John Winthrop

Governor

  • Born: January 22, 1588
  • Birthplace: Edwardstone, Suffolk, England
  • Died: April 5, 1649
  • Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

English-born American colonist

Winthrop served as the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was committed to the ideal of creating a Christian commonwealth, and his determined leadership was crucial to the establishment and success of the colony.

Area of achievement Government and politics

Early Life

John Winthrop (WIHN-thruhp) was the son of Anne Browne and Adam Winthrop, who lived at Groton Manor in Suffolk. Winthrop’s grandfather, a successful London cloth merchant also named Adam, had purchased the manor from Henry VIII in 1544. It had been part of a monastery confiscated by the monarch. Winthrop received an extensive education beginning at age seven with instruction from a local vicar. At fifteen, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Winthrop remained there less than two years but later studied law at Gray’s Inn, one of the London Inns of Court.

Winthrop started a family at a tender age; his father arranged a marriage to Mary Forth when he was only seventeen, and he became a father at eighteen. Over the next twelve years, Winthrop moved from his dowry lands at Great Stambridge back to Groton, presided over the manorial court, served as a justice of the peace, and assumed control of the family lands on the manor. In the 1620’s, he widened his horizons by developing a lucrative London law practice. It enabled Winthrop to make contacts in the government and led to his selection in 1627 as an attorney in the King’s Court of Wards and Liveries, a court which administered the estates of minor heirs to lands held from the king.

As he matured, Winthrop became ever more committed to the faith of the Puritan reformers in the Church of England. Advocates of the teaching of John Calvin, Puritans believed that God had predestined salvation for only a few. From his early teens, Winthrop had followed a rigorous regimen of prayer and study in search of signs that God had selected him. While he struggled for assurance of that elect status, Winthrop also sought to place his relationship with God ahead of all else—his family, his work, and his love of hunting, food, and drink. He never became an ascetic; he believed God’s creations should be enjoyed but always with proper moderation. His faith made Winthrop a stern and determined man; this was clearly evident in a painting of the mature Winthrop. His serious countenance, graced by a Vandyke beard and ruffled collar, befits a man with a sense of purpose.

Life’s Work

Winthrop probably would have been known only as one of the lesser English gentry had not a series of economic, religious, and personal crises in the late 1620’s caused him to leave England. Inflation, smaller returns from the fixed rents he could charge the tenants on his land, and a depression in the Suffolk textile trade all dearly cost the squire of Groton. His disappointing financial situation worsened in 1629 when Winthrop lost his attorneyship in the Court of Wards and Liveries. He was only one of numerous casualties in the campaign of Charles I to remove Puritans from secular and religious positions. The king’s Catholic wife, the appointment of William Laud (a resolute anti-Puritan) as bishop of London, and the dissolution in 1629 of a Parliament heavily influenced by Puritans all caused Dissenters to despair about their future in England. They did not see much hope for their faith under a monarch who opposed their advocacy of simpler services and a Calvinist theology in the Church of England.

Winthrop had a more immediate reason for feeling that he was living in an evil and declining nation. Long concerned by what he considered a lax moral climate in the nation, Winthrop was appalled by the behavior of his son Henry. The nineteen-year-old had gone to the West Indian island of Barbados in 1627. Upon his return two years later, Henry did little more than carouse with boisterous friends in London. Winthrop believed that it was imperative that he act to save his family and preserve his faith. He worried that migration meant abandoning his homeland, but he hoped that the creation of a model Christian community in North America would show England the way to reform.

Winthrop worked with the members of the Massachusetts Bay Company to achieve his goal. Made up of substantial landowners, merchants, and clergymen, the company selected Winthrop as its governor. He organized the ships, settlers, and provisions for the expedition and then led more than one thousand people to Massachusetts in 1630. In the next nineteen years, Winthrop retained an important role in the colony’s government; twelve times he was elected governor. Throughout those years, he struggled to keep the settlers committed to building a cooperative, godly commonwealth.

Challenges to Winthrop’s vision emerged quickly. Few were willing to settle in a single, compact town as Winthrop had hoped; in addition to Boston, six towns were formed in the first year alone. The cheap land, the high wages paid to scarce skilled workers, and the profits to be made in commerce led many to a greater concern over the material benefits of Winthrop’s colony than its spiritual. Price and wage controls mitigated the impact of the more acquisitive settlers but could not completely suppress the growing economic individualism. More troubling to Winthrop than the greed of some colonists and the dispersal of settlement, however, was religious dissent. Winthrop and his supporters did not migrate to Massachusetts to create a utopia of toleration; rather they moved to worship in a singular fashion—in self-governing congregations of God’s elect. Consequently, Winthrop fought all attempts to undermine that effort.

The first significant trouble came from Roger Williams, a minister who arrived in the colony in 1631. Among other things, Williams demanded that the colonists repudiate all ties to the Church of England, a position contrary to Winthrop’s resolve to reform, not break from, the established church. Williams also argued that the elect should not worship with the unregenerate, an idea repugnant to Winthrop, whose hope for a unified colony dictated that persons of all conditions worship together.

A brilliant woman, Anne Hutchinson, presented an even greater threat. Not long after her arrival in 1634, she began to hold mid-week meetings in her home. Hutchinson used these popular gatherings to criticize ministers whom she believed erred in their sermons. All but two, she charged, taught a Covenant of Works—that good conduct could lead to salvation—rather than a Covenant of Grace—that salvation was obtained only through God’s grace. Her attacks on the clergy made Hutchinson a danger to the established order. When she later claimed that she received divine revelation, Hutchinson became a pariah to Winthrop.

When persuasion failed to convince the two dissenters to retreat from their positions, Winthrop supported the decision to banish them, Williams in 1636 and Hutchinson two years later. Other dissenters also suffered banishment or were forced to migrate to other regions. The departure of these people ensured a religious orthodoxy that prevailed throughout the colony’s first two decades.

In addition to these religious conflicts, Massachusetts faced other vexing problems. Disputes over who could participate in the government were resolved by permitting male church members to vote. Complaints from outlying settlements that their interests were not being served by Boston lawmakers were handled by allowing each town to have representation in the colony’s General Court.

The outbreak of civil war in England in the early 1640’s dramatically reduced the immigration to Massachusetts. Immigrants had been the chief consumers of the colony’s produce, and with the decline in their numbers, the economy slumped badly. Prices fell until the Puritans found new markets in the Canaries and the Caribbean Islands. Winthrop figured prominently in the resolution of these difficulties; he helped work out the political problems, and he maintained contacts and promoted trade in the West Indies.

Winthrop usually avoided the extremes in both secular and religious matters. He deplored the ideas of separatist dissenters such as Williams, for example, because he believed that they would lead to the chaos of dozens of little utopias. Yet other leaders in the colony, notably Thomas Dudley, criticized Winthrop for being too lenient with dissenters. His general commitment to moderate positions offended many, but it helped preserve the Puritan experiment in the New World, one with more than fifteen thousand inhabitants at his death in 1649. Besides a grateful colony, Winthrop was survived by six of his sixteen children and his fourth wife.

Significance

As he led the Puritan expedition across the Atlantic in early 1630, Winthrop had time to think about the meaning of their collective effort. He drafted a lay sermon containing those reflections, and he delivered it to the passengers prior to their arrival in Massachusetts. Entitled “A Modell of Christian Charity,” it remains one of the most eloquent statements of Christian brotherhood. He explained to his followers,

wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brotherly Affeccion… wee must delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne rejoyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes… our Community as members of the same body.…

His effort to convince settlers to subordinate their self-interest to the good of the community was far from successful. Yet through his example and his support of laws governing economic behavior, Winthrop helped keep in check the individualism he believed would destroy the colony.

Perhaps Winthrop’s greatest impact on American life was his evocation of a sense of mission. He thought that the tired generations of the Old World were eagerly observing the Puritan effort to build a model religious society. “For wee must Consider,” he claimed, “that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.” Winthrop and fellow Puritans believed that they were God’s new chosen people, a new Israel. Succeeding generations have shared this sense that America had a special destiny to be a light to other nations. They have revealed their debt to the great Puritan leader each time they borrowed his metaphor and claimed that America must be as a city upon a hill.

Bibliography

Bercovitch, Sacvan. “Puritan Origins Revisited: The ’City upon a Hill’ as a Model of Tradition and Innovation.” In Early America Re-explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture, edited by Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischman. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Examines Winthrop’s sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity.”

Bremer, Francis J. John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Bremer, editor of the Winthrop papers for the Massachusetts Historical Society, draws upon those papers to produce this exhaustively detailed biography.

Crilly, Mark. “John Winthrop: Magistrate, Minister, Merchant.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 40, no. 2 (Winter, 1999): 187-196. Discusses the many roles Winthrop played in the life of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Miller, Perry. “Errand into the Wilderness.” In Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. This is an essay by the leading historian on the Puritan mind. He describes both the exhilarating sense of mission Winthrop shared with other leaders in the 1630’s and the disappointment of a later generation when it realized that England had paid scant attention to the errand of reform they had run for God.

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 1999. Morgan’s book is not only the best available biography of Winthrop, but also one of the clearest presentations of Puritan thought. He discusses Winthrop’s life in England and America and in the process details the struggle faced by a pious man in a corrupt world.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Founding of Massachusetts: Historians and the Sources. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. This is a helpful collection of primary sources from the first five years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Notably, Morgan includes more than one hundred pages from Winthrop’s letters, journal, and miscellaneous other papers. There are also excerpts from the works of four historians’ accounts of the colony.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Builders of the Bay Colony. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930. Reprint. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981. Morison profiles more than a dozen individuals in these lively essays originally published in 1930. The profiles attempt to rehabilitate the long-tarnished image of Puritans, they serve as an excellent introduction to the leading personalities in seventeenth century Massachusetts. The longest is on Winthrop, and in it Morison portrays him as a pious yet practical leader.

Moseley, James G. John Winthrop’s World: History as a Story, The Story as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. This book is composed of two parts. The first is a short biography of Winthrop; the second examines how subsequent historians have perceived Winthrop and the Puritan experiment.

Rutman, Darrett B. Winthrop’s Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965. A well-researched and well-written work on the Puritan capital during Winthrop’s life. A study of the town’s government, church policies, population trends, and economic development, it reveals how far Bostonians strayed from Winthrop’s goal of a cooperative godly community.

Vaughan, Alden T., and Francis J. Bremer, eds. Puritan New England: Essays on Religion, Society and Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. This collection of essays, written by leading scholars, covers many areas of Puritan life—religion, witchcraft, government, economics, family, and race relations. Several include references to Winthrop.

Wall, Robert E. Massachusetts Bay: The Crucial Decade, 1640-1650. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. A detailed account of the political events of the 1640’s. Wall describes the growing conflict between leaders from Boston and those in other towns jealous of their power.

March, 1629-1640: “Personal Rule” of Charles I; 1642-1651: English Civil Wars.