William Bradford, 1621-32, 1635, 1637, 1639-43, 1645-56.
Edward Winslow, 1633, 1636, 1644.
Thomas Prince, 1634, 1638, 1657-72.
Josiah Winslow, 1673-80.
Thomas Hinckley, 1681 to the union, except during the Andros interregnum.—Ed.]
These outside experiences were all in the way of encouragements: the most serious annoyances came, not directly from the savages, but from neighbors of their own blood. Thus in 1623 the wretched colonists sent out the year before by Thomas Weston to Weymouth, twenty miles northwest from Plymouth, had to be protected from their own mismanagement and the hostility of the natives, by which means came about the first shedding of Indian blood by the Pilgrims; and thus again, five years later, the unruly nest of Morton’s followers at Merry Mount, just beyond Weymouth, had to be broken up by force.
Of the progress of civil government in this first period we have scanty memorials. Few laws and few officials answered the simple needs of the colony. Bradford was annually elected governor, and in 1624, at his desire, a board of five Assistants was substituted for the single Assistant who had hitherto shared the executive responsibility. The people met from time to time in General Court for the transaction of public business, and in 1623 a book of laws was begun; but three pages sufficed to contain the half-dozen simple enactments of the next half-dozen years.
The next period of the colony history extends from Jan. 13/23, 1629-30, when the Council for New England granted to Bradford, his heirs, associates, and assigns, a useful enlargement of the patent for Plymouth and Kennebec, to March 2/12, 1640-41, when Bradford in the name of the grantees conveyed the rights thus bestowed to the freemen of New Plymouth in their corporate capacity.
PILGRIM RELICS.
[The chest of drawers is an ancient one, which there is some reason to believe belonged to Peregrine White. (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. 1873, p. 398.) The sword and vessels belonged to Standish. The cradle belonged to Dr. Samuel Fuller, the physician of the Pilgrims. (Russell’s Pilgrim Memorials, p. 55; Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 201.) Chair No. 1 belonged to Governor Carver; No. 2 was Elder Brewster’s; No. 3 is said to have been Governor Edward Winslow’s; and this with a table, which was until recently in the hall of the Massachusetts Historical Society, has lately been reclaimed by its owner, Mr. Isaac Winslow. (See 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. v. 293.; Proceedings, ii. 1, 284; iv. 142; xix. 124; Young’s Chronicles, p. 238; Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers, p. 197.) There are other groupings of Pilgrim relics in Dr. Dexter’s papers; C. W. Elliott’s “Good Old Times at Plymouth” in Harper’s Monthly, 1877, p. 180; Bartlett’s Pilgrim Fathers.—Ed.]
The most striking feature of this period was the growth from a single plantation to a province of eight towns, seven of them stretching for fifty miles along the shore of Cape Cod Bay, from Scituate to Yarmouth, and Taunton lying twenty-five miles inland,—in all containing about twenty-five hundred souls. With this growth there was also some extension of trade on the Kennebec and Penobscot, and in 1632 a beginning of exploration, and in 1633 of settlement, in the Connecticut Valley; but the appearance of numerous emigrants from Massachusetts Bay defeated the contemplated removal of the entire colony to the last-named location.
The establishment of towns led necessarily to a more elaborate system of civil government, and in 1636 it was found expedient to revise and codify the previous enactments of the General Court, and to prescribe the duties of the various public officers. In 1638 the inconveniences of governing by mass-meeting led to the introduction of the representative system already familiar to Massachusetts Bay. The number of Assistants had been increased in 1633 from five to seven.