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On January 12, 1588, John Winthrop, English Puritan lawyer and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was born in Edwardstone, England (d. 1649). From the article:
"John Winthrop, (born January 22 [January 12, Old Style], 1588, Edwardstone, Suffolk, England—died April 5 [March 26], 1649, Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony [U.S.]), first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the chief figure among the Puritan founders of New England.
Background and early life
Winthrop’s father was a newly risen country gentleman whose 500-acre (200-hectare) estate, Groton Manor, had been bought from Henry VIII at the time of the Reformation. Winthrop thus belonged to a class—the gentry—that became the dominant force in English society between 1540 and 1640, and he early assumed the habit of command appropriate to a member of the ruling class in a highly stratified society.
At age 15 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. At age 17 he married the first of his four wives—Mary Forth, daughter of an Essex squire—and the next year the first of his 16 children was born. Like many members of his class, Winthrop studied law, served as justice of the peace, and obtained a government office; from 1627 to 1629 he was an attorney at the Court of Wards and Liveries. For more than 20 years Winthrop was primarily a country squire at Groton, with no discernible interest in overseas colonization.
He was an ardently religious person. From his early teens Winthrop threw himself into scriptural study and prayers, and gradually he trained himself into a full-fledged Puritan, convinced that God had elected him to salvation—or, in Puritan terms, to “sainthood.” His religious experience reinforced his elitist outlook, but it also made him a social activist. Like other prominent Puritans, Winthrop dedicated himself to remaking, as far as possible, the wicked world as he saw it, arguing that “the life which is most exercised with tryalls and temptations is the sweetest, and will prove the safeste.”
During the late 1620s, Winthrop felt increasingly trapped by the economic slump that reduced his landed income and by Charles I’s belligerent anti-Puritan policy, which cost him his court post in 1629. When, in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company obtained a royal charter to plant a colony in New England, Winthrop joined the company, pledging to sell his English estate and take his family to Massachusetts if the company government and charter were also transferred to America. The other members agreed to these terms and elected him governor (October 20).
Journey to America
As Winthrop sailed west on the Arbella in the spring of 1630, he composed a lay sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in which he pictured the Massachusetts colonists in covenant with God and with each other, divinely ordained to build “a Citty upon a Hill” in New England, with “the eyes of all people” on them:
If we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world; we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all believers in God; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us, till we are forced out of the new land where we are going.
Some critics have seen Winthrop as a visionary utopian while others have seen him as a social reactionary, but most obviously he was urging his fellow colonists to adopt the combination of group discipline and individual responsibility that gave Massachusetts such immediate and lasting success as a social experiment.
For the remaining 19 years of his life, Winthrop lived in the New England wilderness, a father figure among the colonists. In the annual Massachusetts elections he was chosen governor 12 times between 1631 and 1648, and during the intervening years he sat on the court of assistants or colony council. His American career passed through three distinct phases. On first arrival, in the early 1630s, he did his most creative work, guiding the colonists as they laid out a network of tightly organized towns, each with its church of self-professed saints. Winthrop himself settled at Boston, which quickly became the capital and chief port of Massachusetts. His new farm on the Mystic River was much inferior to his former estate at Groton, but Winthrop never regretted the move, because he was free at last to build a godly commonwealth.
Opposition against him built up after a few years, however, as dissidents kept challenging Winthrop’s system in the mid- and late 1630s. He was nettled when the freemen (voters) insisted in 1634 on electing a representative assembly to share in decision making. He found Roger Williams’s criticism of church-state relations intolerable, though he secretly helped Williams to flee to Rhode Island in 1636. And he took it as a personal affront when numerous colonists chose to migrate from Massachusetts to Connecticut.
Conflict with Anne Hutchinson
The greatest outrage to Winthrop by far, however, came when Anne Hutchinson, a mere woman, gained control of his Boston church in 1636 and endeavoured to convert the whole colony to a religious position that Winthrop considered blasphemous. It was he who led the counterattack against her. His victory was complete. Hutchinson was tried before the general court—chiefly for “traducing the ministers”—and was sentenced to banishment.
Hutchinson, Anne
Hutchinson, Anne Anne Hutchinson. Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers Memorial Edition by Elbert Hubbard, 1916
Winthrop wrote about the event in his journal in 1637:
The Court…charged her with diverse matters, as her keeping two public lectures every week in her house…and for reproaching most of the ministers (viz., all except Mr. Cotton) for not preaching a covenant of free grace, and that they had not the seal of the Spirit, nor were able ministers of the New Testament; which were clearly proved against her….And, after many speeches to and fro, at last she…vented her revelations; among which…that she had it revealed to her that she should come into New England, and should here be persecuted [presented], and that God would ruin us and our posterity, and the whole state, for the same. So the Court proceeded and banished her.
Later Hutchinson was tried before the Boston church and formally excommunicated. She established a settlement on Aquidneck Island (now Rhode Island) in 1638 and four years later, after the death of her husband, settled on Long Island Sound. Winthrop sanctimoniously noted her tragic misfortunes—her deformed stillborn baby and her murder by Indians—as proof of God’s judgment against heretics.
By 1640 Winthrop had become the custodian of Massachusetts orthodoxy, suspicious of new ideas and influences and convinced that God favoured his community above all others. In 1641 Winthrop went against the recent trend of accepting Native Americans and Africans into the church (an outgrowth of the Great Awakening) and helped write the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the first legal sanctioning of slavery in North America. Indeed, Winthrop owned at least one Native American slave, taken during the Pequot War (1636–37). (As slavery grew in New England, it was more typical for Native American slaves to be sent to the West Indies, where they were exchanged for enslaved Africans.) With the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, many New Englanders returned home to fight against Charles I. Winthrop, however, stayed in America, and he criticized the course of the Puritan Revolution. His own political philosophy was best summed up in a speech of 1645, in which he defined the magistrates’ authority very broadly and the people’s liberty very narrowly.
But Winthrop was never a petty tyrant, and the colonists respected and loved him to the end. His tender side is best revealed by the loving letters he exchanged with his third wife, Margaret, who was his helpmate from 1618 to 1647. The most notable of his sons, John Winthrop the Younger (1606–76), was a talented scientist and governor of Connecticut. Later descendants have figured prominently in American politics, science, and business.
After struggling six weeks with “a feverish distemper,” he died, age 61, in the spring of 1649. By force of character Winthrop had persuaded the colonists to adopt many—though by no means all—of his pet social and political ideas. The detailed journal that he kept during his years in America is a prime source for the early history of Massachusetts, and his copious file of correspondence and memoranda gives an exceptionally full impression of his activities and personality."
"John Winthrop, (born January 22 [January 12, Old Style], 1588, Edwardstone, Suffolk, England—died April 5 [March 26], 1649, Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony [U.S.]), first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the chief figure among the Puritan founders of New England.
Background and early life
Winthrop’s father was a newly risen country gentleman whose 500-acre (200-hectare) estate, Groton Manor, had been bought from Henry VIII at the time of the Reformation. Winthrop thus belonged to a class—the gentry—that became the dominant force in English society between 1540 and 1640, and he early assumed the habit of command appropriate to a member of the ruling class in a highly stratified society.
At age 15 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. At age 17 he married the first of his four wives—Mary Forth, daughter of an Essex squire—and the next year the first of his 16 children was born. Like many members of his class, Winthrop studied law, served as justice of the peace, and obtained a government office; from 1627 to 1629 he was an attorney at the Court of Wards and Liveries. For more than 20 years Winthrop was primarily a country squire at Groton, with no discernible interest in overseas colonization.
He was an ardently religious person. From his early teens Winthrop threw himself into scriptural study and prayers, and gradually he trained himself into a full-fledged Puritan, convinced that God had elected him to salvation—or, in Puritan terms, to “sainthood.” His religious experience reinforced his elitist outlook, but it also made him a social activist. Like other prominent Puritans, Winthrop dedicated himself to remaking, as far as possible, the wicked world as he saw it, arguing that “the life which is most exercised with tryalls and temptations is the sweetest, and will prove the safeste.”
During the late 1620s, Winthrop felt increasingly trapped by the economic slump that reduced his landed income and by Charles I’s belligerent anti-Puritan policy, which cost him his court post in 1629. When, in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company obtained a royal charter to plant a colony in New England, Winthrop joined the company, pledging to sell his English estate and take his family to Massachusetts if the company government and charter were also transferred to America. The other members agreed to these terms and elected him governor (October 20).
Journey to America
As Winthrop sailed west on the Arbella in the spring of 1630, he composed a lay sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in which he pictured the Massachusetts colonists in covenant with God and with each other, divinely ordained to build “a Citty upon a Hill” in New England, with “the eyes of all people” on them:
If we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world; we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all believers in God; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us, till we are forced out of the new land where we are going.
Some critics have seen Winthrop as a visionary utopian while others have seen him as a social reactionary, but most obviously he was urging his fellow colonists to adopt the combination of group discipline and individual responsibility that gave Massachusetts such immediate and lasting success as a social experiment.
For the remaining 19 years of his life, Winthrop lived in the New England wilderness, a father figure among the colonists. In the annual Massachusetts elections he was chosen governor 12 times between 1631 and 1648, and during the intervening years he sat on the court of assistants or colony council. His American career passed through three distinct phases. On first arrival, in the early 1630s, he did his most creative work, guiding the colonists as they laid out a network of tightly organized towns, each with its church of self-professed saints. Winthrop himself settled at Boston, which quickly became the capital and chief port of Massachusetts. His new farm on the Mystic River was much inferior to his former estate at Groton, but Winthrop never regretted the move, because he was free at last to build a godly commonwealth.
Opposition against him built up after a few years, however, as dissidents kept challenging Winthrop’s system in the mid- and late 1630s. He was nettled when the freemen (voters) insisted in 1634 on electing a representative assembly to share in decision making. He found Roger Williams’s criticism of church-state relations intolerable, though he secretly helped Williams to flee to Rhode Island in 1636. And he took it as a personal affront when numerous colonists chose to migrate from Massachusetts to Connecticut.
Conflict with Anne Hutchinson
The greatest outrage to Winthrop by far, however, came when Anne Hutchinson, a mere woman, gained control of his Boston church in 1636 and endeavoured to convert the whole colony to a religious position that Winthrop considered blasphemous. It was he who led the counterattack against her. His victory was complete. Hutchinson was tried before the general court—chiefly for “traducing the ministers”—and was sentenced to banishment.
Hutchinson, Anne
Hutchinson, Anne Anne Hutchinson. Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers Memorial Edition by Elbert Hubbard, 1916
Winthrop wrote about the event in his journal in 1637:
The Court…charged her with diverse matters, as her keeping two public lectures every week in her house…and for reproaching most of the ministers (viz., all except Mr. Cotton) for not preaching a covenant of free grace, and that they had not the seal of the Spirit, nor were able ministers of the New Testament; which were clearly proved against her….And, after many speeches to and fro, at last she…vented her revelations; among which…that she had it revealed to her that she should come into New England, and should here be persecuted [presented], and that God would ruin us and our posterity, and the whole state, for the same. So the Court proceeded and banished her.
Later Hutchinson was tried before the Boston church and formally excommunicated. She established a settlement on Aquidneck Island (now Rhode Island) in 1638 and four years later, after the death of her husband, settled on Long Island Sound. Winthrop sanctimoniously noted her tragic misfortunes—her deformed stillborn baby and her murder by Indians—as proof of God’s judgment against heretics.
By 1640 Winthrop had become the custodian of Massachusetts orthodoxy, suspicious of new ideas and influences and convinced that God favoured his community above all others. In 1641 Winthrop went against the recent trend of accepting Native Americans and Africans into the church (an outgrowth of the Great Awakening) and helped write the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the first legal sanctioning of slavery in North America. Indeed, Winthrop owned at least one Native American slave, taken during the Pequot War (1636–37). (As slavery grew in New England, it was more typical for Native American slaves to be sent to the West Indies, where they were exchanged for enslaved Africans.) With the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, many New Englanders returned home to fight against Charles I. Winthrop, however, stayed in America, and he criticized the course of the Puritan Revolution. His own political philosophy was best summed up in a speech of 1645, in which he defined the magistrates’ authority very broadly and the people’s liberty very narrowly.
But Winthrop was never a petty tyrant, and the colonists respected and loved him to the end. His tender side is best revealed by the loving letters he exchanged with his third wife, Margaret, who was his helpmate from 1618 to 1647. The most notable of his sons, John Winthrop the Younger (1606–76), was a talented scientist and governor of Connecticut. Later descendants have figured prominently in American politics, science, and business.
After struggling six weeks with “a feverish distemper,” he died, age 61, in the spring of 1649. By force of character Winthrop had persuaded the colonists to adopt many—though by no means all—of his pet social and political ideas. The detailed journal that he kept during his years in America is a prime source for the early history of Massachusetts, and his copious file of correspondence and memoranda gives an exceptionally full impression of his activities and personality."
John Winthrop | American colonial governor
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America's Forgotten Founding Father: Creating a Puritan City on a Hill (2003)
John Winthrop (12 January 1587/88 – 26 March 1649) was an English Puritan lawyer and one of the leading figures in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the...
Thank you, my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that January 12 is the anniversary of the birth of English Puritan lawyer and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop who was born near the family seat at Groton in Suffolk County, England.
America's Forgotten Founding Father: Creating a Puritan City on a Hill (2003)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VZP2Kglutk
1. background from encyclopedia.com/people/history/us-history-biographies/john-winthrop-1588-1649
"John Winthrop
John Winthrop (1588-1649) was an American colonial political leader and historian. He was a very effective governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his journal constitutes an important historical record.
John Winthrop was the dominant figure in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His actions and ideas gave the Puritan colony much of its essential character. He had close dealings with other important Puritan leaders, such as John Cotton, minister of the church to which he belonged, and Roger Williams, with whom he disagreed.
Winthrop was born on Jan. 22, 1588, near the family seat at Groton in Suffolk County, England. He was the only son of a prosperous landowner, Adam Winthrop. After an education near home, John was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1602; he studied there less than two years. At the age of 17, by family arrangement, he was married to Mary Forth. Sometime during his early years Winthrop had a religious experience. He adopted a zealous Puritanism as a result, although he decided not to enter the ministry.
Winthrop's wife produced six children before she died in 1615. He remarried but his wife died a year later. In 1618 he married Margaret Tyndale, and their relationship is one of the most attractive in history. During these years Winthrop devoted himself to the tasks of a country landholder and also to the study of law; he was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1613 for legal studies. In 1617 he was made a justice of the peace in Suffolk, where he lived at Great Stambridge on dowry lands. In 1627 he was appointed attorney in the Court of Wards and Liveries. But Winthrop found several sources of dissatisfaction. The government's religious and political policies and his unprosperous personal circumstances led to a concern to provide for his sons.
Massachusetts Bay Colony
In 1629 Winthrop agreed to go to America with the Massachusetts Bay Company, and in October, after a decision had been reached to put the government of the colony in the hands of resident leaders, he was elected governor. He was involved in all of the elaborate financial arrangements and preparation of supplies, and in April 1630 he sailed on the Arbella, one of the four ships that brought 400 Puritan men, women, and children to America. Under his direction the colonists settled in the area around the Charles River. Despite courageous and able leadership, 200 colonists died during the first winter, and 80 returned home in the spring. Among the earliest deaths was that of Winthrop's son Henry. Because of the discouragement that resulted among the colony's backers, Winthrop was obliged to invest increasing amounts of his money to provide supplies. The rest of his family did not arrive until the fall of 1631, by which time the colony was solidly established.
Winthrop provided a rationale for the colony in a sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," which he delivered on the Arbella. Here he argued for the creation of a community covenanted with God, and "a due form of government civil and ecclesiastical." The colony was to be "as a city upon a hill" for all to observe. The key provision was that full citizenship in the colony was to be available only to church members. The churches first established adopted a congregational polity, and thenceforth only congregational churches were permitted. The government took great authority unto itself, though it was based on a principle of representative government. Though in 1634 the citizens elected Thomas Dudleyas the colony's governor, Winthrop continued to be the most influential man in the colony.
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In 1630 Winthrop had begun keeping a diary, which he continued to the year of his death. It is a dry, cold, and impersonal document in style, but it is of immense interest because of its contents. He referred to it as a journal, though it has been called The History of New England. In it he reports nearly all important events of the day; he also offers profound insights into the essential nature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Religious Controversies
Among the problems that Winthrop and the colony had to deal with was the highly individualistic Roger Williams. The separatist religious tendencies that Williams had demonstrated in Salem (he urged the church there to renounce the other churches of the colony) led to his being banished. But Winthrop, who recognized that Williams's views were potentially destructive to the colony he had helped create, also recognized the virtues of the man and maintained a friendship with him.
Winthrop was much less sympathetic to another member of the church in Boston, Anne Hutchinson. She had arrived in Massachusetts in 1634 to enjoy the preaching of the Reverend John Cotton, whom she had admired in England. As early as 1636 Winthrop began to record a list of the theological errors that she was teaching in weekly meetings. Her fundamental teaching was that "the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person," in a person called to eternal salvation, and that the presence of the indwelling spirit, not good works, was the evidence that one was of the elect. This antinomianism undercut the Puritan emphasis on the Bible as interpreted by learned ministers, and Mrs. Hutchinson went so far as to declare that only two ministers in the colony, Cotton and John Wheelwright, were among the elect.
At this time, 1636, Winthrop was not governor; the man who held the post was Henry Vane, also a member of Cotton's church and an admirer of Mrs. Hutchinson. Many of the other members of the church also admired her, but she and her views were much less popular outside Boston. Eventually Winthrop was reelected governor, replacing Vane, and Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson were banished. Though Winthrop had been in the minority in his church, his position once more triumphed. In both the Williams episode and the antinomian controversy Winthrop's role was to create unity within the colony, unity necessary for survival.
Winthrop's governorship was intermittent (he served 1630-1633, 1637-1639, 1642, 1646-1648). The General Court recognized his services in 1637 by granting him substantial acreage in Concord. Unfortunately his incapable overseer brought Winthrop deeply into debt. When he put up his Boston house and much of his land for sale, the colony gave him gifts of land and money.
Political Spokesman
The Puritan Revolution in England in the early 1640s led many American colonists to feel a sense of responsibility to their mother country. Some of Winthrop's friends urged his return. But Winthrop felt that it was his duty to remain in Massachusetts. When Dr. Robert Child announced that he was asking Parliament to reduce the colony's independence and abolish the right to limit the vote to church members, Child was promptly fined for contempt, and Winthrop announced that the colony recognized no appeal to higher authority.
One of Winthrop's most important roles in the life of the colony was his spokesmanship for its political position; he sometimes created public policy as well. In July 1645 he delivered a speech to the General Court in which he defined two kinds of liberty: natural (liberty to do as one wishes, "evil as well as good," a liberty that should be restrained) and civil (liberty to do good). It is only the latter, according to Winthrop, that is "the proper end and object of authority." In other words, it is the duty of government to stop corruption and to promote justice, not to promote the general welfare.
Winthrop died on March 26, 1649. Although circumstances in time changed the nature of the colony, many of the features of the New England way he had established remained. He more than anyone else gave the colony its distinctive character, and he was largely responsible for the flourishing state of its 15,000 inhabitants at the time of his death. Of his several children, the most notable was John, who became governor of the colony of Connecticut.
Further Reading
The best edition of Winthrop's journal, The History of New England, 1630-1649, is that of James Savage (2 vols., 1825-1826; rev. ed. 1853). The Massachusetts Historical Society's Winthrop Papers (5 vols., 1929-1947) is also of great value. Other important sources are Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (1864-1867), and the splendid biography by Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958). A valuable discussion of Winthrop in relation to Boston's growth is Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (1965)."
2. thearda.com/timeline/persons/person_24.asp
background on John Winthrop
Time Period 1/22/1588 - 3/26/1649
Description
John Winthrop was influential in the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Not only did he lead a group of Puritan colonists from England to America in 1630, but he oversaw the prosperity of the colony while governor off and on from 1629 to his death in 1649 (he was elected governor prior to their emigration). He is famous for delivering his speech entitled "A Modell of Christian Charity," where he compared the flight of the Puritans to the Book of Exodus, and described their future colony as a "city on a hill," a place for others to observe an ideal Christian society. His also was involved in the banishment of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, although he still maintained a friendship with Williams until his death in 1649.
Narrative
John Winthrop was born in Edwardstone, England at Groton Manor on January 22, 1588. While at Trinity College, Cambridge, he embraced a Puritan understanding of theology. Winthrop left Cambridge to marry the first of his four wives, manage his family's estate, practice law, and serve as a justice of the peace. In the 1620s, tensions mounted between the Puritans and King Charles I when the Puritans accused Charles, who had married a Catholic French princess, of seeking to return the Church of England closer to Rome in theology and liturgy. As a result of a royal crackdown on religious dissenters, Winthrop lost his job and became increasingly involved in Puritan plans to leave England. Winthrop, along with other Puritans, obtained a charter from the king to plant the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England. He was named governor of the colony in 1629 while the group prepared to set sail, finally leaving England on April 7, 1630.
While crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Arbella, Winthrop delivered a renowned sermon entitled “A Modell of Christian Charity.” Winthrop compared the flight of the Puritans to the story of Exodus. He described the future colony as an ideal Puritan society, where colonists could uphold their obligations to God and one another. Winthrop believed that the world was watching this grand Puritan experiment and, in an echo of Jesus's words in Matthew chapter 5:14, he declared that Massachusetts "shall be as a city on a hill." Winthrop's words did not attract much attention at the time, but when the sermon was published in the 1830s, his message of American providential destiny fit the national mood as Americans celebrated the anniversaries of the American Revolution and its surviving veterans. Since then, Winthrop's borrowed imagery has become a staple in the rhetoric of politicians from both sides of the aisle, including John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Of the roughly 400 people who landed with Winthrop in Massachusetts on June 12, 1630, only half would survive the first winter as starvation and disease wracked the colony. Winthrop's own son died that winter, but he thrived in the difficult conditions, writing his wife "I like so well to be heer, as I doe not repent my comminge: and if I were to come againe, I would not have altered my course, though I had foreseene all these Afflictions: I never fared better in my life, never slept better, never had more content of minde." Winthrop served as the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and held office for intermittently twelve one-year terms between 1629 and his death in 1649. His strong rule--which helped the colony survive during that first terrible winter--ruffled feathers as the colony boomed in 1633-1634 when a "Great Migration" of between 15,000 and 20,000 settlers fled another royal crackdown in England.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was organized along loosely theocratic lines, with voting citizenship offered only to those white men in good standing with the colony's official church. A faction within the colony pushed for more democratic representation as well as a code of law restricting what they saw as arbitrary rulings from magistrates (the inciting incident involved possession of a runaway pig). Winthrop resented this intrusion onto his authority. He condemned democracy as "the meanest and worst of all forms of government," a violation of the fifth of the Ten Commandments which read, "Honor thy Father and thy Mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Despite the fact that Puritans were themselves dissident Anglicans, Winthrop, fueled by his conception of a watchful government that united church and state, would not brook dissent.
Winthrop's authoritarian rule had major consequences for the religious history of New England. In 1635, Winthrop expelled Roger Williams from the colony for proclaiming that colony's church had been corrupted because of its continued ties to the established Church of England. Winthrop and Williams remained friendly however, writing letters for years after Williams's banishment; indeed, despite playing a role in Williams's conviction, Winthrop warned him that he would soon be arrested, allowing the dissident to slip away from the colony and found a new colony at Providence, Rhode Island. Winthrop also banished Anne Hutchinson in 1637 for antinomianism, or denying the final authority of Scripture, when she accused the leadership of laboring under a "covenant of works," charged words that Puritans typically reserved for Catholics."
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America's Forgotten Founding Father: Creating a Puritan City on a Hill (2003)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VZP2Kglutk
1. background from encyclopedia.com/people/history/us-history-biographies/john-winthrop-1588-1649
"John Winthrop
John Winthrop (1588-1649) was an American colonial political leader and historian. He was a very effective governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his journal constitutes an important historical record.
John Winthrop was the dominant figure in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His actions and ideas gave the Puritan colony much of its essential character. He had close dealings with other important Puritan leaders, such as John Cotton, minister of the church to which he belonged, and Roger Williams, with whom he disagreed.
Winthrop was born on Jan. 22, 1588, near the family seat at Groton in Suffolk County, England. He was the only son of a prosperous landowner, Adam Winthrop. After an education near home, John was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1602; he studied there less than two years. At the age of 17, by family arrangement, he was married to Mary Forth. Sometime during his early years Winthrop had a religious experience. He adopted a zealous Puritanism as a result, although he decided not to enter the ministry.
Winthrop's wife produced six children before she died in 1615. He remarried but his wife died a year later. In 1618 he married Margaret Tyndale, and their relationship is one of the most attractive in history. During these years Winthrop devoted himself to the tasks of a country landholder and also to the study of law; he was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1613 for legal studies. In 1617 he was made a justice of the peace in Suffolk, where he lived at Great Stambridge on dowry lands. In 1627 he was appointed attorney in the Court of Wards and Liveries. But Winthrop found several sources of dissatisfaction. The government's religious and political policies and his unprosperous personal circumstances led to a concern to provide for his sons.
Massachusetts Bay Colony
In 1629 Winthrop agreed to go to America with the Massachusetts Bay Company, and in October, after a decision had been reached to put the government of the colony in the hands of resident leaders, he was elected governor. He was involved in all of the elaborate financial arrangements and preparation of supplies, and in April 1630 he sailed on the Arbella, one of the four ships that brought 400 Puritan men, women, and children to America. Under his direction the colonists settled in the area around the Charles River. Despite courageous and able leadership, 200 colonists died during the first winter, and 80 returned home in the spring. Among the earliest deaths was that of Winthrop's son Henry. Because of the discouragement that resulted among the colony's backers, Winthrop was obliged to invest increasing amounts of his money to provide supplies. The rest of his family did not arrive until the fall of 1631, by which time the colony was solidly established.
Winthrop provided a rationale for the colony in a sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," which he delivered on the Arbella. Here he argued for the creation of a community covenanted with God, and "a due form of government civil and ecclesiastical." The colony was to be "as a city upon a hill" for all to observe. The key provision was that full citizenship in the colony was to be available only to church members. The churches first established adopted a congregational polity, and thenceforth only congregational churches were permitted. The government took great authority unto itself, though it was based on a principle of representative government. Though in 1634 the citizens elected Thomas Dudleyas the colony's governor, Winthrop continued to be the most influential man in the colony.
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In 1630 Winthrop had begun keeping a diary, which he continued to the year of his death. It is a dry, cold, and impersonal document in style, but it is of immense interest because of its contents. He referred to it as a journal, though it has been called The History of New England. In it he reports nearly all important events of the day; he also offers profound insights into the essential nature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Religious Controversies
Among the problems that Winthrop and the colony had to deal with was the highly individualistic Roger Williams. The separatist religious tendencies that Williams had demonstrated in Salem (he urged the church there to renounce the other churches of the colony) led to his being banished. But Winthrop, who recognized that Williams's views were potentially destructive to the colony he had helped create, also recognized the virtues of the man and maintained a friendship with him.
Winthrop was much less sympathetic to another member of the church in Boston, Anne Hutchinson. She had arrived in Massachusetts in 1634 to enjoy the preaching of the Reverend John Cotton, whom she had admired in England. As early as 1636 Winthrop began to record a list of the theological errors that she was teaching in weekly meetings. Her fundamental teaching was that "the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person," in a person called to eternal salvation, and that the presence of the indwelling spirit, not good works, was the evidence that one was of the elect. This antinomianism undercut the Puritan emphasis on the Bible as interpreted by learned ministers, and Mrs. Hutchinson went so far as to declare that only two ministers in the colony, Cotton and John Wheelwright, were among the elect.
At this time, 1636, Winthrop was not governor; the man who held the post was Henry Vane, also a member of Cotton's church and an admirer of Mrs. Hutchinson. Many of the other members of the church also admired her, but she and her views were much less popular outside Boston. Eventually Winthrop was reelected governor, replacing Vane, and Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson were banished. Though Winthrop had been in the minority in his church, his position once more triumphed. In both the Williams episode and the antinomian controversy Winthrop's role was to create unity within the colony, unity necessary for survival.
Winthrop's governorship was intermittent (he served 1630-1633, 1637-1639, 1642, 1646-1648). The General Court recognized his services in 1637 by granting him substantial acreage in Concord. Unfortunately his incapable overseer brought Winthrop deeply into debt. When he put up his Boston house and much of his land for sale, the colony gave him gifts of land and money.
Political Spokesman
The Puritan Revolution in England in the early 1640s led many American colonists to feel a sense of responsibility to their mother country. Some of Winthrop's friends urged his return. But Winthrop felt that it was his duty to remain in Massachusetts. When Dr. Robert Child announced that he was asking Parliament to reduce the colony's independence and abolish the right to limit the vote to church members, Child was promptly fined for contempt, and Winthrop announced that the colony recognized no appeal to higher authority.
One of Winthrop's most important roles in the life of the colony was his spokesmanship for its political position; he sometimes created public policy as well. In July 1645 he delivered a speech to the General Court in which he defined two kinds of liberty: natural (liberty to do as one wishes, "evil as well as good," a liberty that should be restrained) and civil (liberty to do good). It is only the latter, according to Winthrop, that is "the proper end and object of authority." In other words, it is the duty of government to stop corruption and to promote justice, not to promote the general welfare.
Winthrop died on March 26, 1649. Although circumstances in time changed the nature of the colony, many of the features of the New England way he had established remained. He more than anyone else gave the colony its distinctive character, and he was largely responsible for the flourishing state of its 15,000 inhabitants at the time of his death. Of his several children, the most notable was John, who became governor of the colony of Connecticut.
Further Reading
The best edition of Winthrop's journal, The History of New England, 1630-1649, is that of James Savage (2 vols., 1825-1826; rev. ed. 1853). The Massachusetts Historical Society's Winthrop Papers (5 vols., 1929-1947) is also of great value. Other important sources are Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (1864-1867), and the splendid biography by Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958). A valuable discussion of Winthrop in relation to Boston's growth is Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (1965)."
2. thearda.com/timeline/persons/person_24.asp
background on John Winthrop
Time Period 1/22/1588 - 3/26/1649
Description
John Winthrop was influential in the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Not only did he lead a group of Puritan colonists from England to America in 1630, but he oversaw the prosperity of the colony while governor off and on from 1629 to his death in 1649 (he was elected governor prior to their emigration). He is famous for delivering his speech entitled "A Modell of Christian Charity," where he compared the flight of the Puritans to the Book of Exodus, and described their future colony as a "city on a hill," a place for others to observe an ideal Christian society. His also was involved in the banishment of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, although he still maintained a friendship with Williams until his death in 1649.
Narrative
John Winthrop was born in Edwardstone, England at Groton Manor on January 22, 1588. While at Trinity College, Cambridge, he embraced a Puritan understanding of theology. Winthrop left Cambridge to marry the first of his four wives, manage his family's estate, practice law, and serve as a justice of the peace. In the 1620s, tensions mounted between the Puritans and King Charles I when the Puritans accused Charles, who had married a Catholic French princess, of seeking to return the Church of England closer to Rome in theology and liturgy. As a result of a royal crackdown on religious dissenters, Winthrop lost his job and became increasingly involved in Puritan plans to leave England. Winthrop, along with other Puritans, obtained a charter from the king to plant the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England. He was named governor of the colony in 1629 while the group prepared to set sail, finally leaving England on April 7, 1630.
While crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Arbella, Winthrop delivered a renowned sermon entitled “A Modell of Christian Charity.” Winthrop compared the flight of the Puritans to the story of Exodus. He described the future colony as an ideal Puritan society, where colonists could uphold their obligations to God and one another. Winthrop believed that the world was watching this grand Puritan experiment and, in an echo of Jesus's words in Matthew chapter 5:14, he declared that Massachusetts "shall be as a city on a hill." Winthrop's words did not attract much attention at the time, but when the sermon was published in the 1830s, his message of American providential destiny fit the national mood as Americans celebrated the anniversaries of the American Revolution and its surviving veterans. Since then, Winthrop's borrowed imagery has become a staple in the rhetoric of politicians from both sides of the aisle, including John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Of the roughly 400 people who landed with Winthrop in Massachusetts on June 12, 1630, only half would survive the first winter as starvation and disease wracked the colony. Winthrop's own son died that winter, but he thrived in the difficult conditions, writing his wife "I like so well to be heer, as I doe not repent my comminge: and if I were to come againe, I would not have altered my course, though I had foreseene all these Afflictions: I never fared better in my life, never slept better, never had more content of minde." Winthrop served as the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and held office for intermittently twelve one-year terms between 1629 and his death in 1649. His strong rule--which helped the colony survive during that first terrible winter--ruffled feathers as the colony boomed in 1633-1634 when a "Great Migration" of between 15,000 and 20,000 settlers fled another royal crackdown in England.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was organized along loosely theocratic lines, with voting citizenship offered only to those white men in good standing with the colony's official church. A faction within the colony pushed for more democratic representation as well as a code of law restricting what they saw as arbitrary rulings from magistrates (the inciting incident involved possession of a runaway pig). Winthrop resented this intrusion onto his authority. He condemned democracy as "the meanest and worst of all forms of government," a violation of the fifth of the Ten Commandments which read, "Honor thy Father and thy Mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Despite the fact that Puritans were themselves dissident Anglicans, Winthrop, fueled by his conception of a watchful government that united church and state, would not brook dissent.
Winthrop's authoritarian rule had major consequences for the religious history of New England. In 1635, Winthrop expelled Roger Williams from the colony for proclaiming that colony's church had been corrupted because of its continued ties to the established Church of England. Winthrop and Williams remained friendly however, writing letters for years after Williams's banishment; indeed, despite playing a role in Williams's conviction, Winthrop warned him that he would soon be arrested, allowing the dissident to slip away from the colony and found a new colony at Providence, Rhode Island. Winthrop also banished Anne Hutchinson in 1637 for antinomianism, or denying the final authority of Scripture, when she accused the leadership of laboring under a "covenant of works," charged words that Puritans typically reserved for Catholics."
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