the authorities delayed the wife's admittance for a week because of certain comments she had been overheard to make before setting foot on New England soil. One of her shipmates, Reverend Zachariah Symmes, evidently reported his uneasiness with her beliefs and kept her from joining the church until she could show a group of elders that her theology was sound.⁵

Despite a troublesome beginning, once established in New England Anne Hutchinson found herself immediately useful not only as homemaker for her own family, but as community midwife and healer as well; she was one of a few who knew how to mix herbs for medicinal purposes. She also found herself within a few months hosting weekly discussions pertaining to John Cotton's sermons, first with groups of women, then with mixed groups of men and women. The ostensible purpose of the meetings was to give members of the community the opportunity to discuss the meaning of Cotton's lectures. The meetings soon grew beyond mere recitations, however, and became the vehicle for the rise of what Winthrop called “Antinomianism.” Hutchinson's group was by no means small or uninfluencial. Anne Hutchinson enjoyed the support of the young, newly elected governor, Henry Vane, and of the popular minister John Wheelwright, her brother-in-law. She and her supporters essentially divided Boston. In Winthrop's eyes that division threatened to disrupt the equilibrium and well-being of the entire colony.

By the time Winthrop makes his first journal entry concerning Hutchinson (21 October 1636), she had been in Boston just over two years and had become the leader of an active movement. As we can picture it, John Winthrop sat down at his desk not too long after beginning the second volume of his manuscript journal and wrote his first entry concerning Anne Hutchinson. He had known, or at least known of, Hutchinson since her arrival in September 1634. Indeed, she and her family built their house and settled literally across the street from the Winthrops. The governor begins his entry with characteristic understatement, but does carefully itemize the polity behind the dispute: “One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a woman of ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors: 1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification.—From these two grew many branches; as, 1. Our union with the Holy Ghost, so as a Christian remains dead to every spiritual action, and hath no gifts nor graces, other than such as are in hypocrites, nor any other sanctification but the Holy Ghost himself” ([A Journal of the Transactions and Occurrences in the Settlement of Massachusetts and the Other New-England Colonies, from the Year 1630 to 1644,] J, 1:195-96). Winthrop's entry touches on crucial questions concerning the colonists' understanding of regeneration.⁶

Winthrop's literary outpouring in response to the Antinomian Controversy begins with this journal entry, but the governor's official account of the trials of Hutchinson and her disciples was published in London in 1644, several years after the controversy and trials of 1637 and 1638. Within the same year it was republished as A Short Story of the rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists and Libertines, that Infected the Churches of New England (London, 1644).

The original title of Winthrop's version of the Hutchinson episode indicates the thrust of his account: Antinomians and Familists Condemned by the Synod of Elders in New-England: With the Proceedings of the Magistrates against Them, and Their Apology for the Same (London, 1644). Winthrop loads the title with pejorative terms, each of which effectively deprecates his adversaries. Etymologically, antinomian means “outside or against the name or law.” Used by Winthrop, the term connotes those who stood opposed to the legalism of the Bible.

Understanding the intricacies of the Antinomian controversy depends on an acquaintance with several terms bandied about by the members of the religious community. Legalism, as Winthrop applied the concept, referred to strict conformity to the moral codes or law of the Bible. Justification was a term used to connote salvation or grace (in other words, a justified person was a visible saint, one preordained by God to grace). Antinomians maintained that because justification was free—that is, because it came as a gift of God that no one could otherwise acquire—ministers should not stress the performing of good works. Rather they should emphasize free justification, also referred to as the “Covenant of grace” as opposed to the “Covenant of works.” Indeed, the Antinomians accused the orthodox ministers of preaching a doctrine of works rather than a doctrine of grace. Winthrop applied the term sanctification or preparation to this notion of growing or earning divine grace as a result of commitment to the biblical law or moral code. According to Winthrop, as an orthodox Calvinist, of course, man did not earn justification, but could prepare to receive grace. Winthrop saw sanctification as a necessary or concomitant part of a visible saint's life in preparation to receive grace. If saved or “of the elect,” one would necessarily behave as a saint. The two notions, justification and sanctification in this sense, were in some ways so interdependent as to be indistinguishable.

To a large extent, the point of contention between the Antinomians and the orthodox New England Puritans rests on the distinction between free justification and sanctification (or grace and works). As evident in his conception of New England's covenant with God, Winthrop held that a person could not be justified and not show signs of sanctification; Anne Hutchinson is reputed to have held that because justification is free, sanctification is of no concern in the eyes of God. Antinomians, including Hutchinson, relied on the power of the Holy Spirit, rather than on a moral code, to govern actions.

Winthrop thus addresses those who believed that if justification were free then sanctification (that is, behaving oneself according to biblical law and rule) had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with one's being saved. The obvious danger of such a belief, reasons Winthrop, is that because of man's corrupt nature, it will inevitably lead to widespread immorality, licentiousness, and unnameable sins.

As Winthrop used the term in the 1630s, familist was a general term referring to those who relied on their own spiritual experience to interpret the Bible; that is, they believed in a direct communication between the individual and God. Like an Antinomian, a familist did not necessarily feel bound to the legalism of the Bible. The Massachusetts Bay officials feared that any such sect threatened their whole community, which was inextricably bound to upholding conduct based on the scriptural word. Because the Familists had a bad reputation in England, Winthrop gained an advantage over his opponents by associating Antinomians with Familists. Similarly, a Libertine, originally one who opposed the rigors of Calvinism, came to be associated with all kinds of religious freethinkers. Certainly an establishment based on conformity and dutiful practice—as was Winthrop's—did not admire or encourage freethinking in this sense.

The Short Story consists of several documents, some obviously not written by the governor. In addition to a long preface supplied by the Reverend Thomas Weld (who was in New England from 1632 until 1641), the collection includes a list of “erroneous opinions”; the petition that John Wheelwright's adherents devised; and Winthrop's narrative of the court cases against Wheelwright, his adherents, and Anne Hutchinson. The collection also includes Winthrop's description of Mary Dyer's “monstrous birth”; the justification of Wheelwright's censure, and a summary of Hutchinson's excommunication trial before the church. In addition to the Short Story, much of the history of the Antinomian Controversy can be gleaned from Winthrop's journal account of his response to the Hutchinson episode.

Winthrop had strong misgivings about the theology of Anne Hutchinson, but in 1636, as deputy governor, he could not effectively oppose her actions or reduce her influence. When she and her followers attempted to invite their colleague John Wheelwright to become an assistant teacher (that is, to accept ministerial duties) at the First Church and thereby officially establish within the system a cleric sympathetic to their views, however, the former governor became assertive. As he describes the confrontation in his journal, he “stood up and said, he could not consent.” After all, he argued, the First Church already had two able ministers in John Wilson and John Cotton. Furthermore, the congregation did not know Wheelwright sufficiently well, and should not run the risk of inviting a disputatious teacher. Winthrop “thought it not fit (no necessity urging) to put the welfare of the church to the least hazard, as he feared they should do, by calling in one, whose spirit they knew not, and one who seemed to dissent in judgment.” So Wheelwright was denied a position in Boston; instead, he was offered a position at a “new church, to be gathered at Mount Woolaston, now Braintree,” ten miles south of Boston along a difficult road (J, 1:197). In other words, Winthrop had essentially disposed of Wheelwright as a threat to the community and had won a small skirmish. But the battles ahead promised to be more difficult.

In January 1637, John Cotton seems to have invited Wheelwright to speak to the congregation at the Boston church. His sermon occasioned further dissension among the churches of Massachusetts Bay and ultimately resulted in Wheelwright's banishment. In this fast-day sermon—delivered on January 1637, a day set aside to repent for dissensions in the New England churches—Wheelwright's doctrine is that “the only cause of the fasting of true beleevers is the absence of Christ”.⁷ (Public fast days were common in New England as a means of repentance for the entire population. Such days did not necessarily involve total abstinence.) To Winthrop and others of the establishment even the hint of Christ's absence must have seemed an affront. Did this man (Wheelwright) not scruple to say that Christ was absent from New England, the New Canaan, God's chosen land? The notion of God being displeased and departing from New England would eventually become a popular motif for the New England ministers, but in the 1630s this idea was unwelcome and certainly offended the leaders in the congregation.

What Winthrop and others actually took Wheelwright to task for was not his references to God's departure, however. Rather Wheelwright got in trouble because of his repeated use of the metaphor of combat. In the text he admits that he intends “spirituall combate,” but goes on at some length about warfare, fighting, and battle. Specifically, he argues that “if we would have the Lord Jesus Christ to be aboundantly present with us, we must all of us prepare for battell and come out against the enimyes of the Lord, and if we do not strive, those under a covenant of works will prevaile.”⁸ Wheelwright also seems to advocate “combustion in the Church and common wealth. … I must confesse and acknowledge it will do so, but what then? did not Christ come to send fire upon the earth”? He also argues that those who fight for Christ “must be willing to lay downe [their] lives.”⁹

Whether Wheelwright actually intended a literal battle must remain conjectural, but his rhetoric was powerful enough to frighten the establishment. As a result of his fiery sermon, the court banished Wheelwright, and the following November he left the jurisdiction of the colony. Winthrop and the others of the established authority had thus won another political battle. Nevertheless, the sermon epitomized the division among the members of the Boston congregation and made manifest the frail hold the establishment had on maintaining conformity and keeping a peaceful unity among colonists in the Puritan commonwealth.

Another major victory for the establishment was to come by way of the May elections. At the gathering for the election a group of Bostonians in support of Henry Vane demanded that before the election a petition relating to liberty and revoking Wheelwright's banishment be heard. As Winthrop records it, “There was great danger of tumult that day.” As deputy governor, Winthrop insisted that the business of a court for election is restricted to the elections themselves: “So soon as the court was set … a petition was preferred by those of Boston. The present governor [Vane] would have read it, but the deputy governor [Winthrop] said it was out of order. It was a court for elections.” After some debate, and evidently some fistfights, elections were held; Winthrop once again became governor and Henry Vane, as Winthrop notes glibly in his journal, was “left quite out” (J, 1:215).

As governor (reelected in May 1637), Winthrop had the authority he had earlier lacked to deal with the Antinomians. He took immediate steps to set the colony back on its feet, writing in his journal that the “Magistrates set forth an apology to justify the sentence of the court against Mr. Wheelwright.” In what is a sure sign of Winthrop's leniency and political savvy, the court granted Wheelwright a period until the following August (1637) to reform his error. Winthrop thereby hoped that the court's “moderation and desire for reconciliation might appear to all” (J, 1:216, 218).

Included in Winthrop's Short Story is the justification of the court's censure of Wheelwright. In it Winthrop summarizes the steps the court took and explains the court's reasons for those actions. The purpose was to clear the justice of the court and to satisfy those “to whom this case may be otherwise presented by fame or misreport.” The court's opinion was that Wheelwright “had run into sedition and contempt of the Civil authority.” (SS, 290, 289). The establishment ministers felt that they had been described as ones who advocated a covenant of works. As is characteristic of Winthrop's reporting, his account of the proceedings is detailed. He lists several reasons to demonstrate that the court was justified in banishing Wheelwright. Some of these reasons are that he knew he was inciting contention and that he went against Cotton's injunction about peace on a fast day. Uncharacteristically, Winthrop turns to classical authors such as Tully, Isidore, and Vergil (a turn which might suggest that Winthrop was not sole author of this tract) to define sedition, but he also refers to scripture to corroborate this definition. Returning to Wheelwright, Winthrop writes that “hee did intend to trouble our peace, and hee hath effected it; therefore it was a contempt of that authority which required every man to study Peace and Truth, and therefore it was a seditious contempt, in that hee stirred up others, to join in the disturbance of that peace, which he was bound by solemn oath to preserve” (SS, 294).

Because Winthrop governed and wrote in an age before the notion of freedom of speech was established, certainly before it was considered an inalienable right, he could simply respond to the objection that the court could not tell a minister what to preach by answering that it is the court's prerogative to “limit him what he may not teach” (SS, 295). Specifically, the court could forbid his preaching heresy or sedition. In response to the objection concerning the lack of a trial by jury, Winthrop answered according to his philosophy of the magistrates' authority: the court makes its law, is subject to no others, and has as its sole guiding principle truth and justice. A typical Puritan, Winthrop believed that a good ruler was virtually incorruptible; after all, magistrates received their authority from God and so governed by divine right. In Winthrop's mind there would be no question of the court not acting in a fair manner because it had the welfare of the state and church as its sole motive.¹⁰

In concluding his account of Wheelwright's banishment, Winthrop returned to his definition of sedition. Wheelwright did tend to the “great hinderance of public utility” and was therefore guilty of sedition (SS, 299). Such a judicial procedure might be difficult for a twentieth-century reader to accept without realizing that Winthrop was writing in the 1630s, an age when the Bill of Rights and free speech were still more than 150 years in the future. Judged in light of his contemporaries, Winthrop was in fact lenient in that he was more than willing to give Wheelwright the opportunity to reform and thereafter remain within the colony's jurisdiction. Nevertheless, in a community where all were to be bound together in one body, each limb and part helping the other, Winthrop could not allow the holding and spreading of doctrine so contrary to that of the establishment.

In September 1637 the ministers organized a synod in which they drew up the list of errors to be attributed to the Antinomians. In his preface to Winthrop's Short Story, Thomas Weld offers a description of the synod: “we had an Assembly of all the Ministers and learned men in the whole Countrey, which held for three weeks together, at Cambridge … the magistrates sitting present all that time, as hearers, and speakers also when they saw fit.” The populace at large was also given liberty to attend and participate as long as they observed “due order.” As Weld describes the synod, the members spent one week confuting “loose opinions” and two weeks “in a plaine Syllogisticall dispute” (SS, 212, 213).

The result or product of the synod was the drawing up of eighty-two, numbered, erroneous opinions with a confutation of each one. As should be expected, the refutation comes from scripture; in almost every case the erroneous opinion was found to be contrary to Scripture, and Scripture was used to point out the error. If, for example, the error concerned the belief that “those that bee in Christ are not under the Law, and commands of the word, as the rule of life,” the confutation would read that it “is contrary to the Scriptures, which direct us to the Law and to the Testimony” (SS, 220). The list is part of the Short Story and is, of course, not of Winthrop's sole authorship (although he most likely had a hand in establishing the various errors). According to Philip Gura, the errors can be arranged into three major classes. One class pertains specifically to one of the most immediate questions facing the rulers of the Bay Colony, questions about the Antinomian controversy itself: “beliefs in the primacy of the Spirit over the injunctions of Scripture.” The second concerns the ability of a justified person to know the condition of another. The third class covers that group of opinions that challenge the authority of the ministers.¹¹

The synod met during September 1637; in November of that year the court brought Anne Hutchinson to trial. Winthrop and his fellow magistrates had already dealt with many of her group, banishing Wheelwright and dealing harshly with others. Her other most powerful ally, Henry Vane, had left the colony to return to England. Thus she stood alone on a November morning before the court, ready to face her accusers.

Winthrop's characterization of Hutchinson is fascinating both for its vigor and for what it tells us about the author and his times. The others disfranchised, banished, or disabled “were but young branches, sprung out of an old root”; that root was Mistress Hutchinson, “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold then any man, though in understanding and judgment, inferiour to many women” (SS, 262-63). The description informs us of Winthrop's animosity toward her; it also suggests that he was subject to the sexism and biases of his time. Hutchinson's understanding of the fine differences of theological opinion was obviously acute, and if Winthrop is referring to them he is simply dissembling. In her understanding and judgment of a woman's role and proper place in seventeenth-century Puritan New England, certainly she was not deficient, but of that role she was undoubtedly defiant.

Winthrop adds that she “had learned her skil in England” (SS, 263). It is politically important for the governor of New England to intimate that her erroneous opinions did not, in fact could not, originate in the New Canaan. Rather, he suggests that she brought them with her, already hatched and nurtured in the corruption of old England. As proof he cites the opinions she expressed on the ship before even setting foot in New England. Alertly he adds that the Boston church was hesitant to admit her. To justify the church's ultimate admission of her, Winthrop explains that “shee cunningly dissembled and coloured her opinions.” Further, she “easily insinuated her selfe into the affections of many.” Winthrop's own insinuation is that much like a serpent she slid subtly through the Boston garden. Certainly the governor was aware of the seventeenth-century connotation of insinuate as “to introduce by subtle means,” implying the agent's subversion and infection. Through the tone and diction Winthrop further reprobates his adversary. Although he gives her credit for helping with the “publick ministery,” he turns it to his own advantage: “But when she had thus prepared the way by such wholesome truths, then she begins to set forth her own stuffe” (SS, 263). Winthrop does not mince words here; in seventeenth-century English, stuff commonly referred to a worthless idea or nonsense. Winthrop's diction is clearly pejorative in his opening description of the woman and her ideas.

In the course of his characterization of Hutchinson, Winthrop justifies his complaint by citing her teachings. Theologically the difference between her and the establishment lay in her insistence that “no sanctification was any evidence of a good estate, except their justification were first cleared up to them by the immediate wittnesse of the Spirit.” According to Winthrop, the negative consequence of this opinion is twofold. First, she was subverting the authority of the colony, church, and state. Second, she was inciting others: “many prophane persons became of her opinion, for it was a very easie and acceptable way to heaven.” Winthrop feared that her opinions would become manifest in the people's backsliding. Formerly godly people would fall under her persuasion, and “indeed most of her new tenents tended toward slothfulnesse” (SS, 263, 264).

The primary charges against Hutchinson were that she taught against the ministers of the commonwealth and that she argued for the primacy of the spirit over the Scripture. Winthrop also attributed to Hutchinson “the utter subversion both of Churches and civill state.” At the December 1636 session of the General Court, the Pastor John Wilson made “a very sad speech on the condition of our churches” (J, 1:204). This “free and faithfull speech in the Court,” as Winthrop called it, caused Wilson much consternation. He was called to answer publicly. Winthrop blames Hutchinson for occasioning the speech and for causing Wilson's embarrassment: “Thence sprang all that trouble to the Pastour of Boston.” In addition to causing problems for Wilson and the magistrates, Hutchinson received the blame for corrupting John Wheelwright, who before her influence “was wont to teach in a plaine and gentle style” (SS, 265).

Winthrop's ultimate argument against Hutchinson emerges as a political struggle for survival. According to the governor, the fate of the colony was at stake; Hutchinson threatened to destroy the principle of the state as one body knit together by love. She threatened to divide the state and church into factions that could not even coexist, much less develop into a model community, a holy commonwealth.

Twentieth-century students of the Antinomian Controversy generally find fault with Winthrop. Edmund Morgan, for example, who is generally sympathetic toward the governor, calls the trial “the least attractive episode of Winthrop's career.” The documents reveal “a proud, brilliant woman put down by men who had judged her in advance.” David D. Hall even maintains that “Mrs. Hutchinson parried the accusations of her examiners with a wit and verve that reduced them to confusion.”¹² The consensus appears to be that the controversy stands as a prime indication of the authorities' total intolerance of any belief but their own. According to Philip Gura, however, “the magistrates' and ministers' responses to Anne Hutchinson and her sympathizers must be seen not as a stubborn defense of long-held principles but as the consequence of the colony's process of self-definition.”¹³

One of the major threats of Hutchinson, besides her inciting discontent or dissatisfaction with the New England ministers was—according to Winthrop—that if works played absolutely no part in justification, as Hutchinson argued, then godly living, modeling one's behavior on Christ's, obeying the commandments Moses brought down from Sinai, and even having faith, had no authority whatsoever. For the Puritan, the Scripture was the law; it proscribed life and death. The business of the Puritan ministers was to interpret those texts to the best of their ability for the lay congregation. Hutchinson threatened the whole evangelical principle with its emphasis on the authority of Scripture and the importance of preaching. She challenged the authority of both Scripture and ministers. The patriarchy in the seventeenth century would allow no person, and certainly no woman, to exercise that power.

Winthrop's description of the trial itself constitutes a section of his Short Story. Whereas Winthrop briefly summarized the other cases, he gives specific detail of the Hutchinson case, even paraphrasing several of her statements. Winthrop's report is one of very few accounts that is supposed to record Hutchinson's actual words. In the absence of any of her own writing, this account is historically invaluable. Though the court may well have condemned Hutchinson before she entered the Cambridge meetinghouse where her trial was held, Winthrop began by pointing out that the purpose was for her either to acknowledge and reform her faults or to suffer the court's punishment: “that we may take such course with you as you may trouble us no further” (SS, 266). The court was trying her, after all, for causing public disturbances; for holding “erroneous opinions”; for broaching those opinions; for encouraging sedition; for “casting reproach upon the faithfull Ministers” and thereby weakening them and raising prejudice against them; and for maintaining public meetings even though the court had explicitly condemned them.

After Winthrop's introductory remark, the court seems to have proceeded in a somewhat unorganized, even haphazard, way. One of the charges brought against Hutchinson concerned her public meetings. The court accused her for teaching, an act reserved in Puritan society exclusively for men. According to Winthrop's account, Hutchinson defended herself by saying that she and her group did no more than “read the notes of our teachers Sermons, and then reason of them by searching the Scriptures.” She supported herself by reference to the “men of Berea [who] are commended for examining Pauls Doctrine” (SS, 268). The court's charge, according to Winthrop, was that she did not search Scriptures to confirm, rather she used Scriptures to declare the teacher's meaning or even to correct the teacher. Winthrop condemned the principle of independent thought by members of the congregation because such thought could be dangerous to the homogeneity of the community.

Hutchinson's “ready wit” is evident in her response to the court's challenge that she has no rule from the Bible for teaching as she does:

COURT
Yet you shew us not a rule.
HUTCH.
I have given you two places of Scripture.
COURT
But neither of them will sute your practise.
HUTCH
Must I shew my name written therein?

(SS, 269)

Winthrop's record of the trial differs here somewhat from the anonymous account of her examination. The discussion, according to that anonymous report, concluded with Winthrop stating that the magistrates would not allow her to hold meetings. She responded that if “it please you by authority to put it down I will freely let you for I am subject to your authority.”¹⁴ The difference between the two accounts is significant because it suggests that Winthrop might have allowed his politics to interfere with his record of all the facts. Which account of the trial is closer to the truth remains a mystery because no one can ever know exactly what words were actually spoken in the court, but the comparison reveals that Winthrop might have deliberately decided to omit Hutchinson's submission to his and the court's authority. Winthrop's version does not conceal the fact that Hutchinson was witty, however. It makes clear her ability to argue intelligently with her prosecutors, an ability Winthrop seemed to deny her in his description of her character.

Besides charging her with inciting discontent by her teaching and questioning the doctrine of the Bay ministers, the court accused her of reviling several of the ministers. After excepting Cotton and Wheelwright, she maintained that the New England ministers “could not hold forth a Covenant of free Grace, because they had not the Seal of the Spirit, and that they were not able Ministers of the New Testament” (SS, 270). By “seal of the spirit,” Hutchinson meant that the new England ministers lacked the figurative mark or seal that signified the permanent indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Without such a seal they were not able ministers of the New Testament and therefore unfit to preach. Winthrop would not tolerate such a reproach of the ministers. According to Winthrop's version, she denied the charge, but the ministers, whom the court had asked to be present for that purpose, affirmed it. After their affirmation, Hutchinson confessed and, according to Winthrop's account, repeated her reproach.

Winthrop's account of the court's proceedings of the following morning portrays the defendant as the antagonist. Hutchinson requested that the ministers “might be sworne to what they had spoken” and declared that an“oath is the end of all controversy” (SS, 270). In other words, she simply requested that the ministers take an oath swearing to the truth of their previous testimony. Because they recognized the seriousness of taking such an oath, the ministers were extremely reluctant. If they could not be absolutely sure of what they had said months before, they ran the risk of committing blasphemy. Were they to take the oath and then be proven false, they would surely be liable to the charge of being unworthy ministers, and they would also have broken the third commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain” (Exodus 20:7). On this possibility of blasphemy rested Hutchinson's hope.

Whereas the anonymous account records in great detail the arguments over the oath-taking, Winthrop cleverly and politically pauses briefly on this aspect of the trial to state that “All this would not satisfie Mistris Hutchinson, but she still called to have them sworne, whereupon the Court being weary of the clamour, and that all mouths might be stopped, required three of the Ministers to take an oath” (SS, 271). The chronology of events as Winthrop records them differs significantly from that related in the anonymous account of the examination. According to Winthrop, the oath-taking preceded Hutchinson's confession about her receiving divine revelations. According to the “Examination” record, the ministers did not swear until the very end, that is, not before Hutchinson had already ruined any chance she might have had to obtain the court's leniency or forgiveness. According to Winthrop's chronology, the ministers took their oath just after Cotton's testimony. If this were the case, the ministers would have been taking a much greater risk, and their oaths would have carried more weight. If they did not swear until after Hutchinson described her revelations, the oaths would have been uncontested and therefore virtually meaningless; the defendant was by her own admission by then irremediably convicted.

The account of Cotton's testimony sheds further light on the governor's method of composition. Winthrop is vague on Cotton's actual testimony where it did not seem to fit the court's wishes and conclusions. For example, Cotton stated (according to the anonymous version) that as far as he could recollect, he “did not find her saying they were under a covenant of works, nor that she said they did preach a covenant of works.”¹⁵ In a sense Cotton here defended Hutchinson effectively, and any charge on this score would have to be dropped. Ultimately Hutchinson was to convict herself not on the grounds of causing sedition or of overstepping a woman's bounds in teaching and interpreting the scripture, but by revealing that she had a direct spiritual communion with God. Knowing this as he writes his own account of the trial, Winthrop blithely concludes the reference to Cotton's testimony by stating that “Mr. Cotton did in a manner agree with the testimony of the rest of the Elders” (SS, 271).

The irony of the case against Hutchinson is that even though the court could do little about her teaching, or her being a woman, or her disagreement with the ministers, the court could condemn her for her confession of immediate, divine revelation. Evidently on her own initiative she enumerated the various times she had experienced revelations. Her coming to New England “was revealed” to her as was her knowledge that the magistrates in New England would prosecute her. Of her prosecutors she knew “that for this you goe about to do to me, God will ruine you and your posterity, and this whole State” (SS, 273).

Winthrop seems to have been aware of this irony and to have delighted at the opportunity it provided the court to dispose of its arch-enemy with impunity: “Mistris Hutchinson having thus freely and fully discovered her selfe, the Court and all the rest of the Assembly (except those of her owne party) did observe a speciall providence of God, that … her owne mouth should deliver her into the power of the Court, as guilty of that which all suspected her for, but were not furnished with proofe sufficient to proceed against her” (SS, 274). According to Winthrop's account, the governor realized what she was saying when she began, foresaw the inevitable result of such a speech, and so he tried to cut her off: “The Governour perceiving whereabout she went [self-incrimination?] interrupted her … but seeing her very unwilling to be taken off, he permitted her to proceed” (SS, 271). According to the anonymous “Examination,” there is no clue as to when, where, or even if Winthrop tried to stop her from speaking about her immediate revelations.¹⁶

So speak she did. She spoke until Winthrop could say that “the revelation she brings forth is delusion,” and he could have the court cry out in agreement.¹⁷ She proceeded until, as Winthrop narrates it, “The Court saw now an inevitable necessity to rid her away, except wee would bee guilty, not only of our own ruine, but also of the Gospel, so in the end the sentence of banishment was pronounced against her, and shee was committed to the Marshall, till the Court should dispose of her” (SS, 276). As the court passed its sentence, Hutchinson—defeated but still proud and forthright—asked why she was banished. Winthrop replied: “Say no more, the court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”¹⁸ Here again Winthrop's version omits this apparent exchange, one that does not show the prosecutor in a very favorable light.

The court may well have been satisfied, for it had just rid itself of the greatest internal threat since the colony's inception in 1630. Whether or not the court was satisfied with Hutchinson's banishment, however, the community had still to deal with Hutchinson's constituency. So although Winthrop had passed the sentence of banishment in November, Hutchinson was allowed to remain, imprisoned in the home of Thomas Weld's brother, in the Boston area (Roxbury) until the season “might be fit, and safe for her departure” (SS, 300). In an effort to shame her even further than the court had done, the elders of the Boston church called her to an excommunication hearing in March 1638. This trial was to be her final humiliation in Boston and a lesson to any who might continue to support her beliefs. The final section of Winthrop's Short Story is his account of this church trial.¹⁹

Hutchinson's confinement through the winter of 1637-38 had not kept her ideas—heresies, according to Winthrop's report—from circulating among some members of the congregations. In vain, several orthodox ministers had visited her in what the ministers maintained were efforts to bring her from her errors. In March the elders of the church sent for her to stand an interrogation. On the Thursday lecture day, 15 March 1638, Anne Hutchinson began her last defense against the commonwealth and the church of Boston. Thursdays were generally set aside as days for public lectures by the clergy. In this sense, Hutchinson's excommunication trial would serve as a public lesson. As Winthrop writes, “she came not into the Assembly till the Sermon and Prayer were ended (pretending bodily infirmity) when she was come, one of the ruling Elders called her forth before the Assembly” (SS, 301).

Winthrop's Short Story includes a list of the twenty-nine errors that explain “why the Church had called her.” Few of the twenty-nine were ever actually brought up in the sessions preceding her excommunication, but Winthrop maintained the list to be correct, stating that she acknowledged she had spoken all of them. Many of the errors relate to Hutchinson's apparently recent concern with death and resurrection, beginning with the first which reads “That the soules of all men (in regard of generation) are mortall like the beasts” (SS, 301).²⁰ Many of the errors concern body, soul, and spirit and questions about union with Christ at death. Several others in the list have to do more specifically with evidence of grace, and still others concern law and works. For example, in errors 13 and 23, Hutchinson was accused of holding that the laws of Scripture are not binding: “The Law is no rule of life to a Christian,” and “We are not bound to the Law, no not as a rule of Life” (SS, 302). The repetition suggests the haste with which the errors were drawn up, and the accusation itself hardly seems fair given what is known about Hutchinson's knowledge of and devotion to the Bible.

Winthrop summarizes the two days (the two lecture days the trial lasted), relating that Hutchinson was not entrapped by the ministers who visited her, as she claimed, but that they had come “in compassion to her soule, to helpe her out of those snares of the Devill.” The governor, who was in attendance at the trial but who played little part, drew a picture of the accused as stubborn and obstinate; despite the learned ministers' arguments against her opinions, “shee still persisted in her errour, giving forward speeches to some that spake to her” (SS, 303, 304).

After a week's recess, Hutchinson returned to the second and last session against her. In the intervening week John Cotton and John Davenport had evidently made some progress with her, for she acknowledged “her error in all the Articles (except the last)” (SS, 305). She wrote down her answers to them all. (Alas, that manuscript is lost.) According to Winthrop, she did so well in her responses that “the Assembly conceived hope of her repentance.” Such hope was short-lived, however, because many of her answers proved unsatisfactory. Further, writes Winthrop, she argued that she “had not been of that judgement, that there is no inherent reghteousnesse in the Saints.” John Cotton gave her over at this point, for despite his admonition the previous week and his long week's conference with her in his home between sessions, she was “maintaining of untruth” (SS, 306, 307). Cotton left the matter to her pastor. That pastor, John Wilson, perhaps Hutchinson's most bitter enemy, attacked her viciously. According to the anonymous report of the church trial, he spoke harshly: ‘I doe account you from this time forth to be a Hethen and a Publican and soe to be held of all the Brethren and Sisters of this Congregation, and of others. Therefore I command you in the name of Christ Jesus and of the Church as a Leper to withdraw your selfe out of the Congregation.”²¹ So much for a community knit together in a mutual bond of affection. In his version of the church trial, Winthrop did not record Wilson's vituperative final words. The attack, according to Winthrop, was much less vindictive, in that the governor placed blame on Hutchinson herself. Even though she heard some argue on her behalf “that she might have a further respite, yet she herself never desired it” (SS, 307). Indeed, Winthrop seems to have been very insistent about having Hutchinson convict and sentence herself.

The governor did set down, without interpretive comment, Hutchinson's final words, however: “In her going forth, one standing at the dore, said, The Lord sanctifie this unto you, to whom she made answer, The Lord judgeth not as man judgeth, better to be cast out of the Church then to deny Christ” (SS, 307). Winthrop's motive in including this final outburst might have been to suggest that Hutchinson's former supporters in the Boston congregation had deserted her and turned against her, signifying the total victory of the state and church against such a major and potentially devastating threat as Hutchinson was. Perhaps, too, Winthrop included a description of Hutchinson's exit in this final scene to suggest just how misled the woman was. Certainly in Winthrop's and the church's sense of propriety, Hutchinson was cast out because she seemed to be denying Christ. In the context of Hutchinson's departure, Winthrop did not include the fact that one faithful adherent, Mary Dyer, did rise to join her teacher, nurse, and soul mate as she walked out of the meeting house for the last time.²²

One can hardly read the history of Anne Hutchinson without the compulsion to feel sorry for her and to want to side with her against the combined forces of the establishments of church and state. The temptation is to see in Hutchinson's trials the noble attributes of a spirit of resistance, an independence of thought, and a pursuit of truth that characterize only a very few. Hutchinson traveled to the New World full of hope and excitement. She had a dream of a holy commonwealth in union with the church just as did the New England patriarchy. The problem was that Hutchinson's vision, conception, and interpretation of that holy commonwealth invited faction, dispute, and the questioning of authority. John Winthrop's vision did not. He rested his hopes on conformity and acceptance of authority. Thus, Hutchinson was to him and his community a dire threat. She had to be disposed of for the good of the colony. Hutchinson was a woman before her time.

With the spring weather in late March 1638, Hutchinson journeyed to Portsmouth—in what is now Rhode Island. There she rejoined her husband and others of her family and friends. Several months later she suffered the miscarriage of a hydatidiform mole,²³ news of which further inspired Winthrop to point out the Lord's displeasure with his former neighbor. In 1642, shortly after her husband's death, Hutchinson and her six youngest children moved to the Dutch settlement on Long Island. The next year she and her family—except for one daughter—were killed by a group of Indians reclaiming the land that European settlers had previously taken from them.

Judging by subsequent journal entries, Winthrop's concern with Hutchinson and her adherents did not end with her banishment and excommunication. Several later journal entries, for example, indicate that the Hutchinson affair had deeply troubled him and his notion of a holy commonwealth. He spent much mental energy trying to justify his actions by recording the divine providences against his antagonist.

The Antinomian Controversy inspired Winthrop to write extensively in various genres. Besides the historical account that was subsequently published as the Short Story, he wrote two theological essays, which his friend and guide Reverend Thomas Shepard convinced him not to circulate and which he evidently destroyed. As we have seen, the episode might also have motivated him to write his “Christian Experience” in an effort to convince himself of his own trials, sanctification, and ultimate justification. He engaged in a manuscript debate with Henry Vane in the winter of 1636-37. In May he wrote a tract in defense of the court's order of limiting immigration depending on the immigrants' qualification, following it up with a further defense in response to comments by Vane. In response to many members of the Church of Boston “being highly offended with the governor” for the proceedings of the court against Hutchinson (J, 1:256), Winthrop wrote an “Essay Against the Power of the Church to Sit in Judgment on the Civil Magistracy” (November 1637). In the essay Winthrop argues that the “Church hath not power to Call any Civill Magistrate, to give Account of his Juditiall proceedinge in any Court of civill Justice” ([Winthrop Papers] WP, 3:505). Relying on biblical precedent, he outlines the reasons the church does not and should not have such a power. In his journal history of New England, Winthrop kept track of the developments of the Antinomian Controversy and even reported on Hutchinson's movements after she left the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The journal was to record the important events of the colony.

.....

THE JOURNAL: A NEW LITERATURE FOR A NEW WORLD

In the meantime most of our people went on shore upon the land of Cape Ann, which lay very near us, and gathered store of fine strawberries.

(Winthrop's Journal, 1:50)

As a history of the first twenty years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England, Winthrop's journal is invaluable. Indeed, many historians have utilized Winthrop's journal extensively as one of the major sources for the early history of the colony. In the surge of attention to its merit as history, however, critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the work for its own sake. Richard Dunn, like other editors before him, has written about the composition of the journals and has compared Winthrop's journal with other, contemporary histories of settlements in the New World.²⁴ Barbara McCrimmon has written briefly about the publication history and has discussed some of the topics of Winthrop's journal.²⁵ In her study Before the Convention, M. Susan Power describes Winthrop's journal and discusses its symbolic content in relation to his sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity,” arguing that whereas the “Modell” theorizes about a preconceived system, the journal records Winthrop's actual, ultimately vain efforts to build the commonwealth the shipboard lay-sermon promised.²⁶

Winthrop's journal does seem to have a purpose beyond the mere recording of the first twenty years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Perry Miller formulated a definite purpose for Winthrop and his contemporary New England historians. According to Miller, “the entire purpose of the New England historians [was to] chronicle the providence of God in the settlement of New England.”²⁷ Whether or not Miller is guilty of overgeneralization, the story Winthrop tells in his journal is undeniably permeated with ideas and the exposition of values reaching beyond the mere record of fact. Winthrop's journal both records the triumphs and calamities of an entire community and thematically reports one writer's hopes, trials, successes, and disappointments. Winthrop's “History of New England,” as he characterized the journal himself on the first page of the third volume, is one important marker on the path that leads to a distinct American literature.

If trials are to be a major subject and overcoming them a theme, Winthrop's opening entries are certainly appropriate. The first major trial the writer faced was to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The journal opens with a minute account of the sea crossing, so minute in fact that Charles Banks was able to use it to chart what he supposes to be the actual route the Arbella and the rest of the fleet took in the spring of 1630.²⁸ As new as the sea venture was to the Puritans, Winthrop evidently did have a model for his description of an Atlantic crossing. After journeying to New England a year earlier, Francis Higginson had sent back to England his “True Relation of the Last Voyage to New England” (1629), and Winthrop seems to have had a copy of it sent to his wife at Groton.²⁹ On 8 April 1630 after a week's delay in the waters off Southampton, the Arbella set sail.

As Banks's account demonstrates, part of Winthrop's purpose must have been to provide a document by which subsequent voyagers could navigate the Atlantic, but he also provided a help to later emigrants in understanding the perils and knowing what to expect in crossing the sea, such as attacks from enemy or pirate vessels, storms, and calms. Beyond these pragmatic functions, Winthrop's sea-journal provides a fascinating account of a landsman's concerns while at sea for the first time. Perhaps most striking is the landlubber's obsession with the wind. All but one of the seventy-eight entries in the sea-journal mention the wind—the lifeblood, as it were, of a seventeenth-century ocean-going ship. Not only did Winthrop's immediate physical safety depend upon the wind, but so did the future of his colony. Thus it is not surprising that of the entries Winthrop wrote at sea, all mention the wind, all but about five begin with a description of the wind, and many entries deal exclusively with the wind and weather.³⁰

After threats from supposed enemy vessels, storms, and calms, the sea-weary Puritans sighted land on 6 June 1630. On 12 June, Winthrop fails to mention wind for the first time during the voyage: “About four in the morning we were near our port” (J, 1:49).³¹ Now that the wind had brought ship and passengers safely across the Atlantic to the New England garden, Winthrop must have felt that he was near his new home and that the wind was not the major concern it had been for the previous eleven weeks.

The wind was both friend and foe, friend as it carried the Arbella and other ships safely across the Atlantic, foe as it also brought with it deadly storms or withheld itself in equally threatening calms. From the shore, Winthrop characterizes the weather as another antagonist in his narrative of the colony. In the early years, he wrote repeatedly of the severe New England storms, heat waves, and cold spells. The first winter seems to have been particularly extreme. In February Winthrop recorded the freezing of the rivers, boating mishaps, deaths due to weather, and the severity of the wind: “this day the wind came N. W., very strong, and some snow withal, but so cold as some had their fingers frozen, and danger to be lost” (J, 1:55). In August 1632, Winthrop recorded a tempest that prevented sailing. The summer was “wet and cold” (J, 1:89). The summer and fall of 1634 were evidently hot and dry. The following winter is remembered by an “extraordinary tempest of wind and snow.” Indeed, “the weather was many times so tedious as people could not travel” (J, 1:143). Winthrop reports that hurricanes would occasionally threaten destruction as well. In one instance he records the uprooting of trees, overturning of houses, and the grounding of ships. Winthrop peppers his journal with such reports, indicating that one of the many obstacles the valiant colonists had to overcome was adverse weather. There is never any doubt, however, that with God's help overcome it they will. After one particularly vicious storm, for example, Winthrop writes that “there did appear a miraculous providence in their preservation” (J, 1:156).

Turning from the Atlantic crossing and the weather, Winthrop found room in his journal to record that “there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.” Shortly after the passengers came within reach of the land they had been yearning for, Winthrop continued the garden imagery in a description of the passengers leaving ship: “most of our people went on shore upon the land of Cape Ann, which lay very near us, and gathered store of fine strawberries” (J, 1:47, 50).

As paradisaical as these entries are, Winthrop provided few descriptions of this newfound paradise in the following months. Shortly after arriving, he took up the business of beginning a city from scratch, an endeavor that seems to have taken all his time and energy; the journal is blank concerning the details about the settling of Boston, just as it had been blank concerning life aboard a ship. What the passengers did with their time or the governor with his must be projected from consideration of other accounts. Winthrop gave little space to the mundane projects of building houses, planting crops, and setting out gardens. He neglected the mundane because he intended to create a public record of the settling of a holy commonwealth, and he hoped to provide political propaganda for the enhancement of the colony. Certainly it was important to him to record the moral and religious aspects of the settlement, not the daily activities of mere mortal men and women. An implied theme of the journal seems to be that despite all the trials that the colonists were to face in coming years, Winthrop's opus would assert the colony's success. Each potentially cataclysmic threat would be introduced, overcome, and disposed of. Even though Satan is always at work, Winthrop would write, the commonwealth would pursue its course in becoming that city on a hill.

Consistent with the public-document nature of the journal, the governor's first entries after the arrival of the Arbella record the coming of the other ships, whose safe arrivals were certainly seen to be a positive omen for the establishment of the colony. Indeed, after listing the week's arrivals, Winthrop noted that the company “kept a day of thanksgiving in all the plantations” (J, 1:51). The list of arrivals also anticipated a matter that was to become crucial to the colony, that of emigration. The arrival of ships for the first few years meant more colonists, bringing money and buying the goods the New Englanders could provide them. The more the arrival of ships helped the community, the more important it was for Winthrop to record the fact. In this way the journal becomes a public statement of the colony's economic self-sufficiency.

In the first months Winthrop recorded arrivals, deaths, fires, boating mishaps, and severity of the weather. He did not create his first extended narrative until December 1630 when he tells of an accident at sea. The entry immortalizes Richard Garrett, a shoemaker, by recounting the story of his attempt to sail to Plymouth in midwinter. After shipwreck caused by ice and severe weather, Garrett and most of the boat's party died of exposure or frostbite. With this account, Winthrop ushered in what was to become one of the most distinctive characteristics of his journal, the narrative with an implied or merely insinuated moral. In this case since the shoemaker had attempted to make his journey “against the advice of his friends,” the narrative reiterates Winthrop's emphasis on the importance of people banding and staying together. The same might be said for the colony as a whole. Returning to Boston, Garrett's daughter's “boat was well-manned, the want whereof before was the cause of their loss” (J, 1:55, 56).

The notion of being well-manned in the New England wilderness is a theme Winthrop seemed to think he could not stress forcefully enough. One of the conditions of immigration, according to the Cambridge Agreement written and signed in England in 1629, was that the commitment to come to New England was binding because each member of the new community depended desperately on all the others. Therefore, Winthrop could not tolerate those who chose to return to England or leave the Bay Company's jurisdiction. To a large extent, Winthrop avoided even mentioning colonists' departures or their desire to depart, but in one instance he notes how even the thought of better times in old England could be dangerous: “It hath been always observed here, that such as fell into discontent, and lingered after their former conditions in England, fell into the scurvy and died” (J, 1:58).

If merely thinking about the comforts of a former home in England could result in scurvy or death, actually deserting by traveling back to the mother country could invite catastrophe: “Of those which went back in the ships this summer, for fear of death or famine, etc., many died by the way and after they were landed, and other fell very sick and low” (J, 1:58). Winthrop here early established a theme that would recur throughout the history. He lamented the departure of members of the colony. Since such departures did not speak well for the community, he rarely mentioned them except to note the misfortune that befell the deserters. The New England patriot must have been especially upset at the hastening away of John Humfrey, four ministers, and a schoolmaster in December 1641. In September 1642 he records the trials of their voyage back to England with this preface: “The sudden fall of land and cattle, and the scarcity of foreign commodities, and money, etc., with the thin access of people from England, put many into an unsettled frame of spirit, so as they concluded there would be no subsisting here, and accordingly they began to hasten away, some to the West Indies, others to the Dutch, at Long Island … and others back for England.” For those who abandoned the godly enterprise in New England, Winthrop had little sympathy. Indeed, he seems almost to have thrived on their misfortune, writing that although it “pleased the Lord to spare their lives … yet the Lord followed them on shore. Some were exposed to great straits and found no entertainment, their friends forsaking them. One had a daughter that presently ran mad, and two other of his daughters, being under ten years of age, were discovered to have been often abused by divers lewd persons, and filthiness in his family. The schoolmaster had no sooner hired an house, and gotten in some scholars, but the plague set in, and took away two of his own children” (J, 2:82-83).

Besides describing the dangers of defecting and returning to England, Winthrop also recorded information about other colonies in America, those both near and far. He reported each colony's shortcomings and presented each as altogether unappealing. Of Virginia, for instance, he writes that the custom was to be “usually drunken,” and even formerly godly ministers gave themselves up to “pride and sensuality” (J, 2:20-21). In incidents closer to home, Winthrop also seems to emphasize the negative aspects of a particular community, if it in any way threatens the unity, homogeneity, or progress of his own Bay Colony. His accounts of the Reverend Thomas Hooker's experiences in Connecticut are a case in point. As early as September 1634 Hooker and his company desired to resettle in Connecticut. Winthrop, deputy governor at the time, opposed their removal for the same reasons he regretted the departure of any group beneficial to the commonwealth: “in point of conscience, they ought not to depart from us, being knit to us in one body, and bound by oath to seek the welfare of this commonwealth” (J, 1:132). Although through his arguments he was able to thwart an immediate departure, he could not prevent Hooker and his congregation from eventually leaving and settling on the Connecticut River in what is now Hartford. Winthrop records Hooker's departure on 15 October 1635. At the very top of the manuscript page he writes that the sixty people went to Connecticut and, “after a tedious and difficult journey, arrived safe there” (J, 1:163). The journey may well have been as tedious as Winthrop reports, but the author's disgruntlement at their departure seems to have colored his report. Following this entry, Winthrop left almost half a page blank, suggesting he had more to say on the matter, but that he never got back to it.

Winthrop did get around to reporting the Connecticut colony's misfortunes, however. In the first winter those colonists lost two thousand pounds' worth of cattle and had to subsist on “acorns, and malt, and grains.” Later he added that “Things went not well at Connecticut.” (J, 1:178, 200). Even though he forgave Hooker completely and praised him sincerely at his death (J, 2:326-27), he still managed to point out the tribulations suffered by Hooker's community and to compare that community unfavorably with Boston. Winthrop's thematic implication is that those who leave the Bay Colony will be punished for their transgression. Such punishment is attributed to God who was most certainly, in the eyes of the colonists, watching carefully over Boston as a holy commonwealth.

Winthrop also turned to his journal to map the progress of Anne Hutchinson, a much more threatening transgressor. The beleaguered governor depended on his occasional entries to demonstrate that the Lord continued to be displeased with her after her banishment and excommunication. Winthrop reported that her miscarriage “might signify her errour in decrying inherent righteousness.”³² Winthrop's detailed account of the physician's report was his way of demonstrating how Anne Hutchinson was pertinaciously pursued for her troublemaking in Boston. In 1639 Winthrop mentioned that there were political troubles at Aquiday, Hutchinson's place of settlement (J, 1:299). In 1641 he reported that civil and ecclesiastical unrest was great, causing a great schism among them. In Boston Hutchinson's son and son-in-law were both troublemakers (J, 2:39-41). The implication is, of course, that any place where Hutchinson settled would suffer, as would anybody related to or in sympathy with her. In 1638 Winthrop exclaimed that those who went with Hutchinson “fell into new errors daily,” a falling that God-fearing Bostonians would want to avoid at all costs. Outsiders would know that Hutchinson was corrupt and corrupting. He also reported that she still suffered from delusions: “By these examples we may see how dangerous it is to slight the censures of the church; for it was apparent, that God had given them up to strange delusions” (J, 1:284, 297).

In reporting Hutchinson's death by Indians the journalist reminded his readers that these “people had cast off ordinances and churches” and noted that after the deaths of her and her family “a good providence of God” saved some of the others in her community (J, 2:138). Finally, as late as 1646, eight years after the Antinomian Controversy had passed, Winthrop suggested that Hutchinson's children continued to suffer punishment for their mother's transgressions. A daughter who escaped death at the hands of the Indians was eventually returned to the colonists, but she “had forgot her own language, and all her friends, and was loath to have come from the Indians” (J, 2:276-77). The description suggests that as a final punishment for the sins of her mother this daughter lost her language and very identity in New England, from Winthrop's perspective a grave punishment indeed.

Certainly one of the major functions of Winthrop's journal (as suggested in the previous chapter) was for Winthrop to write down for posterity a record of the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. To this end he detailed not only his response to Hutchinson but also to other major threats to the community; he recorded the court sessions and the community's successes and failures. Depending on context, however, he related episodes emphasizing varying details. Indeed, one of the aspects of Winthrop's journal that makes it enjoyable reading as well as informative history is the inclusion of many brief accounts from the experiences of the colonists. His large history includes numerous small private histories, many of which Winthrop related with a special knack for the art of story-telling. There are, in fact, so many delightful vignettes that choosing from among them is itself difficult and any selection must be somewhat arbitrary. But any selection shows that Winthrop became a good storyteller.

Perhaps the most famous, certainly one of the most frequently anthologized, parables is his story of the battle between the snake and the mouse: “At Watertown there was (in view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake; and, after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: That the snake was the devil; the mouse was a poor contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his kingdom” (J, 1:83-84).

The account is indicative of Winthrop's story telling in several ways. As a historian, Winthrop recorded fact. Here he insured the reader's faith in this verity of the matter by noting the several witnesses. The episode has a meaning that a sincere and holy person could interpret according to God's intentions for New England or for the settlers in the new colony. This account differed from Winthrop's typical accounts in the length to which the narrator went (via Wilson's interpretation) to explain the moral. More often Winthrop only inferred the moral or stated it briefly as God's providence for New England.

A parable with a less obvious message is that of a poor Mr. Mansfield and a rich Mr. Marshall, a story which is “a witness of God's providence for this plantation.” As Winthrop narrates it, Mansfield wanted badly to come to New England but could not afford the passage for himself and his family. Since Marshall, the wealthy merchant, was troubled by bad dreams about the poor man, he gave him fifty pounds and lent him another one hundred, enabling Mansfield to sail to New England. Winthrop concludes by stating that this “Mansfield grew suddenly rich, and then lost his godliness, and his wealth after” (J, 1:141).

This seemingly cryptic passage suggests the complexity of Winthrop's art. If the emphasis falls on the final sentence, God, through providence, appears to intend the immigrant Mansfield to lose his godliness and wealth after getting to New England. Another possibility, one that seems more likely in light of Winthrop's general purpose, is that God's providence for the colony is made evident through Mansfield's receipt of the means to travel to New England in the first place. Winthrop implies that God provides for the colony, and at the same time suggests that the snare of worldly wealth threatens even those sometimes shown God's favor. Because of God's high expectations for the New England colonists, their corruption is especially lamentable. So much for Mansfield. By God's providence he got to New England; by his own fault he let Mammon corrupt him; and he is punished for his corruption by losing his new wealth.

The moral of a story about a woman who attempted to drown her infant is much more obvious, yet the story seems equally complex. “A woman of Boston congregation, having been in much trouble of mind about her spiritual estate, at length grew into utter desperation, and could not endure to hear of any comfort, etc., so as one day she took her little infant and threw it into a well, and then came into the house and said, now she was sure she should be damned, for she had drowned her child; but some, stepping presently forth, saved the child” (J, 1:230). This short narrative demonstrates the power that concern about personal salvation had over the colonists. Writing it in the midst of the Antinomian Controversy (summer 1637), Winthrop demonstrates the problems that result from controversies about justification. The narrator implies that such church problems, which should never have existed to begin with, result in tragic actions. The moral is so obvious for Winthrop and his readers that he evidently felt no need to enunciate it. Mortals can never truly know their spiritual estate; therefore, it is pointless to challenge God in an attempt to determine that estate. Winthrop depicts, by means of this woman, a person's helplessness to establish or verify her own damnation. Winthrop's unstated lesson is that because men and women can not know their estate on earth they should not fail to live by the rules of God and the Bible, its being the only testament they have of God's workings. In another similar incident concerning a mother who unsuccessfully attempts to drown her child, Winthrop does conclude his tale with a moral: “Thus doth Satan work by the advantage of our infirmities, which should stir us up to cleave the more fast to Christ Jesus and to walk the more humbly and watchfully in all our conversation” (J, 2:61).

Winthrop did not always leave the moral of his parables up to his reader's interpretations. In a story about a godly woman who “set her heart too much upon” a “parcel of very fine linen of great value” and who consequently had to suffer its accidental loss, the historian states the obvious moral for his readers: “but it pleased God that the loss of this linen did her much good, both in taking off her heart from worldly comforts, and in preparing her for a far greater affliction by the untimely death of her husband, who was slain not long after” (J, 2:30-31).

Judging by the frequency of entries, perversion of the socially sanctioned sex drives of men and women was a subject that evidently fascinated Winthrop. Such perversion could manifest itself in adultery, licentiousness, incest, and even bestiality. To Winthrop all such perversions were obvious signs of Satan's continual work to corrupt the godly and undermine the sanctity of the holy commonwealth. In an episode that exemplifies the depths of the colonists' beliefs in what would now be considered superstition, Winthrop records the story of a “loose fellow in the town” who—because of some “human resemblances” between the man and a pig—is suspected of fathering a sow. When questioned, the suspect confessed and was subsequently put to death. Winthrop makes no interpretive comment.³³

In one particular adultery case, Winthrop attributes a woman's fall to her father's negligence. The father departed for England, leaving his daughters behind, “but took no course for their safe bestowing in his absence, as the care and wisdom of a father should have done” (J, 2:317). The cause is clear: the result as Winthrop explains it is that a married man “was taken with [one of the daughters], and soliciting her chastity, obtained his desire.” The daughter, Mary Martin, having “committed sin” with this man in the house, became pregnant, killed the child after its birth, was found out, and condemned to death. In Boston the law forbade anyone from living alone; this narrative stresses the importance of membership with a legitimate family and a pious community. According to the colonial tradition, individuals by themselves faced a much greater risk of transgressing than those who were tightly bound into the community through family. Winthrop's prose style in this instance is especially terse and unembellished. He relates “a very sad occasion” in a most objective manner, leaving the condemnation of the woman to God: “she behaved herself very penitently while she was in prison. … Yet all the comfort God would afford her, was only trust (as she said) in his mercy through Christ” (J, 2:317). Such incidents are indicative of the terrible pressures on colonists to “move humbly and watchfully” in the New England community. Winthrop's report demands attention by its subject matter and must have been intended to compel readers to avoid the sins that would lead to such dire consequences. At the same time, it seems arguable that Winthrop himself laments the transgression and the tragic deaths of both mother and child.

When misfortune befell the unrighteous, Winthrop had no qualms about entering the episode into his journal. Despite his firm belief in justification by grace not works, he seems to suggest (as Hutchinson was banished for pointing out) sanctification (an honest, humble, industrious life-style according to the laws of the Bible and the model of Jesus) can help to evidence grace. Although God is free to strike down any one at any time for reasons beyond the understanding of man, that same God is somehow more likely to strike down the ungodly. After relating the shooting death of a Captain Patrick and describing his various transgressions, for example, Winthrop wrote that his death “was the fruit of his wicked course and breach of covenant with his wife, with the church, and with that state who had called him and maintained him, and he found his death from that hand where he sought protection” (J, 2:154). About a man who dies crossing the Atlantic, Winthrop writes “one of the seamen died—a most profane fellow, and one who was very injurious to the passengers” (J, 1:44).

With relative ease Winthrop discovers justice and the divine plan in these obvious cases. In reporting misfortunes that befell the godly without apparent logical or discernible cause, however, Winthrop has little explanation to offer other than to admit that any such incident was a sad accident. Often a moral can be implied either by context or by the circumstances of the narrative itself. Such is the case in the story about the accidental shooting death of a five-year-old whose father left him alone in the house. In their care and wisdom, Winthrop implies, fathers should know better than to leave children unattended in a room or house in which loaded guns are accessible.

Within the larger history of New England, many of these stories have as a common theme Satan's repeated-but-thwarted attempts to ruin the colonies. Winthrop noted that the “devil would never cease to disturb our peace, and to raise up instruments one after another” (J, 1:285). Whether referring to public goings-on or to private incidents and misfortunes, Winthrop believed that readers should be aware of the devil's work. In 1645 he wrote about the purpose of his journal: “It may be of use to leave a memorial of some of the most material, that our posterity and others may behold the workings of Satan to ruin the colonies and churches of Christ in New England, and into what distempers a wise and godly people may fall in times of temptation; and when such have entertained some false and plausible principles, what deformed superstructures they will raise thereupon, and with what unreasonable obstinacy they will maintain them” (J, 2:240).

Given the prevalence and the thematic importance of the stories that make up a large portion of the journal, it seems perfectly fitting that Winthrop's final entries (and perhaps his last surviving writing) would be stories of a private nature. The final entry, for example, tells of the drowning of a child of five whose father had worked into the Sabbath (Saturday night). Winthrop concludes by vindicating the parent to a degree: “But the father, freely in the open congregation, did acknowledge it the righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day against the check of his own conscience” (J, 2:355).

In the nineteen years that Winthrop kept his journal, Massachusetts Bay changed from a small trading company to an established, virtually self-sufficient colony, part of a united federation of colonies. During these years Winthrop was always either at or near the head of the political and religious decision-making bodies. This proximity encouraged him to write many tracts concerning governmental and ecclesiastical decisions for which there was no room in the journal. The next chapter investigates many of these other writings.

CHEERFUL SUBMISSION TO AUTHORITY: MISCELLANEOUS AND LATER WRITINGS

Judges are Gods upon Earthe.

(Winthrop Papers, 4:476)

Although the journal history of New England that John Winthrop kept for almost twenty years is unquestionably his most significant contribution to American literature, it is by no means his only important work. As we have seen, he wrote a historically important sermon, a documentary history of the Hutchinson trial (published in 1644), and a record of his conversion experience (1637). Throughout his career, the governor also wrote several less well-known tracts concerning politics, theology, and the colony's relations with the Indians.

MISCELLANEOUS EARLY WRITINGS

For the political and legal writing Winthrop would be called upon to do in New England, he had an apprenticeship in his native country. While he worked as an attorney from 1627 to 1628, for example, he prepared several bills evidently for presentation before Parliament. As Robert C. Winthrop describes them, they “are wholly in his own handwriting, on large paper, with ample margins, and prepared as if for the consideration of a Legislative Committee.”³⁴ In one of these tracts he described the reasons for preventing drunkenness, arguing against the “loathsome vice of Drunkennesse”: “An Act for the preventing of drunkenness and of the great waste of corn.”³⁵ His concern is that beer is brewed too strong and thus “an excessive wast of Barlye, which might be imployed to the great good of the poore, and good of the whole kingdom” (WP, 1:371-74). Winthrop records facts and figures to argue his case, concluding that this law, if passed, could enrich the kingdom by five million pounds a year. Contrary to the modern stereotypical notion of Puritans as teetotalers, Winthrop was not against drinking in itself; he favored beer as a wholesome drink, but abhorred it as an intoxicant.

The bill, which might have been presented to the House of Commons in 1627 or 1628, never became law, but it is representative of several such pieces Winthrop wrote during his tenure at the Court of Wards and Liveries. Another tract attributed to Winthrop and written near the same time is “An Acte to settle a Course in the Assessinge and Levienge of Common Charges in Townes and parishes” (WP, 1:418-19). The bill proposes to establish a law concerning taxation that would end dissension about rates and collections for common charges for such public benefits as maintaining soldiers, prisons, bridges, and churches. Winthrop recognized a need for such taxation, and he gained valuable experience in attempting to organize a fair and workable means of taxation. Such experience would serve him well in New England.

In addition to gaining ability as a framer of legal tracts, Winthrop prepared himself thoroughly for his command as governor of a holy commonwealth. In the late 1620s, he attended church services regularly and copied into a notebook brief outlines of each sermon. He kept track of the preachers, the texts, and the main points of the arguments.³⁶ Certainly this minute record helped to prepare the governor for the composition of his own lay-sermon aboard the Arbella in 1630.

REFORMATION WITHOUT SEPARATION

In an early New England document, Winthrop combined his two types of writing skills as he composed a tract on the reasons for reformation without separation: “Reasons to prove a necessitye of reformation from the Corruptions of Antechrist which hath defiled the Christian Churches, and yet without an absolute separation from them, as if they were no Churches of Christ” (1631). Winthrop probably composed the tract in response to Roger Williams's refusal to become temporary teacher at the Boston Church. (He was offered the position while John Wilson was in England trying to convince his wife to join him in New England.) Winthrop voices essentially the same sentiment in the Humble Request, insisting that the colonists were not separating from the Church of England; rather they were merely reforming it from within.

Although the manuscript exists only in a fragment, Winthrop's method and argument are clear.³⁷ As he argued in his tract on the reasons for settling in New England in the first place, he admits that the churches in England are corrupt, but he maintains that they are not unsalvageable: “the Corruption of a thinge dothe not nullifie a thinge so long as the thinge hathe a beinge in the same nature, that it had, when it was in the beste beinge: so is it with the particular Congregations” (WP, 3:13). Referring to the Gospel of Matthew, Winthrop reminds his readers that the Bible prophesies that the visible church will stand until the end of the world. In response to the objection that the Church makes whores and drunkards of visible saints, he argues that “to terme the people in gen[era]l whores and drunkards is evill: for althoughe the most part are ignorant (the more is their sinne and our griefe) yet whores and drunkards they are not: weake Christians they are indeed, and the weaker for want of that tender Care, that should be had of them” (WP, 3:12). Because that church has become corrupt in England, transplanting, purifying, and caring for the visible church becomes the obligation and responsibility of the true Christians in New England. Winthrop thus takes a middle ground, arguing on the one hand that the Church of England needs reforming, while denying on the other hand that reformers have the right to separate from corrupt churches so long as they are “churches of Christ.”

DEFENSE OF AN ORDER OF COURT

Judging by surviving documents of Winthrop's writings, the Antinomian Controversy and the colony's troubles with Anne Hutchinson inspired one of Winthrop's greatest literary outpourings. In addition to the Short Story account, the journal entries, and his “Christian Experience,” Winthrop wrote several tracts on different subjects related to the controversy. He engaged in a manuscript debate with Henry Vane concerning restrictions on immigration; he wrote a document concerning the power of the church; he also wrote arguments concerning works and grace, tracts which unfortunately do not survive.

Just after the proceedings against Wheelwright for his supposed sedition in March 1636, the General Court passed an order “to keep out all such persons as might be dangerous to the commonwealth” (J, 1:219). The order immediately followed Winthrop's election to the governorship after three years absence, and the reelected governor lost no time in publishing an explanation of the General Court's order.

In this explanation, Winthrop essentially argues that because the welfare of the whole should not be put at hazard for advantage of any individual, the magistrates of the commonwealth have the right to “receive or reject at their discretion.” The document's full title is descriptive of its contents: “A Declaration of the Intent and Equitye of the Order made at the last Court, to this effect, that none should be received to inhabite within this Jurisdiction but such as should be allowed by some of the Magistrates” (WP, 3:423, 422).³⁸ Besides explaining the court's order, the “Declaration” is emblematic of Winthrop's view of the commonwealth. In phrases that are reminiscent of his “Modell of Christian Charity,” the “Cambridge Agreement,” and “Arguments for Plantation,” Winthrop describes “the essentiall forme of a common weale or body politic” as he perceived it: “The consent of a certaine companie of people, to cohabite together, under one government for their mutual safety and welfare.” Given this view of the commonwealth, Winthrop's argument is indicative of the sincerity of his intentions. He wanted what he felt was best for the colony: “The intent of the law is to preserve the wellfare of the body; and for this ende to have none received into any fellowship with it who are likely to disturbe the same and this intent (I am sure) is lawful and good” (WP, 3:422-23, 424).

Winthrop premises his argument on the political ideology current at the time, brought with the Puritans from Jacobean England, namely that “no man hath lawfull power over another, but by birth or consent.” The commonwealth is founded by free consent of the members who “have a public and relative interest each in other.” Echoing specifically the metaphor he expounds in the “Modell of Christian Charity” of 1630, Winthrop argues that every member of a commonwealth such as the one in New England is obligated “to seeke out and entertaine all means that may conduce to the wellfare of the bodye” (WP, 3:423). In the “Modell,” we remember, he writes that “All the partes of this body being thus united are made soe contiguous in a speciall relation as they must needes partake of each others strength and infirmity, joy, and sorrowe, weale and woe” (WP, 2:289).

An objection that concerns the author of the defense is that the law may result in rejecting “good Christians and so consequently Christ himselfe” (WP, 3:425). The possibility of denying Christians a home in New England was a serious consideration for Winthrop, who earnestly desired and certainly recognized the need for immigration. He knew that not only religiously but also economically and politically the growth of the colony was imperative.

Because he sincerely believed that it would be wrong to deny a true Christian admittance into his holy commonwealth, Winthrop argues that the magistrates and elders have not yet, as far as they know, rejected a Christian. Moreover, he argues that rejecting the man would not necessarily be the same as rejecting Christ. Weak as it is, Winthrop's argument rests on that simple denial. He firmly believes that to admit those who threaten the peace and harmony of the commonwealth would be a sinful evil, and that he would be unfaithful to his duty as Puritan magistrate in receiving such. According to Perry Miller, Winthrop assumes “that man is a reasonable creature, and his statement of political theory in these papers owes more to logic than to the word of God.”³⁹

Because Henry Vane was not convinced by Winthrop's “Defense,” he wrote an answer questioning both the author's logic and his authority as a magistrate. The young Henry Vane, who had recently been left out of the government altogether, was certainly bitter. As governor he had been the most important ally the Antinomians could have had. Unfortunately for Hutchinson, Wheelwright, and the others of their camp, his dethroning, as it were, cost them their stronghold in Boston, and ultimately their own rights to residence within the limits of the Bay Colony. In his response to Winthrop's “Defense,” the ex-governor makes one last vain effort to confront his adversaries, an effort that is cogent and perhaps appealing to democratic ears.⁴⁰ Winthrop had written that “If we are bound to keepe off whatsoever appears to tend to our ruine or damage, then we may lawfully refuse to receive such whose dispositions suite not with ours and whose society (we know) will be hurtfull to us” (WP, 3:423). In response to this passage, Vane writes that “this kind of reasoning is very confused and fallacious … [the question is] whether persons may be rejected, or admitted, upon the illimited consent or dissent of magistrates.”⁴¹ According to Winthrop, Vane's answer cast “much reproach and slander … upon the Court.” In other words, the General Court approved Winthrop's stance; and when the whole “proceedings about the law” was read before the court, most parties were satisfied, even “some that were on the adverse party, and had taken offense at the law, did openly acknowledge themselves fully satisfied” (SS, 251-52).

In his “Reply to an Answer Made to a Declaration,” Winthrop essentially restates his former argument in the light of Vane's objections. (See WP, 3:463-76). The governor moves from point to point, methodically and patiently, showing in each case what his own argument is, what Vane's objection is, and how he refutes or answers Vane's objections. In this sense the “Reply” adds little new to the original “Defense.” In other ways, however, the “Reply” is worthy of comment. Winthrop begins by condemning “Contentions among brethren … [as] sad spectacles (WP, 3:463). But because “the cause of truth and justice” calls to him, Winthrop feels obliged to respond even though he thereby continues the contention; he is careful to place the blame, however, on Vane: “if I deale more sharply, than mine owne disposition leads me, the blame must fall upon him, who puts such occasions upon me, as I cannot otherwise shunne” (WP, 3:463). Risking further contention, Winthrop verges on attacking the man rather than his argument, stating for example, that “his zeale for the cause outrunes his judgment” (WP, 3:468). In other instances Winthrop submits that Vane's argument is simply fallacious and does not merit a reply. Winthrop also accuses the addresser of merely babbling: “Thus he runs on in a frivolous discourse, and in the end falls upon this false conclusion” (WP, 3:465).

Whether or not Winthrop is guilty of an ad hominem argument, he was careful to avoid ever naming his adversary (although certainly the author of the “Address” was known to all who heard the tract read at court). Instead Winthrop designates him as the “Answerer,” and generally refers to him with an anonymous third person pronoun. On occasion, however, Winthrop slips into the second person, under the pretense of a direct quote of a question Winthrop would ask him: “I must make bold to aske him this question, viz. Seeing you are bound by your oath” (WP, 3:472).

In justifying his position Winthrop emphasizes the duty of the magistrate. He states that the magistrates have made an oath both to the church and to the civil state, and that they also are under a sort of civil moral code that regulates their behavior: “As they are magistrates, they are sworne to doe right to all, and regulated by their relation to the people, to seeke their wellfare in all things” (WP, 3:466).

Winthrop felt that in the tight-knit, ideal holy commonwealth he advocated, such a system would be perfectly appropriate. The faith the members of a holy commonwealth needed to have in their magistrate would justify their belief in his righteousness. A magistrate was elected by the freemen, but once in office he was believed to have God's authority to perform his task. In a holy commonwealth, of course, the law of the Bible is the magistrate's guide, and the corruption of a magistrate, in this ideal circumstance, is out of the question. In setting up in Massachusetts the colonists agreed “to walke according to the rules of the gospell.” In Winthrop's terms, one thus would have “a christian common weale.”

According to the account in Winthrop's Short Story, the governor's reply to Vane's answer to the original defense was successful. Even some members of the opposing faction were convinced of the justice of the immigration law. Winthrop was successful here, as he would be again the next fall in banishing Wheelwright and Hutchinson. The established colony would survive the internal threats despite Satan's intention to distract or overthrow the churches in New England.

FORMER PASSAGES

Besides the theological threats to the community, the colony was repeatedly beset with problems concerning the Indians, either as a result of the colonists' behavior toward them or the Indians' real or imagined threat to the Europeans' safety and welfare. In a seven-page pamphlet published by the commissioners for the United Colonies, Declaration of Former Passages and Proceedings betwixt the English and the Narragansetts [DFP] (1645), Winthrop recounts the colonists' dealings with the Narragansett Indians between 1636, when a treaty was signed, and 1645, when the commissioners were armed and ready to fight. To a certain extent, the tract was a declaration of war.

Despite protestations to the contrary, much of the English interaction with the Indians involved deceit, subterfuge, and murder. Having badly defeated the Pequots during the wars of the 1630s, the colonists diminished their threat and even arranged a treaty with them. The colonists then turned to the Narragansetts, another powerful New England tribe. Miantonomoh, one of the most powerful of the tribe's chieftains, had come to the English—as the treaty between English and Narragansetts prescribed—to ask for permission to attack the Pequots in an effort to avenge an earlier attack by the Pequots. The authorities did not refuse permission, and in the battle that ensued Miantonomoh was taken prisoner. Although the colony's leaders had led Miantonomoh to believe he was an ally, they were suspicious of his trustworthiness and thought him too powerful for the good of the colonies.

While the commissioners were considering what action to take against the sachem, their ally Uncas of the Pequots reported that he had captured him, and loyally, “craved the commissioners advice how to proceed with him” (DFP, 2).⁴² In a journal entry from August 1643, Winthrop describes the dilemma the commissioners had faced while they held Miantonomoh captive. Miantonomoh was rumored to have been the “head and contriver” of a conspiracy “to cut off all the English.” He was also “of a turbulent and proud spirit”—just the type of man the Puritans would not tolerate. Fearing, therefore, that it would “not be safe to set him at liberty, neither had we sufficient ground for us to put him to death.” The magistrates called upon the elders, letting them recommend that he be executed. Next the commissioners secretly informed Uncas that they had decided Miantonomoh should be put to death. Uncas obliged: “Onkus' brother, following after Miantunnomoh, clave his head with an hatchet, some English being present” (J, 2:135, 136).

The Declaration opens with Winthrop's reminder that the English “came into these parts of the world with desire to advance the kingdome of the Lord Jesus Christ and to injoye his precius Ordinances with peace” (DFP, 1). Despite these benevolent intentions on the part of the English, as Winthrop narrates it, the Indians were now forcing the settlers to war.

After narrating the circumstances surrounding Miantonomoh's murder—as if to justify the Bay Colony's action—Winthrop recounts the Indian's offenses against the state, dating back to 1637 when the chief signed a treaty and 1638 when he was reputed to have broken that treaty by attempting to murder Uncas and then actually killing a Pequot prisoner put in his charge. In relating Miantonomoh's execution Winthrop leaves out the details of the Indian's death. In fact, Winthrop describes it in the pamphlet in a jargon not unlike the political-military jargons of other ages: “Uncas hereupon slew an enemy, but not the enmity against him.” Because of this surviving enmity, the troubles with the Narragansetts continued. After describing them, Winthrop was forced to conclude that the “premises being duly weighed it clearly appeares that God calles the colonies to a war.” The governor concludes the declaration by insisting that Satan was again stirring up “many of his instruments against the Churches” (DFP, 4, 7).

As a defense of the English actions against the Indians, the Declaration of Former Passages stands in ironic contrast with the earlier writings about Indians in New England. The first ground of settling in Massachusetts, we remember, was for the propagation of the gospel to the Indians; the settlers would “come in with the good leave of the natives who finde benifight [benefit] allreaddy by our Neighbourhood” (WP, 2:141).⁴³ In contrast to this hopeful beginning, the Declaration asserts that military measures would have to be taken against the Narragansetts despite the colonists' former intention to bring them to the word of God. The ideal of delivering them from the snares of the Devil by converting them seems to have been forgotten.

Historian Francis Jennings calls the Declaration a “bill of charges against the Narragansetts, which was concocted, as usual, of a great many highly misleading words.”⁴⁴ The most damning evidence is Winthrop's rendition of a letter Roger Williams sent, explaining that despite nearby troubles the Rhode Island Indians sought peace not war.⁴⁵ As Jennings demonstrates, the commissioners (Winthrop?) literally changed Williams's account to fit their need, which—according to the author—was to wage war against the Indians. This subterfuge by the colonists Jennings calls “mendacity extraordinary even among adepts.”⁴⁶

Other passages in the Declaration suggest Winthrop's attempt to mislead. He repeats, for example, phrases concerning the colonists' efforts to maintain peace even though the English have suffered “many injuries and insolencies” at the Indians' hands. Several times he refers to the Indians' violation of treaties. Meanwhile, according to Winthrop, the commissioners “in care of the publick peace, sought to quench the fire kindled amongst the Indians, these children of strife.” The political nature of the Declaration is undeniable; Winthrop's method of twisting facts to suit his needs seems equally obvious. The tract shows Winthrop and his fellow commissioners at their manipulative, exploitative worst. As Jennings argues, this manipulation “shows a side of old John Winthrop's character that sorts badly with his reputation for integrity and gentleness.”⁴⁷

In the Declaration, as with so many of his writings, the governor demonstrates that he saw behind the trouble of the moment Satan working against the colony. Although we cannot forgive Winthrop and his fellow colonists for their mistreatment of the native Americans, we can view him in the context of his age.⁴⁸ We can acknowledge that his Declaration shows him to have had the perseverance necessary to build and maintain a city founded in and governed by the will of his God; to have had faith in the future of a holy commonwealth; and to have felt that the Indians, like the Antinomians, were threats to that future.

DEFENSE OF THE NEGATIVE VOTE

In addition to writing about the internal theological threats and the external military threats to the community, Winthrop repeatedly wrote about domestic political adversity, introducing, defending, or justifying his positions concerning various governmental regulations. The policy of a negative vote (right to veto) essentially divided the General Court into two groups, giving the magistrates the power to dissent from or override the other group's decision despite the magistrates' numerical minority. As such, the policy marks the beginning of bicameral government in the United States. The occasion for Winthrop's written defense of the theory of the negative vote in 1643 has a fascinating background.

Winthrop introduced the idea of negative vote shortly after he was succeeded in the governor's spot by Dudley in 1634. Winthrop had granted power to the deputies as they demanded as early as 1634, but he wished to maintain the magistrates' authority and power. As we have seen, the deputies were elected by the freemen of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Each township sent representatives to be a part of the General Court. Magistrates were also elected by popular vote, but Winthrop saw a distinction between the two groups. The deputies were simply intended to be representatives of the people; magistrates, once elected, had the power of divine sanction. The deputies, however, outnumbered the magistrates and therefore had the potential to carry any vote, a fact that gave them great political power. A simple majority, of deputies and magistrates, would give deputies an advantage Winthrop did not believe they deserved. So he established the principle of the negative vote: “No Lawe etc: shall passe, as an Acte of the Court, without the Consent of the greater parte of the magistr[ate]s of the one parte, and the greater number of the Dep[u]tyes on the other parte” (WP, 4:386). Thus neither group, deputies nor magistrates, could pass laws or make judgments in legal cases without procuring a favorable majority from the other group. In this way Winthrop avoided what he called a “mere democracy,” something abominable according to Winthrop's seventeenth-century outlook.

The law as Winthrop framed it remained silently on the books, as it were, until a legal battle about ten years after its inception brought it again to the forefront. The legal battle, Sherman vs. Keayne, arose over the rightful ownership of a pig. The General Court addressed the issue in June 1642, but the actual sow business, “a great business upon a very small occasion” (J, 2:64) began in 1636 when Captain Robert Keayne received a stray sow and evidently advertised it.⁴⁹ After a year he claimed to kill his own sow, retaining the stray. At this point Mrs. Sherman came forward, arguing that Keayne took her sow, but because he had killed it she could not identify it. The court decided in Keayne's favor, giving him three pounds for costs and twenty for damages. Mrs. Sherman with the help of George Story gained popular support, and got a witness “to confess … that he had forsworn himself.” The case was reopened. The deputies tended to side with Sherman, and the magistrates with Keayne so that, as Winthrop writes in his journal, since the deputies far outnumber the magistrates (thirty to nine), “no sentence could by law pass without the greater number of both.” The deadlock occasioned the popular party's, the deputies', denigrating the principle of the negative vote, asserting that it “had hindered the course of justice” (J, 2:64, 65, 66).

In a journal entry for June 1643, Winthrop explains the occasion for his writing “a small treatise” on the negative vote, “wherein he laid down the original of it from the patent, and the establishing of it by order of the general court in 1634, showing thereby how it was fundamental to our government, which, if it were taken away, would be a mere democracy.” To this treatise “one of the magistrates as was conceived” made an answer, “undertaking to avoid all the arguments both from the patent and from the order” (J, 2:120). The surviving document is Winthrop's “Reply to the Answ[er] made to the Discourse about the Neg[ative] vote.”⁵⁰

In a style similar to the one he used in his reply to Vane's arguments about immigration laws, Winthrop states his case point by point. In his response he answers questions about the legality of the negative vote, and shows that it subscribes to the letter of the patent, is fundamental to Massachusetts Bay government, and is lawful and expedient. He also has something to say about “the proper place and power of the Dep[u]ties” (WP, 4:380).

In defending the negative vote Winthrop refers to the two documents most important to the commonwealth, the Bible and the Charter. Though his use of the Scripture in this instance is slight, he does refer to the Old Testament to point out that the negative vote saved Jeremiah “against the minde of the Preists” (WP, 4:389). Winthrop makes detailed reference to the Charter, arguing that the first question will be “best cleared by the Patent it selfe, wherein I will set down the very words themselves (so far as concernes the state of the Question) and not leave out what may make against me, as the Answ[erer] often doth” (WP, 4:380). Winthrop uses the patent in two ways: one is to demonstrate that the negative vote is lawful according to the laws brought over from England initially; the other is to deprecate the answerer's method. In concluding his argument that the patent makes legitimate the negative vote, Winthrop becomes vehement: “I must Conclude, that either these words in our Patent doe give the magistrates a Neg[ative] vo[te] or els there was never any Neg[ative] vo[te] granted by any Patent or Comission by any kinge of England since Edw[ward] the 3ds time” (WP, 4:382).

Winthrop argues that the negative vote is fundamental to the commonwealth in that it marks a specific difference between one form of government and another. If the negative vote were taken away, Winthrop repeats, “our Government would be a meere Democratie” (WP, 4:382). As a seventeenth-century Puritan aristocrat, Winthrop had no sympathy with democracy. According to Winthrop, no precedent or warrant for a democracy existed in Scripture; “there was no such government in Israell.” Correspondingly, for a new Israel in New England there should be none. Besides the lack of biblical precedent, secular histories record democracies as monsters, “the meanest and worst of all formes of Government,” full of troubles, and short-lived (WP, 4:383). Democracy does not come highly recommended from Puritan New England. Ironically, of course, with the division of the General Court into two separate houses each with the power to veto, the modern bicameral aspect of government which is such an integral part of the democracy in the United States owes its genesis to Winthrop and Puritan New England.

Winthrop's mistrust of democracy lies in his doubts about the abilities of the common man to govern himself or others, a mistrust, incidentally, that was echoed by many of the framers of the Constitution some 150 years later. Winthrop did acknowledge that some deputies might boast accomplishments equal to those of a magistrate, but generally the magistrates were chosen specifically for their abilities in law and politics.

Finally, Winthrop addresses the objection that the negative vote gives undue power to the magistrates even if their judgment is unjust: “If the Court of Assist[ant]s should give an unjust sentence in any Cause, the partye injured can have no remedye in the generall Court if the magistr[ate]s (as they are like to doe) shall persist in their former Judgment” (WP, 4:390). It is more likely, argues Winthrop, that the jury errs than the judge. Were judges to err, however, given new evidence that magistrates would “have good ground” to change their judgment. Magistrates are sure to be open-minded and “ready to attende such further helpe and light, as the wisdome and counsell of the generall Court may seasonably afforde.” Furthermore, according to Winthrop, any unjust magistrate who persisted in error would be shamed into either correcting his error or leaving office.

We can only conclude that as Winthrop struggled to retain the power for the magistrates he had the benefit of the colony at heart. His ultimate motives may have been to some extent influenced by pride and human striving for fame, but regardless of what was personally best for the individual man, Winthrop sought what he thought and what the Bible taught was best for the commonwealth. Such thoughts guided him in devising and recording responses to the crises he and his colleagues faced.

ARBITRARY GOVERNMENT

By midsummer 1643, Winthrop had satisfied, or at least quieted, the opposition concerning the negative vote. For a time he and the deputies “let the cause fall” (J, 2:121). By the following summer (1644) Winthrop had been voted out of the governorship; as deputy governor he opposed the deputies' claim of judicial authority, and he thereby caused them to accuse him of maintaining an arbitrary government. Once again Winthrop was put on the defensive.

To defend himself, the other magistrates, and the system of government in the Bay Colony, Winthrop again wrote a small treatise. Like his other titles, the full title of this treatise is descriptive: “Arbitrary Goverment described and the Common mistakes about the same (both in the true nature thereof, and in the representation of the Goverment of the Massachusetts, under such a notion) fully cleared” (1644).⁵¹

Winthrop's challenge in this treatise was to demonstrate that the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was not arbitrary. To this end he defines arbitrary government as that in which “a people have men sett over them without their choyce” who have power to govern them “without a Rule” (WP, 4:468). Where the people choose their own governors and require their own rules, in contrast, there is no arbitrary government. As he had done in defending the negative vote, Winthrop referred directly to the Charter to show how the government of Massachusetts allows those liberties that keep it from being arbitrary.

A rhetorical trick Winthrop uses to his advantage is to define arbitrary government by negation and thereby imply the positive characteristics of the government he defends. The foundation, laws, and constant practice for the common good insist that Massachusetts offers liberties unknown to an arbitrary government. The foundation is in the Charter that prescribes the election of officers; the rules are established by the Charter, and the magistrates have been liberal in issuing punishment for transgressors of the rules. The rule observed by the magistrates is the word of God. Because of his divergence from the Bible in exacting penalties, Winthrop got in trouble with the deputies. He maintained that except for certain capital crimes, the punishment should vary with the circumstances of the crime. According to biblical precedent, argued Winthrop, penalties other than for capital offenses are not prescribed. The individual crime is considered in each case. Winthrop seeks to avoid oppressing the people by unjust sentences yet to punish adequately those who transgress against holy or civil law. Laws are objective and fixed; penalties subjective and relative.

In exacting punishments, Winthrop admits, a government can appear to be arbitrary. In a statement that anticipates the dictum “innocent until proven guilty,” Winthrop writes that a human judge “cannot sentence another, before he hath offended, and the offence examined, proved, layd to the Rule, and weighed by all considerable Circumstances, and Libertye given to the partye to Answerer for himselfe” (WP, 4:474). By appealing to the accused's liberties, Winthrop argues that his government is not arbitrary, but liberal.

In contrast to this relatively liberal view, in perhaps the boldest statement he makes, Winthrop asserts that “Judges are Gods upon earthe.” This statement verbalizes the seventeenth-century understanding of the judge's role in New England, but it also provides further evidence of Winthrop's naïveté, innocence, and hope. Again exhibiting his faith in the justice of Scripture and in the basic goodness of the magistrates in a holy commonwealth, Winthrop argues that the judges in their judgments will “holde forthe the wisdom and mercy of God” (WP, 4:476). God gives men the ability to interpret God's own laws.

Winthrop concludes by arguing that although laws should be fixed, firmly established, penalties should not be rigid. After all, in infinite wisdom, “God foresaw, that there would be corrupt Judges in Israell, yet he lefte most penaltyes, to their determination” (WP, 4:481). In answering objections, Winthrop acknowledges that judges are fallible, subject to temptation and error, but that the consequences of their error is slight compared with the injury an unjust law could do.

In the ideal commonwealth Winthrop envisions, knowing the laws will be sufficient cause for obeying them; the virtuous need not know the penalty. The best humans can do, submits Winthrop, is to provide against “common and probable events” (WP, 4:481). For the rest, the members of a holy commonwealth must trust in God.

THE “LITTLE SPEECH ON LIBERTY”

No sooner had Winthrop argued that the government was not arbitrary than a group from the town of Hingham accused him of again overstepping his rightful authority. As with the sow business, here too a story stands behind Winthrop's creation of what has come to be known as his “little speech on liberty.”⁵² A group of townspeople from Hingham, a community near Boston, accused Winthrop of overstepping his authority when he appointed a militia captain contrary to the people's choice. The people of Hingham refused to respond to the appointed captain's orders and called Winthrop to court. Winthrop considered the Hingham faction mutinous and argued that he was honored in being singled out to defend a just cause. After being cleared of any criminal charges and reinstated, as it were, Winthrop “desired leave for a little speech” (J, 2:237). The speech he gave, as much as any other single piece of his writing, helps to characterize the man and to explain his theory of government.

After a short preface asking for the court's indulgence, Winthrop introduces the matters that his speech addresses: “The great questions that have troubled the country are about the authority of the magistrates and the liberty of the people.” In his speech, then, he clarifies and expounds on the principle of authority and defines his notion of liberty. He acknowledges that even though he is a magistrate, he is also a person and, therefore, is subject to failings. Because he has been chosen by a godly people, however, he has his authority from God: “It is yourselves who have called us to this office, and being called by you, we have our authority from God.” Yet unlike gods, magistrates come from among the electors, “men subject to like passions.” Therefore, he cautions his audience, “when you see infirmities in us, you should reflect upon your own, and that would make you bear the more with us, and not be severe censurers of the failings of your magistrates, when you have continual experience of the like infirmities in yourselves and others” (WP, 4:238). If a judge's cases are clear, the magistrate—unless he “fail in faithfulness”—will be able to act appropriately. “But if the case be doubtful, or the rule doubtful, to men of such understanding and parts as your magistrates are, if your magistrates should err here, yourselves must bear it” (J, 2:238). In other words, Winthrop argues that unless a magistrate openly and obviously transgress the law of God, those who elect him must bear the consequences of his errors.

In discussing liberty, Winthrop again exhibits his belief in the ultimate goodness of God's covenanted people in the Bay Colony. He argues that there “is a twofold liberty, natural (I means as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal.” He defines natural liberty as that of a brute beast, a liberty that has no place in a holy commonwealth: “By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority” (J, 2:238). A “civil or federal, it may also be termed moral” liberty, in contrast, has “reference to the covenant between God and man. … This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it. … This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority.” Such a liberty, argues Winthrop, is worth standing for with one's life. It is the liberty of being free and content to do God's will, to accept authority. Winthrop concludes by again contrasting natural and moral liberty: “If you stand for your natural corrupt liberties, and will do what is good in your own eyes, you will not endure the least weight of authority, but will murmur, and oppose, and be always striving to shake off that yoke; but if you will be satisfied to enjoy such civil and lawful liberties, such as Christ allows you, then will you quietly and cheerfully submit unto that authority which is set over you” (J, 2:238, 239). Winthrop's conception of liberty in this context epitomizes the belief of his age. Even though he was a judge, he also humbled himself in recognizing the interdependence of his fellow colonists. If he appeared happy in his harness, to paraphrase Robert Frost, it was only because he acknowledged that the success of the commonwealth depended on everyone being happy in harness. Winthrop's little speech delineates the accepted understanding of liberty in seventeenth-century Boston and is, if for no other reason, invaluable as a piece of literature.

Certainly Winthrop, like many of his colleagues in the government and the church, found his yoke “easy and sweet,” yet some of the colonists did not. Those malcontents strove continually against the authorities. Much of Winthrop's writings in his journal and separate treatises attest to this continual struggle. Winthrop attempted to establish a holy commonwealth in which all members were parts of the same body, each dependent on the other, and he wrought a government suitable for the colony set on the edge of a vast wilderness continent.

Differences of opinion were inevitable. Jealousies and power struggles were a matter of course. Frustration and fear were the natural human responses to a community that was envisioned as an ideal holy commonwealth but discovered to be as real and as challengingly problematic as any community in the world. Winthrop's various literary responses to the many problems that beset him and his community in his career as governor of the Bay Colony demonstrate his ability to govern despite a multitude of problems, and make manifest—as historians have long recognized—that politically, socially, and religiously he was clearly the most able governor in Puritan New England. As his manifold writings attest, he must also be considered one of the most important American Puritan writers.

Notes

1. Morgan, [Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop Boston: Little, Brown, 1958] 134.

2. Several works address the Antinomian Controversy. In The Puritan Dilemma, for example, Morgan discusses Hutchinson in a chapter entitled “Seventeenth-Century Nihilism” but argues that Winthrop was “one of the libelers” and writes that “Anne Hutchinson excelled him not only in nimbleness of wit but in the ability to extend a theological proposition into all its ramifications” (134, 136). See also Selma R. Williams, Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981); Emery Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962); and “Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomians,” a chapter in Philip Gura's A Glimpse of Sion's Glory, 237-75.

3. See Williams, [Selma R. Divine Rebel: the life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson New York: Holt, and Rinehart and Winston, 1981] 63-76, for a detailed explanation of possible reasons for the family's decision to settle in New England.

4. Reference is to Winthrop's A Short Story of the rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & libertines, (London, 1644); reprinted in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History, ed. David D. Hall (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 199-310. Subsequent references appear in the text as SS, followed by page number.

5. See Williams, Divine Rebel, 73-74, 79-80.

6. The account of the theological fine points of the Antinomian Controversy presented in this chapter are necessarily brief. An indispensable account of the theological aspects of the controversy is William K. B. Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978). In the context of Winthrop's journal entry, see pp. 9-10.

7. John Wheelwright, “A Fast-Day Sermon” (Boston: 1637); reprinted in Antinomian Controversy, 154.

8. Ibid., 158.

9. Ibid., 165, 166.

10. See T. H. Breen, The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630-1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 3-7.

11. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory, 254-55.

12. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 147-48; “Examination of Mrs. Hutchinson,” in Antinomian Controversy, 311.

13. Gura, Glimpse of Sion's Glory, 239.

14. “Examination of Mrs. Hutchinson,” Antinomian Controversy, 316.

15. Ibid., 334.

16. Compare Winthrop's Short Story (271) with the anonymous version, “Examination of Mrs. Hutchinson,” in Antinomian Controversy, 336-38 and 341.

17. “Examination of Mrs. Hutchinson,” in Antinomian Controversy, 343.

18. Ibid., 348.

19. For Winthrop's account of the trial, see Antinomian Controversy, 300-10; for the anonymous report, see “A Report of the Trial of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson before the Church of Boston,” in Antinomian Controversy, 349-88.

20. See Battis, Saints and Sectarians, 233-35, for an explanation of Hutchinson's newfound interest in death and resurrection.

21. “A Report of the Trial,” in Antinomian Controversy, 388.

22. In the context of Mary Dyer's monstrous birth, of course, Winthrop has recorded Dyer's act of accompanying Hutchinson; see Antinomian Controversy, 281.

23. See Margaret Richardson and Arthur Hertig, “New England's First Recorded Hydatidiform Mole,” New England Journal of Medicine 260 (1959):544-45. See also Anne Jacobson Schutte, “‘Such Monstrous Births’: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (Spring 1985): 85-106.

24. Dunn's work on Winthrop and his journal is extensive. See “Experiments Holy and Unholy, 1630-31,” in K. R. Andrews et al., The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480-1650 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 271-89. See also “Seventeenth-Century English Historians of America,” in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 195-225. Most recently Dunn has elaborated on the composition of the journal in “John Winthrop Writes His Journal,” 185-212.

25. McCrimmon, “John Winthrop's Journal,” Manuscripts, 24, 2 (1972):87-96.

26. Power, Before the Convention: Religion and the Founders, 65-106.

27. Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 360.

28. See Charles E. Banks, [The Winthrop Fleet of 1630: An Account of the Vessels, the Voyage, the Passengers and Their English Homes from Original Authorities. Boston: Riverside Press, 1930] 33-45. In a letter dated 14 August 1630 Winthrop mentions a chart of the sea voyage that Peter Milbourne, captain of the Arbella, drew for him (see Winthrop Papers [5 vols. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929-47.] 2:309).

29. The best modern edition of Higginson's “True Relation” is in Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638, ed. Everett Emerson, 12-24. It is also reprinted in Hutchinson's Collection of Original Papers (Boston: Prince Society Publications), 32-47, and in Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1623-1636, ed. Alexander Young (Boston: 1846), 215-238, 260-64. See Winthrop Papers, 2:157, for the letter in which Winthrop mentions Higginson's “booke.” See also Dunn, “Winthrop Writes His Journal,” 190-91.

30. It is interesting to note that Winthrop's model, the Higginson account, also gives much space to descriptions of the wind (see Emerson, ed., [Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976] 12-24).

31. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent references to Winthrop's journal, in this chapter are to Hosmer, [James Kendall] ed., [Winthrop's Journal “History of New England,” 1630-1649. 2 vols. New York: Scribner's Sons, 1908].

32. History of New England [from 1630 to 1649. 2 vols. Vol. 1, Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1825; vol. 2, Boston: T. B. Wait and Son, 1826] ed. James Savage (1825), 1:271. Hosmer felt obliged to omit Winthrop's account of the “monstrous birth” (J, 1:277, note 2). For the text of Winthrop's account, see the Savage edition, 1:271-73.

33. This is another of the several passages Hosmer decided not to include in his edition of the journal. See The History of New England, ed. Savage (1825), 2:61.

34. Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop, [2 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864, 1867] 1:221.

35. In this context, corn is meant in the British sense of grain in general, and specifically, as Winthrop makes clear in the paper, barley.

36. See Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters, 1:262. The autograph volume of these sermon notes is housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society. A microfilm reprint is available in the Winthrop Family Papers, 1537-1905, reel 35.

37. The fragment is reprinted in Winthrop Papers, 3:10-14.

38. For the text of the “Declaration,” see Winthrop Papers, 3:422-26.

39. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 70.

40. Winthrop summarizes the debate in his Short Story. See Antinomian Controversy, ed. Hall, 251.

41. For Vane's answer to Winthrop's defense, see Thomas Hutchinson, Collection of Original Papers Relative to the History of Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Prince Society Publication, 1865), 1:74 and following.

42. Subsequent references to Winthrop's A Declaration of Former Passages Betwixt the English and the Narrowgansets (Boston: By Order of the Commissioners for the United Colonies, 1645) appear in the text as DFP and page.

43. Judging by historical evidence, one cannot be too sure of the Puritan settlers' sincerity concerning the conversion of the Indians. Besides the work of John Eliot, little was done to introduce the word of God to the native Americans. See Francis Jennings, [The Invasion of America: Indians, colonialism, and the cant of conquest. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1976.] especially 228-53.

44. Jennings, The Invasion of America, 274.

45. The text of Roger Williams's letter is reprinted in Winthrop Papers, 4:30-31.

46. Jennings, Invasion, 275.

47. Ibid, 274.

48. In his biting appraisal, Jennings is not nearly so generous. See Jennings, Invasion, 265-76.

49. For Winthrop's account of the episode, see Winthrop's Journal, 2:116.

50. See Winthrop Papers, 4:380-91, for the text of Winthrop's “Reply to the Answ[er].”

51. For the text of Winthrop's “Arbitrary Government,” see Winthrop Papers, 4:468-88.

52. For Winthrop's account of events leading up to his writing of the little speech and for the text of the speech itself, see his Journal, 2:229-40.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Antinomians and Familists Condemned by the synod of Elders in New-England: with the proceedings of the magistrates against them, and their apology for the same. … London: Printed for R. Smith, 1644. Republished as A Short Story of the rise, reign and ruin of the Antinomians, Familists & libertines. … London: Printed for Ralph Smith, 1644. Reprinted in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History, 199-310. Edited by David D. Hall. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968.

A Declaration of Former Passages and Proceedings Betwixt the English and the Narrowgansets, with Their Confederates, Wherein the Grounds and Justice of the Ensuing Warre Are Opened and Cleared. Boston: Commissioners for the United Colonies, 1645.

A Journal of the Transactions and Occurrences in the Settlement of Massachusetts and the Other New-England Colonies, from the Year 1630 to 1644. Edited by Noah Webster. Hartford: Printed by Elisha Babcock, 1790. Reedited and published as The History of New England from 1630 to 1649. 2 vols. Edited by James Savage. Vol. 1, Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1825; vol. 2, Boston, T. B. Wait and Son, 1826. Revised edition, Boston: Little, Brown, 1853. Republished as Winthrop's Journal “History of New England,” 1630-1649. 2 vols. Edited by James Kendall Hosmer. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1908. Reprint. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966.

Winthrop Papers. 5 vols. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929-47.