John Winthrop

Winthrop, John (1638-1707) colonial military leader and governor. Born the son of the governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop was also known as Fitz or Fitz-John. He reached the rank of captain in the English Army and helped restore King Charles II in 1660. Back in the colonies, he led militia on Long Island during the third Anglo-Dutch War (1673-1674), and in 1687 was appointed major general in charge of the combined militias of Connecticut and Massachusetts. During King William's War in 1690 he led a colonial-Indian force from Albany in an unsuccessful campaign into Canada. In 1698 he was elected governor of Connecticut, a position he held until his death in Boston nine years later.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

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 Dudley as the colony's governor, Winthrop continued to be the most influential man in the colony.

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).

For more information on John Winthrop, visit Britannica.com.

Winthrop, John (1588-1649). Governor of Massachusetts. Of a prosperous Suffolk clothier's family, Winthrop went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then studied law at Gray's Inn. In 1630 he left for America with a group of Puritan families, having been elected governor of the tiny colony of Massachusetts, which had then no more than 700 settlers. Winthrop was governor until 1634, and then 1637-40, 1642-4, and 1645-9. He was involved in all the religious disputes of the day, gradually adopting a more austere line towards dissent.

(1588-1649), founding governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop's contribution to the Puritan adventure in British North America would appear self-evident. He was governor of the Bay Colony almost continuously from 1630 to 1649, and in the interim years he also exerted a powerful influence over colonial affairs as a member of the Council of Assistants. Dedicating his personal funds as well as his administrative talents, Winthrop conscientiously advanced the Puritan standard of "nursing father" to the emergent wilderness theocracy.

He symbolizes the ambiguity of the Puritan mystique at the root of American national identity. Consider the importance ascribed to Winthrop's famous sermon, "The Modell of Christian Charity," which he wrote and possibly delivered on board the flagship Arbella when the Puritans were en route to America. More than the formulaic admonition that was customarily preached to shipmates at the launching of transatlantic voyages, it was the moral code for a godly society that Winthrop hoped would serve as a model for a reformed England. In later generations his prediction that "wee shall bee as a Citty upon a hill, the eyes of all people ... upon us" evoked a self-conscious ideal against which the themes of each day were measured. Still later, the image would become a republican symbol of American exceptionalism and world mission, and ultimately an ideological touchstone for imperial diplomacy in the twentieth century.

Winthrop was a third-generation son of English landed gentry, whose religious aspirations were focused on the advancement of the Protestant Reformation in England and continental Europe. His migration to Massachusetts Bay was in response to "corruptions" he perceived in English society at a time when the Puritans were threatened with persecution as well as an unpromising economic future. His life and writings reveal a man caught in the broad overlap of the late medieval and early modern eras. His Journal is both an excellent source for early Massachusetts history and the chronicle of his personal efforts to secure the commonwealth as a gentry-dominated oligarchy.

Winthrop regarded the governorship as his lifetime position. But several defeats in colonial elections revealed a significant opposition to his arbitrary methods. His political ideal presupposed an interdependent community wherein all members had a prescribed place and function in the social hierarchy. Despite his legal training at the Inns of Court, he opposed the movement to curtail magistrates' authority by enacting a code of laws. Instead, he consistently defended discretionary rule and the magisterial veto over the resistance of the town deputies. In a famous speech to the General Court in 1645 he distinguished civil from natural liberty as that which "is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority."

Winthrop's imperious treatment of dissenters may also be seen in the context of premodern social ideals that defined the religious mission of Massachusetts Bay Colony. To achieve a Puritan utopia, Winthrop and his colleagues committed themselves to a policy of intolerance. He played a leading role in prosecuting Anne Hutchinson and her supporters during the antinomian controversy (1636-1638); in ordering the capture of Rhode Island radical Samuel Gorton and his company at Shawomet to be tried and sentenced at Boston (1643); and in subduing the "Presbyterians" William Vassal, Robert Child, and Samuel Maverick for their "Remonstrance and Humble Petition" (1646), which called for a more liberal church membership policy. In each case, the possibility of English interference threatened the goals of Winthrop's godly society.

England accepted a limited toleration in the 1640s, but Massachusetts continued to punish dissenters, thus isolating itself from the mainstream of political culture abroad. Then, too, Boston's development into a seaport town was a process that made Winthrop's medieval standard of social relations anachronistic by the final decade of his life. Ironically, it was this transformation that refurbished Winthrop's "Citty upon a hill" imagery as an American emblem, one that related the themes of progress and declension in popular rhetoric.

Bibliography:

Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958); Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (1965).

Author:

Barbara Ritter Dailey

See also New England Colonies; Puritanism.

Winthrop, John, 1588–1649, governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, b. Edwardstone, near Groton, Suffolk, England. Of a landowning family, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, came into a family fortune, and became a government administrator with strong Puritan leanings. A member of the Massachusetts Bay Company, he led the group that arranged for the removal of the company's government to New England and was chosen (1629) governor of the proposed colony. He arrived (1630) in the ship Arbella at Salem and shortly founded on Shawmut peninsula the settlement that became Boston. He was—with the possible exception of John Cotton—the most distinguished citizen of Massachusetts Bay colony, serving as governor some 12 times. He helped to shape the theocratic policy of the colony and opposed broad democracy. It was while he was deputy governor and Sir Henry Vane (1613–62) was governor that Winthrop bitterly and successfully opposed the antinomian beliefs of Anne Hutchinson and her followers, who were supported by Vane. The force of his influence on the history of Massachusetts was enormous. Winthrop's journal, which was edited by J. K. Hosmer and published in 1908 as The History of New England from 1630 to 1649 is one of the most valuable of American historical sources.

Bibliography

See The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649 (1996), abridged ed. by R. S. Dunn and L. Yeandle; R. C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (2 vol., 1864–67; repr. 1971); Winthrop Papers (5 vol., 1929–47); biographies by J. H. Twichell (1892), E. S. Morgan (1958), G. R. Raymer (1963), and F. J. Bremer (2003); R. S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees (1962, repr. 1971).

(1588-1649)

1630	"A Modell of Christian Charity." Delivered on his way to America, this sermon asserts Winthrop's plan for the colony and warns the colonists of what might lie ahead. Winthrop also begins his most famous work, his Journal, which he would continue until his death. A vital record of activities in the colonies, the Journal, along with William Bradford's History of Plimmoth Plantation, would come to be valued as the most significant secular prose writing of early New England. The first two parts would be published in 1790, and the complete work would appear as The History of New England in 1825-1826.
1639	The Wicked Capitalism of Robert Keayne. A rebuke of merchant Robert Keayne for his sharp business practices in Boston. Keayne is soundly attacked for overcharging in the Massachusetts Bay colony at a time when the colonists believe that this practice violates their covenant with God.
1644	Arbitrary Government. Winthrop's discourse supports the absolute power of the Puritan government. It so inflames his constituents that he is impeached as governor. Nonetheless, he would avoid conviction by delivering a rousing speech on liberty and would be reelected governor annually until his death in 1649.
1644	Antinomians and Familists Condemned by the Synod of elders in New England. Better known by the title of its second edition, A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians..., Winthrop's only historical book published during his lifetime is a collection of materials related to the Antinomian controversy and a defense of his banishment of Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) from Massachusetts.
1645	On Liberty. Winthrop discusses the political liberties demanded by the colonists when challenged by the magistrates. In the same year Winthrop publishes A Declaration of Former Passages and Proceedings Betwixt the English and the Narrowgansets, a pamphlet expressing his concern that the colonists would soon have to punish the Rhode Island Indians at war with the Mohegans.
1761	Relation of the Voyage from Boston to Newfoundland for the Observation of the Transit of Venus. Winthrop records his experiences on the first scientific expedition sponsored by a colonial college or government (Harvard and Massachusetts) to observe the parallax of the sun.
1790	A Journal of the Transactions and Occurrences in the Settlement of Massachusetts and the Other New England Colonies from the Year 1630 to 1644. The first publication of Winthrop's journal, a major primary source of New England history, including documentation of political, social, and religious life in the Massachusetts Bay colony.
1825	A History of New England from 1630-1649. An expanded version of Winthrop's Journal (1790) after his third notebook is found in the tower of Boston's Old South Church. The manuscript had been edited by James Savage, who publishes the complete journal with corrections and modernized spellings.

A Puritan political leader of the seventeenth century, born in England. Winthrop was sent to America as the first governor of Massachusetts. He compared the colony to “a city upon a hill,” suggesting that it would be a model for all nations.

Quotes:

"For we must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall 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 through the world."

"For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. Soe that if we shall 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."

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