CHAPTER 11
God’s Conventicle, Bradford’s Lamentation
1. The proposal to allow “full and free tolerance of religion to all men that would preserve civil peace,” backed by most of Plymouth’s deputies in 1645, horrified Bradford and the other leaders. They refused to allow it to come to a vote, so certain were they that it “would eat out the power of Godliness.” Edward Winslow to John Winthrop, Nov. 24, 1645, in Winthrop Papers, V (Boston, 1947), 56.
2. Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn., 1984), 53–54; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963), 53.
3. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (Samuel E. Morison, ed., New York, 1952), 33 [hereafter: Bradford, Plymouth; other editions will be specifically cited].
4. Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World (New York, 2010), 103, 125ff. [hereafter: Bunker, Pilgrims]; Robert C. Anderson, The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony, 1620–1633 (Boston, 2004), 67–68; Henry M. Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Baltimore, Md., 1978), 40, 154–57, 215ff., 259ff., 320–29, 395; B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford, England, 1971), 91–92; M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939), 313–14 and chap. 15 generally.
5. For book collection, James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives (New York, 2000), 195; Bunker, Pilgrims, 129, 170–77, 106–10; 165–66; Bradford, Plymouth, 326, 9–10; Dexter, England and Holland, 377ff., 239; Timothy George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, Ga., 1982), iii; White, Separatist Tradition, vi; Bradford Smith, Bradford of Plymouth (Philadelphia, 1951), 36–38, 55, 57. On Bradford’s family background, his peripatetic childhood, and his defiance of his family’s expectations, see Bunker, Pilgrims, 115–17.
6. Bradford, Plymouth, 8, 11, 14; Bunker, Pilgrims, 113, 187, 191. For Cushman’s description of the economic distress that contributed to the Pilgrims’ determination to leave England (“each man is fain to pluck his means, as it were out of his neighbour’s throat … There is such pressing and oppressing in town and country … so as a man can hardly any where set up a trade, but he shall pull down two of his neighbors”), see ibid., 269.
7. George D. Langdon, Jr., Pilgrim Colony … 1620–1691 (New Haven, Conn., 1966), 6; Bradford, Plymouth, 20n, 19n. Bradford in his “First Dialogue” (Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers … 1602 to 1625 [Boston, 1841], 455–56) estimated the Leiden congregation at “not much fewer” than three hundred; Dexter, England and Holland, 648, estimates the number at 473. On the geographical distribution, ibid., 650. On the “purging,” Bradford, Plymouth, 18. For a comprehensive account of the Pilgrims in Leiden—the city, the circumstances, and the fortunes of the Pilgrims there—see Jeremy Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, Mass., 2009).
8. Ibid., 17n, 25; Johanna W. Tammel, comp., Pilgrims and Other People from the British Isles in Leiden, 1576–1640 (Isle of Man, 1989), 57, 6; Dexter, England and Holland, 601–41, 565–67.
9. Bradford, Plymouth, 28, 30–31, 25–26; Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked… (London, 1646, reprint ed., Providence, R.I., 1916), 91; David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York, 1974), xiii.
10. Bradford, Plymouth, 27, 36, 368; Ruth A. McIntyre, Debts Hopeful and Desperate (Plymouth, Mass., 1963), 20, 32–33, 45.
11. Winslow, Hypocrisie, 90, 91; Smith, Bradford, 113–14; Dexter, England and Holland, 587–88; Bradford, Plymouth, 48.
12. William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (Worthington C. Ford et al., eds., Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1912), I, 142n, 145 [hereafter: MHS, ed., Bradford, History]; W. Sears Nickerson, Land Ho!—1620 (1931; rev. ed., East Lansing, Mich., 1997), 16; Bradford, Plymouth, 53.
13. Nickerson, Land Ho!, 17, 19–28; Eugene A. Stratton, Plymouth Colony (Salt Lake City, 1986), 21, 31n, 323–24; Smith, Bradford, 121–22; Bradford, Plymouth, 55. Martin called the Pilgrims “froward and waspish, discontented people.” McIntyre, Debts, 19. Bunker, Pilgrims, 55, identifies twenty-four households aboard the Mayflower, of whom at least fifteen were led by men who had lived in Leiden.
14. George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers (New York, 1945), 454; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 328; Bradford, Plymouth, 58.
15. Willison, Saints, 440, 441; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 245, 308–9, 283–85; Henry M. Dexter, ed., Mourt’s Relation or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth [London, 1622] (Boston, 1865), 42–43; Annie L. Jester and Martha W. Hiden, comps., Adventurers of Purse and Person (3rd ed., revised by Virginia M. Meyer and John F. Dorman, Richmond, Va., 1987), 374–75; Charles E. Banks, The English Ancestry and Homes of the Pilgrim Fathers (New York, 1929), 61–63.
16. MHS, ed., Bradford, History, I, 394n; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 357–59, 373; Bradford, Plymouth, 327–28 and chap. 33 generally; Anderson, Pilgrim Migration, 10–15; Cynthia J. Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford, England, 2008), passim. On Allerton’s jumbling of private and community affairs, McIntyre, Debts, 52–58.
17. Banks, English Ancestry, 44; Bradford, Plymouth, 42n, 367; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 259, quoting William Hubbard’s General History of New England…[1682] (Cambridge, Mass., 1815).
18. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Books I and II [London, 1702] (Kenneth B. Murdock, ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 207; Bradford, Plymouth, 58–59, 61–63, 75, 76; Nickerson, Land Ho!, 11; Mourt’s Relation, 7–9.
19. Ibid., 5, 27, 46, 39; Bradford, Plymouth, 68, 70–71; Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, 57.
20. Thomas Prince, A Chronological History of New-England in the Form of Annals [1736–1755] ([Boston], 1826), xviii; Mourt’s Relation, 70, 72–73, 66, 137–41; Bradford, Plymouth, 77–78; Robert C. Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620–1633 (Boston, 1995), III, 1522. [hereafter Anderson, Immigrants]. For a dismissal of the idea that Dorothy Bradford may have committed suicide “after gazing for six weeks at the barren sand dunes of Cape Cod” (Morison, in Bradford, Plymouth, xxiv), see Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 324–25. Cf. Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, 305.
21. Charles F. Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (rev. ed., 1892), 55–57, 65–66, 73, 76–79; Phinehas Pratt, “A Declaration of the Affairs of the English People That First Inhabited New England” [1662], Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., IV (1858), 479–87.
22. Young, Chronicles, 331–32, 339; Adams, Three Episodes, 92–93, 97, 99; Bunker, Pilgrims, 328–30.
23. Ibid., chaps. 7, 9, 139–40; Bradford, Plymouth, 138.
24. Ibid., 127–30, 132; Willison, Saints, 446–50. On the “great cheer” at Bradford’s wedding feast, see Emmanuel Altham’s report, in Sydney V. James, Jr., ed., Three Visitors to Early Plymouth (Plymouth, Mass., 1963), 29–30.
25. Bradford, Plymouth, 133, 142–44, 148ff, 165, 167, 168, 373–74. Bradford indicates that Oldham brought with him his wife “and family” (157). Details on Oldham’s and Lyford’s backgrounds and careers are in Anderson, Immigrants, II, 1350–53 and 1214–17.
26. John Smith, in his description of the colony, probably based on information Winslow brought back to England late in 1623, summarized here, estimated the value of Plymouth’s goods at hand at £500 and noted that the community still lived “as one family or household, yet every man followeth his trade and profession both by sea and land.” John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles… (London, 1624), in Smith, Works, II, 472. Altham, writing from Plymouth in September 1623, estimated only twenty houses but otherwise agreed with Smith’s description (Three Visitors, 24). McIntyre, Debts, 49, 50; Langdon, Pilgrim Colony, 36; Bradford,
Plymouth, 193n, 140–41, 180. For an extended discussion of the housing in Plymouth—the initial pit or cave houses, the predominant, small, simple “earthfast” dwellings, impermanent and fragile, typical of rural England, see Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, chaps. 5, 4.
27. Young, Chronicles, 373–74.
28. Adams, Three Episodes, 162, 168, 163, 169, 171, 177, 182; Bradford, Plymouth, 205–6; Governor Bradford’s Letter Book (Boston, 1906), 41.
29. Adams, Three Episodes, chap. 8; Bradford, Plymouth, 208–9; Bradford, Letter Book, 42–43; Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, or New Canaan… (Amsterdam, 1637), reprinted in Publications of the Prince Society, XIV (Boston, 1883), 284, 286–87. Michael Zuckerman, in “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” NEQ, 50 (1977), 255–77, argues that Morton and his Merrymount crew have been misinterpreted as a result of the Pilgrims’ animus against them. Morton, Zuckerman claims, a nature lover, simply delighted in the “sensual splendor” of the New England landscape, believed that the Indians were innocents, “full of humanity,” and sought to share food, drink, and sex with them. That frightened the Pilgrims, who “could not countenance carnal pleasure for its own sake,” evoking their fear that intimate association with the natives “would weaken the discipline they maintained so tenuously over their own impulses.” For another sympathetic view of Morton, based on his intercultural familiarity with the Indians, see Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations, 96–97.
30. Bradford, Letter Book, 17, 18, 19, 1; Bradford, Plymouth, 374.
31. McIntyre, Debts, 31–32, 47, 48; Bradford, Letter Book, 4, 9, 6, 21–22, 45, 50; Bradford, Plymouth, 382; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 47, 40, App. F.
32. Bradford, Letter Book, 50, 45; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 38, 246, 324; Young, Chronicles, 481, 483n, 73n.
33. Willison, Saints, 454.
34. Bradford, Plymouth, 210–11; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 39–40; Willison, Saints, 346; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 353, 42.
35. Bradford, Plymouth, 257; Winthrop, Journal, 82, 50; Willison, Saints, 349; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 40–41.
36. Willison, Saints, 355; Bradford, Plymouth, 293, 313; MHS, ed., Bradford, History, II, 302.
37. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England…Court Orders, vol. I, 1633–1640 (Boston, 1855), 177, 97; Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, chaps. 3, 4; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 245; Bradford, Plymouth, 316, 320–21.
38. Stratton, Plymouth Colony, App. G; McIntyre, Debts, 47; John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970), 9, 11n; Dorothy Wentworth, Settlement and Growth of Duxbury, 1628–1870 (Duxbury, Mass., 1973), 4; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 58ff.
39. Bunker, Pilgrims, 301; Bradford, Plymouth, 253, 254, 333–34.
40. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), II, 1168; John Demos, “Notes on Life in Plymouth Colony,” WMQ, 22 (1965), 269–71; Demos, Little Commonwealth, 192, 193, tables I, II, III.
41. Bradford, Plymouth, 33n; Mark L. Sargent, “William Bradford’s ‘Dialogue’ with History,” NEQ, 65 (1992), 396–97.
42. William Bradford, “A Dialogue or 3d Conference,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, [XI] (1869–70), 465–82; Smith, Bradford, 300–4.
43. Bradford, Plymouth, xxviii; Isidore S. Meyer, “The Hebrew Preface to Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Plantation,” Publications of the Jewish Historical Society, 38 (1948–49), 296–303. For a full account of Bradford’s Hebrew studies, see Meyer, The Hebrew Exercises of Governor William Bradford (Plymouth, Mass., 1973).
44. Young, Chronicles, 414–58, quotations at 414; Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXII (1920), 115–41. For the complicated provenance and bibliography of the Dialogue, see Sargent, “Bradford’s Dialogue,” 391n.
45. Ibid., 390; Young, Chronicles, 457, 415.
46. Ibid., 415–17, 421, 422, 427–32, 436–40, 457; Bradford, Plymouth, 171–72 (cf. Winslow, Hypocrisie, 93–98); David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 48–61.
47. Bradford, “A Dialogue or 3d Conference,” 407–64, quotations at 420, 421, 423, 424, 428, 452, 464.
CHAPTER 12
The New-English Sionists: Fault Lines, Diversity, and Persecution
1. For a summary of statistical estimates of English emigration in the seventeenth century, see Nicholas Canny, “English Migration into and Across the Atlantic During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move … 1500–1800 (Oxford, England, 1994), 54–56, 64. The first figure of the size of the migration to New England was that of the contemporary, Edward Johnson, in his Wonder-working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England [London, 1653] (J. Franklin Jameson, ed., New York, 1910), 58. His estimate of 21,200 “or thereabout” arrivals in New England 1628–43 in 298 ships (corrected to 198 ships, 61) is undoubtedly too high. Richard Archer, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” WMQ, 47 (1990), 478, working with the standard genealogical listings, finds records for 9,314 migrants before 1650 and 4,981 who were either migrants to New England or were born there, hence a maximum of 14,295 to 1650. Robert C. Anderson, “A Note on the Changing Pace of the Great Migration,” NEQ, 59 (1986), 407, based on his own exhaustive genealogical study, in progress (eleven volumes to date: The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony 1620–1633 [Boston, 2004]; The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620–1633 [3 vols., Boston, 1995]; The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England 1634–1635 [7 vols., Boston, 1995–2011, vols. 1 and 2 in collaboration with George F. Sanborn, Jr., and Melinda L. Sanborn]) estimates 2,500 before 1634 and “somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000” in 1634–40. Virginia D. Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, England, 1991), 15, estimates “13,000 men, women, and children.”
2. For a summary of the question and a forceful argument in favor of primary religious motivation, see Virginia D. Anderson, “Migrants and Motives: Religion and the Settlement of New England, 1630–1640,” NEQ, 58 (1985), 339–83 (followed by discussion with David G. Allen, ibid., 59 [1986], 408–24), and her New England’s Generation, 37–46. For a contrary view, see David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, England, 1987), esp. chap. 3.
3. Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 30. V. Anderson, New England’s Generation, 39.
4. R. Anderson, Great Migration Begins, II, 1105; James Savage, Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England…[Boston, 1860–62] (Baltimore, Md., 1965), II, 157; Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay (Lawrence S. Mayo, ed., 3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1936), I, 409; Alexander Young, Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay… (Boston, 1846), 317, 106; Michael J. Canavan, “Isaac Johnson, Esquire, the Founder of Boston,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXVII (Transactions, 1927–1930), 272–85; Charles E. Banks, The Planters of the Commonwealth (1930; Baltimore, Md., 1979), 109–10; Winthrop, Journal, 323.
5. Robert S. Moody, comp., The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1815, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 80–81 [1972–74]), I, 3–8; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution … 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 135–40, 150.
6. Banks, Planters, 161; J. H. Adamson and H. F. Folland, Sir Harry Vane… (Boston, 1973), chaps. 4, 5; James K. Hosmer, The Life of Young Sir Harry Vane… (Boston, 1889), pt. 1.
7. Winthrop, Journal, 120; Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop, America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, England, 2003), 255–59; Hutchinson, History, I, App. II.
8. Ibid., App. III.
9. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins o
f the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 136; Karen O. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, England, 1993), 265–66, chap. 6. For Winthrop’s bitter rebuke to Lord Saye and Sele and others for their efforts to divert settlers from Massachusetts to Providence Island, and for Saye and Sele’s equally bitter, rambling reply denying that God had intended only Massachusetts as a refuge for His people, see Winthrop, Journal, 323–25; Winthrop Papers, 1498–1654 (Boston, 1929), IV, 263–67.
10. The appeal to people of high status continued, however fruitlessly. Thus John Masters, a settler in Watertown, Massachusetts, wrote the pious and distressed Lady Joan Barrington (see p. 396), who was deeply devoted to the Puritan cause, and her son Thomas, of the excellence of New England’s bounty, urging them “or any of yours” to come to the colony; it was a land, he said, “fitt to receive lords and ladies,” though more houses were needed. The land was there, the water, the “good creatures to hunt and to hawke, and for fowling and fishing, and more also our natures to refresh in.” And he pointed out that Sir Richard Saltonstall’s family was there, investing in the development of the land. But if the Barringtons themselves were tempted, they gave no sign of it. Similarly uninterested in migrating was Lady Joan’s youngest son, John, who was casting about for suitable employment. A possible involvement in New England seems to have been proposed to him, but that, he wrote his mother, was something “I do utterly dislike.” Arthur Searle, ed., Barrington Family Letters, 1628–1632 (London, 1983), 183, 122, 168. There is a rather wistful mention by Cotton Mather that Sir William Constable, the future regicide, Parliamentary leader, and successful military commander, and Sir Matthew Boynton would have accompanied Ezekiel Rogers from Yorkshire to New England “if some singular Providences had not hindred them.” Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana…[London, 1702] (facsimile ed., New York, 1972), III, 102. Thomas Hutchinson had heard that various “persons of figure and distinction” had been expected to come over, among them Pym, Hampden, Sir Arthur Haslerigg, Oliver Cromwell “&c,” some of whom had been prevented “by express order of the King.” History, I, 38–39.
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