Dwelling Interior, Plimouth Plantation, Plymouth, Massachusetts (author’s photo)
So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims…William Bradford
Why Do We Call the Mayflower Passengers “Pilgrims”?
The words above, penned (literally) by Plymouth Governor William Bradford, are a reference to the New Testament letter to the Hebrews (11:13). The letter’s eleventh chapter is known as the hall of fame of the faithful, who saw (God’s) promises afar off, and who “confessed that they were 
strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” Bradford would have read this in his well-worn Geneva Bible (he did not use the King James Version). He penned the words early in Chapter VII, “Of their Departure from Leyden…,” in Of Plimouth Plantation, 1620 ~ 1647, his combination history and annual official record of the Plymouth settlement. It was owing to Bradford’s words, “first printed in 1669,” writes Samuel Eliot Morison, “that the Mayflower’s company came eventually to be called the Pilgrim Fathers.” [Note 4, pg. 47, OPP] The term was “first applied exclusively to the Mayflower passengers in the celebration of 1799,” says Morison. [Intro, pg. xxxi, OPP. I use the 1993 reprint pictured here of Morison’s 1952 edition.]
Their homeland ~ England ~ welcomed them no longer, so they risked everything and became travelers ~ pilgrims ~ in search of a new, Earthly home. There was no “safe guarantee,” no insurance that it would work or that they would even survive. But they considered well their purpose and counted the cost, and “they left.” In the words of famed historian, Harvard professor, and Navy Admiral, Samuel Eliot Morison,...
Bradford’s History is a story of a simple people inspired by an ardent faith to a dauntless courage in danger, a resourcefulness in dealing with new problems, an impregnable fortitude in adversity that exalts and heartens one in an age of uncertainty, when courage falters and faith grows dim. It is this story, told by a great human being, that has made the Pilgrim Fathers in a sense the spiritual ancestors of all Americans, all pioneers. (Preface, xii, 1952)
Morison’s own “age of uncertainty” was the birth of a nuclear world, the end of two horrific wars (WWII and Korea), and the beginning of a “cold” one. In order to understand the foundations of America and the founding documents of the United States, we need a true understanding of the Pilgrims. They eschewed safety and risked all to gain the freedom to live and worship as they believed the Bible taught them. And 156 years later, the Founding Fathers claimed “self-evident” truths of “certain unalienable Rights,” “endowed by their Creator,” for which they also, like the Pilgrims, eschewed safety and risked all, pledging their Lives, Fortunes, and sacred Honor to, as British citizens, fight their own government. They chose not to leave. They bravely (almost insanely, considering they defied an empire) stood the ground the Pilgrims bequeathed them.
Half the Pilgrims died soon after arriving at “New Plymouth.” All suffered. A century and a half later, of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, 12 fought in battles as members of state militias, five were captured and imprisoned during the Revolutionary War, 17 lost property as a result of British raids, and five lost their fortunes in helping fund the Continental Army and state militias battle the redcoats. The wife of Georgia’s George Walton was imprisoned on a West Indies island. The Long Island, New York, estate of Francis Lewis was destroyed and his wife imprisoned and repeatedly tortured. [See details at DailySignal.com, the Heritage Foundation]
And so, from the Pilgrim Fathers (and brave Mothers) and the Founding Fathers (and brave Mothers), we inherit our dearly defended “unalienable rights” and the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. This April of 2020, 244 years later, what rights, Land, and Home do we have? What would the Pilgrims say about freedom to worship and freedom to assemble? What would the Founders say about liberty, private property, the freedom to speak, and the freedom to pursue happiness?
Such questions are important. Do they not call all Americans to know and understand the Pilgrims?
And that it cost them something this ensuing history will declare…William Bradford
So, What Do You Really Know About the Pilgrims?
Well, we now know why and when we began to call them “the Pilgrims.” But to have some understanding of their daring decisions and actions, we need to have some understanding of their motivation ~ what they believed and what they sought ~ what they could not exist without. Governor Bradford decided that his record of Plymouth needed an introduction, an explanation “with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things” of “the occasion and inducements” of their radical move to America. Thus, there are seven chapters before the Mayflower even puts to sea.
Very basically, the Pilgrims were a product of the Bible translated into English (John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Geneva Bible, etc.) and the Reformers who wished to correct the errors of the Roman Catholic Church, which the Pilgrims called “popery.” There were Christians who wished to reform and correct the Church, and those who wished to completely separate from it. The Pilgrims were Separatists who, in the words of Bradford, wished the “churches of God” to “revert to their ancient purity and recover their primitive order, liberty and beauty.” They wanted “to have the right worship of God and discipline of Christ…according to the simplicity of the gospel, without the mixture of men’s inventions,” to be ruled only by “the laws of God’s Word,” dispensed by their own “Pastors, Teachers and Elders, etc. according to the Scriptures.” They wanted complete freedom from the priests and bishops of the Catholics and the “episcopal dignity” of the Anglicans. They desired and determined to “walk in all His ways…according to their best endeavours, whatever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them. And that it cost them something this ensuing history will declare.” [OPP, Chapter I]
Such was their desire and determination, straight from the pen of the Pilgrim who would lead them for over 30 years.
Their churches were called Separatist and, later, Congregational. There were churches in “sundry towns and villages,” in Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire. (“Shire” is like a county.) William Bradford joined a group at the house of William Brewster in the village of Scrooby, which organized formally as a Congregational church in 1606. As a member, Bradford endured wrath and scoff from relatives and neighbors. The group was “hunted and persecuted on every side,” their houses “beset and watched night and day.” Some were “taken and clapped up in prison,…and many other sharper things.” [OPP, Chapter I]
So, in 1607 and 1608, they looked to move to the Low Countries, “where they heard was freedom of religion for all men,” others having already gone to live in Amsterdam and elsewhere in Holland. In Part II of this post, we’ll look more closely at what the people we now call Pilgrims endured to earn the words “dauntless courage.”