William Bradford

Who Was William Bradford?

William Bradford was the second governor of Plymouth Colony and the author of Of Plymouth Plantation — the most important prose narrative of the founding of New England and one of the foundational documents of American literature. Born in Austerfield, Yorkshire, to a farming family, he joined the Separatist congregation at Scrooby as a teenager and followed it to Holland, then to the Mayflower voyage of 1620, and finally to the shore at Plymouth, where he would spend the rest of his life.

He served as governor of Plymouth Colony for thirty years (1621–1656, with brief intervals) and wrote his history of the colony between approximately 1630 and 1651, though it was not published until 1856. The manuscript had a remarkable history — it was taken to England during the Revolution, deposited in the library of the Bishop of London, and returned to Massachusetts in 1897. It is now housed in the State Library of Massachusetts.

Of Plymouth Plantation is a work of genuine literary power: a history written in the plain style that the Separatist tradition prized, organized around the theological conviction that the Pilgrims were a covenanted people whose sufferings and deliverances were providentially ordered, and marked throughout by a honesty about failure and loss that the later mythology of the Pilgrims has consistently suppressed.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Of Plymouth Plantation — c. 1630–1651, published 1856
• The Mayflower Compact — 1620 — Bradford was a signatory and probable drafter