USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Plymouth > The church of the Pilgrim Fathers > Part 4
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On Monday they sounded the harbor and found it fit for shipping; they marched into the land and found divers cornfields and little running brooks - a place (as they
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supposed) fit for situation. "At least," as Bradford put it quaintly, "it was the best they could find." It was this landing of the exploring party, on the 21st of December, 1620, which has come down in history as the Landing of the Pilgrims. Of it the poet wrote,
Here on its Rock and on its sterile soil, Began the kingdom not of kings but men; Began the making of the world again.
He looked upon the event as part of a world movement and not merely as the struggle of a little band of wanderers to make a home for themselves in the wilderness.
The exploring party returned to the ship and on De- cember 26 the Mayflower and her passengers reached Plymouth. Several days were spent in exploring the re- gion, and on Saturday, January 2 the work of building the town was actually begun. The town was to consist of a single street running from the water to Fort Hill. This street was called The Street, and was later known as First Street, Great Street, and Broad Street. It was not until 1823 that it became known as Leyden Street.
The first building erected was one twenty feet square, for common use until single houses could be built, but the work proceeded slowly. The weather was bad and sickness was common. Many of the party remained on the ship, and it was not until the last of March that the ship's carpenter could repair the shallop "to fetch all from aboard."
In April the Mayflower sailed for home, leaving the little band behind. A more discouraging situation could hardly be imagined. Half their number had died during the winter; their connection with the old world was
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severed, and the most they could hope was that another ship would come before the next winter. But whether the Adventurers would be able to furnish and equip such a ship they did not know. To a degree which can scarcely be overestimated the future of the New World depended upon the courage, fortitude and faith of that little group of men, women, and children.
It is not my intention to dwell upon the happenings in the colony during the years of its slow growth. They were years of hardship, uncertainty and peril, and in those years the names of Bradford, Brewster, Standish and Winslow stand out. It was their ability, their heroic devotion to duty as they saw it, and their sublime faith, which made the colony a success.
In the story of the Pilgrims and their dealings with the Indians, two names occur frequently - Samoset and Squanto. Samoset was an Indian from the Maine coast, where he had learned a few English words from the fisher- men. Squanto had been carried to Europe by Hunt and had lived in London several years. John Slanie, a London merchant, had taken an interest in him and sent him back to this country by way of Newfoundland. Whether you call it a coincidence, or regard it, as the pious annalist did, a marvelous interposition of a wonder-working Provi- dence, the presence of these friendly English-speaking Indians is one of the most remarkable events in history. It was through these friendly Indians that the Pilgrims got in touch with Massasoit and made the treaty which may well be regarded as one of the landmarks in the colony's history. The scene has been described in detail by a writer of the period.
April 1, 1621, was a sunny day, and just after noon there
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was great excitement in the colony; Massasoit, grand sachem of the confederated tribes of Pokanoket, appeared on Watson's hill with a band of sixty warriors. The situa- tion was a serious one; if friendly relations could not be established with the Indians the colony would be in great and constant danger. The colonists were unwilling to let the governor venture among the savages, and the latter naturally hesitated about letting their chief visit the armed settlement. The mission required bravery and skill, as there was yet no security against bad faith on the part of the Indians. Winslow was selected to make contact with the chief, and the historian relates how he set out alone for the camp, wearing his armor and side-arms. He marched down the slope, across the ford, and advanced boldly up the hill. His companions did not see him again for several hours. On being conducted to Massasoit he presented him with a pair of knives and a copper chain with a jewel attached. To the chief's brother he gave a pot of strong water, a quantity of biscuits and some butter. The chief then expressed a wish to buy Winslow's sword. After that Winslow made a speech, saying that King James saluted the Indian ruler with peace and love, accepting him as a friend and ally and that the governor wished to see him "to confirm a peace with him" and open a trade for their mutual advantage. The interpreter did not suc- ceed very well with the message but Massasoit grasped the substance of it and was much pleased.
Leaving Winslow behind as a hostage, and taking some twenty warriors as a guard of honor, the chief started for the village. Captain Standish and Master Allerton, with guard of six musketeers, met him at the crossing on Town Brook. As he crossed, the guard saluted him and the two
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leaders took their places, one on each side of him, and con- ducted him to The Street, where, in a house not yet fin- ished, there had been placed a green rug and some cush- ions. Governor Carver, assuming some state, came at once with a small body of musketeers, attended by drum and trumpets. After grave salutations had been exchanged they joined in some strong drink, of which, the historian says, "Massasoit drunk a great draft that made him sweat all the time after."
Then and there they made the treaty which established peace and friendship with the Indians and which lasted more than forty years. Massasoit outlived Carver, Brad- ford, Winslow, Brewster, Standish and Allerton, yet had been many years in his grave before the treaty was violated by his younger son.
When the treaty had been concluded the Governor es- corted the returning Indians to the brook, and as the evening shadows lengthened Winslow returned.
One of the lessons we may learn from the Pilgrims is the lesson of the adequate preparations which they made for the safety of the little town. As early as 1622 a fort was built on the hill, of stout timber, with a flat roof on which their ordnance was mounted and from which they kept constant watch. Not only was a fort built but the town was surrounded by a palisade. As Secretary Morton wrote, "It was a great work for them to do in their weak- ness and in time of want, but the danger of the time re- quired it."
The thoroughness of their preparations, the compulsory training in the use of military arms, and the law under which every man was required to equip himself with a musket and ammunition, offer a sufficient explanation why
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they escaped the peril of Indian attacks. Both treaty and preparedness were necessary, and "useless each without the other."
It is interesting to note that no hostile shot was ever fired from the guns of the fort.
It has been said of some of our modern ideas, that the Pilgrims tried them three hundred years ago and they would not work. Their experience with communism was an interesting one and we of today can learn much from it. In the agreement with the London merchants there was inserted a provision to which I have already referred; for the first seven years the total income of the colony was to be put into a common fund and out of this the colonists were to get their living. At the end of seven years the capital and profits were to be divided between the Ad- venturers and the colonists.
But the plan was a failure from the first; one man thought that he did more than another and was not satisfied that he did not get more out of it; the young men thought that they did more than the old men and should get more pay; the old men thought it beneath their dignity that the young men got as much as they did; and the single men did not like the idea as it seemed to them that they were helping to support the families of the married men. At the end of three years conditions were so unsatisfactory that it was decided to modify the plan and give each man his land for present use but not for inheritance. The Governor notes that this made everyone much more in- dustrious. The men planted much more corn than they would have done otherwise. Even the women went into the fields and worked, although before this they had alleged weakness.
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The experience that was had in this comone course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that amongst godly and sober men, [wrote Governor Bradford] may well evince the vanitie of that conceite of Platos & other ancients, applauded by some of later times: - that the taking away of propertie and bringing in comunitie into a comone wealth would make them happy and florishing, as if they were wiser than God.
If communism did not succeed on Leyden street three hundred years ago, in a little community speaking the same language, with a common history and tradition, where their very existence depended upon the success of the plan, we may well wonder whether it would succeed under the vastly more difficult and complicated conditions of today.
This is briefly the story of the beginning of the Plymouth Colony. In 1692 it became a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ceased to exist as an independent unit. But the part that it took in the founding of the nation has never been forgotten. Plymouth Rock, as a symbol, is known to every schoolboy in the land.
Plymouth Rock does not mark a beginning or an end. It marks a revelation of that which is without beginning and without end - a purpose shining through eternity with a re- splendent light, undimmed even by the imperfections of men, and a response, an answering purpose, from those who, oblivi- ous of all else, sailed hither seeking only an avenue for the immortal soul.
IV The Pilgrims' Church in Plymouth
BY ARTHUR LORD
THE STORY OF THE FIRST CHURCH in the country is mainly to be gathered from the ancient records of the church. The history of the Pilgrims' separation from the church of their fathers in England, of the bitter persecutions to which they were subjected in their English homes, of their departure into Holland, of their life for twelve years in Leyden, of the reasons which led them to encounter the perils of the sea and seek a new home on unknown shores, of their protracted and tempestuous voyage, and their ar- rival at Cape Cod, written by William Bradford, the Governor, was entered in full in those records by Nathaniel Morton, who, from 1645 until his death in 1685, was Sec- retary of Plymouth Colony. Until the discovery of the manuscript of Bradford's History in the library of the Bishop of London at Fulham, of which the church records give only a part, those records were first in authority and interest of the chronicles of the Pilgrims.
Morton also copied into the church records the Dialogue
Reprinted from The New England Magazine, Vol. VII, No. 6, February 1893.
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written by Governor Bradford, entitled, "A dialogue or the sum of a conference between some young men born in New England and sundry ancient men that came out of Holland and old England, (written) Anno Domini 1648." The first request of the young men in the Dialogue is to know the minds of the ancient men "concerning the true and simple meaning of those of The Separation, as they are termed, when they say the Church of England is no Church or no true Church."
The first volume also contains the interesting and beautiful memoir of William Brewster, the first ruling elder of Plymouth Church, written by Governor Brad- ford and copied into the records by Morton.
Following the pages in the handwriting of Morton, now faded and difficult to decipher, are the pages in the hand- writing of John Cotton, son of that famous John Cotton, minister of the First Church in Boston. Mr. Cotton was ordained as minister in Plymouth, June 30, 1669, having come to Plymouth with his family in November, 1667. His pastorate continued until October, 1697, and from his time until the present the records of church or parish are continuous.
Next in importance to these church and parish records is "An Account of the Church of Christ in Plymouth, the first church in New England, from its establishment to the present Day," written by John Cotton, a member of the church, in 1760, and first printed as an appendix to the sermon preached at the ordination of Rev. Chandler Robbins as minister of the church, in January, 1760, and later published in the fourth volume of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1795.
In the simplicity of its style and the felicity of its expres-
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sion the history of William Bradford stands easily first in the contemporaneous accounts of the beginnings of a na- tion, and may well serve as a model for future historians.
The interesting account by Cotton of the ecclesiastical history of Plymouth is of great value to all who seek to know of the history, practice and government of the First Church, and all subsequent accounts of the church have been largely drawn from those two sources.
In the first two years of the seventeenth century there separated from the churches of Scrooby, Austerfield, and Bawtry and the neighboring towns the men and women whom later generations called the Pilgrim Fathers. At first they worshipped in the old manor house on the great Northern road, which was the home of William Brewster, the first ruling elder in the colony of Plymouth. Brewster had studied at the University of Cambridge; he had been the confidential secretary of Davison when he was Secretary of State and when as ambassador of Elizabeth he had visited the Netherlands; and when Davison was put into the Tower after the execution of Mary Stuart, Brewster came to the manor house of Scrooby and held the position of "post" or postmaster therein. On successive Sundays there came to his house the Separatists or Independents of those towns, to listen to the preaching of John Robinson, their pastor. The little congregation that gathered there had separated from the churches where they and their fathers before them had worshipped. They were not non-conform- ists merely, as the Puritans were; for the Separatists first held that the Church of England was no church, and that it were better that the people should have no fellowship with it. The Puritan non-conformists were still members of the church, objecting to some of its forms, ceremonies
-
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and usages. The persecutions to which the former were subjected in England made their separatism at first rigid; only when the memory of the persecutions had somewhat faded and the kindlier teachings of Robinson in the pleas- ant city of Leyden had influenced them, and their love of England had grown more intense as the years went by, did that separatism soften, until they were ready to concede that the church with all its faults was a real church of Christ, but that it was better for them to be out of it and keep out of it. At the time of their embarkation from Leyden, both Robinson and Brewster in a letter to London expressed the willingness of the Pilgrim company to take the oath of supremacy and recognize the king as the supreme head of the Church of England, and also to take the oath of allegiance, which was an oath of subjection and obedience to the king as a temporal sovereign inde- pendent of every other power.
The story of their life in England and in Holland is simply and finely told by the historian of the colony, Gov- ernor Bradford, and was copied into the first volume of the church records in Plymouth by his nephew, Nathaniel Morton, in 1680, when twelve of the one hundred and two who came in the Mayflower were still living. Morton's preface to the church records, dated Jan. 13, 1680, begins:
I have looked at it as a duty incumbent on me to put to writing the first beginnings and after progress of the church of Christ in New England.
The persecutions by Church and State in England in- creased so that "their former afflictions were but as mole hills to mountains" in comparison with those which came upon them, until finding it impossible to endure them
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longer they resolved to get over into Holland. After great difficulties and sufferings they left England during the years 1607 and 1608, and came first to Amsterdam. After remaining there a year, they removed to Leyden, "a fair and beautiful city and of a sweet situation."
The different view which the Massachusetts Puritans entertained of their departure from England from that which they believed the Pilgrims held is stated by Francis Higginson, the pastor of the first church of the Massa- chusetts Bay at Salem, in the words which he addresses to his congregation on board the ship which was bearing them from England, in May, 1629:
We will not say as the Separatists were wont to say at their leaving of England, Farewell Babylon! Farewell Rome! But we will say, Farewell, dear England. Farewell the church of God in England, and all the Christian friends there. We do not go to New England as Separatists from the church of England, though we cannot but separate from the corruptions in it; but we go to practice the positive part of church re- formations and propagate the gospel in America.
The Pilgrim company left England under widely dif- ferent circumstances and holding other views from the prosperous Puritan companies which later left England bound directly to the shores of Massachusetts Bay. By manual labor in various occupations the members of the congregation which left Scrooby and came to Leyden sup- ported themselves for twelve years. The magistrates of the city said: "These English have lived among us now these twelve years, and yet we never had any suit or accusation against any of them." The leaders of the company in Leyden were Brewster and Robinson, both men of ability and learning, both admirably fitted to give wise counsels
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and set high examples. Robinson is described by Bradford as
a man learned and of solid judgment, and of a quick and sharp wit; so was he also a tender conscience and very sincere in all his ways, a hater of hypocrisy and dissimulation, and would be very plain with his best friends.
While of Brewster, Bradford writes:
He was tender-hearted and compassionate of such as were in misery, but especially of such as had been of good estate and rank and were fallen into want and poverty, either for good- ness or religion's sake, or by the injury and opression of others. In teaching he was very stirring and distinct in what he taught, by which means he became the more profitable to his hearers. He had a singular good gift in prayer, both public and private, in ripping up the heart and conscience before God, in the humble confession of sin and begging the mercies of God in Christ for the pardon thereof. He always thought it were better for ministers to pray oftener, and divide their prayers than to be long and tedious in the same, except upon solemn and special occasions, as in days of humiliation and the like.
The vigor of Robinson's intellect and his singular skill in debate so impressed itself upon the scholars of Leyden, that to him was intrusted the duty of public dispute with the most learned champion of the teachings of Arminius as opposed to those of Calvin. Bradford says: "He was terrible to the Arminians, and did foil his adversary and put him to an apparent non plus in this great and public audience."
But in spite of the success which Robinson and Brewster met with, one as a writer and the other as a printer of books, in Leyden, the life of the Pilgrim company there
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was a hard and unsatisfactory one, and at last it was de- termined that they must leave Holland and found another home. They found that the hardness of the place was such that few came to them and fewer stayed; that old age began to come upon them, and their great and continual labors hastened it before their time; that their children bowed under their heavy burdens and became decrepit in their youth. They say that their children were exposed to great temptations, and feared that their posterity was liable to become degenerate and corrupt; and, which was not the least,-
They had a great hope and inward zeal of laying some great foundations, or at least to make some way thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in these remote parts of the world, yet they should be but as stepping stones unto others for performing so good a work.
Another and important consideration which moved them was their desire to live under the protection of Eng- land and to retain the name and language of Englishmen. Their twelve years in Leyden had softened the bitterness which they felt toward the mother country at the time of their departure, and their experiences in Holland had revived their ancient loyalty, and had impressed upon them the firm conviction that English laws and manners and thought were better than those of any other nation.
When it was determined that the congregation should seek the new world, the question at once arose as to who should go and who should stay. It was decided that the youngest and strongest should go first, and that those only should go who volunteered. Of the leaders of those who went, Bradford was but thirty-two years of age, Edward
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Winslow was twenty-five, and Brewster, who was to go with them as their ruling elder, was then fifty-six years of age. As the greater number of the Leyden congregation remained behind, it was determined that Robinson should stay with them; while the religious interests of those who were to sail in the Mayflower were intrusted to the keeping of William Brewster. Fortunate indeed was that congre- gation, that in the years in which it dwelt in a strange land among a strange people, it was taught and counselled and ministered unto and guided by such men as Robinson and Brewster; and thrice fortunate those who beyond a stormy sea and on an unknown shore, through doubt and peril and suffering and death were consoled and comforted and encouraged and sustained by the teachings of the pastor who sleeps beside the Rhine and who never saw the Pilgrims' land, and the presence of the elder who in sickness and in sorrow, in prosperity and in health, was their guide and adviser, their teacher and friend, and who, in his old age, passed away full of years and honor, loved and reverenced by the whole community he had served so long and so well. Sadly the Pilgrim company parted from those who were to remain in Holland, with mutual em- braces and many tears; and the Speedwell, with a pros- perous wind, sailed from the harbor of Delftshaven to the port of Southampton, where they found the Mayflower ready for her long and famous voyage.
"But they knew that they were Pilgrims and looked not on those things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country and quieted their spirits."
The date of the departure of the Speedwell from Delft- shaven or of the Mayflower from Plymouth may be looked upon, perhaps, as the date of the organization of the church
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of Plymouth; for it was distinctly understood that those of the congregation of Leyden who went first were to be an "absolute church of themselves, as well as those who staid behind - with the proviso that as any go over or return they shall be reputed as members without further dismissal or testimonial."
It seems to have been intended that the Pilgrim com- pany separating from the congregation at Leyden should form a distinct church. Such would be the more natural and the more practical course to adopt; and the fact that it was provided that the members of the congregation at Leyden who should afterwards go to the new world, and those of the Mayflower company who might afterwards re- turn to Leyden, should be considered as in the one church or the other without formal letters or testimonials seems to indicate that, recognizing that by their action a new church had been formed, they intended to provide that letters of dismissal or testimonial should not be necessary as between the parent church in Leyden and the new church beyond the sea; fearing that if it were not so understood, questions might arise which could not be conveniently or easily settled as to the right to be admitted to the separate organization which those who might return would have.
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