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Thankful for William Bradford · Commentary - TJ Meadows

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  Speaker 1: One more Thanksgiving thought. This week, with politics of late
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  Speaker 1: feeling loud, tense and divided, I found myself looking back
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  Speaker 1: about four hundred years to a man who held a
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  Speaker 1: fragile community together, William Bradford, the longtime governor of Plymouth Colony.
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  Speaker 1: We all remember the basics of the Pilgrims from school,
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  Speaker 1: the Mayflower, the brutal winner, but the real story behind
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  Speaker 1: the simplified version is Bradford, a man whose humility, discipline,
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  Speaker 1: and calm steadiness kept a struggling community from falling apart.
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  Speaker 1: Bradford was born in fifteen ninety, orphaned young, expected to
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  Speaker 1: become a farmer, but instead he joined a group of
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  Speaker 1: religious dissidents, the Separatists. They were harassed, even jailed for
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  Speaker 1: rejecting the Church of England, so they fled to Holland
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  Speaker 1: and eventually took the biggest gamble of their lives. Boarding
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  Speaker 1: the Mayflower in sixteen twenty one hundred and two passengers
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  Speaker 1: packed into a wooden ship crossing the Atlantic with no
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  Speaker 1: guarantee they'd make it, And when they did finally reach
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  Speaker 1: the New World, far north of where they intended to land,
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  Speaker 1: things started to break down. Some passengers argued they weren't
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  Speaker 1: bound to any authority anymore. Order was slipping. Bradford and
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  Speaker 1: the other leaders stepped up with a simple idea, the
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  Speaker 1: Mayflower Compact, not a constitution, not a grand declaration, just
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  Speaker 1: to promise to form a government based on consent and
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  Speaker 1: majority rule. But that tiny document planted one of the
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  Speaker 1: earliest seeds of democracy on this continent. And then winter hit.
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  Speaker 1: By spring, half the colonists were dead, including Bradford's wife.
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  Speaker 1: The governor died too, and at just thirty years old.
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  Speaker 1: The survivors turned to Bradford as their new governor, and
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  Speaker 1: he delivered for decades. He negotiated peace with the wampin
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  Speaker 1: Ogg that allowed Plymouth to survive. He kept the colony
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  Speaker 1: stable through disease, famine, and infighting. He even left the
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  Speaker 1: Pilgrims in buying out their debt from English investors, bringing
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  Speaker 1: themselves from outside control. And then he wrote it all down.
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  Speaker 1: His journal of Plymouth Plantation is still one of the
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  Speaker 1: most important first hand accounts in American history, the only
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  Speaker 1: full record written by someone who lived it. What comes
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  Speaker 1: through in that journal is simple. Bradford wasn't loud, he
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  Speaker 1: wasn't flashy. He believed communities survive when people bind themselves
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  Speaker 1: to common laws and when leaders choose humility over ego.
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  Speaker 1: In a moment when shouting often drowns out everything else,
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  Speaker 1: Bradford offers a reminder you don't have to raise your
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  Speaker 1: voice to lead. You just have to hold a community
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  Speaker 1: together when it matters most. That's something worth being grateful for.