PREFACE.
Lord Bacon assigns the highest meed of earthly fame to the builders of states, conditores imperiorum. The Pilgrim Fathers were members of that guild, and their story belongs to the heroic age of America. “No other state,” remarks Stoughton, “can boast of such an origin, and adorn its earliest annals with a tale as true as it is beautiful, as authentic as it is sublime.”
But aside from the honor which attends the Forefathers as the founders of empire, they march down the ages crowned with richer and more fragrant laurels; for they built not for themselves or for posterity alone, in imitation of Romulus, and Cyrus, and Cæsar, and Ottoman; they planted also for justice and for God.
Therefore they are the rightful heirs of the benedictions of mankind; while to Americans they are doubly precious as “the parents of one-third of the whole white population of the Republic.”
Of course, the career of the Pilgrim Fathers has been often painted: but the interest of the story is inexhaustible, and its thrilling incidents exhibit the wisdom, the benevolence, the faithfulness of God in so many glorious and delightful aspects, and are so replete with facts whose inevitable tendency is to inflame the love, strengthen the faith, and awaken the wondering gratitude of the human heart, that it is impossible to wear the “twice-told tale” threadbare by repetition. Besides, a thoughtful scholar, who has himself laid his garland of everlasting upon the altar of the Pilgrims, has reminded us that, “however well history may have been written, it is desirable that it should be re-written from time to time by those who look from an advanced position, giving in every age to the peculiar and marked developments of the past, a simple, compact, and picturesque representation.”
This sketch runs back to the cradle of Puritanism; summarily rehearses the causes of which it was begotten; accompanies the Pilgrim Fathers across the channel, and depicts the salient features of their residence in Holland, and the reasons which pushed them to further removal; sails with them in the “Mayflower” over the stormy winter sea; recites in some detail, the incidents which accompanied the settlement at Plymouth and the kindred colonies throughout New England; and closes in the sunshine of that league between the New England colonies which was the prophecy of the Republic, and the crowning glory of those who are distinctively called the Pilgrim Fathers.
The volume has been carefully written, and it is fortified by copious marginal notes and citations from a wide range of authoritative authors, from the humblest diarist to the most pretentious compiler who struts in the rustling satin of history.
This is “a round unvarnished tale,” and aims at fairness of statement, not copying that dealer in history whom Lucian derides for always styling the captain of his own party an Achilles, and the leader of the opposition a Thersites. Nor does it enter the “debateable ground” of sectarian polity; but avoiding alike the Scylla of indiscriminate encomium, and the Charybdis of controversy, it merely reproduces the broad and unquestioned facts of an emigration whose purpose and whose result was to
New York, January, 1867.