Of Plymouth Plantation Study Guide

William Bradford was born into a prosperous family of farmers. As a teenager, he began attending sermons delivered by church reformers, despite the fact that his family believed all reforms to the church to be heretical. Bradford eventually became a Separatist—a Christian who believed in separating from the established Church of England. In the 1610s, Bradford fled to the Dutch Republic to avoid persecution in his own country. It was during this period that Bradford and some of his fellow Separatists began to entertain the idea of settling in America. In 1620, Bradford and his wife set sail aboard the Mayflower, along with a few dozen other Separatists. Bradford rose to become the governor of the Plymouth Colony from 1621 to 1632, and later served as governor from 1645 to 1656. During these years, Bradford was instrumental in instituting a fledgling system of democracy in the colony, and in negotiating with Native American tribes in the surrounding area. His journal of the colony’s history, Of Plymouth Plantation, is still regarded as one of the key primary sources of early American history. He died in 1657, a highly respected colonist.

The overarching historical event in Of Plymouth Plantation is, of course, the Pilgrims’ colonization of New England in North America. Readers interested in a more authoritative, unbiased account of this period in history might consult Nathaniel Philbrick’s recent book Mayflower (2007), or, for a more partisan account, the early chapters of either Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) or James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995). One aspect of the colonial era that Bradford doesn’t really delve into is the reformation of the English church. Following the reign of Henry VIII, the English church broke with the Roman Catholic church, becoming its own separate institution. Under Queen Elizabeth I, Henry’s daughter, England underwent further reforms that limited the role of ceremony and prelate jurisdiction in Christian practice, and pushed England in a more overtly Protestant direction. By the end of the 17th century, however, English Christianity had undergone a schism: some reformers thought that England hadn’t gone far enough in expelling Catholic ritual, while others thought it had gone too far. Many Christians in the former group went on to become full-fledge separatists, and some of these separatists became the American Pilgrims.

Of Plymouth Plantation is regarded as one of the most elegant examples of the Puritan “plain style”—the literary style that stresses simple sentence constructions and a relatively small vocabulary. The plain style is often regarded as a stylistic analogy for the Puritans’ simple, sparse lifestyle. Other good examples include The Narrative of the Captivity and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). Notable works of fiction about Puritan/Separatist society include The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Crucible (1953) by Arthur Miller.