Religious Persecution
William Bradford commenced a two-decade process of writing his history of the Plymouth colony in 1630. The year was a high water mark for Plymouth and many scholars have analyzed this decision as insight into the mind of the author. Plymouth was not to just some exercise in exploration, but a religious pilgrimage to a land that the Puritans firmly believe would one day come to be seen as every bit as sacred as the Holy Land. The entire expedition was prompted by what Bradford and other members of the Separatist Church saw as persecution from two opposing sides: Catholicism and the protestant Anglican Church. These Puritans truly felt—and not without some reason—that they had no safe haven in England after first going into exile in Holland, the New Land across the ocean was not just a place to escape to, but calling from God. Two years after beginning his history, the devastating effects of a hurricane had flooded that high water feeling of optimism with desperation.
The Seeds of Revolution
Bradford’s account comes to a close 130 years before the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, contained within it is a running theme of Puritan defiance, independence, and, most clearly, dissent from established norms. The modern of view of Puritans is unfortunately inextricably linked to the madness of the Salem witch trials and all the attendant negative aspects of character linked to it. Beneath the admitted judgmental self-assurance of their own superiority, however, can be found within the daily struggles of the Plymouth colony described by Bradford the seeds of revolution. In a way, the story of the Separatists and the Mayflower foresees the American Revolution in miniature: a committed group of people pushed to the edge by the effects of authoritarian persecution.
Culture Clash
Clash may perhaps be less than appropriate. Much of what is known about how the early settlers—and the Puritans specifically—dealt with the significant cultural differences between the British and the indigenous tribes already calling the New Land their old home can be discovered between the pages of Bradford’s book. One of the most enduring characters is Squanto; made famous during the first Thanksgiving. What stands out most remarkably is the truly breathtaking chasm existing between how the early settlers treated Native Americans and how their generation offspring and later arrivals would treat them. The difference, of course, is starkly clear: the Pilgrims needed to cooperate and collaborate with existing tribes for the purposes of survival; those who came later did not.
