long Parliament in 1641, the dissolution of the episcopacy, and the victories of the Roundheads inspired Bradford to splice the story of his colony into England's grand drama.¹⁶

That proved a difficult task. Cromwell's New Model Army was busy establishing God's kingdom in the very English counties the Pilgrims had fled, and the humble gains of Plymouth were muted refrains compared to the glorious hymns sung by the Roundheads. Immigration to New England fell sharply as the Puritans gained favor in Parliament, and the subsequent decline in the value of livestock severely affected Plymouth. Faced with signs of decay, Bradford tried to assure Plymouth that Roundhead victories were among the “fruits of your labours.” His colony was the “one small candle” that had, “in some sort,” spread its light to the “whole nation”—that is, to Old England as well as to the English settlements in Massachusetts Bay.¹⁷

However, the “small candle,” according to Delbanco, was snuffed out by the theological diversity of England. Though Bradford tried to hold his tale together by representing Plymouth as “the shrinking center of an expanding sphere of influence,” his history becomes “patchwork” as its “central exemplary idea inevitably falters before the reality of tolerationist England.” For Delbanco, the “unspoken problem” of the history “is always England, which has become a chaos of competing polities—less a reflection of congregationalist Plymouth than an alien Babel.”¹⁸ Actually, cries for toleration swept through Plymouth as well, although Bradford, as both governor and historian, tried to seal the shutters against the wind. In 1645 a formal petition for “free tollerance of religion to all men who would preserve the Civill peace” was presented to the colony leadership. Not only did Bradford help suppress the measure, but he left the incident out of his annals.¹⁹

Yet the “great alterations in the State” did leave their mark elsewhere in the text; most of all, they forced Bradford to readjust his earlier appraisals of the English Reformation. The first chapter in Of Plymouth Plantation had narrowed the real Reformation to but a few exemplary Separatist groups. Rather than opening his tale with a broadside at Catholicism or a paean to the reformers, Bradford built a case for Separatism by showing how Satan had sowed “the seeds of discord and bitter enmity amongst the professors, and seeming reformed, themselves.” He deplored the “bitter war of contention” over the Prayer Book that sprang up among the British exiles during the reign of Mary I; he complained that the champions of the “episcopal dignity” had seized power under Queen Elizabeth; and he conceded that the relentless persecution of the “zealous professors” during the Elizabethan era had depleted their ranks. Although he recognized that God continued to bless the work of ministers “in other places of the land,” he heralded only “two distinct bodies or churches” from the “North parts”—the Separatist congregation at Gainsborough, under John Smith, and its sister church at Scrooby. And no sooner did he proclaim these congregations as models of the Christian “covenant” than he lamented that the Gainsborough group fell “into some errours in the Low Countries” and “there (for the most part) buried themselves and their names.”²⁰ Thus the stage was cleared for the small band from Scrooby, forebears of the Separatist communities in Leyden and Plymouth, to emerge as the sole exemplars of a rejuvenated Christianity.

Sixteen years later, however, Bradford conceded that he had miscalculated the potential for reform within the Church of England. In 1646, while re-reading the early passages in his manuscript, he composed a brief essay on the back of one of the pages in the first chapter. This “Late Observation” reveals that he was both overjoyed with and bewildered by the timing of Providence. “Full little did I think that the downfall of the Bishops … had been so near, when I first began these scribbled writings,” he noted. Clearly, the reformation of the Church of England had not been one of the possibilities that Bradford had imagined when he began to recount the Separatists' reasons for abandoning their homeland. Now there was occasion to boast that the “tyrannous Bishops” had been “ejected,” their “plots for popery prevented,” and their “monuments of idolatry rooted out of the land.” Yet England was welcoming this religious renewal and theological tolerance at the some moment as Plymouth was struggling with economic stagnation and the dissipation of its church. In 1646 Bradford could exalt over the liberation of “Jerusalem,” but he had to confess that the “poor people” of Plymouth were still “the least amongst the thousands of Israel.”²¹

II

When he wrote his first dialogue in 1648, Bradford had already witnessed the deaths or departures of most of the “ancients,” the infiltration of “many wicked persons and profane people” into the community, and the scattering of the young.²² He had also acknowledged the economic predominance of Massachusetts and had heard, with varying emotions, reports of the Roundheads' triumphs and the growth of toleration in England. The final annals in Of Plymouth Plantation, an “unsorted” arrangement of episodes and political details, reveal a certain dismay over each of these matters. Indeed, the disarray into which the text falls is viewed by many sympathetic twentieth-century critics as a distinct literary choice, a refusal to submerge the incongruities of the Pilgrims' experience beneath a coherent narrative or typological scheme.

In his first dialogue, however, Bradford makes an aggressive effort to organize that disarray, to bring his visions of the past and the present into sharper focus. The dialogue endeavors to set the colony on a new footing in the wake of the Civil War, to reconcile the Eusebian and Augustinian strains of historiography, and to reestablish the communion between the ancients and the young. In certain respects, the conference is Bradford's attempt simultaneously to write both a preface and a sequel to Of Plymouth Plantation. Reaching further back into the controversial beginnings of the Separatist movement, Bradford searches the past to find a home for Plymouth within the new boundaries of the theological and political landscape.

Those boundaries were being re-mapped in 1646 at meetings of a synod in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called by the General Court of the colony. Among its primary tasks, the synod set out to reduce the growing animosity between the Congregational leadership in Massachusetts and a small, but aggressive, minority of ministers anxious to revamp New England Puritanism according to “presbyterian” principles. The product of the conference, “The Cambridge Platform” of 1648, reaffirmed Congregational polity, especially the autonomy of individual churches, though some Presbyterians applauded the stress on state-enforced orthodoxy and the value of voluntary synods.²³

In both Britain and America, signs of conciliation between Puritan Congregationalists and Presbyterians were disturbing omens for Separatists. Even as Separatist congregations expanded in England following the Civil War, the history of the Separatist movement was being severely reviewed by rival Calvinists. As Murray Tolmie observes, 1648 was a dangerous year in England for the Reformation's left wing. The most radical of the Independents and “sectaries,” including the Separatists, could “expect violent suppression at the hands of a threatening threefold combination of Royalists, English Presbyterians, and Scots.”²⁴ King Charles was in prison, only months away from death, and many of the moderates scurrying for power wanted to squelch the freedom and influence of liberal preachers and lay leaders. The Cambridge sessions, which Bradford attended briefly as an observer in 1647, and a number of caustic attacks on Separatism in the late 1640s breathed new life into the governor's historical imagination and rekindled his desire to protect Plymouth from dispersion and isolation.

The most persistent critic of the Separatist movement and the Pilgrim church was Robert Baillie, a Presbyterian minister in Glasgow. In 1643 the English Parliament had convened the Westminster Assembly to establish a new reformed national church in place of the old episcopal system. Baillie, one of the Scottish delegates to the meeting, entertained hopes that the English would adopt the Scottish, Presbyterian version of Calvinism for their own ecclesiastical polity and creed. Angered by the reluctance of the English to embrace the Presbyterian model, Baillie let loose a parade of books and pamphlets assailing the slowness of reform. He complained that the failure of the English Parliament immediately to reorganize the national church had eroded church discipline and left citizens susceptible to the heresies of extremist factions.²⁵

Like many Presbyterians and Puritans within the English Parliament, “Scotch Baillie” deplored the spread of Separatist communities in England during the aftermath of the Civil War. In 1641 there were only a handful of Separatist churches in London, probably encompassing less than one thousand members, although there were many “quasi-Separatists,” those who left the Anglican service whenever the Prayer Book was opened or who held private prayer meetings in their own homes. When the bishops fell, however, the Separatists emerged. By 1646 there were at least thirty-six known Separatist congregations meeting openly in London.²⁶ For Baillie, as for others, the demise of the episcopal system vindicated those reformers who had all along attempted to blend their Calvinistic principles with their membership in the Church of England. Now, not only did the early Separatist cry for a full withdrawal from the Anglicans seem unnecessarily extreme, but the recent proliferation of Separatist churches was undermining the progress of reform within the liberated national church.

Baillie's invective was not showered on the London Separatists alone. The Netherlands, he believed, had become a “cage” for “unclean birds”—Separatists, Anabaptists, Familists, and others espousing anarchic creeds. In his Dissuasive from the Errors of Time, first printed in 1645, Baillie depicted “a small company at Leyden, under Master Robinson's ministry, which, partly by divisions among themselves, was well near brought to nought.” According to the Scottish minister, John Robinson eventually came to see the “evil” of the “rigid Separation” and renounced some of his earlier books to adopt a “Semi-separating Independency” that welcomed a reunion with the Church of England. The Pilgrims' beloved pastor might very well have “proved a happy instrument for the extinguishing and totall abolition” of Separatism if he had lived a few years longer. Although he commended Robinson as a “modest spirit,” Baillie viciously attacked Robinson's colleagues in Holland. Robinson's good friend Henry Ainsworth and Francis Johnson were blamed for the rift in the Amsterdam congregation and for their bitter attempts to excommunicate one another; and the Separatist minister John Smith, who baptized himself and went to his deathbed assured of “his own perfect righteousness,” is displayed as an “example full of horrour.”²⁷

In 1648 Bradford may well have taken a detour from Of Plymouth Plantation because he was anxious to join other colonists—most notably Edward Winslow—in defending New England against the accusations of Baillie and others. Two years earlier Winslow had sailed for England to help exonerate the government of Massachusetts from charges leveled against it by former settlers. Many of the “complaints” were spread by Samuel Gorton, the founder of a sect in Rhode Island and an outcast from both Boston and Plymouth. Gorton's criticisms were fuel for the British Presbyterians, who wanted the Massachusetts theocracy to be more accountable to England and more receptive to Scottish and Presbyterian settlers. While in England, Winslow lobbied politicians and took his debate to the public in Hypocrisie Unmasked, a long rebuttal to “Mr. Gorton's slanderous and scandalous books.”²⁸

Winslow's polemic concludes with a “Brief Narration” proposing to lay out the “true grounds or the cause of the first Planting of New England.” By Winslow's own account, this appendix was “occasioned by certain aspersions” he had encountered in England issuing from a “late,” or recent, writer, unquestionably Robert Baillie. Baillie had fanned Winslow's anger by assailing the “divisions or disagreements in the church of Leyden.”²⁹ Winslow struck back fiercely at Baillie's claim that the Pilgrims' relocation to America was prompted by discord within the Leyden congregation. Baillie responded with a 1647 tract that depicted Separatism as one of the “errours” springing from the “Fountaine” of Anabaptism. His crusade eventually drew John Cotton into the debate, largely because he had blasted Cotton as the “great promoter and Patron of Independency.”³⁰ In 1648 Cotton countered with The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared from the Historical Aspersions of Mr. Robert Baylie.

For the most part, Cotton's defense is sympathetic to the Pilgrims' venture. Citing the book repeatedly in his dialogues, Bradford especially appreciated Cotton's stress on the “peace and concord” of the church in Leyden. But Cotton and his colleagues in Massachusetts were not always quick to shield Plymouth from its critics. Even as they resisted Presbyterian attempts to seize the reigns of the English church, the Congregationalists in Boston assured the Presbyterians that they did not ride along John Robinson's road. Absolving himself of some of Baillie's reproaches, Cotton rehearsed his own reprimands of other New England ministers who had experimented with the Separatism of Plymouth. During the deliberations over the Cambridge Platform, Cotton depicted Congregationalism as a “middle-way” between Separatism and Presbyterianism.³¹

Indeed, by the end of the 1640s, Massachusetts was openly scolding Plymouth for its tolerance of Anabaptists. Bradford and Plymouth were also caught in the crossfire of the acrimonious debate between Cotton and Roger Williams. Before publishing The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, his famous declaration for freedom of belief, Williams privately sought Cotton's views on church polity and religious tolerance. Unsatisfied with Cotton's responses, Williams went public with his rebuttal, printing an “Examination” of Cotton's views in 1644. Already infuriated by The Bloody Tenet, Cotton lashed back in 1647 with a shrill “Reply to Mr. Williams.” As he assailed Williams's “Separatist” instincts, the pastor also reproached Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, and the Elizabethan Separatists. Williams may have been the target of Cotton's polemic, but Bradford also felt its sting. Often throughout the first dialogue, the young cite Cotton's accusations, and the ancients shudder at the thought that a new generation has learned its Separatism from the hostile Bostonian. With his first dialogue, Bradford enters the fray stirred up by Baillie, Cotton, and Williams determined to rescue the Pilgrims from charges of Anabaptism and other heresies. Anxious to draw Plymouth more fully into the mainstream of post-war Puritanism, the governor cautiously challenges Cotton's reports on the early Separatists and sharply attacks Baillie's claim that Separatist heresies justified a Presbyterian solution to current ecclesiastical problems. If he could unsully the Separatist past, Bradford knew he could help the Puritans resist the Presbyterian hegemony and strengthen Plymouth's ties with Boston.³²

Whereas earlier, in the opening chapters of his history, Bradford had chiseled the Reformation down to a few Separatist congregations, in the dialogue the Pilgrim church stands among a large company of “Reformed Churches,” both in Europe and America. Not only does Bradford stress his affinities with Congregationalists, but he applauds the Pilgrims' “intercommunion” with Lutherans and the Dutch Reformed as well. Bradford's generosity toward the Dutch Reformed is especially noteworthy, since he had previously stated that the licentiousness of the Dutch and their disregard for the Sabbath were two reasons why his church had attempted a new beginning in the Anglican colony of Virginia. Of Plymouth Plantation juxtaposes the Pilgrims' internal harmony with the constant “strifes and quarrels” of the French Walloons, yet the first dialogue commends the ideals the Pilgrims and the French shared in Leyden. Bradford even admits his affinities with the Scottish Presbyterians, although he could not resist noting that they were “not of the best mould.”³³ Two years earlier, in Hypocrisie Unmasked, Winslow had also insisted that the church at Leyden had “made no schism or separation from the Reformed Churches. Some of the godly Presbyterian party,” Winslow maintained, encouraged him to recount the Pilgrims' association with Dutch, French, and Scottish congregations, for if such communion were better known, then some recent “writers and preachers would have never spoken of us as they did, and still do as they have occasion.”³⁴ By the mid 1640s, both Bradford and Winslow were determined to recover a place for the ancients within the trans-Atlantic Reformation, even if old enmities with the French, Dutch, and Scots had to be recast as cordial alliances.

The English Civil War had entered Of Plymouth Plantation largely through the annotations and digressions that often jarred with Bradford's earlier recollections. In the dialogue, however, the war, along with the “unsettled” state of the church, frames the very first question. When the young demand to know the “true and simple meaning” of “The Separation,” they display their own fears that the ancients still cannot accept the Church of England as a “true Church,” even after the fall of the bishops. The elders defend their flight from Anglicanism as a legitimate response to the church “as it then was.” Now that the “hierarchical prelacy” has “been put down by the State,” however, they defer to the Augustinian and Calvinist view that the “Church of Christ” consists of the “mystical body” of “visible Christians professing faith and holiness.”³⁵ Bradford concedes that “parish assemblies” had always been able to form an “implicit covenant” to practice “the primitive order of the Gospel” and still remain within the Church of England. Furthermore, he approves John Cotton's claim that “secession from the corruptions” of the national church could purify the Christian as fully as “separation” from its membership. “Formal” or “orderly” covenants of separation had never really been necessary.³⁶

Under the barrage of questions from the young, the ancients also admit that the early Separatists had been too “rigid” in their isolationism. “Out of some mistake and heat of zeal,” many had shunned “communion in lawful things with other godly persons.” John Robinson had learned to soften his dogmatism, and Bradford modifies his own views when he grants that voluntary synods are safely within the bounds of New Testament practice. The idealization of the single church covenant in the history gives way to the celebration of inter-church cooperation in the dialogue as Bradford depicts the messengers shuttling between the Leyden and Amsterdam congregations as representatives to an informal “synod” of Separatists.³⁷

In setting foot outside the strictly Separatist camp, Bradford also hoped to elude the specter of Robert Browne. A graduate of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, Browne created a stir at his alma mater when he returned in 1578 to preach. Rejecting the Calvinist appeal to reform the Church patiently from within, Browne formally separated from the Church of England in 1580. Two years later, while in exile, he turned his impetuosity into doctrine when he published A Treatise on the Reformation Without Tarrying for Any, probably the chief manifesto of Separatist principles. Browne eventually gave up his cause, re-entered the Church of England, and was branded an “apostate” by his followers.

Baillie assailed Browne as a “common beater of his poor old Wife” and an “open profaner of the Sabbath.” Bradford ignored Browne in Of Plymouth Plantation, but the Pilgrims had a hard time shedding the label “Brownists.” On three occasions in the dialogue the young, directly citing John Cotton, invoke the epithet. Even after the ancients lambast Browne for his “defection,” the young still suspect that Browne was the “first inventor and beginner” of the Pilgrim Way.³⁸ Trapped by the young in their Brownist past, the ancients look for an escape by linking their Separatism to the principles of “Independency” nourished within Congregationalist churches during the last half of the sixteenth century. They identify Separatist pastors and deacons during the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth and insist that Brownism was a late mutation, not the seed, of Separatist principles.

In its review of Separatism, the first dialogue amplifies a quiet confession in Of Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps for political reasons, Bradford had conspicuously avoided the term “Separatism” in his history, even though its early chapters are full of Separatist ideals.³⁹ Interestingly enough, a variant of the term appears only once in the entire manuscript, in one of the short dialogues the governor inserted into the annals of the second volume. Re-creating the trial of contentious pastor John Lyford, Bradford noted that the minister had imputed that the Pilgrim church would “quickly distaste” any of the “honest men that are not of the Separation.” Bradford recorded the Pilgrims' “answer”—“that it was a false calumniation; for they had many amongst them that they liked well of, and were glad of their company.”⁴⁰ In both the history and the first dialogue, “the Separation” is mentioned more often by the Pilgrims' antagonists than by the Pilgrims themselves. “Separatism” was now as much an allegation as it was a creed, and Bradford wore the title with both respect and reluctance.

III

As he reshapes the New England Separatists' past into a preamble to the English Civil War, Bradford dusts off the Eusebian lens through which he had, on occasion, previously viewed the Pilgrims' experience. For the first time since the opening chapter of his history, he cites the “ancient Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.”⁴¹ Now, even more than when he started Of Plymouth Plantation in 1630, the governor had reason to share Eusebius' conviction that his own era had been singled out by God for a special work of grace: no longer did the separated conventicles, awaiting the day of salvation, have to seclude themselves from error, for there was new promise that they could enter the national debate about the reformation of the English church.

Bradford, though, is quick to draw a Separatist moral from his reading of the Roman historian. As his third dialogue repeatedly indicates, the governor blamed Constantine, Eusebius' champion, for empowering the prelacy when he “bestowed ritches & honours upon the church, espetially vpon the bishops.” “In the days of Constantine,” Bradford writes, “the externall peace & libertie of the Churches encouraged all sorts of men (cleane and uncleane) to offerr themselves to the fellowship of the Church, and Congregationall discipline began to be neglected through the usurped authority of the bishops and presbyters.”⁴² He implies that Eusebius' chronicle should be read for its evidence of the ecclesiastical despotism under Constantine as well as for its record of the pure Christianity of the early apostles. Eusebius' endorsement of the prelacy under Constantine now struck Bradford as a warning against the Presbyterian commitment to a clerical hierarchy. When the governor cites Eusebius in the first dialogue, he does so to illustrate that the health of the early Christian church was linked to one of its most democratic practices—the participation of the laity in the interpretation of Scripture. The year before Bradford composed the dialogue, lay “prophecies” had been condemned by Ezekiel Rogers at the meeting of the synod in Cambridge, where Bradford had represented Plymouth. Eusebius' account of the early church provided Bradford with the grounds for defending the “exercise of prophecy” long practiced by his Separatist congregation in Holland and America.⁴³

While he is turning Eusebius into a friend of Separatism, Bradford also depicts Paul and Augustine as prophets of political change, not just of heavenly compensations. In the first dialogue, the young repeat Cotton's charge that many of the Separatists had behaved disreputably prior to their conversions. It seems unreasonable to them that God would be “wont to make choice of men infamous for gross sins and vices before their calling, to make them any instruments of reformation.” In defense of the first Separatists, the ancients plead that occasionally God chooses strange but “notable instruments” of reformation, like Paul, “a persecutor of God's saints,” and like Augustine, “a Manichæan.” Set in the tradition of Paul and Augustine, Henry Barrow's dramatic repudiation of his past sins and his willingness to die for his cause epitomize the Separatists' renunciations of both personal vice and church corruption. Bradford takes special pains to show that Barrow's sacrifice—and John Greenwood's—not only vindicated their characters but also reaped political results. Their deaths were the “true cause” behind Elizabeth's decision to stop executing Puritan dissenters; thus, they opened the door for Puritans to gain access to the English government.⁴⁴

The first dialogue persistently juggles Augustinian and Eusebian themes as it tries to clear a trail between the early days of Separatism and the post-war Puritan world. Bradford's account of the afflictions endured by Barrow and his contemporaries echoes many of the Augustinian ideals expressed in his elegy for Brewster. Once again, Bradford notes that the Separatists endured long years in prison and in exile, often without winning sympathy from other Calvinists. The ancients, especially perturbed by Cotton's charge that Separatists' afflictions were “a minori,” remonstrate that they “would not only equalise” but “farr exceede” the “sufferings of those reproached by the name of puritains.” Of course, the ancients admit, many Puritans were also excommunicated, imprisoned, and stripped of their offices and means of livelihood. But they kept their land and were permitted to stay within their country. How can their grievances compare to the “compulsorie banishment,” the real and threatened executions, and the constant ridicule that plagued the Separatists? “To speake y^e truth,” Bradford declares, the Puritans “had a great aduantage of y^e separatists; for y^e separatists had not only the prelats, & their faction to encounter with. … But also they must endure y^e frowns, & many times the sharp inuectiues of y^e forward ministers against them, both in publick, & priuate.” On this point, Bradford is holding his ground against Cotton. Willing to praise John Robinson and the “first comers” at Plymouth for shipping a little “leaven” into New England, Cotton nevertheless wanted to free his Congregationalism from the teachings of Barrow and other early Separatists.⁴⁵ With some deference to Cotton, Bradford avoids the thorny issues of theology and polity to accentuate the personal sacrifices of the first Separatists, a topic much less contentious. He then presses his point by arguing, as he had in Of Plymouth Plantation, that the sufferings of the Separatists were the best evidence of their apostolic faith and ample reason for restoring them as heralds of Congregationalism.

Even as he stresses the Separatists' otherworldliness, Bradford is eager to place them within a tradition that understood martyrdom as the source of political transformation. The dialogue includes a catalog of martyrs, a Separatist counterpart to John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, a work deliberately cast in a Eusebian mold. Foxe's horrific images of the victims of “Bloody Mary” were dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, who seemed willing, at least for a brief season, to reward the extraordinary sacrifices of the saints by encouraging Calvinists to think they might have a hand in reforming England. Comparing Elizabeth to Constantine, Foxe equated himself with Eusebius as the historian who recorded past sufferings and announced a new era of friendly cooperation between Christianity and the state.⁴⁶ In the final passages from Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford appeared content to leave Brewster and the “ancient members” to their heavenly “rest,” yet in the dialogue he wants to be sure that the Separatist martyrs are not excluded from the list of saints credited with the downfall of the episcopacy. Their selfless adherence to Augustinian values, their resignation to the agonies of this world, had made it possible for other Puritans to promote political change in the nation the Pilgrims had fled.

IV

While narrowing the distance between Elizabethan Separatism and the Puritanism of the Protectorate, Bradford also sought to narrow the distance between himself and his readers in the first dialogue. Though he hoped his historical annals would prove “profitable” to the “rising generation,” the final pages of the text reveal Bradford's fears that the narrative would amount to little more than a record for “my own benefit.”⁴⁷ In the dialogue the governor attempts to reclaim an authoritative voice by creating his own attentive readers and adopting a language of consensus. Not only does he imagine an audience of young persons hungry for information about the past, but he also sets aside the first-person perspective of his history and moves behind the mask of the “ancients.”

To create his own persona, Bradford had to revive the dead. The conversation between the old and the young is an anachronism. In 1648, none of the individuals Bradford generally chose as spokespersons for the Plymouth and Leyden churches—Robinson, Brewster, Winslow, Allerton, Cushman—were available to him. Only a handful of “men” from the Mayflower were still in town, and Bradford and Francis Cooke were the only ones “ancient” enough to remember “holland and old England” in the detail the dialogue displays. By the time Baillie's criticisms reached Plymouth, virtually all of the ancients who could provide eyewitness testimony to refute him had either died or departed. The ancients, therefore, are not so much the surviving immigrants as the protagonists from Of Plymouth Plantation. The “conference” enables them to enter into a discussion with the young colonists who, in Bradford's mind at least, had not been reading the annals with sufficient profit.

Throughout the first conference the young repeatedly announce that they are “satisfied” with the ancients' answers, and it is easy to misread this satisfaction as the author's ploy to manage dissent. By bringing the young from Plymouth Plantation and the ancients from Of Plymouth Plantation into “dialogue,” however, Bradford wisely dramatizes the act of historical recovery as a negotiation between the two generations, between his young readers and his text. In this respect, it is interesting to consider how effectively Bradford's conference illustrates Dominick LaCapra's notion that historical interpretation must be understood as an ongoing conversation between the reader and an era's primary texts.⁴⁸ The portraits of the early Separatists are no longer drawn to furnish Bradford's personal memoir; instead, many of the pictures of the men and women from Of Plymouth Plantation are reframed by the interrogations of the young, presumably the readers of that historical text, especially as they elaborate their concerns for the future. It would seem that the governor, as he worked on his annals, recognized that the skepticism of the “rising generation” had to be confronted if his own memoir was to retain meaning beyond his death. The ancients from Of Plymouth Plantation had read their final lines there; they cannot be brought onto the contemporary stage unless the new generation is permitted to question them about their understanding of the past. What the ancients “remember” is shaped largely by the ideological and life choices facing the young.

The ancients' rapprochement with the new generation becomes more apparent as the dialogue nears its conclusion. In one of their last requests, the young ask for short biographies of the “eminent” men and women from the Separatist churches in Amsterdam and Leyden. The leaders treated are those Bradford knew “familiarly” rather than by reputation alone, and so most critics have accused him of hagiography.⁴⁹ Admittedly, Bradford openly urges the young to revere many of their predecessors, but he was not uncritical.

The ancients conclude their brief sketches of the Separatists by proclaiming that there were “many worthy and able men” at both Leyden and Amsterdam “who lived and died in obscurity in respect of the world, as private Christians, yet were they precious in the eyes of the Lord, and also in the eyes of such as knew them, whose virtues we wish such of you as are their children do follow and imitate.” It is important to note that those receiving these warm accolades are not public figures but “private Christians.” Nor do all of the Separatist leaders meet with full approval—from either the young or the ancients. One who does, John Robinson, gets surprisingly short treatment. The ancients declare that their minister was “a man not easily to be paralleled,” yet since they have “resolved to be brief in this matter,” they leave Robinson's reputation to the many others who have already paid him homage. By contrast, the Separatist pastor from Gainsborough, John Smith, is presented as an “object of pity for after times”: he was a “good preacher” and a “good scholar,” yet he was “unsettled,” a person of “unstable judgment” who “fell into some errours about the Scriptures,” caused division within the Amsterdam congregation, and eventually “misled” his flock into Dutch Anabaptism. The ancients are anxious to defend Francis Johnson, another of the preachers at Amsterdam; yet, when pressed by the young, they admit that Johnson bought his wife immodest and elegant clothes, such ostentatious adornments as corked shoes and a whalebone for her corset. Quoting Cotton's “Reply to Mr. Williams,” the young also complain that Henry Barrow was a “great gamester and a dicer” before his conversion. Even though Barrow reformed, the ancients accept John Robinson's judgment that the converted Barrow, like Luther, continued to mix his “spiritual zeal” with his “fleshly indignation.”⁵⁰

Moreover, Bradford turned his biography of Henry Ainsworth, “a man of a thousand,” against other Separatists. This “powerful” teacher, who led an “innocent and unblamable life,” wrote and taught during times that were “not worthy of such a man.” When the young observe that Ainsworth was branded a “manpleaser” and an apostate by some Separatists, the ancients admit that such accusations were evidence of the early rigidity and intolerance of their movement.⁵¹ The engagement of the two generations in a conversation about the past not only acquaints the young with the virtues of the church founders, but also opens the curtains on the turmoil within the Separatist communities in Holland that Bradford had, by and large, kept drawn in Of Plymouth Plantation.

After listening attentively to the chorus of biographies, the young acknowledge that “God raiseth up excellent instruments in all ages to carry on his own work,” but they still proclaim that “there is no new thing under the sun.” The testimonials have shown them that “the best of men have their failings sometimes, as we see in these our times.”⁵² Such tepid praise should caution us against reading the biographies as moral lessons for an errant generation. One member of the new generation, Nathaniel Morton, caught the governor's ambivalence about his Separatist predecessors. In a few prefatory remarks to his transcription of the dialogue, Morton admitted that neither he nor Bradford wanted to defend “all the words that might fall from those blessed souls in the defence of the truth.” The early Separatists, according to Morton, were occasionally prone to “circumstantial weakness”: the Reformation would have been better off if “some passages that fell from them might have been spared.”⁵³

Unlike Bradford's elegant tribute to William Brewster in Of Plymouth Plantation, then, the biographies in the first dialogue do not underscore the present generation's divergence from the piety of the past. Instead, the dialogue attempts to erase some of the distinctions between generations. The ancients laud the present reformers who have recently overthrown the episcopacy and seized the reins of government in England and Massachusetts, while the young express a newfound respect for the Elizabethan and Jacobean Separatists. Bradford represses his inclination to mourn the infidelity of the second generation and takes the optimistic view that the young will reaffirm the covenant once formed by their parents. But, even in his own fiction, Bradford hints that the terms of the covenant will be revised by the founders' children.

V

Written near the “meridian” of the Reformation, Bradford's first dialogue signals a shift in his literary habits, if not the habits of his heart.⁵⁴ He is still fervently loyal to the memory of the ancients, but he is well aware that the Separatist past has to be reconciled with the ascendant orthodoxies in Cotton's Boston and Cromwell's England. For all its boasts of “satisfaction,” the first dialogue ends with a request by the young to reassemble at a future date, an admission that more matters need to be resolved. Yet when Bradford returned to his history, that resolution proved elusive. The final lines in Of Plymouth Plantation, composed two years after the first dialogue, betray fears that his colony was now stranded in an irrelevant corner of the Christian landscape. In drawing up his list of Mayflower passengers, Bradford proudly represented them as the “first beginners and in some sort the foundation of all the Plantations and Colonies in New England.” But when forced to record Winslow's departure on missions for Massachusetts and for Cromwell—missions which “hath been much to the weakening of this government, without whose consent he took these employments upon him”—the governor was again confronted with Plymouth's diminished power in the post-war Reformation.⁵⁵ The final pages of his history reveal how difficult it was for him to graft his post-war historiography onto his annals. He felt compelled to trust his new vision to other genres.

Scholarship on Bradford has commonly depicted this shift in genres as an act of discouragement, and not without reason: his poems are often lamentations, sharp indictments of the infidelity and self-interest of the new generation. On occasion, the poems recycle dark images from the history—the “mixed multitude” that accompanied the Separatists out of England, the ancient “widow” who was forsaken of her children.⁵⁶ But it is easy to dwell on such bleak notes and to miss the confident tones echoing throughout the dialogues and the poems.

While they are saturated with Bradford's personal emotions, the dialogues and poems usually speak with greater public assurance than the history. No longer is Bradford apologizing for his “slender judgment”;⁵⁷ he assumes the role of a New England prophet, not merely the recorder and guardian of a Separatist legacy. Not only does he offer “A Word to New Plymouth”; he also sends a “Word to Boston.” His jeremiads do not simply bewail the dissolution of Plymouth but sound warnings about the collapse of virtue throughout the entire region. In “A Word to New Plymouth,” he assures his settlement that, despite its sorry condition, it is at least “a place secure” from the religious wars that have swept Europe, and he finds ample consolation for his own weak colony in Cromwell's victories over the Stuarts, the Scots, and the Spanish.⁵⁸

Bradford's third dialogue, composed in 1652, demonstrates that his post-war historiography has taken him far afield of the narrow Separatism advocated in the preamble to Of Plymouth Plantation. In the third dialogue, markedly different from even the first, he endorses a “Congregationall discipline” conspicuously free of Separatist antecedents. Having crammed citations from John Robinson into the first dialogue, Bradford had implied that his pastor's teachings served as a blueprint for Congregationalism. Bradford avoids Robinson in the third dialogue, however, and allies himself with Cotton and the Massachusetts leadership against the “Antinomians & Familists” and other “corrupt sects & heresies which shroud themselues under the vast title of Independencie.” Anxious to shake free of Baillie's and Cotton's charge that the Separatists were no better than other radical English dissenters, Bradford tries to reassure his northern neighbors once more that Plymouth will not become a haven for Anabaptists.⁵⁹

In his history Bradford lamented that the citizens of Plymouth were often entangled with communities elsewhere, but in the third dialogue he openly supports joining an anti-Presbyterian coalition as a means of preserving his colony from fragmentation and decline. Between 1648 and 1652, much to the dismay of New Englanders, British Presbyterians had repudiated the Cambridge Platform, and theological disagreements between Presbyterians and Puritans had fanned the violence between Scotland and England. When he wrote the third dialogue, Bradford had heard enough from “books & letters & reports” about Cromwell's triumphs at Dunbar and Worcester to conclude that these battles against Charles II and the Scots had vindicated Congregational principles. The tone of the first dialogue had been largely defensive, as Bradford tried to shield the Separatists from attempts to estrange them from other Protestants. In the third dialogue, however, Bradford goes on the offensive. He grants the Presbyterians a safe spot above the valleys dominated by the “Roman-Church,” that “scarlet-coloured whor,” and the Stuart Church of England, but he insists that the Scottish church must be “better examined and mended according to the true standard and right patterne of the word of God” before it can be welcomed fully into the Reformation. With far greater boldness than he had previously displayed, he presents the New England experiment as the spark that ignited change in Britain. Under the direction of God, the “Honourable Houses of Parlemente” learned to “consider of our sufferings, and of the causes thereof, as to conclude a necesitie of reformation of the Ecclesiasticall state.” Bradford proclaims that Cromwell's “great and gratious & glorious victories” in these “late warres” were among the “many testimonies of the blessing of God vpon our way.”⁶⁰

“Our way,” at this moment in Bradford's career, is a much wider path than he had taken in 1608 when he joined his friends from Scrooby on their flight to Holland. It is a much broader route than he had pursued in 1630 when he began to recount the story of his colony's small beginnings in Europe. However, seen as a response to the theological and political turnmoil in Britain and New England, Bradford's defense of the “Congregationall Way” is also an effort to keep his colony from wandering too far off course. Dominated by the ancients, packed with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin quotations, and preoccupied with doctrinal subtleties, the third dialogue is far more didactic than the first, at times a virtual catechism of the Cambridge Platform. The ancients reaffirm the Cambridge position that although “perticuler” churches needed be autonomous, “voluntary” synods could still be profitable. Nevertheless, despite the confident, pedagogical tone of the final conference, Bradford's concern with the proper use of synods echoes his anxiety, so evident in the first dialogue, about the alienation of Plymouth. According to the ancients in the third dialogue, the Book of Acts demonstrates that synods were not regular assemblies in the early Christian church but rather conventions called upon an “vrgent and vnwonted occation,” such as the “dissention of the church of Antioch, which both craued & needed direction.” By 1652, most of the churches in Plymouth colony lacked settled ministers, and their predicament attracted criticism, but not always sympathy, from Boston. Bradford realized that his colony needed support from Massachusetts and that occasional synods might bring new “light to satisfie discenters” and rescue a church “rent with dissention,” like the governor's own congregation, soon reeling from its dismissal of John Reynard.⁶¹

Bradford's interest in Congregational synods has failed to capture wide attention from cultural historians. The Pilgrims' Separatism retains its hold on our historical imagination as both a precursor of American Independence and a tragic episode of sectarian intolerance. Without doubt the governor grieved over the scattering of his community, but he generally chose to articulate the principles of ecclesiastical interdependence rather than retreat into sentimental reveries about better days in his own church. As he tries to square Separatist tradition with Congregational polity in his dialogues, Bradford anticipates the absorption of Plymouth into Massachusetts nearly half a century later. In 1691 the Plymouth colony, vulnerable without a royal charter and threatened with incorporation into New York, was willingly annexed to the greater commonwealth of “saints.” The merger, it was hoped, would fortify Plymouth against possible French attacks and reinvigorate churches and schools starving for public support.⁶² A record of perseverence, Of Plymouth Plantation had also been a reminder of the Pilgrims' frailty. Bradford's account of the Pilgrims' “weighty” debate over whether to migrate to New Netherlands, Virginia, or Guiana was a preview of the dialogues, a meditation on the hard choices brought upon the Pilgrims by poverty and international upheaval.⁶³ Readers of Bradford's history would be wise to take heed of the dialogues, for the conjunction of the two forms displays Bradford's internal struggle to move beyond isolation and despair to assimilation and renewal.

Notes

1. George F. Hoar's speech celebrating the return of the manuscript is included in the “Commonwealth Edition” of Bradford's History “Of Plimoth Plantation” (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1898). Pages cited are xxxix, lv, lxxiii.

2. See Samuel Eliot Morison's introduction to Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. xxxi-xxxix.

3. “Governor William Bradford's Will and Inventory. Literally transcribed from the Original Records, by George Ernest Bowman,” The Mayflower Descendant 2 (1900): 228-29.

4. Robert Daly, “William Bradford's Vision of History,” American Literature 44 (1973): 557.

5. William Bradford, “A Dialogue or the sume of a Conference between som younge men borne in New England and sundery Ancient men that came out of holland and old England Anno dom 1648,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 22 (Boston: The Society, 1920), p. 115.

6. The surviving fragment of the manuscript for Bradford's first dialogue represents about 12 percent of the full text. It is in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The third dialogue, also owned by the Historical Society, is currently on long-term loan to the Pilgrim Society and is kept at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth.

   The first dialogue was initially published in 1841, as one of the Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, an anthology compiled by Alexander Young, a Unitarian minister ([Boston: Little and Brown, 1841], pp. 414-58). Although Thaddeus Harris, president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, loaned Young the fragment of the manuscript, the pastor merely reproduced the dialogue he found in Morton's additions to the Plymouth Church Records, modernizing the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Young's version of the text was occasionally reprinted in nineteenth-century anthologies (New England's Memorial [Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1855]; and The Founders of New England [Boston: Old South Leaflets, 1894]).

   In 1920, the first dialogue appeared in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts' edition of the Plymouth Church Records (see n. 5 above). This edition retained the original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. For the sake of readability, I have cited Young's edition in this essay, except when quoting directly from the fragment of Bradford's manuscript. I am grateful to Louis Tucker and the Massachusetts Historical Society for permission to cite from this fragment. References to Young's text are identified as “First Dialogue.” References to the fragment are identified as “First Dialogue—Ms. Fragment.”

   For the textual history of the third dialogue, see Charles Deane, “Governor Bradford's Dialogue,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 2 (1870): 400-401, and Perry Westbrook, William Bradford (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1972), pp. 93, 94, 97.

7. Jesper Rosenmeier, “‘With My Owne Eyes’: William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation,” in Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), pp. 101, 103; see also Westbrook, Bradford, pp. 94-96.

8. Daly, “Bradford's Vision,” pp. 557-61.

9. Francis Murphy, introduction to Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. xxiii-xxiv.

10. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, pp. 316, 320, 322. Henceforth I shall be citing this edition.

11. Bradford, Plymouth, pp. 333-34.

12. Bradford, Plymouth, pp. 47, 324.

13. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 3-34, and Alan B. Howard, “Art and History in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation,” William and Mary Quarterly 28 (1971): 243-44.

14. Bradford, Plymouth, p. 441.

15. Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 51.

16. Rosenmeier, “My Owne Eyes,” pp. 84-86.

17. Bradford, Plymouth, p. 236. For the economic impact of the decline in immigration, see George D. Langdon, Jr., Pilgrim Colony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 44-45.

18. Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 194-95.

19. Langdon, Pilgrim Colony, p. 65.

20. Bradford, Plymouth, pp. 5, 8, 9.

21. Bradford, Plymouth, pp. 351-52.

22. Bradford, Plymouth, p. 321.

23. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 51-53; Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976), pp. 119-21.

24. Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616-1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 173.

25. J. F. McGregor, “The Baptists: The Fount of All Heresy,” in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 23-24.

26. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, pp. 28-34, 37.

27. Robert Baillie, A Dissuasive from the Errours of Time (London, 1645), pp. 8, 54, 16-17.

28. Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, in Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, p. 379. See also Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 210-11.

29. Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, pp. 379-80.

30. Robert Baillie, Anabaptism, the True Fountain of Independency, Antinomy, Brownisme, Familisme, and the most of the “Errours,” which for the time doe trouble the Church of England (London, 1647). For his critique of Cotton, see also Dissuasive, esp. p. 53.

31. John Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared from the Historical Aspersions of Mr. Robert Baylie (London, 1648), pp. 13-17. For a discussion of Cotton's “middle-way,” see Ziff, John Cotton, pp. 203-18.

32. Langdon, Pilgrim Colony, pp. 65-66. See also Mr. Cotton's Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered, in the Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. Reuben Aldridge Guild, 6 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. 1, esp. pp. 92-100. John Cotton attached his “Reply to Mr. Williams his Examination; An Answer of the Letters sent to him by John Cotton” to his longer treatise The Bloudy Tenet, Washed, And made white in the bloud of the Lambe (1647; New York: Arno Press, 1972). Bradford's first dialogue responds most directly to chapter 23 of Cotton's “Reply,” pp. 114-23.

33. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” p. 457, and Plymouth, p. 20.

34. Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked, p. 396.

35. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 414-15. See also Westbrook, Bradford, p. 95.

36. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 416-17. Bradford's arguments about the “implicit covenant” draw upon Cotton, The Way Cleared, p. 13.

37. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 417-19.

38. Baillie, Dissuasive, p. 14, and Bradford, “First Dialogue,” p. 441. See also Cotton's “Reply to Mr. Williams,” p. 122.

39. David Laurence suggests that politics may have been the reason that Bradford avoided the term “Separatism” in his first volume. See his “William Bradford's American Sublime,” PMLA 102 (January 1987): 62.

40. Bradford, Plymouth, p. 153.

41. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” p. 420.

42. William Bradford, “A Dialogue, or 3^d Conference betweene some Young-men borne in New-England, and some Ancient-men, which came out of Holland and Old England, concerning the Church, and the Gouerment thereof,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 2 (1870): 426, 461.

43. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 419.

44. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 430, 431, 433. See also Cotton's “Reply to Mr. Williams,” p. 117.

45. Bradford, “First Dialogue—Ms. Fragment,” pp. 2, 5, 8; Cotton, The Way Cleared, p. 17.

46. Daly, “Bradford's Vision,” pp. 557-60.

47. Bradford, Plymouth, pp. 73, 443.

48. See “History and the Novel” in Dominick LaCapra's History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 127.

49. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 444, 445. See also Westbrook, Bradford, pp. 96-97.

50. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 456, 450-52, 429-30. See also Cotton's “Reply to Mr. Williams,” p. 117.

51. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 448, 449.

52. Bradford, “First Dialogue,” pp. 454-55.

53. Nathaniel Morton's preface to the dialogue is included in Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, pp. 411-13. Though he acclaimed his uncle's dialogue as an expression of ecumenical tolerance, Morton also tried to “spare” readers some of the passages from Governor Bradford. Whenever Bradford took specific aim at Cotton, Morton deleted Cotton's name, substituting a vague generality (such as “divers reverend men”). In transcribing the dialogue, Morton claimed that he took care “to prevent offense and to procure acceptance” (p. 413). One person, no doubt, Morton didn't want to offend was his pastor, John Cotton, son of the Boston minister. When he added Bradford's dialogue to the Plymouth Church Records in 1680, Morton was aware that he would be entrusting those records to the younger Cotton, so he slapped his own brush strokes over Bradford's critiques of Cotton's father.

54. Bradford, “Third Dialogue,” p. 448.

55. Bradford, Plymouth, pp. 346-47.

56. Bradford, “Some observations of God's merciful dealing with us in this wilderness, and his gracious protection over these many years. Blessed be his name,” and “A Word to New Plymouth,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 2 (1870): 474, 478.

57. Bradford, Plymouth, p. 3.

58. Bradford, “A Word to New Plymouth,” pp. 479-82.

59. Bradford, “Third Dialogue,” pp. 461-62.

60. Bradford, “Third Dialogue,” pp. 427-41, 462; Stout, Soul, p. 52.

61. Bradford, “Third Dialogue,” pp. 444, 457, 458.

62. Langdon, Pilgrim Colony, pp. 241-46; Eugene Aubrey Stratton, Plymouth Colony: Its History & People, 1620-1691 (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986), pp. 135-37.

63. Bradford, Plymouth, p. 23.