Read an Excerpt
The American Revelation
Ten Ideals that Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War
By Neil Baldwin St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2005 Neil Baldwin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-0137-6
CHAPTER 1
City on a Hill
The central problem of Puritanism as it affected John Winthrop and New England has concerned men of principle in every age, not least of all our own.
It was the question of what responsibility a righteous man owes to society.
— Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Preface to First Edition, 1958)
Sunday, the Lord's Day, June 6, 1630, dawned at sea with raw wind, rain, fog, and cold, six leagues west of the southern tip of Cape Sable, Nova Scotia. Toward early afternoon the mist lifted. Capt. Peter Milborne spotted land — for the first time in the two long months since the 350-ton Arbella pulled away from Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, stemmed the tide with a slight wind, and slipped past the Needles into the English Channel, beyond Plymouth and Cornwall into the choppy Atlantic.
Following a routine begun as a teenager that he would adhere to for two more decades, the Right Worshipful John Winthrop, Esquire, Governor-elect of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sat at his desk in the small cabin he shared with his two young sons, Stephen and Adam, and in "devilishly difficult," crabbed penmanship made note of the occasion in his notebook — he did not call it a journal, considering his writing to be "history" or "annals." This was as good an occasion as any to drop anchor at thirty fathoms and try some cod fishing, the sea being "somewhat calm" and the boxes of dried salt fish provisions depleted by the many travelers cramped below decks. Within two hours and "with a few hooks," more than sixty "very great" cod were triumphantly pulled from the water, "some a yard and 1/2 long and a yard in compass."
Two days later, continuing south and west into warmer climes, Winthrop sighted Mount Desert Island. "We had now fair sunshine weather," he wrote, "and so pleasant a sweet ether as did much refresh us, and there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden." With the wind behind her, the Arbella passed Camden Hills and Penobscot Bay. A wild pigeon alighted on the deck. As Mount Agamenticus, near York, Maine, loomed into view, Winthrop discerned trees along the shore lowlands. Inspired, he drew a sketch of the coast.
The mackerel were plentiful off Cape Ann, harbingers of a safe arrival. Firing two celebratory cannon shots at four o'clock Saturday morning, the Arbella passed between Little Misery Island and Baker's Island, dropping anchor in the harbor of Salem, "peaceful" in Hebrew, called Naumkeag by the Indians.
John Endecott, provisional leader of the advance settlement in Massachusetts Bay, came aboard in greeting. One-fourth of his people had died during the hard winter just past. Endecott, who had left his home in Devon two years previously, eagerly welcomed the promised transfer of authority to his successor, Governor Winthrop. Venison pasty, beer, and fresh strawberries were served. Weary passengers of the Arbella, women and children and some babies born on the voyage, made their way ashore, joined within the coming days by compatriots from sister ships Jewel, Talbot, and Ambrose, last seen veering away near Georges Bank, south of the Bay of Maine.
John Winthrop knew that before autumn he would have to find — in all practicality, construct — another community, beyond Salem, to accommodate his growing congregation. During the summer they moved up Mystic River to build a church at a new village later called Charlestown. By the end of the first year of the Great Migration to America, seventeen ships delivered to these shores more than one thousand English Protestants, called Puritans because they were determined to reform and "purify" the Church of England while remaining part of it — on their own land and subject to the will of their membership. Winthrop's Trading Company of Massachusetts moved its headquarters to the mouth of the Charles River where Boston was established. By the end of its first decade of life, the Massachusetts colony held fifteen thousand souls within "two days' march" or "a fair day's sail" of each other.
The Puritan pioneer John Winthrop is known as the "most extraordinary, representative man" in the history of the Atlantic world, and the "first citizen of early New England." His grandfather, Adam, was a "wealthy clothier" providing capital for the purchase of wool from Stour Valley sheep farmers. In 1544 Adam Winthrop (the elder), the duly-elected master of the Clothworkers, acquired the manor house of Groton, set on more than five hundred acres in the rolling, rural Suffolk hills and meadows and "quiet horizons" eighty miles from London at the heart of East Anglia. The only son of lawyer-farmer Adam Winthrop (the younger), and his wife, Anne Browne, John Winthrop was born at Edward-stone in Suffolk on January 22, 1588, seven months before the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the British navy.
As children, John and his sisters — Anne, the oldest child; Jane and Lucy, younger than John — enjoyed the unfettered pleasures of country life. The lad developed a bookish, spiritual side. He "caught the fever" of an enduring Calvinist faith in God as the determining force for all mankind. Raised in a devout household, John recalled with humble irony that "from about ten years of age I had some notions of God ... the remembrance whereof many years after made me think that God did love me, but it made me no whit the better."
At fourteen, John was sent up to Trinity, largest of the Cambridge colleges, where he began every day with compulsory 5:00 a.m. prayers. In 1605 he left abruptly to marry a girl four years his elder, Mary Forth of Great Stambridge in Essex. On the birth of their first child, John Jr., in February of the following year, Winthrop the joyous teenaged father started a private "spiritual diary" titled "Experiencia." Written partly in code and now lost, the original manuscript was disparaged by nineteenth-century scholars as "imperfect ... stained and torn in many places, and quite illegible in others ... plainly intended for no eye but his own."
Winthrop's diary was an unsparing, cumulative list of his "many sinnes ... an account-current" against himself. The goal of the harsh soul-searching was to present the author as a spiritual example to his children and grandchildren. In the gradual religious development of a Puritan, the pilgrimage to understanding was lifelong and intensely private. Winthrop monitored his worldly transgressions closely. They ranged from staying up too late at night to overeating and ignoring exercise, from using tobacco to neglecting his wife by spending too many hours tramping through the fields shooting pheasants. These liabilities would have to be overcome if he was ever to reach what his friend John Cotton of Derby — a Puritan preacher whom Winthrop met in Emmanuel College when they were both Cambridge undergraduates — called the "essentiall wisdome."
In 1610, at the age of twenty-two, Winthrop purchased the family property at Groton from his uncle. Following his father's path into the legal profession, Winthrop conducted court sessions at the manor as justice of the peace for Suffolk, settling disputes between farmers. He continued with law education and reading at Gray's Inn, one of the four Inns of Court in central London, where he studied the biblical precedents for judges' rulings. In addition to a focused "habit of command," Winthrop knew that it was customary for a gentleman magistrate judge to bring a sense of spirituality to bear upon his position. After all, his sage friend John Cotton once cautioned, "Zeale is but a wilde-fire without knowledge."
John Winthrop believed that political engagement was a calling equal to ascending to the Christian pulpit. His aspirations as a soldier of the court were to protect the "weale publick," and as a soldier of the Lord to "advance the gospell." This faith in the word of law and the revealed holy "Word" found its roots in the English Puritan tradition. Puritans, thus named beginning in the 1560s, were Protestants who believed that the newly established Church of England should be cleansed of all hierarchical strictures, ceremonies, and polluting rituals remaining from the "smoky for-nace of poperie," the Catholic Church of Rome.
The earliest Protestants were also known as Precisians. Prefiguring the Fundamentalist movement born in America in the years leading up to World War I, the Precisians believed that they were guardians of the text of the Bible as the wellspring for all truths, and that familiarity with its literal message was the natural right of all free-willed people. The Scriptures were God's direct way of communicating to mankind. As such, they should no longer be subjected to the intermediating and arcane interpretations of the priesthood; bishops were resented and condemned by outspoken early Puritans for their arbitrary and unwarranted authority.
The Puritan of John Winthrop's time lived by a succession of moral ideals. First of all he should read the Bible daily and depend upon it as the only guidebook needed along the path toward salvation. He should listen quietly to the "awful and gracious voice of God." He and his family should hope for election to membership in a close-knit community gathered with "one Unitie of Spirite that [will] strengthen and comforte one another, daylie growinge and increasinge in true faythe." Such choices would eventually bring a self-scrutinizing, disciplined man or woman of good character — with hard work and constant attention to the blessed burden of free will — to illumination by the redemptive light of God's grace. Then he would meet his maker face to face in "the perfect beawtie of Sion."
By 1618 John Winthrop had suffered the loss of his first wife, Mary, who had borne him three living sons and a daughter; and his second wife, Tomasine Clopton of Groton, who died in childbirth a year after their marriage. He wedded Margaret Tyndal, daughter of a judge in the nearby town of Great Maplestead. Margaret would be his "sweet spouse" and devoted soul mate, loving her husband with "an unfeigned heart" for thirty years. By 1627 they had four sons. Winthrop was once again settled as the resident squire of Groton Manor, convening the daily morning, evening, and Sabbath "exercises" of prayer with his wife and brood of children, setting tasks for the farm workers, serving on the sewer commission, and hearing petitions from victims of small crimes and disputes in the village.
In 1627 the family considered setting up an additional household in London when Winthrop was named to a prestigious position as an attorney in the Court of Wards and Liveries and admitted to practice in the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, between Fleet Street and the river Thames. He worked there for the next two years and kept a special notebook composed of phrases he heard in noteworthy sermons.
On March 10, 1629, Charles I dismissed Parliament. This imperial action removed the people's ability to petition for legislative recourse for their grievances, and Winthrop was deprived of his attorneyship. Charles's royalist ally, Bishop of London William Laud, chancellor of Oxford and a watchful anti-Puritan with little patience for unorthodox and nonconformist clergymen, ascended to greater power as archbishop of Canterbury. Laud's desire to strengthen established High Church rituals, government, and canon enjoyed the encouragement of the king.
"... [M]y Office is gone, and my Chamber [in London] ... so as I hope, we shall now enjoy each other againe as we desire," John gloomily and wistfully confided to Margaret in one of the many letters he sent while professional affairs kept him in town during court sessions and she remained at Groton. "I am veryly persuaded, God will bringe some heavye Affliction upon this lande, & that speedylye."
In the early summer of 1629, Winthrop departed the Temple and London for the quiet countryside. During July and August, with heaviness in his heart, but in accordance with the Puritan commitment to scholarly writing and publishing of all manner of papers and pamphlets, Winthrop began to compose and codify his first labored thoughts and "grevances" on a "propounded Course" to leave England. He submitted the drafts for critique and commentary to his fellow corporate investors in the Massachusetts Bay Company when they gathered at Bury St. Edmunds near Winthrop's Suffolk homestead, and also at Tattershall in Lincolnshire, on the estate of Winthrop's colleague, the wealthy landowner Isaac Johnson and his wife, the Lady Arbella Fiennes. Winthrop's goal in encouraging the debates was to emerge with an agreed upon template for a principled "removal" from England. At one time Winthrop called the proposal in progress "Arguments and Generall Considerations for the Plantation of New England" and at another, more personally, "Perticular Considerations in the Case of J.W." "Why should any of us go?" melded with "Why should I go?" Winthrop wanted the company's governing partners to understand that the flexible mandate in the charter establishing the "rights and privileges" of their joint-stock commercial trading business made its jurisdiction just as feasible on the soil of the New World as anywhere in England.
In the proposal Winthrop first staked out where he stood on the ideological spectrum of religious dissent. He was not a radical. Those were the other Puritans — called Separatists then, and now known to us as the Pilgrims of the Mayflower — who first fled to Leyden, Holland, then headed from Delfts-Haven across "a sea of troubles before them in expectation" toward Virginia in 1620. Under William Brewster's leadership as their ruling elder, the first 150 Pilgrims landed by navigational accident at Cape Cod and settled in Plymouth Plantation, finding "easiness, plainness, and plen-tifulness in living."
John Winthrop made it clear from the outset of his exhaustively reasoned petition for withdrawal from England that he did not view himself or the members of the company in the same light as Brewster's followers, nor like the Scottish Presbyterians, treasonous zealots whose "wicked myndes" could not accept the idea of remaining within a national church. Separatists even descended to the claim that the churches of England were not legitimate houses of worship, to which Winthrop mildly countered that "the corruption of a thing doth not nullify the thing."
That said, as a sensitive Puritan, John Winthrop was mindful of the buildup of social prejudice against the continuing observance of his type of Protestantism. More and more Puritan preachers were arbitrarily suspended by the Anglican hierarchy, as centralized ecclesiastical courts at Westminster superceded the authority of local congregations that had always served as models for correct Puritan practice.
Winthrop read these disturbing trends as signals that in order for the Protestant Church he cherished to remain strong, it was necessary, if frightening, to "rayse a bullwarke" against the harassments by King Charles and Bishop Laud, and take a dramatic, life-changing risk — "runne the hazard" of seeking refuge and renewal elsewhere in the world. Winthrop waxed enthusiastic, imagining the fresh rewards of engendering new parishes in a faraway church "in the infancye ... as by timely assistance may growe stronge and prosper."
Winthrop wrote with ambivalence and melancholy of his beloved green and pleasant England, "this lande growes wearye of her Inhabitants." A Stour Valley countryman for his whole life and the descendant of country gentlemen, he was depressed by the depletion of natural resources through overcrowding, overbuilding, and speculation. Such economic conditions were the root causes for "Intemperance" and "excesse of Ryot." It was sadly no longer worth "striving heere for places of habitation" when "the whole earthe is the Lordes garden and he hath given it to the sons of men to be till'd and improved by them." Winthrop's own "Meenes here are shortned," he wrote, "[and] I shall not be able to continue in this place and imploy-ment ... many of our owne people do perish for want of sustenance."
Winthrop's own brother-in-law, Deane Tyndal, had written him to express "lament when I think of your journey." Was it not, Tyndal asked, a "great wronge to our owne Churche and Countrye to take away the good people?" Once one embraced the universality of the concept of the true church, Winthrop replied, this objection dissipated. The true church needed to be everywhere. A particular good example of the church in one place would by nature bolster all the others.
What about the possibility that Winthrop's concerns for the future of his native country were exaggerated? Although for many years he had "feared Judgement," he could not have known, of course, that civil war in England would break out a dozen years later. Was it sensible — or just willful — to depart from his "fruitfull Lande" aware of the overwhelming odds that whole families might "perish by the way" or meet unforeseen dangers when, or if, they reached the fatal shores ahead? To these speculations John Winthrop responded that faithful emigrants will "trust God's Providence" and accept that the imperative of the Gospel was that it be preached "to all Nations."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The American Revelation by Neil Baldwin. Copyright © 2005 Neil Baldwin. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
