William Bradford

William Bradford was baptized on March 19, 1590, at Austerfield in Yorkshire, England; the family profile of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants writes the date in Old Style double-year form as March 19, 1589/90.⁠[1][2]

His parents were William Bradford and Alice (Hanson) Bradford.⁠[3]

Cotton Mather’s life of him, first published in 1702, gives his year of birth as 1588 and relates that his parents died when he was a child, that he was brought up by his grandparents and then by his uncles and trained in farming, that a long childhood illness kept him from the vanities of youth, that from about the age of twelve the reading of Scripture made a deep impression on him, and that he was helped by the ministry of Richard Clyfton.⁠[4]

At about twelve he came to the neighboring town of Scrooby, where the worship of a congregation impressed him, and he kept returning; Dorothy Honiss Kelso’s chronology places his regular attendance at Separatist meetings in 1602. By seventeen he was a committed member of the congregation, which favored separation from the Church of England.⁠[5]

As a young man he formed friendships with two educated and devout mentors, William BrewsterWilliam BrewsterWilliam Brewster (c. 1566–1644) was a Mayflower passenger and the Elder of the Separatist church at Leiden and then in Plymouth Colony, an office he held for the rest of his life.Open the full entry and John Robinson; the Separatist church he joined was illegal at the time.⁠[1]

The Commonwealth Museum’s exhibit text judges that he could have become a larger landowner and that his religious convictions led him to leave England.⁠[6]

Separatist leaders were hunted and imprisoned, and from 1608 the Scrooby congregation began leaving England for Holland; William Bradford joined them in Amsterdam in 1609. The exiles lived first in Amsterdam and then in Leiden, where John Robinson led the church, and spent twelve years in the Netherlands in all.⁠[5]

He left England at eighteen and made his living in Leiden as a weaver. A Leiden record of March 30, 1612, shows Rogier Wilson and William Lisle standing as guarantors for his admission as a citizen.⁠[1][4]

The Dutch betrothal records of November 15, 1613, describe him as a fustian worker from Austerfield, aged 23, living in Leiden, with no parents living; the bride, Dorothy May of Wisbech, England, was 16.⁠[4]

The couple married in Amsterdam on December 10, 1613 (New Style), and their son John was born about 1617.⁠[3]

Encouraged by John Robinson, the congregation decided to emigrate to America, choosing a site north of the Virginia Colony, about the Hudson River. William Bradford, then about thirty, took charge of record-keeping, correspondence with the financial backers and the negotiations for a patent; his young son stayed in Holland, as did the pastor and most of the congregation.⁠[5]

The Mayflower left Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, with 102 passengers, reached Cape Cod on November 9 after a voyage of 66 days, and arrived at present-day Provincetown on November 11, Old Style (November 21, New Style).⁠[7]

The emigrants had permission to settle in VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and the decision to settle outside the Virginia Company’s patent led to “mutinous speeches” among some passengers. Shortly after the ship anchored off Provincetown Harbor, the passengers signed the Mayflower Compact on board on November 11, 1620 (Old Style), to create a temporary, legally binding form of self-government; William Bradford was one of the first to sign.⁠[7]

The original Compact is lost, and the earliest surviving handwritten text is the copy in his manuscript; he did not list the signers or use the name “Mayflower Compact.” It was first printed in Mourt’s Relation in 1622, and Nathaniel Morton, secretary of Plymouth Colony, published the earliest known list of signers in New England’s Memorial in 1669.⁠[7]

BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry’s article holds that he helped frame the Compact aboard ship and that this agreement for voluntary civil cooperation became the foundation of the Plymouth government.⁠[8]

After the arrival at Cape Cod, sixteen men set out overland under Myles StandishMyles StandishMyles Standish (c. 1584–1656) was a Mayflower passenger and the military leader of Plymouth Colony; a former soldier in Holland, he later helped found Duxbury and served many times as an Assistant to the governor.Open the full entry, with William Bradford, Stephen Hopkins and Edward Tilley assigned to him as counsel; on the way William Bradford’s leg was caught in a device set to catch deer. The profile of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants dates the incident to November 16, 1620.⁠[4][2]

On December 6, 1620, he set out on a further exploration with Myles Standish, John CarverJohn CarverJohn Carver (died 1621) was one of the chief organizers of the Mayflower voyage and, after the signing of the Mayflower Compact in November 1620, the first governor of Plymouth Colony, serving until his death in April 1621.Open the full entry, Edward WinslowEdward WinslowEdward Winslow (1595–1655) was a Mayflower passenger and one of the founders of Plymouth Colony, where he served three times as governor, handled the colony’s dealings with the Wampanoag leader Massasoit and repeatedly went to England as its agent. In his last years he served in Oliver Cromwell’s government, and he died on an expedition to the West Indies.Open the full entry and others. The party camped near Cape Cod Bay and was attacked about dawn; arrows passed through several coats hung on the barricade, but no one was hit, and they named the place the “First Encounter.”⁠[4]

On December 7, 1620, his wife Dorothy fell overboard and drowned while the ship lay at anchor off Cape Cod Harbor.⁠[2]

Pilgrim Hall Museum’s compilation of documents notes that his only known reference to her death is in a passage written in 1650, and that there is no evidence for suicide, foul play or any mystery.⁠[4]

On January 11, 1621 (1620/21 in Old Style double-year form), he was taken ill while at work and was thought likely to die; he had caught cold on the earlier expeditions. On January 14 the newly built common house caught fire while he and John Carver lay sick inside, and the two were nearly hurt by gunpowder stored there.⁠[4][2]

During the first winter about half of the colonists died within five months.⁠[5]

On March 22, 1621, Governor John Carver concluded a treaty of mutual aid with Ousamequin, the great sachem of the Wampanoag, whom the English usually called by his title, Massasoit. Years later William Bradford set down the six terms of the treaty in his manuscript and wrote that the peace “continued this 24 years”; a second account is in Mourt’s Relation, written by him and Edward Winslow shortly after the event and published in London in 1622.⁠[9]

After John Carver died in April 1621, William Bradford, newly recovered from his illness, was chosen governor, and Isaac Allerton was elected his Assistant.⁠[4]

He was governor in 1621–1632, 1635, 1637, 1639–1643 and 1645–1656 and an Assistant in 1633, 1634, 1636, 1638 and 1644; the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s sketch notes that this count gives him thirty-one terms as governor, a figure at odds with a number of secondary sources.⁠[3]

Britannica’s article states that he was chosen unanimously the first time and was re-elected thirty times.⁠[8]

In the years when he was not governor the office was held by Edward Winslow (1633, 1636, 1644) and Thomas Prence (1634, 1638). In 1624, as new arrivals enlarged the colony, the number of Assistants rose from one to five, with the governor given a double vote, and it was later increased to seven.⁠[10]

As governor he oversaw crop production and the creation of a new system of government and worked to address the debts owed to the investors; he regarded the alliance with the Wampanoag as vital to the colony’s survival and sometimes assigned diplomacy with Native people to others better suited to it.⁠[1]

The division of land in 1623 ended the earliest system of common land, with each family receiving a parcel in proportion to its size; the colony’s oldest surviving record book opens with this division in William Bradford’s handwriting. As a Mayflower passenger he received three acres.⁠[4][3]

On August 14, 1623, he married Alice (Carpenter) Southworth at Plymouth. The daughter of Alexander Carpenter and widow of Edward Southworth, she had two young sons and had arrived that year on the Anne.⁠[3][5]

Emmanuel Altham described the wedding in a letter of September 1623 to his brother Sir Edward Altham: Massasoit attended with his wife, four other leaders and about 120 men, and the feast included about twelve venison pasties, with grapes, plums and nuts.⁠[4]

The settlers had a seven-year contract with the merchant adventurers in London, after which the assets were to be divided among the shareholders. In 1626 William Bradford helped negotiate a better agreement; in 1627 fifty-three Plymouth freemen, called the “Purchasers,” agreed to buy out the company over several years, and twelve “Undertakers” (eight from Plymouth and four from London) agreed to pay the colony’s debts in return for trade benefits. He was one of the eight Plymouth Undertakers, with John Howland, Myles Standish, Isaac Allerton, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, John Alden and Thomas Prence.⁠[4]

The group set up trading posts on Cape Cod, the Kennebec River and the Connecticut River and faced competition from rival colonists; repaying the debt took years. The colonists eventually repaid 1,800 pounds, while the total invested may have reached 7,000 pounds.⁠[1][11]

The six men who laid out the land allotments of 1627 were William Bradford, Edward Winslow, John Howland, Francis Cooke, Joshua Pratt and Edward Bangs. At a court held on May 22, 1627, the company’s cows and goats were divided equally among its members; the eleventh lot, made up of thirteen people including himself, his wife Alice, his son William and Mercy Bradford, received a heifer and two she-goats.⁠[4]

He was watchful of anyone who threatened the unity of his congregation or Plymouth’s civil authority and could take harsh action; in 1628 he deported Thomas Morton of the Mount Wollaston colony.⁠[1]

In 1628 Isaack de Rasieres, a Dutch official of New Netherland, described in a letter to Samuel Blommaert the layout of Plymouth, the governor’s house, and the governor with a council elected each year.⁠[4][12]

The Second Peirce Patent, issued by the Council for New England in 1621, was provisional; the Warwick/Bradford Patent, issued in 1629, was signed by the Earl of Warwick and addressed to William Bradford. Under the successive patents of 1621 and 1629 a governor and Assistants were elected annually and presided over the General Court.⁠[13][10]

The history in William Bradford’s own hand, known as Of Plymouth Plantation from the heading on its first page, was written between 1630 and 1647 and follows the congregation from its settlement in Holland in 1608 through the Mayflower voyage of 1620 to 1647; it ends with a list of the Mayflower passengers that he wrote in 1650.⁠[14]

It is a retrospective account in two books, the second never finished; he did not try to publish it but wanted later generations to preserve and read it. The first pages of the manuscript hold his notes from studying Hebrew; he described himself as “growne aged” and remained devoted to learning in his last years.⁠[7]

He also wrote poetry and several dialogues describing Puritan virtues and the sacrifices of the Plymouth founders.⁠[8]

He had no university education but owned one of the largest libraries among first-generation New Englanders and knew several languages, including Hebrew.⁠[3]

By the 1630s residents were leaving the town of Plymouth as land was granted farther away; the towns of Duxbury, Marshfield, Taunton, Sandwich and Barnstable were founded in the 1620s and 1630s. William Bradford wanted to keep the community together but could not halt the trend.⁠[1][12]

He wrote in his manuscript that the church seriously considered moving as a body to another place and that the greater part consented, with conditions, to move to a place called Nawsett; he likened the church left at Plymouth to an “anciente mother, growne olde, and forsaken of her children.”⁠[15]

As governor he managed the colony’s finances, served as a judge and negotiated with the Dutch in New York and with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.⁠[5]

In 1643 Plymouth Colony entered into Articles of Confederation with Massachusetts Bay, New Haven and ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, forming the United Colonies. He served as a Plymouth commissioner to the United Colonies in 1647–1649, 1652 and 1656.⁠[10][3]

A letter from him to John WinthropJohn WinthropJohn Winthrop (1588–1649) was an English Puritan lawyer and the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who led a fleet across the Atlantic in 1630, founded Boston and was chosen governor 12 times between 1631 and 1648. His sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” likened the colony to “a city upon a hill.”Open the full entry, governor of Massachusetts Bay, dated to 1644 by internal evidence, asks about the Narragansett and the Mohawk and reports that Mr. Atwood and Mr. Jeney had died.⁠[4]

In 1645 a dispute over 400 pounds between the Undertakers and the London merchant John Beauchamp was settled through transfers of land.⁠[4]

What distressed him most in his later years was the breaking up of the colony; he mourned the death of William Brewster and the departure of Edward Winslow.⁠[5]

William Bradford died at Plymouth on May 9, 1657. His nuncupative will, made that day and proved on June 3, 1657, named his wife Alice executrix and reserved his stock in the Kennebec trade for her support; his sons John and William had already received their land, and Joseph was to be made roughly equal to his brothers. Thomas Prence, Thomas Willett and Thomas Southworth were named supervisors.⁠[3]

The inventory taken on May 22, 1657, lists his house, orchard and small parcels near Plymouth, valued at 45 pounds, and unvalued parcels at Eastham, Bridgewater and elsewhere; his library comprised two Bibles, thirty books or sets, mostly theological, and a parcel of fifty-three small books. His will mentions books written in his own hand.⁠[3]

He was buried on Burial Hill in Plymouth, where a monument to him was placed in 1825.⁠[2]

From 1657 to about 1775 the manuscript stayed in the Bradford family, which let historians and clergymen use it; its last known location was the library of the Old South Church in Boston, from which British soldiers presumably removed it during the American Revolution. In 1855 it was rediscovered in England, in the library of the Bishop of London.⁠[7]

Formal proposals for its return failed until 1897, when Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts took the initiative with the support of the Pilgrim Society, the American Antiquarian Society and the New England Society of New York.⁠[14]

On May 26, 1897, the two houses of the Massachusetts General Court met in joint convention; a decree of the Consistorial and Episcopal Court of London authorizing the return was read, and Thomas F. Bayard, the former United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry ambassador to Great Britain, formally presented the manuscript to the governor.⁠[7]

In 1898 Governor Roger Wolcott placed the manuscript in the custody of the State Librarian, Caleb B. Tillinghast, and it has remained at the State Library of Massachusetts ever since; a facsimile of the whole volume was published in 1897. Between 2012 and 2014 the library secured funding for conservation and digitization, work carried out by the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry.⁠[7]

The volume is bound in seventeenth-century vellum and measures 11½ by 7¾ inches, with cream-colored handmade laid paper and dark brown iron-gall ink; the State Library of Massachusetts gives its length as about 580 pages, while Pilgrim Hall Museum’s description gives 270 pages, numbered, sometimes inaccurately, by Bradford himself.⁠[7][14]

John, his son by Dorothy May, married Martha Bourne by 1650. With Alice he had three children: William, born at Plymouth on June 17, 1624; Mercy, born by 1627, who married Benjamin Vermayes at Plymouth on December 21, 1648; and Joseph, born about 1630, who married Jael Hobart, daughter of the Rev. Peter Hobart, at Hingham on May 25, 1664.⁠[3]

Alice cared for the son he had left behind in Leiden.⁠[5]

Alice died at Plymouth on March 26, 1670; the profile of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants gives March 26 or 27. In her will of December 29, 1669, she asked to be buried near her husband.⁠[3][2]

Pilgrim Hall Museum holds several objects associated with him: a Geneva Bible printed in London by Christopher Barker in 1592; a great chair made in New England between 1630 and 1655, probably one of the “2 great wooden chaires” in his inventory; and a silver wine cup made in London in 1634, seven inches tall and marked “W. B.” near the lip, which the Pilgrim Society and the SmithsonianSmithsonian InstitutionThe Smithsonian Institution is a museum, education and research institution created by the U.S. Congress in 1846 with the bequest of the English scientist James Smithson. Based in Washington, D.C., it runs museums such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the National Zoo.Open the full entry’s Museum of American History hold in alternating three-year periods.⁠[4]

The chair later passed to the Hedge family, who gave it to the museum in 1953; at the Tercentenary Pageant in Plymouth in 1921 Warren G. HardingWarren G. HardingWarren G. Harding (1865–1923) was an American newspaper publisher and politician who served as lieutenant governor of Ohio and as a U.S. senator before becoming the 29th president of the United States in March 1921; he died in office in August 1923.Open the full entry, then president of the United States, sat in it.⁠[2]

A statue of William Bradford stands at 62 Water Street in Plymouth, a short distance from Plymouth Rock.⁠[16]

The Plymouth Colony Records for 1639 call him “our right trusty and well beloved.”⁠[1]

Pilgrim Hall Museum’s description holds that the colony’s survival was largely due to his patience, wisdom and courage and that his manuscript is the single most important source on the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony.⁠[14]

Britannica’s article holds that he is remembered mainly for nurturing institutions of self-government such as the franchise and the town meeting among fellow believers, which helped set patterns for later self-government; he called himself a Congregationalist but discouraged sectarian labels and welcomed all separatist groups to New England.⁠[8]

The Commonwealth Museum’s exhibit text calls him the most influential governor of Plymouth Colony, respected for his wisdom and moderation and capable of toughness when the colony was threatened.⁠[6]

Pilgrim Hall Museum: Official website: https://www.pilgrimhall.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

General Society of Mayflower Descendants: Official website: https://themayflowersociety.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]