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There was no hope of ever recruiting the likes of Robinson for the local ministry, but no one even approximate in quality appeared on the scene. The first appointment after the Lyford debacle was equally disastrous. In 1628 Allerton, without consultation, brought over at some expense as minister a Mr. Rogers, who proved to be, Bradford wrote, simply “crazed in his brain.” Within a year he was sent back to England, where he was said to have become “quite distracted.” He was followed by—in fact overlapped with—a Rev. Ralph Smith, whom the Pilgrims picked up at a forlorn encampment on nearby Nantasket, where he and his family had landed after having been forced out of the recently settled Puritan village of Salem because of Smith’s separatist views. Housed in a flimsy shelter “that would neither keep him nor his goods dry,” Smith begged the Pilgrims to rescue his family, servants, and supplies from the straggling fishing post. As a graduate of that Puritan center, Christ’s College, Cambridge, and an experienced preacher, he had credentials for the vacant ministry. Soon he was “kindly entertained and housed” by the Pilgrims and appointed, at least temporarily, their “teacher.” But it quickly became clear that he was no match, intellectually, pedagogically, or as a community leader, for such learned and experienced laymen as Brewster and “unable to discharge the trust committed to him with any competent satisfaction.” All agreed that the responsibility was “too heavy a burden” for him, and he resigned his position, to drift about in various local ministries, finally to return to Salem with his second wife, who was Masterson’s widow.34
One of Smith’s problems in Plymouth must have been the extraordinary competition that suddenly appeared in the person of Roger Williams, who even then, still in his twenties, was a charismatic preacher and a subtle, learned, and combative intellectual. Harassed by the Puritan authorities in the Bay Colony for his separatist ideas and his belief in the separation of church and state, he assumed that the Pilgrims’ conventicle would be a more congenial situation for him. Smith, with fitting modesty, shared his pulpit with him, but in the end Williams was no more acceptable to the Pilgrims than he had been to the Bay Colony’s Puritans, who were still, in theory, members of the English church. That he was “godly and zealous, having many precious parts,” no one in Plymouth doubted, and in later years Bradford would thank God for Williams’s teaching even though at times he had been sharply critical of the Pilgrims’ practices. For a while Williams worked easily with the dialogic formula of the Pilgrims’ public worship, proposing the questions for discussion and “prohecying” (explicating) the issues with great effect. But he soon “began to fall into some strange opinions, and from opinion to practice, which caused some controversy between the church and him.” Whether it was his insistence on the separation of church and state that caused the rift, or his publicized argument that the English had no right to seize the Indians’ land, or his belief in absolute religious toleration—none of which the Pilgrims could accept—is not known. All these ideas, formulated with great acuity, probably played a role. Even so, some felt that compromises might be made to retain his services, until Brewster, fearful that Williams’s views would splinter the fragile consensus that bound the community and that his ideas were heading toward the radical Anabaptism that twenty-five years earlier had split the church in Amsterdam, advised against his remaining.35
They never found a fully satisfactory “teacher” to assume the role they believed had been destined for Robinson. A Mr. Glover, engaged by Winslow in 1635, died on the eve of his departure from England. The learned, influential, and ambitious Rev. John Norton, who like Brewster had studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, lasted only four months before he left for more important posts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, eventually the powerful ministry of Boston’s first church. Spurned also by the patriarchal Richard Mather, they had to settle for the “able and godly” John Rayner, a young Yorkshireman who had studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Adequate but uninspired, he had all the secondary virtues: “a meek and humble spirit, sound in the truth and every way unreproveable in his life.” He would serve as teacher for eighteen years, three of them together with the learned Charles Chauncy. That imperious and “very vehement” scholar from Hertfordshire, once a fellow and Greek lecturer in Trinity College, Cambridge, came to Plymouth as pastor in 1638; but he was no more likely than Norton to remain there. (He eventually became president of Harvard College.) If Chauncy’s absolute insistence on baptism by full immersion had not brought him into conflict with the Pilgrims (“in this cold country not so convenient,” Bradford wrote), something else would have driven him away.36
FOR THE MODEST Plymouth community, once the only beacon of Christian light in the northern coastal zone, was becoming deeply provincial, overwhelmed in the early 1630s by the vastly more populous, more sophisticated, and more prosperous Massachusetts Bay Colony of Puritans. Plymouth’s confidence in the survival of its original mission, its faith in itself, seemed to be leaching away. A sensational murder trial of 1630 came to symbolize the growth of the profane influences creeping in among the saints, as well as the spiritual ordinariness of the majority of the people who had been drawn to the separatists’ utopia.
The Billingtons, the troublesome family of the first Mayflower voyage, had become uncontrollable. Within a year of their arrival, the elder Billington’s defiance of Standish’s orders had led to his having to crave pardon to escape the punishment of being tied up neck and heels together. Soon thereafter he had joined Lyford’s agitations, and in 1625 he had been reported to be railing against Cushman and threatening to have him arrested. It came as no surprise, therefore, that this “knave, and so will live and die,” turned violent over a petty quarrel. His murder of John Newcomen led to his trial, the first of its kind, his conviction, and his execution by hanging.
Billington’s crime was notorious but not unique; three others were hanged for robbing and murdering an Indian, and lesser crimes and abrasive social conflicts in this pious community were shockingly common. The first volume of the Plymouth court records covering the years 1633–40 documents cases of blasphemy, drunkenness, extortion, fornication, receiving stolen goods, and sedition. Servants were running away; there were charges of slander and accusations of witchcraft; and there was evidence of adultery and illegitimacy. The climax came in a bizarre case of bestiality “with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey,” which followed closely on cases of attempted sodomy. The culprit, a teenaged servant boy, upon his confession and conviction by jury, was executed, and the animals concerned (they had trouble identifying which particular sheep had been involved) were ritually slaughtered “before his face,” as required by Leviticus 20:15.
Bradford was utterly baffled, not only by the “foul nature” of such evil but also by where, and from whom, such practices could even have been learned. Perhaps, he said, the Devil had a greater animus against communities that were most successful in bridling and subduing man’s corrupt nature. Perhaps, as with water that is dammed up, when there is a break, the flow is more violent, noisy, and disturbing. Perhaps it was not a matter of an excess of evil at all, but only the result of greater scrutiny, visibility, and punishment of evil. But these were large abstractions. There was a more specific issue involved: the nature of the specific people who had settled in the colony.
How could it have happened, he asked himself, that “so many wicked persons and profane people should so quickly come over into this land and mix themselves amongst them … seeing it was religious men that began the work and they came for religion’s sake”? The answers, he believed, were, first, that the planters, the initial builders of the colony, had been desperate for help and so had brought over “many untoward servants” who, when their contracts expired, spawned families of their own that had no commitment to the church or even to decent behavior. Then, too, ambitious merchants, seeking to profit by the Pilgrims’ market and the freightages of emigrants, sent over anyone who could pay the fare, among them “many unworthy
persons who, being come over, crept into one place or other.” Finally, the Pilgrims’ material success, such as it was, their remoteness from metropolitan corruptions, and the stability of their community attracted some who were such burdens or embarrassments to people at home that they were happily disposed of to the colony; once here they followed “their dissolute courses.” It was for these reasons, Bradford concluded, that the majority of his saintly community was becoming the “worser” part.37
But there was an even deeper problem, affecting more directly the core community of saints, and it emerged with what to some was tragic inevitability. The cohesiveness, the physical integrity, of the church community had been reinforced by the communal ownership of land and trade, except for a single acre for each individual. The plan had been that for seven years all would pool their efforts and productive goods to help pay off the debts to the sponsoring merchants. When the initial joint stock was dissolved in 1626, that arrangement ended. The colony’s cattle were divided among the permanent residents (156 had claims), and land was distributed, twenty acres for each adult male who was not a servant. The resulting privately owned farms were needed to support the growing families and provide for approved newcomers. But every effort was made to keep the community together. The grants were not to be isolated in the interior but to front on the bay, spreading out equally on each side of the central village. And those who farmed the more distant plots were to reside, as far as possible, in Plymouth, or at least worship there. But such formal constraints were difficult to maintain. The land to the north and east was especially attractive, and by 1628 Miles Standish, who had claims to one hundred acres, had opened a farm eight and a half miles from Plymouth farther along the bay, which he worked in the summer. By 1632 he was joined by Alden, Prence, and the younger Brewster, whose claims reached farther north, ending at the end of Plymouth Bay in what became Duxbury. They promised to return to Plymouth in the winter, “that they may better repair to the worship of God.” But the propulsive force was inexorable, especially since the initial recipients of land were entitled to portions of subsequent divisions when the colony expanded. Duxbury proved to be the first of a ring of satellite villages that within a decade spread out around the bay and inland: Marshfield and Scituate followed Duxbury to the north, then Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth to the south, and then Taunton, twenty-two miles inland.38
The first outliers, core figures among the saints, deeply committed to the conventicle’s welfare, were responding to the need to provide for their growing families, but others had different motivations. The influx of the Puritans to the Boston Bay area immediately to the north of Plymouth created a huge new market for agricultural goods. An increasing number of Plymouth’s settlers responded by maximizing their acreage and thus their yields, taking up new land grants whenever they could get them. So, Bradford explained,
as their stocks increased and the increase vendible, there was no longer any holding them together, but they must of necessity go to their great lots.… And no man now thought he could live except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep them, all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over [Plymouth] Bay quickly, and the town in which they lived compactly till now was left very thin and in a short time almost desolate.
Their harvests improved year after year, but these were not the harvests of souls that Bradford sought. However well intentioned the outliers were, they were serving Mammon, Bradford felt, and not God, destroying the integrity, the very heart, of the asylum he—and they—had fought so hard to create. Worst of all, the church itself was splintering—“those who had lived so long together in Christian and comfortable fellowship must now part and suffer many divisions.” Initially, this was not the work of evil intentions. It was the elder Brewster himself who presided over the forming of the Duxbury parish, the first of the separate congregations within Plymouth’s jurisdiction.
Bradford tried everything he could think of to stem the tide. Special land grants were given to those who promised to live in Plymouth, wherever their fields might lie, and be helpful to the church and community. “But alas,” he reported, “this remedy proved worse than the disease; for within a few years those that had thus got footing there rent themselves away.” Some simply marched off in defiance of their pledges; others so noisily insisted on the need for their permanent removal that the town faced the choice of letting them go or putting up with endless contention. The future for Bradford was bleak: at the least, the ruin of the church; ultimately, God’s displeasure.
And then came the wrenching debate of the early 1640s on whether to move the church itself, hence the central town, to a place called Nauset (later Eastham), a harbor town on the Atlantic side of Cape Cod fifty miles from Plymouth. Surrounded by freshwater ponds, the site was known to have some of the richest soil on the cape. So fierce was the determination of some to make the move that the resisters, after arguing that people should be satisfied with what they had instead of seeking to enrich themselves elsewhere, finally gave in. But when a closer survey of Nauset proved that it would be too small an area to accommodate the whole of Plymouth, the vote was rescinded, and only the most insistent broke away to settle there. But their departure was a significant loss. So it was, Bradford wrote, that
this poor church [was] left, like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children, though not in their affections yet in regard of their bodily presence and personal helpfulness; her ancient members being most of them worn away by death, and these of later time being like children translated into other families, and she like a widow left only to trust in God. Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor.39
But what for Bradford was ruin was for others a rising good fortune. By the late 1630s recruitment from the old Leiden congregation had come to an end, and direct seaborne immigration from other sources fell away. Yet the resident population, now in control of its environment, was growing rapidly by natural increase, supplemented by a small but continuous migration south from the Bay Colony. The total of approximately three hundred souls in 1630 had become at least a thousand by 1640, perhaps fifteen hundred by 1650, and about two thousand in 1660. And as the population grew, it showed signs of a remarkable demographic profile, utterly different from that of the Chesapeake south, different too from that of England, that would characterize New England’s people throughout the seventeenth century. Settling families whose marriage partners lived to age fifty had seven or eight children who lived to adulthood. Infant and child mortality was not more than 25 percent, and the life expectancy of men who reached the age of twenty-one was approximately seventy. In a sample of 645 individuals, 30 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women lived into their seventies, 22 percent of them into their eighties. Remarkable figures whose full implications would become clear only in later years, they indicate the Pilgrims’ success in controlling the environment and the general healthiness of the environment itself.40
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But none of this was success for Bradford. For him, as he entered his sixties in 1650—still devoted to the ideals that had led him through the persecutions of Laudian England, the upheavals of Leiden, and the turmoils of resettlement in barren New England—it was all dross and loss. Looking back over the account of the colony’s history he had compiled over the years, he came upon the glowing words that the Pilgrims had written at the outset of their great adventure, that they were “knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord … straitly tied to all care of each other’s good and of the whole, by every one and so mutually.” It was precisely that solidarity and mutual commitment in behalf of the highest Christian ideals that had been lost, Bradford believed, and it was that that he most deeply lamented. Turning to the blank page opposite those confident words of 1617, he wrote his most heartfelt, elegiac lamentation.
O sacred bond, whilst inviolably preserved! How sweet and precious were the fruits that flowed from the same! But
when this fidelity decayed, then their ruin approached. O that these ancient members had not died or been dissipated … or else that this holy care and constant faithfulness had still lived and remained with those that survived and were at times afterwards added unto them. But (alas) that subtle serpent hath slyly wound in himself under fair pretences of necessity and the like, to untwist these sacred bonds and ties, and as it were insensibly by degrees to dissolve, or in a great measure to weaken, the same. I have been happy, in my first times, to see, and with much comfort to enjoy, the blessed fruits of this sweet communion, but it is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay and want thereof (in a great measure) and with grief and sorrow of heart to lament and bewail the same. And for others’ warning and admonition (and my own humiliation) do I here note the same.
But his grief and lamentation at the loss of that “sweet communion” had deeper sources than the arrival of profane gentiles, the inexorable spread of settlement, and the forsaking of the ancient church. Something more profound and bewildering was at work. The greater world from which the Pilgrims had fled had been turned upside down, and their identity and the meaning of their strivings had been obscured. Once the Pilgrims had been convinced of their unique historic mission, to be a beacon in the recovery of pristine, primitive Christianity in the age of Episcopal persecution. But now, it seemed, their humble efforts had been overwhelmed by the great success of Cromwell’s tolerationist Puritans in England—indeed, in the very counties from which the Pilgrims had fled—and by the defeat of the oppressive church. What now was the meaning of all their strivings in the greater scheme of things?41
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 44
