On a day recently in September 1630 , John Billington – an original Plymouth colonist , a landholder , a founding father to two Son , a signer of the Mayflower Compact – put up with a noose around his cervix . He was sentence tohang . When he died that day , John Billington left behind a legacy of grim historic firsts for the New World .
John Billington was the first person to institutionalise a crime in the dependency . He had the dubious honor of being the first European to be convicted of murder in this new place . And he was the first to be do by the state in the New World .
Earlier that same yr , John Billington shot a untested humanity named John Newcomen , who had recentlymigratedto Plymouth . Billington “ waylaid ” the gentleman’s gentleman and shot him in the woods . Gov. William Bradford , in his historical treatise “ Of Plymouth Colony 1620 - 1647 , ” does n’t name the understanding for the shooting [ source : Pilgrim Hall ] .
The hanging death of Billington was a result of a long , tense history between his family and thePuritanleaders . The Billingtons ( John , his married woman Eleanor and sons , John and Francis ) were part of theStrangers– a grouping of people who came to America on the Mayflower with the stiffly pious Separatist Puritans . Billington is believed to have been a Catholic , the branch of Christianity that the Puritans dislike the most .
On the voyage to North America , John Billington was involved in an attempted mutiny aboard the Mayflower . With tension already high-pitched , one of John Billington ’s Son nearly blew up the ship . In a cabin full of people , the unnamed son can his father’sgunbeside an open drum half - filled with gunpowder . Despite the peril of the muzzle flash of the shot igniting the gunpowder , no one was suffer .
Once in the Modern humankind , Billington ’s bad repute continued to train , after he scoffed at being press into military service by Captain Miles Standish . He was endanger with being hogtied , but is said to have begged for forgiveness . The records show that the leaders choose not to carry out the sentence since it was , after all , Billington ’s first offense . It would just be his last .
Billington apparently disliked how thePuritanleaders governed the settlement , for he is say to have pass a lot of his time involved in what would be consider anti - governmentsubversion . He was entail in a plot to override the Plymouth Colony ’s spiritual governance . When pressed , however , he denied having been a player and was n’t tear .
Over the trend of the 10 age that the family sour its plot of realm at Plymouth , accorded to them by the British crown as members of the first colonist political party , the Billingtons appear to have proceed to make trouble for their fellow colonists .
John Billington Jr. ended up lost in the Sir Henry Joseph Wood and wandered 20 mil before happening upon a Native American village . From there , he was taken to another Greenwich Village farther away . A group of 10 adult male set canvas to come up the male child and found him at what is now Cape Cod after a couple of days . When he returned to the dependency , he was “ behung with beads ” [ beginning : Fiore ] .
William Bradford specially dislike the family . The long - fourth dimension regulator of Plymouth say the Billingtons were “ one of the blue kinfolk ” to get along to the settlement [ source : Morison ] .
From these accounts , it may seem that John Billington and his family were the scourge of the early Plymouth Colony . But not so tight . John Billington may serve as a monitory marker to remind us that chronicle is never so clear - swing .
Billington as a Voice of Reason
Even after thehangingof John Billington , his mob continue to get in trouble with the authorities . In June 1636 , Eleanor Billington was locked in the stemma and whip . She also had to pay five pound sterling after she was found shamed of smear one of her neighbors . John ’s granddaughter Dorcas was condemn to tanning after being found guilty of fornication when she was about 22 .
These events seem incriminating , but many of the particular are missing . The book for Eleanor ’s slander face does n’t hold what was actually said or why . And while the charges against Dorcas Billington are especially tantalizing , the criminal offense was n’t rare . Many other offenders were charge and sentenced for criminal conversation , some of whom were latermarried . And the Plymouth tourist court record are rife with other intimate charge , including bestiality , rape and sodomy . These law-breaking seem outstandingly rampant considering they took place in a Ithiel Town with a universe that reached just 775 people by 1690 [ source : Deetz ] .
And while the bureau were interest with John Billington Jr. wandering in the forest and meeting with the Native Americans on Cape Cod , his wage hike may have unknowingly set up the first peaceable liaison between the settler and the people native to the area .
In historical accounts such as these , it ’s important to commemorate that even original sources should be carry with a grain ofsalt . For example , the famous " Mourt ’s Relation , " write in 1622 by William Bradford ’s first cousin George Morton , also a Separatist , is used as one of just a few primary sources for the study of Plymouth Colony . It should be noted , however , that " Mourt ’s Relation " was written to draw more funding for the newcomer colony .
Gov. William Bradford was perhaps the most ardent critic of John Billington . In a 1625 letter to a Mr. Cushman back in England , Bradford mentions that " Billington still rails against you , and threaten to arrest you , I know not wherefore ; he is a knave [ scoundrel ] , and so will survive and break down " [ source : Johnson ] . Bradford , as governor , was the man who ordered Billington ’s death .
There is a great lack of basal sources left by the Strangers and other minority in Plymouth Colony . But one of the few surviving document casts Billington in a unlike light source . In 1637 , the English trader Thomas Morton write in " The New English Canaan " that Billington " was beloved of many . " He also implies Billing took aim against Newcomen with ruefulness , and that perhaps Newcomen may wear a niggling more of the blame for the trial - in [ source : Morton ] .
Was John Billington plainly a troublemaking manslayer , a rogue – or scoundrel – as the leader of the Plymouth Colony wrote ? Or are Billington ’s subversive acts a glimpse at unrest in Plymouth that is n’t prominent in the chronicle of the dependency ? It ’s difficult to say . Bradford clear dislike Billington . And Bradford himself literally wrote the history . We will never get it on exactly what variety of person John Billington really was . But he reminds us to be calculated and to examine chronicle with open minds .
