A statue of William Bradford whose book on the Plymouth Colony is our best resource about early American settlers stands in Plymouth Massachusetts This rock has become an object of veneration in the United States French historian Alexis de Tocqueville said in 1835 Does this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant and the stone 6 Plymouth and the Settlement of New England
becomes famous it is treasured by a great nation its very dust is shared as a relic The Plymouth Colony wasn’t the first settlement in the New World yet it is probably the most well known Students learn in elementary school that the Pilgrims came here in 1620 and that they created Thanksgiving with the Natives the following year The basics of that story are true and it carries a certain amount of romance The idea that a small group of English citizens packed up their belongings and came to Plymouth to worship God in their own way is satisfying But the story is naturally more complicated than that and much more interesting One of the reasons the story is so popular is that much of the Pilgrims history has been preserved That’s because of the efforts of William Bradford who was the governor of the Plymouth Colony frequently between 1621 and 1657 Bradford wrote a journal about his experiences that covered the years between 1621 and 1646 The first part was written in 1630 and the remainder was done between 1646 and 1650 It not only reviews events but it provides the reactions of the residents to those events The journal was kept in Boston before it was stolen by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War It was published in book form in 1856 and the original was returned to the United States in 1897 Of Plymouth Plantation has become one of the most important historical records of the settlement of America It’s like hearing a voice that is almost four hundred years old Yet the story of the Pilgrims goes back even farther than that and it collides with some important figures in history Let’s go back and see what happened 7 Written in Stone
CHAPTER ONE The Origins Martin Luther worked as a teacher in Wittenberg The Mayflower’s trip to the New World may have lasted only a few months but in another sense it took more than one hundred years to take place A line can be drawn from the actions of a monk in Germany to the settlement in Plymouth Germany part of the Catholic Church’s Holy Roman Empire that spread across much of Europe In the 1510s Luther had become angry about the Church’s practice of awarding indulgences to its followers What upset him most was it appeared that Catholics who had sinned could buy forgiveness with a donation to the Church Luther believed that man’s relationship with God shouldn’t be influenced by money His form of protest was to write out a list of complaints and to nail it to the front door of a Martin Luther caused a sensation when he nailed a list of complaints against the Catholic Church on a church door in Germany The Origins 9
