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William Bradford (Plymouth governor)
William Bradford (Plymouth governor)
William Bradford Succeeded by Edward Winslow (1633) Edward Winslow (1636) Thomas Prence (1638) Edward Winslow (1644) Thomas Prence (1645) March 19, 1590 Austerfield, Yorkshire, England May 9, 1657 Plymouth, Massachusetts English Dorothy Bradford Alice Carpenter Separatist
Born
Died Nationality Spouse Religion
William Bradford (March 19, 1590 – May 9, 1657) was a leader of the Separatist settlers of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, and was elected thirty times to be the Governor after John Carver died. He was the second signer and primary architect of the Mayflower Compact in Provincetown Harbor. His journal (1620–47), was published as Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford is credited as the first to proclaim what popular American culture now views as the first Thanksgiving.
Biography
Bradford’s statue in Plymouth Rock State Park, Plymouth, Massachusetts
2nd, 5th, 7th, 9th & 11th Governor of Plymouth Colony In office 1621 – 1633 1635 – 1636 1637 – 1638 1639 – 1644 1645 – 1657 Preceded by John Carver (1621) Thomas Prence (1635) Edward Winslow (1637) Thomas Prence (1639) Edward Winslow (1645)
The Manor House, Austerfield, Yorkshire birthplace of William Bradford William Bradford was born on March 19, 1589 near Doncaster, in Austerfield, Yorkshire. At an early age, he was attracted to the "primitive" congregational church, in nearby Scrooby, and became a committed member
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of what was termed a "Separatist" church, since the church-members had wanted to separate from the Church of England. By contrast, the Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England. The Separatists instead felt the Church was beyond redemption due to unbiblical doctrines and teachings. When James I began to persecute Separatists in 1609, Bradford fled to the Netherlands, along with many members of the congregation. These Separatists went first to Amsterdam before settling at Leiden. Bradford married his first wife, Dorothy May (d. December 7, 1620), on December 10, 1613 in Amsterdam. While at Leiden, he supported himself as a fustian weaver.
William Bradford (Plymouth governor)
Bas-relief on Bradford Street in Provincetown depicting the signing of the Mayflower Compact was at anchor in Provincetown Harbor. However, there are no contemporary accounts of the circumstances of her death, only a later mention of drowning by Cotton Mather in Magnalia Christi Americana. [2] Bradford included only brief mention of her passing in his own writing. There is a widely circulated story that she committed suicide because the Mayflower was a moored ship, but this is derived from a work of historical fiction published in the June, 1869 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. This claims that they had decided to leave their young son in the Netherlands, and his wife was so stricken with sadness that she took her own life. Regardless of this fictional treatment, there is no proof of suicide. [3] The first winter in the new colony was a terrible experience. Half the colonists perished, including the colony’s leader, John Carver. Bradford was selected as his replacement on the spring of 1621. From this point, his story is inextricably linked with the history of the Plymouth Colony. William Bradford’s second wife, Alice Carpenter Southworth, came to Plymouth aboard the Anne in July 1623 following the death of her first husband, Edward Southworth.[4] Governor Bradford married Carpenter on August 14, 1623 at Plymouth. Bradford and Carpenter had three children, William, Mercy, and Joseph. Alice also helped to raise John, the son of his first marriage; Alice’s sons from her first marriage, Constant and Thomas, arrived in Plymouth sometime after 1627 and presumably lived with their mother and stepfather.[5] William Bradford died at Plymouth, and was interred at Plymouth Burial Hill. On his
Signing of the Mayflower Compact, a painting by Edward Percy Moran, which hangs at the Pilgrim Hall Museum Shifting alignments of the European powers (due to religious differences, struggles over the monarchies and intrigues within the ruling Habsburg clan) caused the Dutch government to fear war with Catholic Spain, and to become allied with James I of England. Social pressure (and even attacks) on the separatists increased in the Netherlands. Their congregation’s leader, John Robinson, supported the emerging idea of starting a colony. Bradford was in the midst of this venture from the beginning. The separatists wanted to remain Englishmen (although living in the Netherlands), yet wanted to get far enough away from the Church of England and the government to have some chance of living in peace. Arrangements were made, and William with his wife sailed for America in 1620 from Leiden aboard the Mayflower. On December 7, 1620, before the colony was established, Bradford’s wife died. [1] Dorothy Bradford died while the Mayflower
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Grave is etched: "qua patres difficillime adepti sunt nolite turpiter relinquere" “What our forefathers with so much difficulty secured, do not basely relinquish.”
William Bradford (Plymouth governor)
was anchored in Provincetown Harbor, Bradford and other men took a small boat ashore to scout for a place to land and build shelter. When they returned, Bradford learned that his young wife had fallen or jumped from the ship. Perhaps Dorothy Bradford was in despair when land was finally sighted and she did not see the hoped-for green hills of an earthly paradise. Beyond the ship lay only the bleak sand dunes of Cape Cod. That bitter winter, half the settlers were to die of cold, disease, and malnutrition. The following year, Bradford was elected governor of the plantation. "If he had not been a person of more than ordinary piety, wisdom, and courage," the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather later recorded, Bradford would "have sunk" under the difficulties of governing such a shaky settlement. Bradford proved to be an exemplary leader, and he went on to be elected governor of the Colony no fewer than thirty times. As the Plymouth Colony prospered and grew, it also gradually disintegrated as a religious community, despite Bradford’s efforts to hold it together. The ideal of the "city upon a hill," the Pilgrims’ dream of an ideal society founded on religious principles, gradually gave way to the realities of life in the new land. Bradford’s record of this grand experiment ends in disappointment. When more fertile areas for settlement were found and when Boston became a more convenient port to England, Plymouth lost much of its population. "Thus was this poor church left," Bradford wrote in 1644, "like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children...Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor."
Plymouth Burial Hill William Bradford’s life displayed a mixture of the commonplace and the extraordinary that was characteristic of the Puritan experience. Bradford was the son of a prosperous farmer in Yorkshire, England. He received no higher education but instead was taught practical arts of farming. Despite his lack of formal training (or perhaps because of it), Bradford was to become a successful, longstanding Colonial governor in America, dealing out justice and settling disputes. Growing up in England, Bradford took a radical step when he was twelve years old. Inspired by his reading of the Bible and by the sermons of a Puritan minister, Bradford began attending the meetings of a small group of Nonconformists, despite the vehement objections of his family and friends. It was illegal for Nonconformists to worship publicily, so the group met furtively in a private house in the nearby town of Scrooby. In 1606, when the group organized as a separate Congregational church, Bradford joined them. In 1608, under increasing pressure of persecution and fearful that they would be imprisoned, the Scrooby group crossed the North Sea to Holland, the group was aided by Longdon profiteers and merchants, who lent them a ship and a crew as an investment. In September the Nonconformists sailed for America in order to found a community where they would be free to worship and live according to their beliefs. For Bradford the hardships of the long ocean voyage did not end with landing at Plymouth. In December, while the Mayflower
Journal
Bradford kept a handwritten journal detailing the history of the first 30 years of Plymouth Colony. Large parts of this journal were published as Of Plymouth Plantation, and have been republished a number of times. (It is currently in print as ISBN 0-07-554281-1.) Bradford, along with Edward Winslow and others, contributed material to George Morton, who merged everything into a book, published in London in 1622, nicknamed Mourt’s Relation, which was primarily a journal of the colonists’ first years at Plymouth.
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William Bradford (Plymouth governor)
• Jan Masaryk,[23] Czechoslovak diplomat and politician • George B. McClellan,[24] Civil War general, Governor of New Jersey, Democratic opponent of Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 United States presidential election • Thomas Pynchon, [25] American short story writer and novelist • Christopher Reeve,[26] American film actor and political activist • William Rehnquist,[27] Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1972 to 1986 and Chief Justice of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2005 • Deborah Sampson,[28][29] female member of the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War • Benjamin Spock,[30] child care specialist and author • Adlai Stevenson III,[31] United States Democratic Senator representing Illinois from 1970 to 1981, two-time candidate for Governor of Illinois • Alfred Sturtevant,[32] American geneticist • Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.,[33] publisher of the New York Times since 1992 • Charles Sumner,[34] American statesman and Republican Party politician • Noah Webster,[35] American educator, journalist, and lexicographer noted for his Webster’s Dictionary • William Collins Whitney,[36][37] American financier and politician, and his descendants, the Whitney family NOTE: Hugh Hefner, media and pornography executive, is a claimant of descent from William Bradford[38], but his claims have been disproved by The Mayflower Society.[39]
Notable descendants
• Serena Armstrong-Jones, Viscountess Linley,[6] wife of David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley • The Baldwin brothers; (Alec, Daniel, William, and Stephen)[7] American actors • Ambrose Bierce[8] American dystopian novelist and satirist • Gamaliel Bradford (1768-1824),[9] American Revolutionary War officer, and his descendants, including Gamaliel Bradford (1863-1932), American biographer and journalist • Robert F. Bradford,[10][11] American lawyer, Republican Party strategist, and Governor of Massachusetts from 1947 to 1949 • William Bradford (1624-1703), military commander of the Plymouth forces during King Philip’s War • William Bradford (1729-1808), American physician, lawyer, and U.S. Senator from Rhode Island • William Bradford (painter),[12] American painter, photographer, and explorer • James G. Carter,[13] American congregational minister, Massachusetts State Representative, and pioneer of Normal schools and public education • Julia Child,[14] American entrepreneur and chef of French and French-influenced cuisine • Frederic Edwin Church,[15] American landscape painter • Frank Nelson Doubleday,[16] American publisher, and his descendants, including Nelson Doubleday, Nelson Doubleday, Jr., and Russell Doubleday • George Eastman,[17] American inventor and the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company • Clint Eastwood,[18] American film actor, director, and producer • Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton, a Professor at MIT who was the developer of pioneering stop-action photographic techniques and electronic flashes. • Charles Dana Gibson,[19] illustrator, best known for his "Gibson girl" drawings • Edward "Ned" Lamont,[20][21] American businessman and Democratic Party politician • John Lithgow,[22] American actor and philanthropist
References
[1] Patricia Scott Deetz; James Deetz. "Mayflower Passenger Deaths, 1620-1621". The Plymouth Colony Archive Project. http://etext.virginia.edu/ users/deetz/Plymouth/Maydeaths.html. Retrieved on 2006-05-21. [2] "William Bradford in 17 Century Records". Pilgrim Hall Museum. http://www.pilgrimhall.org/ bradfordwilliamrecords.htm. Retrieved on 2006-05-21. [3] Austin, Jane Goodwin (1777). "William Bradford’s Love Life". Harper’s New
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William Bradford (Plymouth governor)
[16] Doubleday, Frank Nelson. The Memoirs Monthly Magazine 39 (229): 135–140. of a Publisher; New York: Doubleday, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/ 1972; appendices. pageviewer?frames=1&cite=&coll=&view=50&root=%2Fmoa%2Fharp%2Fharp0039%2F&tif=00145 [17] See ref for Frederic Edwin Church. [4] Stratton, Eugene Aubrey (1986). [18] McGilligan, Patrick. Clint: The Life And Plymouth Colony: Its History & People Legend; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1620-1691. USA: Ancestry Incorporated. 2002; pp. 13. pp. 365–366. doi:0-916489-13-2. [19] Roberts, Gary Boyd. Notable Kin: Volume http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/ Two; Santa Clara, CA: Carl Boyer, 1999. 0916489183/ref=sib_dp_pt/ [20] Sleeper, Jim. "The American Lamonts," 002-2814230-1648055#reader-link. The New York Times, "Opinions and [5] Alice Bradford Editorials;" on-line publication: 15 [6] Roberts, Gary Boyd. "Genealogical October 2006; accessed 5 May 2007. Thoughts by Gary Boyd Roberts #14". [21] Lamont, Corliss, ed. The Thomas New England Historic Genealogical Lamonts In America; New York: A. S. Society. Barnes, 1971. The family-published http://www.newenglandancestors.org/ history of the Lamont family in America education/articles/research/ details how the socialist Lamonts arrived special_guests/gary_boyd_roberts/ in America in the 1750s and married into 14_659_414.asp. New England Pilgrim and Puritan [7] Newcomb, Bethuel Merritt (1923). families, including descendants of Andrew Newcomb and his Descendants: William Bradford. A Revised Edition of "Genealogical [22] The Mayflower Quarterly, Vol. 64, Memoir of the Newcomb Family" by John General Society of Mayflower Bearse Newcomb. New Haven, CT: The Descendants: 1998 (quarterly journal). Tuttle, Morhouse, and Taylor Co. [23] Roberts, Gary Boyd and Wood, Michael J. Daniel LeRoy Martineau, mentioned in "Notable Kin: Foreign Prime Ministers or the book, is the grandfather of the Presidents with New England-Derived Baldwin brothers. Forebears or Wives: Part II - Europe", [8] Morris, Roy (1996). Ambrose Bierce: New England Historic Genealogical Alone In Bad Company. New York: Society. On-line source Crown, p. 10. Retrieved on 2007-05-05. (NewEnglandAncestors.org); accessed [9] Bradford, Gamaliel. Correspondence: 10 June 2007. Guide. Houghton Library, Harvard [24] Ancestry of Mitt Romney (This link College University. Retrieved on shows McClellan’s (and Benjamin 2007-05-04. Spock’s) descent from the Joshua Ripley [10] Robert Fiske Bradford Papers, who married Mary Backus, also 1909-1971, Massachusetts Historical ancestors of Christopher Reeve. Look at Society; accessed 4 June 2007. the source for Reeve to see that Joshua [11] "Blue Bloods," Time; 19 Sept. 1938. OnRipley was the son of Joshua Ripley and line source: Time On-line; accessed 4 Hannah Bradford, the grandson of June 2007. William Bradford and Alice Richards, and [12] William Bradford: Sailing Ships and the great-grandson of Governor William Arctic Seas Bradford.) [13] The Mayflower Quarterly, Vol. 51, [25] Roberts, Gary Boyd. "Royal Descents, General Society of Mayflower Notable Kin, and Printed Sources #48", Descendants: 1985 (quarterly journal). New England Historic Genealogical [14] Fitch, Noel Riley. Appetite for Life: The Society. On-line source Biography of Julia Child; New York: (NewEnglandAncestors.org); accessed 1 Doubleday, 1999; pp. 10. June 2007. [15] Roberts, Gary Boyd. "Genealogical [26] Roberts, Gary Boyd. "Royal Descents, Thoughts by Gary Boyd Roberts #36", Notable Kin, and Printed Sources #77", New England Historic Genealogical New England Historic Genealogical Society. On-line source Society. On-line source (NewEnglandAncestors.org); accessed 5 (NewEnglandAncestors.org); accessed 4 May 2007. May 2007.
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[27] Ancestry of William Rehnquist (William Bradford, #1702 in Rehnquist’s ahnentafel, was the son of Governor William Bradford.) [28] Scott, Fred. Clifton William Scott and Mildred Evelyn Bradford Scott of Ashfield, Mass.: Volume 1 (Genealogical record); iUniverse, 2004; pp. 423. [29] Young, Alfred. Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; pp. 4-5. [30] See ref for George B. McClellan. [31] See first ref for Deborah Sampson. [32] Ancestry of Alfred Henry Sturtevant III (Alfred Sturtevant is the father of the author of this article.) [33] Roberts, Gary Boyd. "Genealogical Thoughts by Gary Boyd Roberts #42", New England Historic Genealogical Society. On-line source (NewEnglandAncestors.org); accessed 10 June 2007. [34] Pierce, Edward L. Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 1, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University; on-line source, accessed 15 June 2007. [35] "Noah Webster"; Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911). On-line
William Bradford (Plymouth governor)
source: "Classic Encyclopedia;" accessed 4 May 2007 [36] Biddle, Flora Miller. The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999; pp. 26. Account of F. M. Biddle, president emeritus of the Whitney Museum, describes the descent of W. C. Whitney’s mother Laurinda Collins (Whitney) from Bradford. [37] "William Collins Whitney (1841 - 1904)". The Whitney Research Group, 1999; accessed 4 May 2007. [38] "Mr. Playboy"; Isenberg, Barbara. Time, on-line: 2 October 2005; accessed 4 May 2007. [39] The Mayflower Quarterly, "Letters," Vol. 72, No. 2 (June 2006), publication of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.
External links
• Bradford’s History at the Pilgrim Hall Museum • William Bradford on MayflowerHistory.com • Full Text Bradford’s book: "Of Plymouth Plantation" (provided by Google Book Search) • Genealogy of William Bradford
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