This week, with so much division in our own politics, I found myself looking back four hundred years to a leader who held a fragile community together — William Bradford, the longtime governor of Plymouth Colony.

Most of us know the broad outlines of the Pilgrim story: the Mayflower, the brutal first winter, maybe the Thanksgiving pageant we sat through in school. But behind that simplified version stands Bradford — a man whose discipline, humility, and steadiness carried a struggling community through chaos and tragedy that make our modern challenges feel modest by comparison.

Born in 1590 in the English village of Austerfield, Bradford was orphaned young and expected to become a farmer. Instead, he joined a group of religious dissenters known as the Separatists, who rejected the Church

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