American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

BREWSTER, WILLIAM

(1560, Nottinghamshire, England-l0 April 1644, Plymouth, MA). Education: Matriculated, Peterhouse, Cambridge, England, but did not graduate. Career: Retainer to William Davison, ambassador to Holland, 1583-89; bailiff and postmaster, Scrooby, England, 1590-1608; printer, Leyden, Holland, 1609-19; church elder, Plymouth, New England, 1620-44.

Known to history as "Elder" Brewster, this Pilgrim exhibits in his career the importance in early Congregational history of learned and pious lay men and women. Brewster was born to a well-to-do English family and served for a time as secretary to William Davison, English Ambassador to Holland. With the death of his father in 1590 he became postmaster and bailiff of Scrooby, where he might have lived out a quiet life, esteemed by his neighbors, except that he was attracted to Puritanism.

Under James I, ministers whom Brewster admired were removed from office for their Puritan leanings. In support of their faith, Brewster hosted separatist meetings of like-minded Puritans, including William Bradford·, at his house. These dissenters feared oppression from the authorities and emigrated in 1608 to Holland, where Brewster supported himself as a printer and became ruling elder of a Puritan congregation. In 1619 he was one of the leaders of Pilgrim efforts to gain a charter for settlement in New England.

During the first winter in New England Brewster is credited with being one of the hardiest and most helpful of the settlers. John Robinson·, the Pilgrim pastor, did not immigrate from Holland. So Brewster was left as religious leader of the community. Lacking -formal training and ordination in the ministry, he "could not administer the sacraments, but he served in other ways as pastor. (The Pilgrims did not have a regular minister until 1629.) The fact that they survived religiously for almost a decade with lessons and prayer, but no sacraments, is an indication of the emphasis placed by early Congregationalists on preaching. The essence of religion was the word; lacking a regular minister, the Pilgrims were content to serve their God under the direction of Elder Brewster.

Bibliography
B: DARB. 65-66; SH 2. 264; NCAB 7. 30-31; DAB 3.29-30; Ashbel Steele, Chief of the Pilgrims: The Life and Time of William Brewster (Philadelphia. 1857); Dorothy Brewster, William Brewster of the Mayflower: Portrait of a Pilgrim (New York, 1971).