From time to time, after its discovery, representations were made to the custodians of the manuscript that it should be restored to America, where its value was inestimable, as one of the earliest records of her National History—in the words of Senator Hoar: “The only authentic history of what we have a right to consider the most important political transaction that has ever taken place on the face of the earth.” Ultimately, the Hon. Thomas F. Bayard, the first United States Ambassador to England, instigated by Senator Hoar, put the matter before the Bishop of London—Creighton—at Fulham, with the result that, after due legal sanction by the Constitutional and Episcopal Court of London, the manuscript was conveyed by Mr. Bayard to America, and formally handed over to Governor Roger Wolcott, on July 12th, 1897, for the State Archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, subject to the production of a photographic facsimile being deposited at Fulham, and to the original manuscript being reasonably accessible for investigation. Its present resting place is the Massachusetts State Library.
No words could more vividly depict the feelings in the hearts of Bradford’s descendants, on the return to American soil of this precious relic by the free gift of England, than those of Senator Hoar, which I now quote:
“I do not think many Americans will gaze upon it without a little trembling of the lips and a little gathering of mist in the eyes, as they think of the story of suffering, of sorrow, of peril, of exile, of death, and of lofty triumph, which that book tells,—which the hand of the great leader and founder of America has traced on those pages. There is nothing like it in human annals since the story of Bethlehem. These English men and English women going out from their homes in beautiful Lincoln and York, wife separated from husband and mother from child in that hurried embarkation for Holland, pursued to the beach by English horsemen; the thirteen years of exile; the life at Amsterdam ‘in alley foul and lane obscure’; the dwelling at Leyden; the embarkation at Delfthaven; the farewell of Robinson; the terrible voyage across the Atlantic; the compact in the harbour; the landing on the rock; the dreadful first winter; the death roll of more than half the number; the days of suffering and of famine; the wakeful night, listening for the yell of the wild beast and the war-whoop of the savage; the building of the State on those sure foundations which no wave nor tempest has ever shaken; the breaking of the new light; the dawning of the new day; the beginning of the new life; the enjoyment of peace with liberty,—of all these things this is the original record by the hand of our beloved father and founder.”
After its discovery and identification, an edition was published in the year 1856, under the editorship of Charles Deane, by the Massachusetts Historical Society, based on a transcript made from the original document in London. A photographic facsimile of the manuscript was issued in 1896, in both London and Boston; and upon receipt of the original by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1897, a resolution was passed providing for the printing and publication of a carefully collated edition, together with a report of the proceedings connected with its return from England to America. This edition was duly issued in 1901, and it is from that as a basis that I have prepared the present modernization. My purpose is obvious. To many, the reading of the mediæval English of the original, to which all preceding editions have adhered, would be so laborious as to preclude them from becoming acquainted with it. I have endeavoured to preserve, as far as possible, the atmosphere of the time, while accurately rendering the thought in current language.
As for the writer himself, William Bradford, who, on the death of John Carver, the first Governor of the colony, a few months after their arrival, succeeded him in the Governorship, and remained the guiding genius of its destinies for over thirty years—his character, despite his utter self-repression throughout his writings, can be clearly read between the lines; his marvelous breadth of charity and tolerance; his strong, simple piety; his plain, unselfconscious goodness—all the grandest characteristics of the best traditions of puritanism seem concentrated in him.
But little is known of his life in England. He was born at the village of Austerfield, near Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, and the baptismal entry in the registers of the church is dated March 19th, 1590. His family was of yeoman stock. The first Mrs. Bradford (Dorothy May) was drowned in the harbour soon after the arrival of the Mayflower, by falling overboard. The second wife was a Mrs. Alice Southworth, a widow, to whom, it is supposed Bradford had been attached before his and her first marriage. He wrote his proposal of marriage to her in England, and she came out to him, with two Southworth children. William Bradford died, May 9th, 1657, at 69 years of age.
His dealings in the external affairs of the colony were largely with that class of hypocritical charlatan which successfully turns to perverse account the generous religious impulses of those with whom they hold intercourse. Yet his firm hold on faith, hope, and charity never failed him; he always ascribed to them, until clear proof of dishonour was revealed, the best of motives; taking account of the possibility of misunderstanding; or, in the last resort, making allowance for human weakness in the face of temptation, and forgiving unto seventy times seven. His was the spirit given to Newton, who as he watched a murderer being led to the gallows, exclaimed: “There goes John Newton, but for the Grace of God”; or to Cromwell, in his typical exhortation,—“I beseech you, in the name of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
The reverse side of the picture shows us, indeed, the horrible hypocrisy of the pseudo-puritans of the Weston-Sherley type, who whenever ill-fortune overtook them called upon the name of the Lord in true Pharisaic fashion,—as if to bribe by flattery a frivolous Providence,—playing upon the finest qualities of forbearance and disinterestedness of such men as Bradford and his colleagues, to get advantage of them and rob them usuriously. Such parasites on the true growth of puritanism brought it into disrepute with the undiscriminating of those times,—nor have the results of their evil work (in very truth, the Sin against the Holy Ghost!) yet disappeared; for we find it in the supercilious and suspicious attitude of the orthodox towards dissent in any form, to this day.
The strong grasp of the intellectual and practical side of his and the other Pilgrims’ ideals of religious liberty,—for which, no doubt, they owed a deep debt to that splendid apostolic figure, their old pastor at Leyden, John Robinson,—is evidenced by the clear exposition of their claims, in the answer they gave to charges against them of dissembling in their declaration of conformity to the practices of the French Reformed Churches, and of undue license in differing from those professed forms of worship: