Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647

The Pilgrims' immediate goal in traveling to America is to escape religious persecution in England; in settling New Plymouth, they hope to create a community where they will be free to worship as they choose. If the Pilgrims' goal was simply religious tolerance, they could have simply stayed in Leyden. As Bradford explains it, the Pilgrims' goal is not simply to worship freely, but rather to create a community that allows them to grow spiritually. Looked at from this perspective, Leyden has several disadvantages, including a lack of opportunities to proselytize—or, as Bradford describes it, "laying good foundations […] for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world" (13). More than anything else, though, it is the economic pressures of life in Leyden that stand in the way of creating the kind of society the Pilgrims envision. According to Bradford, the difficulty of making a living in Leyden discourages would-be Pilgrims from relocating there, while the necessity of sending children out to work exposes them to corrupting influences. In Plymouth, the Pilgrims hope to free themselves from these worldly concerns in order to establish a purer and more spiritual community.

This proves more difficult than the Pilgrims initially suspected it would be. In part, this is because the Pilgrims remain indebted to English investors and business partners and are therefore constantly involved in business negotiations. It is also because Plymouth is open to settlers who do not share the Pilgrims' religious convictions. Although the Pilgrims are tolerant of these outsiders in the sense that they do not force them to conform to their own practices, they view them with suspicion. Bradford, for instance, implies that many of these settlers are overly concerned with the kinds of financial and material preoccupations the Pilgrims came to America to escape, saying that "those [who] came on their own venture looked for greater things than they found" (83). Others are simply "unruly"(80), but the implication in both cases is similar: even after relocating to America, the Pilgrims fear that immoral forces will undercut the godliness of their community.

Arguably, many of the challenges to the Pilgrims' model Christian community come from within. Although the Pilgrims cite their sense of community as a reason investors should back their proposal to establish a colony, they are actually quite disunited in the period leading up to the Mayflower's voyage. Cushman, for instance, writes in a letter that "if ever [the Pilgrims] establish a colony, God works a miracle; especially considering […] how disunited we are among ourselves" (40). Although this initial disunity seems to subside in the early days of settling Plymouth, financial pressures eventually destabilize the colony's sense of fellowship once again. Allerton's side dealings flout Robinson's parting advice to focus on the "general convenience" (37) rather than self-interest, but Allerton's behavior is in some sense symptomatic of a broader tension that exists in Plymouth. Although the kind of capitalism they practice is strongly shaped by their religious beliefs, its individualism also threatens to undermine the sense of shared Christian values that inspired Plymouth in the first place. This becomes particularly clear in the account's later chapters, when settlers who have achieved financial success choose to move away from the community—and church—in order to pursue further economic gains.

Although many factors played a role in the development of modern capitalism, one that historians often cite as important—particularly in the development of American capitalism—was the birth of Calvinist-inspired Protestant sects. Because these groups maintained that certain individuals were simply "predestined" for salvation (and others for damnation), they tended to look to a person's traits and actions as an indication of their spiritual status. One influential variation on this idea was that an individual destined for salvation would possess qualities like patience, frugality, and industriousness. As a result, many Protestant groups saw hard work as a moral imperative, an idea that became central to later American beliefs about self-made men. The Protestant work ethic also contributed to the development of capitalism in more concrete ways—for instance, by providing hard-working and thrifty individuals with accumulated wealth that they could invest in new business ventures.

The Pilgrims in Bradford's account are one of these Calvinist-inspired groups, and the financial success they enjoy at Plymouth establishes a pattern that would repeat itself over and over in New England as religious groups continued to settle there. When the Pilgrims initially arrive in Plymouth, they own next to nothing; in fact, they are in debt to the English investors. In an effort to pay off these debts and establish a comfortable living for themselves, the Pilgrims experiment with different methods of production, including a form of communal farming. According to Bradford, this experiment is unsuccessful because individuals have no incentive to work, a critique that is often made of socialist economies to this day.

The Pilgrims therefore decide to allow each household to grow its own corn, which produces good results: "The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to plant corn, while before they would allege weakness and inability; and to have compelled them would have been thought great tyranny and oppression" (76). Significantly, Bradford ties the failure of the Pilgrims' experiments with communal ownership to religion: "Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself. I answer, seeing that all men have this failing in them, that God in His wisdom saw that another plan of life was fitter for them" (76).

The Pilgrims’ unluckiness with investors and agents means that they never manage to achieve the success they might have under other circumstances. They do, however, manage to pay off their debts in the closing chapters of Bradford's account, and several of the settlers grow quite wealthy. This prosperity has its downsides since it is a contributing factor in the movement of many settlers away from Plymouth. However, while Plymouth itself was eventually outstripped by larger colonies, its fusion of capitalism and Christianity helped shape American history for centuries.