Pilgrims

Pilgrims. The term “Pilgrims” (used in Hebrews 11:13) was first bestowed by William Bradford (1590–1657), governor and historian of Plymouth Colony, on the band of Separatist Puritans that originated in Scrooby, England, but it has been variously applied to all passengers on the Mayflower, to everyone who settled in Plymouth before 1631, and to any early inhabitant of the colony. Separatists differed from most Puritans in maintaining that the Church of England could not be reformed and that true churches were constituted only by members' voluntary covenants. Since Separatists challenged the Church of England's exclusive claim to ecclesiastical legitimacy, and thus traduced its royal head, they suffered persecution; in the years around 1600, hundreds fled to the Netherlands, a haven for religious dissenters from throughout Europe. In 1608 the Scrooby meeting escaped to Amsterdam, relocating to Leiden under pastor John Robinson the next year. Economic hardship, fears that their children were becoming too Dutch, and concern about their neighbors' religious laxity encouraged some congregants to contemplate a further move; in 1620 roughly one‐third of them sailed to America. Having signed the Mayflower Compact aboard ship on 11 November, the Pilgrims went ashore on Cape Cod and, after several exploratory expeditions, established their permanent colony at Plymouth. Although contemporary accounts do not mention landing at a specific site, traditions about the colonists' first footfall on “Plymouth Rock” were locally extant by the mid–eighteenth century and became part of New England's founding legend during the 1770s, when patriots used the Pilgrims' earlier flight from persecution to excoriate contemporary British tyranny. As notions of national identity cohered in the nineteenth century, the Pilgrims were (and continue to be) widely apotheosized for exemplifying such core American virtues as industry, piety, fortitude, self‐government, and tolerance.
See also Colonial Era; Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; Puritanism; Religion.

Bibliography

William Bradford , Of Plymouth Plantation 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 1952.

Charles L. Cohen