William Bradford (Plymouth Colony governor)

William Bradford ( * March 1590 in Oyster Field, Yorkshire, England; † May 1657 ) was an English author, one of the first settlers in New England and later governor of the Plymouth Colony.

Life

Bradford grew up in Oyster Field, a village near Doncaster in South Yorkshire, on. During his childhood he was influenced by sermons separatist Congregationalists. This meant that he joined in 1606 the separatist congregation in Scrooby ( Nottinghamshire ) and in order to escape with their persecution by the Anglican state church, in 1608 emigrated to the Netherlands. There he learned the production of silk. In 1613 he married the sixteen year-old Dorothy May and had with her two years later a son named John.

Since the English Congregationalists could not make friends with the Dutch Calvinism and they were afraid that their children would alienate them, made a part of the community in 1620 the crossing aboard the Mayflower to the New World. Bradford was one of the authors and signatories of the Mayflower Treaty ( Mayflower Compact) and co-founder of the Plymouth Colony on the bottom of today's Massachusetts. In April of 1621 he was elected as the successor of John Carver as Governor of the colony, which then thirty times repeated, except in the years in which he renounced in favor of Thomas Prence and Edward Winslow. Shortly after his first inauguration he reached in negotiations with Massasoit of the Wampanoag tribe of a waiver of land claims and a peace treaty.

Bradford also organized the first Thanksgiving Day in New England. He also served four times as a Member of the New England Confederation and was twice its president. In his work, History of Plimouth Plantation, which was built between 1620-1647, he describes, among other life in the new colonies. It is considered an important document of early American history.