Readings in American History

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WILLIAM BRADFORD William Bradford, the second governor of Massachusetts, was born in the village of Austerfield, England, in 1588. Cotton Mather quaintly remarks that the people of this town were as unacquainted with the Bible as the Jews do seem to have been with part of it in the days of Josiah, a most ignorant and licentious people. Bradford's parents died while he was a child, leaving him comfortably provided for. At an early age he became a convert to the beliefs of the Puritans, in spite of the protests and anger of the relatives with whom he was living, and at eighteen he determined to go to Holland, the refuge for the persecuted of that faith. After some months, part of which time he spent in prison at Boston (England) for attempting to leave the country, he arrived at Amsterdam. He at once began to support himself by making silk, and when he became of age, he converted his estate in England into money and with this set up in business for himself. He does not seem to have succeeded in this, for Mather says, He found some of his designs, by the providence of God, frowned upon, which he judged a correction bestowed by God upon him for certain decays of internal piety, whereinto he had fallen; the consumption of his estate he thought came to prevent a consumption in his virtue. When the project of emigrating to America was proposed, Bradford entered into it most heartily. He helped in the purchase of the Mayflower, and with the other Pilgrims came to America in 1620. In the first landing from the ship, his wife accidently fell overboard and was drowned. At the death of Carver, in 1621, he was chosen governor, and to his rule for the next thirty years the struggling colony owedits success. The Pilgrims found they could not make a success of communism and in 162...