OF THE TOWN OF PLYMOUTH. WITH A SKETCH OF THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF SEPARATISM. ILLUSTRATED. BY WILLIAM T. DAVIS, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE PILGRIM SOCIETY. PHILADELPHIA: J. W. LEWIS & CO. 1885. WID-LC F 74 .୮୪ COPYRIGHT, 1885, BY J. W. LEWIS & Co. HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MAR 5 1987 +251 PREFACE. THE body of this work was written as a contribution to a voluminous history of the County of Plymouth. The available space was necessarily limited, and consequently much of the material essential to the completeness of a town history was sparingly used, while some of it was omitted altogether. To remedy a defect, which would be more apparent in a distinct and separate work, an appendix has been added, in which some of the subjects referred to in the principal text are more fully treated, and some new subjects are introduced, which the reader may find interesting and instructive. The numbers attached to the notes in the appendix correspond to numbers placed either between the lines of the principal text in connection with the subjects to which the notes relate, or in the spaces, where they might properly be inserted. The author has long realized the want of a concise, yet comprehensive, sketch of the Pilgrim movement, its origin, its growth, its development, and of the settlement at Plymouth to which it finally led; a history from which the general reader might obtain, without laborious research, that amount of information which every educated man should possess in the various departments of American history. All readers are not students. The student of Pilgrim history is not deterred from the task of reading Mourt's "Relation," Morton's "New England's Memorial," Thacher's "History," Young's "Chronicles," Benjamin Scott's Lectures," and the formidable array of other books, ancient and modern, bearing directly or indirectly on the subject. But the general reader looks for a single work, in which he may find an intelligible and connected outline of the whole Pilgrim story. It has been the aim of the author to meet both the wants of this class of readers and, to a limited extent at least, the more exacting demands of the antiquary and historian. In this aim he hopes that he has not wholly failed. PLYMOUTH, March 20, 1885. |