Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Writing "A Model of Christian Charity"

For all the historical weight that has been placed on John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity," the text itself carries an unexpectedly modest, even mysterious appearance. No special rotunda exhibits it. Winthrop's "city upon a hill" statement does not rise out of an underground vault each morning for display, honored by flags and guarded by soldiers, as the Declaration of Independence did in the years of the high Cold War. The only surviving copy is housed in the New-York Historical Society in a small archival box, barely five by seven inches. Bound as a pamphlet, it is the seventeenth-century version of a slim modern paperback.

At first glance, Winthrop's words seem barely touched by history's passage. The National Archives' copy of the Declaration of Independence, its ink faded with age, is now an almost completely illegible ghost of the parchment that its endorsers once signed. By contrast, "A Model of Christian Charity," although almost a century and a half older, initially seems immune from change. The Model's words flow over the pages in confident lines of loops and flourishes. The letters s and f blossom into extravagant swirls of form. The p's shoot down below the line of text like daggers. The word the is condensed into a special symbol of its own, like a character in a modern text message. No special emphasis marks off its "city upon a hill" line, tucked into a sentence three pages from the end; but the h in hill soars and dives like an elegant bird in flight. All seems certain and dependable.

But a second glance disrupts that first impression. Marks of time and alteration, in fact, lie all over the manuscript. None of this lettering is Winthrop's own work. His handwriting was much less fluid than this and far harder to read. This is a copyist's output: a product of the system of "scribal publication" through which hand-copied editions of a seventeenth-century text were moved into circulation without the costly intermediation of a printing press. How many copies this or other copyists made or how widely they were distributed we will never know, just as we will never know what Winthrop's original looked like. All these have disappeared. This is the only seventeenth-century version of the Model that has survived into our day.

The copyist's pen moves confidently across the page but then, suddenly, you see the copymaker stumble. There are places where, working too fast, the copyist left something out and came back with a caret mark to insert it. On one page most of a line is crossed out and corrected as if the copyist had momentarily mistaken his place or let her attention slip. A later hand corrects a word. Most striking of all, a whole word was washed out from the sentence just before the "city upon a hill" line. If we hold fast to our purposes, the text reads, the Lord "shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations, the Lord make it like that of New England." But "New England," inked in by a much cruder hand, was written over top of something else. What had been blotted out so determinedly as to leave only the faintest traces? A set of scans reveal that the original word had been "Massachusetts." Why did the alteration matter so much to whoever came along later to make it? Why the hurried corrections? Why the text's blank spaces, as if the original's words, even then, could not be fully deciphered? Why the nagging mysteries? Coming in search of origins and certainty, you find everything — text, identities, keywords, and meanings — in motion.

Motion, of course, shaped every aspect of the composition of "A Model of Christian Charity." The English in the early seventeenth century were a restlessly mobile people. London in the early modern era swelled with uprooted country-folk. Scots and English migrants swarmed by the scores of thousands into Ireland. Across the course of the seventeenth century almost four hundred thousand English and Scots emigrants would embark for the new settlements of British North America, half of them headed for the mainland, half for the West Indies. John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Company took shape within this larger pattern of displacement. The Massachusetts colony was not the first deliberately planned English settlement in North America, but with almost a thousand voyagers under sail in 1630 under the moral and financial sponsorship of its godly Puritan organizers, it was the largest to date and the best organized. Over the next decade, another ten to twenty thousand English folk would follow them to raise new churches and villages and work to plow out new farms from the resistant soils of New England. There would be social and political turmoil to come, too, before John Winthrop's dream of "a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical" would be solidified.

Still, within this swirl of motion, what place did this text occupy? When and for what purposes was it written or spoken? What was its setting? We see the famous story in our mind's eye: the ship, the piously gathered people, and their collective assent to the mission that their governor, John Winthrop, spelled out for them. In our inner ear, we already hear the repercussions echoing through the centuries. We see the story of America begin. But urgently as these images press on a reader's mind, the copyist's text gives no hint of them.

The absence is striking. "Christian Charitie / A Modell hereof," the text is headed. As it was originally copied out, it carried no author, date, or context. We know that the Model was in circulation among English Puritans as early as 1635, when a friend of Winthrop's eldest son asked for a copy of "the Model of Charity" along with a half dozen other documents from the Massachusetts colony's founding. We know the authorship of the "Model of Christian Charity," too, for there are enough traces from Winthrop's earlier writings to make us certain that the Model was his own work, even if it originally circulated anonymously. But for the occasion for its writing we have only the word of a second, later document, a cover sheet written in a different, much cruder hand than the copyist's.

It was the cover sheet writer who added, "Written on Board the Arrabella on the Atlantick Ocean By the Honorable John Winthrop Esq. In His passage with the great Company of Religious people of which he was the Governor, from the Island of Greate Brittaine to New-England in the North America. Anno 1630." And when this did not seem sufficient, it was the cover sheet writer who went back later in parentheses and interlining to stress that these were "Christian Tribes" of which Winthrop was the "Brave leader and famous" governor. Though it is now bound into the copyist's text, the original pamphlet did not carry this cover page. A bit of wax, the seventeenth-century equivalent of a paper clip, Ted O'Reilly, head of the Manuscript Department at the New-York Historical Society explains, stained the first page. But there is no corresponding stain on the cover sheet. The cover sheet identifying the authorship of the now "famous" Winthrop, placing the composition of the Model in the Atlantic Ocean and setting the scene that has become all but inextricable from the Model's story was the work — if not the fiction — of a later time.

The first historians to take John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" seriously did not pause to question this setting of the Model's composition. Knowing what they were looking for, they found it in the cover sheet writer's "on the Atlantick Ocean" assertion. As Perry Miller, the leading mid-twentieth century scholar of New England Puritanism, taught generations of historians to read it, "A Model of Christian Charity" was a mission statement for the society that Winthrop and his fellow voyagers would build in their new world. It stood at a doorway between mental frames, at the threshold of a new consciousness that was no longer English but on its way to becoming American. The shores of a new historical destiny lay right over the horizon. Where else could it have been written and assented to but on the open, yet undefined space of the sea: "in the broad Atlantic, halfway between the Old World and the New, [where] nothing was settled"?

Others writing after Miller would draw this origin scene even more vividly and push it still closer to the moment of American arrival. One of Ronald Reagan's early speechwriters envisioned the Model delivered on the "tiny deck of the Arabella off the coast of Massachusetts" where a little band strained to hear, against "the stormy seas raging around them," what their new life had in store for them. In the leading textbook account of American religious history, Jon Butler and his coauthors set the Model literally at the moment of the Winthrop fleet's entry into their new world, preached while the Arbella lay at anchor off the Massachusetts coast, just before its passengers disembarked into their new tasks and new identities.

More recently historians have grown skeptical of the literal truth of the Model's "on the Atlantic ocean" setting. John Winthrop began writing his Journal, from which so much of what we know about Puritan New England derives, when he boarded the Arbella in the English Channel in late March 1630. Sketchy though Winthrop's subsequent entries were, he made them faithfully virtually every day. He noted the sighting of a spouting whale and the case of a maidservant who drank so much "strong water" that she almost died. He noted days in which sermons were preached and other days when both minister and people were too sick for any sermons. But no hint of "A Model of Christian Charity" appears in any of Winthrop's seaboard entries. The Model's text is not wholly consistent in its allusions to time and place, but its reference to the sufferings experienced by some of our forefathers "here in England," historians now object, is hard to square with composition in the mid-Atlantic, much less just off the shores of New England.

But even those who push the Model's composition point back to England, just prior to the emigrants' departure, have a hard time envisioning it as anything other than a publicly witnessed threshold utterance: the moment when, figuratively speaking, Winthrop's company of New England–bound Puritans walked through the door to the America that the Model framed for them. John Winthrop's most distinguished modern biographer candidly invents such a setting. Winthrop preached the Model, Francis Bremer writes, under the Gothic roof of the Holy Rood Church in Southampton, England, rising to do so right on the heels of John Cotton's much more widely distributed farewell sermon — though Bremer admits there is no hard evidence that any such gathering took place there, much less that Winthrop had any such part in it.

In all these imagined settings, whether on the sea or in sight or smell of oceans, "A Model of Christian Charity" marked a moment of social identity's remaking. Its imagined setting, its "city upon a hill" line, and its message of a new-made people mirrored and reinforced each other. A people gather to hear a text, to embrace their mission in history, as some of their descendants would gather, almost a century and a half later, to hear a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. It is as close to a foundational scene as early American history possesses.

So runs the myth. But, in fact, by the time of the Arbella's sailing "A Model of Christian Charity" had already been months in composition. Parts of it had been framed in Winthrop's mind during the fall and winter of 1629–30, well before the New England Puritans' departure in March — before it was even certain that there would be a departure at all. The Model was not written all of a piece at the doorway to America. Different audiences had heard different pieces of it. Most of Winthrop's fellow passengers to Massachusetts Bay almost certainly never heard it all. Modern readers yearn for it to lead us back to an origin point in the American experiment. But its words were not shaped in a single sitting, either at the English seaport of Southampton or in a liminal Atlantic.

Evidence for the serial process by which the words and themes of "A Model of Christian Charity" came to Winthrop lies right in the text itself. The copyist's determination not to waste paper on section breaks and section headings does not disguise the fact that the Model falls into four clearly distinct segments, only one of which looks explicitly toward America. The first and shortest of the Model's parts is its opening premise, whose utter, uncompromising certainty almost inevitably jars on modern ears: "God almighty in his most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection." From that unchangeable fact of human inequality, charity descends. The Model's second part outlines the practice of that charity, drawing out of a cluster of biblical examples the demanding rules that a godly community must observe in lending, loan forgiveness, and generosity both in normal times and in times of peril. The third and longest part explains the engine of that charity: the love and sympathy that binds each one to others.

It is in its fourth part that the Model shifts abruptly in tone and language to apply these rules of heart and practice to the project at hand. As a covenanted people in a new land, where subordination of "all private respects" to "the care of the public" will be all the more required, the emigrants will live under a stricter charge of unity and love than they had ever practiced before in England. The burden of their special covenant with God swells into prominence. The voyagers' responsibilities are fearsome. They will stand, above the common lot of mankind "as a city upon a hill." "The eyes of all people are upon us." In the last part of the Model, Winthrop's imagination leapt ahead to the settlement that he and his fellow colonizers would struggle to create. But the first three parts of the Model had already congealed in Winthrop's mind months before the voyage to New England began.

When John Winthrop wrote in the Model's opening sentence that society was so disposed that "some must be rich, some poor," he was writing as much from personal experience as from abstract social theory. That he himself belonged to the "high and eminent" fraction of humankind was beyond question. His grandfather had been a successful London clothing merchant who rose to become a master of the city's Clothworkers' Guild and, from there, had made his way into the English gentry by investing in manor properties in East Anglia. In his mid-twenties John assumed possession of his family's landholdings at Groton, England, together with its tenants and servants, its church, and the responsibilities of presiding over the manor court that went with it. He studied at Cambridge's Trinity College and at one of the Inns of Court in London. He would bring as many as eight servants with him to Massachusetts in 1630. Sometime before departure, he posed for an elegant oil portrait, his face framed by a high ruffed collar, his hand holding a silk glove.

The great majority of those caught up in the currents of the new Protestant piety that swept over England in the 1610s and 1620s came from much humbler backgrounds than Winthrop. Small farmers, agricultural leaseholders, artisans, servants, and their wives and children formed the bulk of the English folk who would emigrate to New England in the 1630s. Some were drawn by promoters' promises of abundant soils and fisheries. Some were recruited for their artisan skills. Many came through family and kinship ties. Those who set the dominant tone of the emigration yearned most of all for a more pious and godly community: its churches restored to what they imagined to be Christianity's original practices, purged of the novelties of Catholic invention, and its mores purged of lawlessness and corruption. Within these ranks, Winthrop knew that he was among those whom God had designated for power and dignity. And except for some sharp, humbling occasions, his fellow New Englanders did too. They returned Winthrop to the Massachusetts governorship by annual election twelve times from 1630 to his death in 1649.

Still, among the originators of the Massachusetts venture there were far wealthier figures than the country gentleman John Winthrop. At the social pinnacle of those who enlisted in the Puritan movement were merchants and titled aristocrats whose plans and ventures spread far beyond New England. Matthew Craddock, who preceded Winthrop as head of the Massachusetts Bay Company, had substantial investments not only in the Massachusetts project but in the Levant Company's trading operations in the Near East, the East India Company's trade with India, and the tobacco trade with the West Indies; he was to play a leading role in Parliament at the opening of the Puritan Revolution. Another Puritan grandee, the Earl of Warwick, who had been instrumental in obtaining the charter for New England, had deep investments in the East India Company and in colonization ventures in Bermuda, Virginia, and along the Nicaragua coast. He owned a fleet of West Indies-based privateering ships that regularly harassed Spain's Atlantic trading routes. All these ventures of colonization, commerce, and empire were, in his and others' minds, part of a common front against the power of global Catholicism.

---

Excerpted from "As a City on a Hill"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press.
Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---