Of Plymouth Plantation

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Bradford is the first great prose stylist of the American literary tradition and the first American writer to attempt a sustained theological interpretation of historical events. His history is significant for TLA not as a founding mythology but as a genuine work of providential historiography — an attempt to read the specific, unglamorous events of colonial survival as the acts of a God who keeps his covenant with his people.

Providential History

Bradford wrote his history with a specific theological purpose: to show that the God who had called the Pilgrim congregation to their extraordinary undertaking had sustained them through their extraordinary sufferings, and that the pattern of their experience was the pattern of covenant faithfulness — the God who demands obedience keeping his promises to those who obey him. This is the framework of Deuteronomy, of the Psalms, of the prophets: the reading of history as the arena of divine action.

What distinguishes Bradford’s history from later American mythologization of the Pilgrims is its honesty. He does not present the Plymouth Colony as a triumphant success. He presents it as a fragile, frequently failing community, beset by disease, conflict, and the constant threat of dissolution, sustained by what he calls the Spirit of God and His grace. The mythology of the Pilgrims is a success story; Bradford’s history is a survival story, and the difference is theologically significant.

What the Opening Reveals

Bradford begins his history by quoting the eleventh chapter of Hebrews — the great catalogue of the faithful who “died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.” The Pilgrims, he says, knew that they were pilgrims — knew that the world was not their home, that their journey was toward a destination that was not yet visible, and that the cost of that journey was real and must be willingly accepted.

This is the theological framework that organizes everything that follows. The sufferings of the Plymouth Colony are not accidents or failures; they are the condition of pilgrimage, the bruised heel that the seed of the woman must accept as the cost of pressing toward the destination. Bradford’s history is, at its deepest level, a meditation on what it means to live in the confidence of promises not yet fully received.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a journey — the long, costly journey of the seed of the woman toward the crushing of the serpent’s head. Bradford’s history is the record of one community’s attempt to make that journey in a specific historical moment — to live as a covenanted people in a wilderness, sustained by promises they could not yet fully see fulfilled.

The Plymouth Colony was not the Kingdom of God, and Bradford knew this. His honesty about its failures and his faithfulness in recording them are themselves a form of testimony: to the God who is not embarrassed by human weakness, who works through fragile and frequently failing communities, and who keeps his covenant even when his people do not. This is the God of Scripture, and Bradford’s history is one of its most honest American testimonies.