by Rod Gragg
Their government is after the English form. The governor has his council, which is chosen every year by the entire community, by election or prolongation of term. In inheritances they place all the children in one degree, only the eldest son has an acknowledgment for his seniority of birth. They have made stringent laws and ordinances upon the subject of fornication and adultery, which laws they maintain and enforce very strictly indeed, even among the tribes which live amongst them. They speak very angrily when they hear from the savages that we live so barbarously in these respects, and without punishment.
A Pilgrim mother plays with her children. Within a few decades, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony were surrounded by other colonies and colonists.
STORY OF THE PILGRIMS
Their farms are not so good as ours, because they are more stony, and consequently not so suitable for the plough. . . . The maize seed which they do not require for their own use is delivered over to the governor, at three guilders the bushel, who in his turn sends it in sloops to the north for the trade in skins among the savages; they reckon one bushel of maize against one pound of beaver’s skins; the profits are divided according to what each has contributed, and they are credited for the amount in the account of what each has to contribute yearly towards the reduction of his obligation. Then with the remainder they purchase what next they require, and which the governor takes care to provide every year.
They have better sustenance than ourselves, because they have the fish so abundant before their doors. There are also many birds, such as geese, herons and cranes, and other small-legged birds, which are in great abundance there in the winter. The tribes in their neighborhood . . . are better conducted than ours, because the English give them the example of better ordinances and a better life; and who also, to a certain degree, give them laws, in consequence of the respect they from the very first have established among them. . . .9
“None will ever be losers by following us so far as we follow Christ”
In the seven years since Plymouth Colony’s arduous and deadly beginning, the Pilgrims had achieved their vision of building a new home and a new life in the wilderness of America. Visitors, supporters, and neighboring colonists admired what they had achieved, and they would become the model for all that was good about the early forging of the American nation. Ironically, serving as a model would likely have caused discomfort for the typical humble-hearted Pilgrim of 1620, as noted by Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow later in life. Look not to us as a model for your life, he counseled, but instead look to the Lord:
And if any will take us for a precedent, I desire that they may really know what we do, rather than what others ignorantly or maliciously report of us, assuring myself that none will ever be losers by following us so far as we follow Christ. Which that we may do, and our posterities after us, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and our Father accept in Christ what is according to him; discover, pardon and reform what is amiss amongst us; and guide us and them by the assistance of the Holy Ghost, for time to come, till time shall be no more; that the Lord our God may still delight to dwell amongst his plantations and churches there by his gracious presence, and may go on blessing to bless them with heavenly blessings in these earthly places, that so by his blessing they may not only grow up to a nation, but become exemplary for good unto others.10
As the generations passed, the Pilgrims were viewed with respect and good favor. Observed a visiting official from Virginia: “how happy were it for our people . . . if they were as free from wickedness and vice as these are in this place.”
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY
And yet, despite human frailties and mistakes, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony would indeed establish important precedents and inspire generations of Americans in ages to come. Through faith, perseverance, courage, and much suffering, they had achieved their long-sought goal of worshipping in peace and freedom—“that their children after them might walk in the holy ways of the Lord.” In so doing they had also established a model of faith-based democratic self-government. It had been a long, difficult, and sometimes tragic pilgrimage—from persecution in Scrooby and Gainsborough and grim English jails to hope and hardship in Holland, from frustrating false starts in Southampton and Dartmouth to a long, stormy voyage in the cramped quarters of the Mayflower, from illness and death in the untamed wilderness to hope and heroic determination as they forged their new lives at Plymouth Colony.
And they had succeeded. No one in America would be raiding their Sunday services to stop their worship. Neither would they be hauled off to jail because of their beliefs, nor ever again forced to flee their homes because of their faith. And the way of freedom they had blazed in the wilds of the New World would eventually become the path of liberty for countless people from around the world: people yearning for a new life, a new start, a new home—and who would find it as Americans.11
EPILOGUE
“One Small Candle”
It only lasted for seventy-two years—a single lifetime. In 1692, Plymouth Colony ceased to exist. Inspired by the Pilgrims’ perseverance at Plymouth, England’s mainstream Puritans established the much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony next to Plymouth in 1630. Motivated by the same desire for freedom of faith—and fear of increased persecution—increasing numbers of Puritan colonists spilled into their New England colony: two hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred, and then three thousand in a single year. They arrived not in a solitary ship like the Mayflower, but in fleets of ships. Between 1630 and 1640, more than twenty thousand English Puritans flooded Massachusetts Bay Colony—so many that their exodus from England was known as the “Great Migration.”
Massachusetts Bay Colony did not experience the slow, modest growth of neighboring Plymouth Colony—it boomed. And, in various ways, it also produced the spinoff colonies of Connecticut, New Haven, and Rhode Island, while an influx of Anglicans established nearby New Hampshire Colony. For sixty years, Plymouth Colony remained in the shadow of its larger, more prosperous neighbor. After seventy years of existence, the entire population of Plymouth Colony numbered approximately seven thousand—the same number of people then living in the Massachusetts city of Boston. The population of New England at that time was approximately sixty thousand. In 1691, in the wake of a bloody Indian uprising—King Philip’s War—the English government decided it would be strategically and politically prudent to fold Plymouth Colony into the larger, neighboring Massachusetts Bay Colony. It did so officially in 1692. “To everything there is a season,” Scripture proclaims, “a time for every purpose under heaven.” And Plymouth Colony’s time had ended.
Plymouth Colony, however, was influential far beyond its limited population and brief lifetime—and so were its founders, the Pilgrims. Later immigrants and colonists lacked the faith and fervor of those Mayflower Pilgrims, and the colony’s sense of community declined over time—but it was not so with those Separatist Pilgrims of 1620. They identified themselves with the Hebrew people of the Old Testament, who were led by God from Egyptian slavery into nationhood within the Promised Land. “Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt,” wrote the psalmist. “Thou preparedst room before it and didst cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land.” Plymouth’s Pilgrim founders were confident that they had been providentially placed in “New England” to become that biblical “vine”—to craft a culture that honored and reflected biblical truth. And, politically and culturally that Pilgrim “vine” did indeed “take deep root, and it filled the land.”
The Pilgrims left a political, cultural, and theological legacy that would mold and motivate the American nation. In 1776, 156 years later, the foundation of the Declaration of Independence was the same foundation on which the Pilgrims built their colony in 1620, and they surely would have identified with and embraced its words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of H
appiness.
The treasured liberties championed by America’s Founding Fathers were in huge measure part of their heritage from the Mayflower Pilgrims. Their biblically based values and principles would become the foundation of the United States of America. “These same principles,” the famed eighteenth-century philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville would note, “unknown to the European nations or despised by them, were proclaimed in the wilderness of the New World and became the future symbol of a great people.”
William Brewster, the Pilgrims’ beloved elder and former Scrooby postmaster, continued to serve his people and his church until his death, which likely occurred in 1644, at about age eighty-four. He outlived his wife Mary and his children Patience, Wrestling, and Fear, but not Love. William Bradford said of him: “He would labor with his hands in the fields as long as he was able; yet when the church had no other minister, he taught twice every Sabbath, and both powerfully and profitably, to the great contentment of his hearers.”
Edward Winslow, the printing assistant to William Brewster in Leiden, eventually became governor of Plymouth Colony. He co-authored Mourt’s Relation, which provided invaluable insight into Plymouth’s early days, and authored numerous other works. He returned to England during the English Civil War and served in the government of Oliver Cromwell, England’s temporary Lord Protector. At age fifty-nine, he was lost at sea.
Myles Standish earned fame as Plymouth Colony’s military commander. He stirred controversy, however, when he killed several Indians whom he believed were a threat to the colony. Although Governor Bradford defended him, Pastor Robinson admonished him in a letter. “It is more glorious in men’s eyes than pleasing in God’s,” he wrote, “to be a terror to poor, barbarous people.” Even Robinson, however, commended Standish for his loyal and effective leadership as Plymouth’s military leader. In the 1630s, he and his family helped establish the town of Duxbury. He died there in 1656, reportedly from a bout of kidney stones.
Robert Cushman went back to London aboard the Fortune in 1621 and never returned to Plymouth. His sermon, “The Sin and Danger of Self-Love” was published in England and became an enduring part of Pilgrim literature. From England, he continued to help the Plymouth colonists, notably in developing the fishing trade, but the agreement he persuaded them to sign with the Merchant Adventurers was a continued source of frustration. Four years after leaving Plymouth Colony, Cushman died in England. His son Thomas, whom he left in America in the care of William Bradford, grew up in Plymouth and succeeded William Brewster as the ruling elder of the Plymouth Congregation.
Squanto, or Tisquantum, the Patuxet Indian who did so much to assist the Plymouth colonists, developed a nosebleed and died in the winter of 1622. According to William Bradford, Squanto professed faith in Jesus Christ on his deathbed. Loyal to the last, in his final moments he asked Bradford to give his belongings to his friends at Plymouth.
Samoset, the Abenaki Indian leader who introduced the Pilgrims to Squanto, lived another thirty years in New England, and continued to distinguish himself as a Native American diplomat to the European newcomers. In 1625, he signed one of the first land deeds transacted between Native Americans and European colonists. Some claimed he died in what is now Maine in the 1650s, although there is no record of his death.
Massasoit, the chief of the Pokanoket or Wampanoag, remained a faithful friend to the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony throughout his life. In 1623, he sent word that he was deathly ill. Edward Winslow led a party of Pilgrims to Massasoit’s village, and successfully treated his illness, which may have been typhus. In gratitude, Massasoit warned the Pilgrims of an impending attack by the Massachusetts tribe. He is believed to have died in 1661, after establishing peaceful relations with the Plymouth colonists that would last for half a century. Ironically, his son Metacomet, better known as King Philip, led Native American forces in New England’s bloodiest Indian conflict—King Philip’s War.
Thomas Weston, the obnoxious agent of the Merchant Adventurers, continued to make trouble for the Plymouth colonists for years after the colony was established. Eventually, Plymouth’s leaders negotiated a settlement with the Adventurers in exchange for a monopoly on certain trade opportunities. In an ill-fated money-making scheme, he helped establish a competing colony north of Plymouth in 1622, but it fell into disaster and its colonists had to be rescued by the Pilgrims. Weston showed up at Plymouth soon afterwards, begging for assistance from the Pilgrims. He was assisted by William Bradford and returned to England, where he reportedly died penniless.
John Billington, the profane belligerent “Stranger” who was so argumentative aboard the Mayflower continued to cause problems in Plymouth Colony. In 1630, he was hanged for murder.
Peregrine White, the first English child born in New England, lived a long and productive life in Plymouth Colony. He married colonist Sarah Bassett, fathered seven children, and died at the age of eighty-four.
Stephen Hopkins, the “Stranger” who may have provoked the mutinous mood aboard the Mayflower that led to the creation of the Mayflower Compact, became a leader in the earlier years of Plymouth Colony, even serving briefly as assistant governor. He lost his wife Elizabeth and several children to illness, however, and fell into repeated problems with alcohol. He died in 1644, after requesting to be buried near his wife.
Oceanus Hopkins, the child of Stephen and Elizabeth Hopkins who was born at sea aboard the Mayflower, somehow survived the great sickness that killed so many Pilgrims in Plymouth’s first winter. He died of unknown causes, however, at about age six.
Richard More, the sole survivor of the four More children aboard the Mayflower, grew up to become a sea captain.
John Howland, the young servant to John Carver who was rescued after falling overboard on the Mayflower, received his freedom after Governor Carver’s death—and may have also received a sizeable inheritance from the Carvers. He became a prominent citizen of Plymouth Colony, serving at one point as deputy governor of the colony. He married colonist Elizabeth Tilley, lived until his seventies, and fathered ten children. Among his descendants were three American presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, George Bush, and George W. Bush.
Christopher Jones, the master of the Mayflower, died soon after returning home to England in 1622—most likely as another victim of the illness that killed so many of the Pilgrims.
The Mayflower sat at anchor and unused after Jones’s death. Four years after her historic voyage to America, she was found unseaworthy by her owners, and was probably scrapped.
The Speedwell, which turned back from the Pilgrims’ voyage to America because of her many leaks, made numerous other voyages over the years without incident.
John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ beloved pastor, managed to preach two more sermons in Leiden after falling mortally ill in the deadly plague of 1625. His death was a disheartening blow to the Pilgrims, and prevented the Separatists at Leiden from sending larger numbers of colonists to Plymouth as planned. “Fare you well in Him in whom you trust, and in whom I rest,” Robinson wrote his flock in his final letter. Separatist pastor John Robinson did more for the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony than any man who never came to America.
“Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt,” proclaimed Scripture familiar to the Pilgrims, “ . . . and it filled the land.” Far greater than their numbers might suggest, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony influenced the making of America.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
William Bradford served as governor of Plymouth Colony for more than thirty years. Two and a half years after his wife Dorothy drowned in Cape Cod Bay, Bradford married a widow named Alice Carpenter, who came to Plymouth with a new group of colonists aboard the ship Anne in 1623. His son John, whom he and Dorothy had left in the care of relatives in England, also came to Plymouth. William Bradford’s second wife was a widow with two children, and together the Bradfords had three more. Bradford served Plymouth Colony faithfully and wisely, and no person came to be identified with the Pilgrims and Plymouth C
olony more than he—largely due to his authorship of the Pilgrims’ story in Of Plymouth Plantation, which he began in about 1630 and completed in 1651.
As a new generation of colonists migrated to Plymouth Colony, William Bradford worried about the loss of community caused in part by the spreading out of the colony’s population. Even more, he worried about what he perceived as declining faith as younger colonists arrived and as Plymouth’s residents became comfortable with a more prosperous lifestyle. “Do you not now see the fruits of your labors, O all ye servants of the Lord,” he wrote to Plymouth’s people in 1646. “You have not only had a seed time, but many of you have seen the joyful harvest; should you not then rejoice? Yes, and again rejoice, and say Hallelujah!” Near the end of his life, he wrote a poem which reflected the Christ-centered heart he bore, and which he hoped would mark the lives of the newcomers to Plymouth Colony:
My days are spent, old age is come,
My strength it fails, my glass near run.
Now I will wait, when work is done,
Until my happy change shall come,
When from my labors I shall rest,
With Christ above for to be blest.
William Bradford died at age sixty-seven on May 9, 1657, and was buried in the hillside cemetery of his beloved Plymouth, overlooking the wide bay on which he had arrived so long before in 1620. Despite his worries about his people and his colony, he clearly understood that the Pilgrims of Plymouth had in a mighty way helped launch a nation. “Thus, out of small beginnings, greater things have been produced by his hand that made all things of nothing . . . ,” he wrote, “and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many . . . let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.”1