king and the Church of England, now an ocean away.
The Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower to establish the Plymouth Colony had made a permanent break from England and had rejected the church that bore its name. After another ten years, mainstream Puritans came to Massachusetts, bent on reforming—that is, purifying—Anglicanism. Both sects were followers of John Calvin, the charismatic, fiercely unbending French reformer whose theology, an offshoot of Martin Luther’s, emphasized God’s sovereignty, teaching his followers that only those elected by Him would find salvation in eternity.3
The Puritans had maintained an uneasy truce with King James I, but his successor, Charles I, was a threat to their community and religion. As royal intolerance intensified to oppression and persecution, they looked for guidance in the Bible. For many, the Book of Exodus provided an answer. They would put an ocean between themselves and an earthly sovereign. That would allow them to be the masters of their own land and servants of their Lord.
Unlike the Jewish people in their Egyptian captivity, the Puritans did not think of themselves as turning their backs on an alien land. Rather, they set off to New England to keep the flame of their faith burning until they could return to Old England after it had become purified under a Puritan government. Their sojourn came to be called an “errand into the wilderness.” Their errand was not intended to be forever; when finished, they expected, they would go home.4
Even though they were increasingly out of favor with King James, the Puritans were well established in English business circles. Under their influence, a commercial venture in Massachusetts Bay was reorganized as a colony. The company’s directors hoodwinked His Britannic Majesty by presenting him a prolix charter that was larded with scrapes and bows to the throne. The numbing verbiage seems to have camouflaged a deliberate omission: there was no mention of where the annual stockholders’ meeting would be held in the future. That sleight of pen permitted the directors to move the seat of governance from London to the colony itself, thereby weakening the control of the Crown.5
The principal agent of that step toward quasi-independence was John Winthrop, the first leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In that capacity, he was both a holdout of a vanishing system of governance—religious patriarchy—and an experimenter of proto-republicanism.
He arrived in an eleven-vessel fleet in 1630, leading a flock of more than seven hundred to their new home. The Great Puritan Migration was underway.
Winthrop’s fame today comes largely from a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity” that he reputedly wrote aboard the Arbella, the flagship of the flotilla. Yet there are no known contemporaneous sources that would fix a date and a place where he might have delivered it, or how it was received, or whether he delivered it at all. For all we know, Winthrop’s message bypassed his seagoing parish and went right into a time capsule, widely unknown for three centuries, until his prophecy became a paean to a strong, righteous example of the world during the Cold War and after. In 1989 Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia, consecrated it as “a kind of Ur-text” of the national narrative.6
Of the some six thousand words Winthrop composed, a single sentence was elevated to a place in U.S. presidential rhetoric in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”7 John Kennedy made it a bipartisan trope for his successors to invoke America’s moral strength, magnanimity, optimism, championship of liberty, and leadership in the world. Ronald Reagan picked it up, as did Barack Obama.
Winthrop’s immediate, practical, and somber purpose was to fortify his fellow passengers’ faith that the Lord would protect them in the face of certain and unknown perils. His message was one of pride, responsibility, and liberation. As the Puritans waited for the purification of the Church of England and England itself, Winthrop loosened the rule of the colony from London by moving its seat from Salem to Charlestown without royal permission. This ploy gave the Puritans a latent, subtle advance in the direction of self-governance.8
While future generations came to revere Winthrop as an inspiring orator, in his own time he earned respect for his leadership in his alternating terms as governor and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts over twenty years. He exercised a firm but moderate and fair hand in an era of authoritarianism, initiating several features of governance that would serve the United States a century later. He reined in zealotry among the clergy and respected the laity’s consent for the laws of the community by encouraging petitioning and participation in civil debates.9
As governor, Winthrop was no democrat by today’s definition, nor was he a despot. The minutes of the first meeting in Charlestown suggest that he invited male members of the community to attend the sessions and voice their reactions to the decisions. The outcome of the meeting “was fully assented unto by the general vote of the people.”10
Winthrop rejected “mere”—that is, direct—democracy, but he had laid the ground for the representative, or indirect, variant that the founders would favor.11
John Winthrop was one of the most judicious and esteemed conservatives in the New England hierarchy, and Roger Williams—a courageous, passionate radical—was one of the most controversial.
Before joining the Great Migration, Williams believed that Puritanism needed to be cleansed of corruption and made more inclusive. He had no patience with the idea that Puritans were the vanguard of the Church of England. Much as the Pilgrim separatists, he wanted a clean split from Anglicanism.
Williams was the ultimate freethinker who scandalized much of the community by openly expressing his personal convictions with ferocious eloquence, particularly when he was railing against efforts to impose how people should pray: “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.”12 He had his God, others had theirs. He joined the Baptist branch of Protestantism, which shared his toleration of other sects.
Williams was unswerving in his own faith, and he was certain that those of other denominations were destined to hell. But that ultimate judgment was for God to make. He was also convinced that mortals were unable to interpret God’s law wisely; when they tried, they distorted its meaning, stumbling into earthly injustice. From that premise, he opposed—loudly and often—theocracy in general, and any government involvement in religious affairs. He denounced the concept of Christendom, since it was a political domain of the church, and scoffed at the British Crown’s claim to jurisdiction over the settlements in North America.
He had left England several months after the Arbella flotilla, arriving in Massachusetts in early 1631. He spent five years in the Bay Colony, quickly earning a reputation as a gadfly on many issues, especially the settlers’ cruel treatment of the Native Americans. He chided his fellow Englishmen for bigotry and rejected a law that permitted the eviction of natives from their villages and hunting grounds. He was put on trial for “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions,” charges that amounted to sedition and heresy.13
Winthrop disagreed with almost all of Williams’s unorthodox ideas and concurred with the General Court’s decision to expel him from the Bay Colony. Nevertheless, Winthrop suggested that Williams turn ignominy into opportunity: he should move to Narragansett Bay, neighboring the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for “high and heavenly and public ends.”14 Williams took the advice and founded the colony of Rhode Island as a haven for those “distressed for conscience.” He stood his ground on expansive religious tolerance:
There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and
