John Cotton

English-born colonial American religious leader

• Born: December 4, 1584
• Birthplace: Derby, England
• Died: December 23, 1652
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony

One of the foremost clergymen who defined the religious practices of early New England colonists, Cotton was a key architect of Congregationalism.

Early Life

John Cotton was the son of Roland Cotton, an attorney in Derby, England. Cotton attended the Derby Grammar School and entered Trinity College, Cambridge University, at about the age of thirteen. He received a B.A. in 1602. In 1603, he was elected a fellow (a member of the faculty) at Cambridge’s Emmanuel College, from which he received an M.A. in 1606. While at Emmanuel, Cotton served at various times as tutor, catechist, and dean. He developed close friendships with several Cambridge contemporaries, with whom he cooperated later in his career, including Thomas Hooker , Richard Sibbes, Thomas Goodwin, and Thomas Weld. These men were in part responsible for Cotton’s conversion to Puritanism and his transformation into a zealous Calvinist reformer working within the Church of England. Emmanuel College was a center of Puritan activity at Cambridge, and Cotton was soon recognized as one of the movement’s key spokespeople.

Cotton was ordained into the ministry in 1610, and in 1612, the corporation of Saint Botolph’s Church in Boston, Lincolnshire, chose him as their vicar. He was an active preacher whose popularity attracted many believers, including both laypersons such as Anne Hutchinson and fellow English clergymen, who traveled to Boston to hear him and study under him. His Puritan stand began to involve him in clashes with the authorities, however, including an incident in which he was suspected of having inspired iconoclastic vandalism against some of the statues and stained glass in the church.

The support of prominent laymen, such as the earl of Lincoln, protected Cotton for a while. In 1632, however, he was called to defend himself before William Laud’s Court of High Commission. Cotton was in contact with the leaders of the Puritan exile community in the Netherlands, and he had supported the Puritan migration to Massachusetts, preaching the farewell sermon to the Winthrop fleet in 1630. Fearing that Laud and others would effectively silence him if he remained in England, Cotton decided to emigrate to New England in 1633.

Life’s Work

Upon his arrival in the Massachusetts Bay Colony town of Boston, Cotton was elected by the congregation of Boston’s church to be their teacher, one of the two ministerial positions in the church. His evangelical preaching in the months that followed stirred a religious revival in which many were “born again” and shared the stories of their spiritual rebirth with their fellow believers. From this phenomenon, a requirement evolved for anyone who sought full membership in the colony’s churches to produce a narrative of his or her personal conversion.

The Puritan settlers were attempting gradually to shape an orthodox system of faith and a unified church structure that would be a model for England and the rest of the world. To achieve this goal, the settlers needed to achieve consensus on matters that had been subjects for speculation and debate when the Puritans were a dissenting and largely powerless minority within the established Church of England. There were, however, continual doctrinal disputes within the Church in New England. Cotton’s conflicts with Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson are both examples of such disputes, the eventual resolution of which further defined the colonial polity.

Cotton was a key figure in this ongoing definition of Massachusetts’s religious orthodoxy. In his dispute with Roger Williams, which was carried on in print into the 1640’s, Cotton was the foremost spokesperson for the New England belief that the state, while institutionally separate from the church, had a responsibility to safeguard religion by acting against those whose beliefs threatened the order of the churches.

In the Antinomian controversy, Anne Hutchinson (who had followed Cotton to the New World) claimed Cotton as her inspiration when she argued that there was no connection between saving grace and human works. Hutchinson argued that because the elect had been sanctified by God, there was no need for them to devote themselves to good works in order to ensure their salvation. Salvation was contingent not upon a Covenant of Works but rather upon a Covenant of Grace. Cotton tried to maintain a middle ground that asserted God’s freedom to act in various ways on people’s souls. When Hutchinson’s increasing radicalism threatened to divide and hence to destroy the newly established church, Cotton joined his clerical brethren in their decision to denounce her.

Despite suspicions aroused by his ambiguous position in the early phases of the Antinomian controversy, Cotton maintained and expanded his position as the foremost interpreter of Puritanism in New England. He was a principalarchitect of the Congregational ecclesiastical polity, which allowed each congregation of believers to control its own affairs, in consultation with neighboring churches but free from the supervision of any hierarchical church authority. Cotton argued for the value of this system in a series of tracts: The True Constitution of a Particular Visible Church (1642), The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England (1645), and The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared (1648).

Cotton’s books were directed at an English audience that was in the process of restructuring its own church order as part of the Puritan Revolution. They were published in London through the efforts of English friends, such as Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, who were advocates of New England Puritanism. As the unity of English Puritanism fragmented in the 1640’s, Cotton identified himself with the Congregational faction of the Independent coalition that opposed the imposition of a national Presbyterian system. His publications and those of other colonial clergymen were intended to support Congregational Independency as advanced by clergymen such as Goodwin and by civil leaders such as Oliver Cromwell .

In 1651, Cotton gave evidence of his continued support for the revolutionary cause in England when he preached a sermon explaining and justifying the 1649 execution of King Charles I . In his sermon, Cotton set forth his belief in the limits of civil authority and the right of the people to resist tyranny. He believed that the events in England signaled the approach of the millennium as foretold in Scripture. Cotton died on December 23, 1652, still hopeful that New England Puritanism would prevail in England and that the millennium would soon follow.

Significance

Cotton was one of the most influential members of the founding generation of New England Puritans, a position he achieved by his abilities but which was reinforced by his status as one of the ministers of the Boston church. He helped to define the Congregational system of church governance, and he persuaded New England to accept the Calvinist belief in humankind’s dependence on God’s grace. He defended colonial religious practices against domestic critics such as Roger Williams and against English Presbyterian authors. He was one of the clergymen who shaped New Englanders’ belief that they were a people in covenant with God, a people whose example would transform the world. His views were carried on and defended to later generations by his grandson, Cotton Mather.

Bibliography

Bremer, Francis J. “In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 37 (January, 1980): 103-124. Contains Cotton’s 1651 sermon justifying the execution of Charles I, prefaced by an introduction discussing Cotton’s political theory and his views on the English Puritan Revolution.

Bush, Sargent, Jr., ed. The Correspondence of John Cotton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Bush, a prominent scholar of early American literature, edited and annotated this collection of Cotton’s extant correspondence.

Cotton, John. John Cotton on the Churches of New England. Edited by Larzer Ziff. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. A well-introduced and annotated edition of some of Cotton’s major works on church organization.

Emerson, Everett H. John Cotton. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1965. A volume in Twayne’s United States Authors Series, this study focuses on Cotton’s published works, summarizing them and providing worthwhile analysis.

Fichte, Joerg O. “The Negotiation of Power in John Cotton’s Commentaries on Revelation.” In Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630-1860, edited by Bernd Engler, Joerg O. Fichte, and Oliver Scheiding. Tübingen, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher, 2002. Examines how Cotton analyzed the Book of Revelation to determine the proper relationship of church and state.

Hall, David D. The Faithful Shepard: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. The best study of the Colonies’ clergy, showing the problems faced by Cotton and his colleagues and how they responded to those challenges.

Rosenmeier, Jesper.“’Clearing the Medium’: A Reevaluation of the Puritan Plain Style in Light of John Cotton’s A Practicall Commentary upon the First Epistle Generall of John.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 37 (October, 1980): 577-591. Examines and explains Cotton’s preaching style and relates it to his views on personal relationships.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Teacher and the Witness: John Cotton and Roger Williams.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 25 (July, 1968): 408-431. Examines the debate between Cotton and Williams and relates their differing views to different forms of scriptural interpretation.

Smolinski, Reiner.“’The Way to Lost Zion’: The Cotton-Williams Debate on the Separation of Church and State in a Millenarian Perspective.” In Millenial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630-1860, edited by Bernd Engler, Joerg O. Fichte, and Oliver Scheiding. Tübingen, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher, 2002. Compares the positions of John Cotton and Roger Williams on church-state relations.

Ziff, Larzer. The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962. The best biography, though its interpretations should be supplemented by those in the articles above.