For 350 years Governor John Winthrop's journal has been recognized as the central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s. Winthrop was both the chief actor and the chief recorder in New England for two crucial decades. He reported events—especially religious and political events—more fully and more candidly than any other contemporaneous observer, and his account of the founding of the colony has greatly influenced all subsequent interpretations of Puritan Massachusetts. The governor's journal has been edited and published three times previously—in 1790, in 1825-1826, and in 1908—but all of these editions have long been outmoded.¹ The present editors have prepared two new versions of the journal: a full-scale, unabridged, old-spelling edition,² and this abridged, modernized edition, which incorporates about 40 percent of the governor's text. We have added to the abridged edition Winthrop's celebrated statement of religious purpose, “A Model of Christian Charity,” that articulates his hopes and fears as he set forth for America. The governor wrote his “Model” in 1630 just as he was beginning his journal, and the two texts are closely related.

Winthrop's journal is a challenging document to decipher and to edit. He recorded it in three notebooks, only two of which survive. The first notebook (spanning the dates 29 March 1630 to 14 September 1636) and the third notebook (spanning the dates 17 September 1644 to 11 January 1649)—both preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society—are extremely hard to read because of the author's difficult handwriting and the worn condition of the volumes. The middle notebook (spanning the dates October 1636 to 8 December 1644) was accidentally destroyed by fire in 1825, and the only reliable transcription of its contents is a modernized version by James Savage, who was editing Winthrop's journal at the time of the fire. The present editors offer the reader two quite different modes of transcription. Our unabridged edition keeps the governor's seventeenth-century spelling, punctuation, and capitalization in the first and third volumes as closely as practicable, in combination with Savage's modernized text for the lost middle volume. This abridged edition modernizes the text throughout, combining Yeandle's 1990s-style modernization of the first and last parts with Savage's 1820s-style modernization of the middle part.

John Winthrop was born on 12 January 1588 in Edwardston, Suffolk, the son of a local lawyer. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, for two years and then studied the law at Gray's Inn in London. In 1610 he bought the manor of Groton from his uncle, and he subsequently served as justice of the peace in Suffolk while also presiding over the manorial court at Groton. In 1627 he was appointed an attorney of the Court of Wards and Liveries in London. Thus he was a member of the English ruling elite, and had the habit of command—as is evident to any reader of his journal. Another fundamental feature of Winthrop's life is that he became a dedicated convert to Puritanism in his youth, and over the years formed a wide network of alliances with fellow Puritans. By 1630 he had a considerable family to provide for: he was married to his third wife, Margaret Tyndal, and had eight living children—seven sons and one daughter. Although he was a relatively wealthy man, he had fallen into debt in the late 1620s, and was disgusted by the corruption (as he saw it) of English life and by Charles I's religious and political policies. When the king broke with his critics in Parliament in March 1629, Winthrop decided to sell his English estate and emigrate to America. He joined the Massachusetts Bay Company, which had just received a royal charter granting broad powers of self-government. On 26 August 1629 he pledged with eleven other Puritan gentlemen to move with his family to Massachusetts if the seat of the Company's government and its charter were also transferred to America. The Company shareholders agreed to this, and on 20 October 1629 they chose Winthrop as their new governor. He was then forty-one years old. In the winter of 1629-1630 under his leadership the Company organized a migration of about a thousand persons who sailed to Massachusetts in seventeen ships during the following spring and summer.³

In March 1630, Winthrop came to Southampton and boarded the ship Arbella to sail for America; while still in port—on 29 March—he started to write his journal. It was very likely at just about this date that he composed his eloquent “Model of Christian Charity,” in which he called upon his fellow migrants to join together in building a Christian commonwealth in America (see pp. 1-11 below). But his initial reason for keeping a journal was more prosaic: he wanted to record the day-to-day experience of crossing the ocean for the information of family and friends still in England who would be sailing in 1631 or after to join him in America. During the sea voyage he systematically reported the events of every single day until the Arbella anchored at Salem on 14 June 1630.

After reaching Massachusetts, Winthrop sent an account of the Atlantic crossing based on his journal back to England. And he made the crucial decision to continue keeping his journal, so that when he had the leisure he could write a fuller account of the founding of the colony. Winthrop had a fully developed conceptual framework within which to work. As he explained in “A Model of Christian Charity,” the Massachusetts colonists had a special vocation to love and support one another and to obey the Lord's commandments as they followed His injunction to build “a City upon a Hill.” Should they serve the Lord faithfully, He would bless their efforts; should they deal falsely, He would destroy their plantation. However grand his sense of divine mission, Winthrop was so busy trying to keep the colony going during his initial months in Massachusetts—when many people died or returned to England—that his journal entries were exceedingly brief and irregular. By the winter of 1630-1631 he had a little more time to write. Surprised by the bitterly cold weather, he composed his first extended anecdote, about the harrowing adventures of six Bostonians shipwrecked and frozen on Cape Cod. Winthrop saw this episode as evidence that God was testing the colonists' corrupt hearts, and he became openly jubilant in February 1631 when the Lyon returned from England with emergency provisions, because he sensed that the survival crisis was ending. During 1631 and 1632 he settled into a new form of record keeping, in which he took up his notebook several times a month, and wrote at greater length than in 1630. By the mid-1630s he was averaging nearly a full page every time he put pen to paper. There is almost no evidence in the first notebook that he wrote retrospectively. At most, he discussed incidents a month or two after they occurred.

Having filled up his first notebook in September 1636, Winthrop continued his journal in a (lost) second notebook. And he gradually changed his format, until by the early 1640s his narrative became less segmented and more continuous. His journal was turning into a history. Furthermore, during the course of his second notebook Winthrop began to write lengthy sections of his narrative well after the events described had taken place. This point cannot be proved incontrovertibly, since the original manuscript is destroyed, but close examination of his wording discloses solid evidence of a change from frequent writing sessions and contemporaneous reporting in 1636-1637 to irregular writing sessions and retrospective reporting by 1643-1644. Sometime in mid-1644, Winthrop seems to have stopped keeping his journal altogether for three or four years, and then finished the second notebook in 1647 or 1648.⁴

Winthrop probably took up his third notebook, which carries the narrative from 17 September 1644 to 11 January 1649, no earlier than mid-1648, and so he wrote most of the entries in this volume well after the events described. Inspection of Winthrop's handwriting indicates that he was working fast. He appears to have written twenty pages at one stretch, and fifteen pages on three other occasions. He made many more slips and errors than previously, writing up ten entries twice over and sometimes getting his dates wrong. His style also betrays haste; he has lost the compact precision characteristic of the entries from the 1630s. He seems to have composed most if not all of his final volume during the last few months of his life, between May 1648 and early March 1649, when he became too ill to write. He died on 26 March 1649.⁵

As he gradually changed his mode of composition between 1630 and 1649, Winthrop also gradually altered his perception of his own role as author-actor. At first he narrated as anonymously as possible, presenting the Arbella passengers and the Massachusetts colonists collectively as “we,” while seldom referring to his own leadership role as governor and rarely disclosing his personal opinions. But after he landed in Massachusetts, Winthrop could no longer keep himself out of the story, and soon he was reporting controversial matters that are not mentioned in the official colony records. Only through his journal do we learn that in April 1631 the magistrates reprimanded the Salem church for choosing Roger Williams as its minister, or that in 1632 Winthrop had a series of ugly confrontations with the deputy governor, Thomas Dudley. The portrait that Winthrop sketched of Dudley as a jealous, irascible colleague is bound to linger in the reader's consciousness. It is the first of a long series of unflattering vignettes. Winthrop was not a real portraitist; he never described people in three-dimensional detail. But like Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, he was adept at thrusting a few barbs into most of the personages who figure prominently in his story. Naturally he found little good to say about such outright adversaries as Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, John Underhill, Samuel Gorton, Peter Hobart, and Robert Child. But he was seldom unequivocally positive about his fellow magistrates. John Endecott was rash and blundering, Henry Vane was a spoiled youth, Richard Saltonstall was a dangerous incendiary, John Humfrey was a deserter. Likewise among the clergy, John Cotton was unsound, John Eliot was naive, Thomas Hooker was aggressive, Nathaniel Ward was meddlesome. To be sure, Winthrop freely admitted his own defects on occasion. Yet the reader who accepts his presentation will certainly conclude that the author of the journal was much the best and wisest public man in early Massachusetts.

Winthrop was the governor of his colony for twelve of the nineteen years he kept the journal: he was in charge in 1630-1634, 1637-1640, 1642-1644, and 1646-1649, and was continuously a magistrate. Once his administration came under attack, he began to explain and defend his actions. For example, on 17 February 1632 he tells how he convinced the people of Watertown—who had refused to pay taxes levied by the magistrates because they had no representatives at the General Court—that they were in error, “so their submission was accepted and their offence pardoned” (p. 45). But actually the Watertowners were the winners in this dispute. The May 1632 General Court voted that two representatives from every town should advise the magistrates on taxation, and in the spring of 1634 the freemen agitated for a larger share of power. Winthrop tells us that when the town representatives read the company charter, they discovered that the freemen were authorized to meet four times a year to make laws. Winthrop explained to them that the freemen were too numerous to legislate, nor were they qualified to establish a representative assembly. Nevertheless, on 14 May 1634 the General Court voted that deputies from each town were henceforth to meet with the magistrates four times a year to tax and legislate. Voting by secret ballot for the first time, the freemen in May 1634 chose Dudley as governor in place of Winthrop.

The General Court of May 1634 was Winthrop's worst defeat. The constitutional change was a greater blow than the electoral change, because he never could accept the new deputies from the towns as in any way equal to the magistrates; for the rest of his life he fought to restore the magistrates' independence and supremacy. But the electoral rebuff was also hard. For three years, from 1634 to 1637, other men took over the governorship and Winthrop was not always in agreement with their policy. This section of his journal is especially informative and interesting, because he supplies some inside details about the controversial issues of the day. These were difficult years for the Bay Colony. In England, Archbishop Laud was attacking the Massachusetts Bay Company, and in America, many of the Massachusetts colonists moved to Connecticut, Roger Williams was banished and fled to Narragansett Bay, the colonists plunged into a bloody war with the Pequot Indians, and in October 1636 the Antinomian controversy exploded in Boston. Winthrop hints (and sometimes openly states) that matters in 1634-1637 could have been much better handled.

Yet Winthrop at this time was neither as full nor as frank a writer as he later became. For example, his reports on Roger Williams from 1631 to 1636 raise questions about what really happened and why. Winthrop presents Williams's rebellion against the Massachusetts church-state system as the work of a rigid and isolated fanatic who enjoyed no support outside of Salem. In January 1636 Winthrop seems to have been quite as eager as any of his fellow magistrates to ship the banished man back to England. Yet Williams later claimed that Winthrop encouraged him to flee to Narragansett Bay, and the Bay magistrates and clergy charged Winthrop with “overmuch lenity and remissness” immediately after Williams's flight, very likely because they suspected him of giving covert aid to the Salem rebel (pp. 87-89).

The journal reaches its most dramatic point in 1636-1637 with the Pequot War and the Antinomian controversy (pp. 96-135). Winthrop's interpretation of the Pequot War is somewhat equivocal. He hints, without quite saying so, that the Bay government blundered into the war, then briskly describes the virtual extermination of the Pequots in May-August 1637. But he was in no way equivocal about Anne Hutchinson. He saw this “woman of a ready wit and bold spirit” as a very dangerous adversary, since her stronghold was Winthrop's own Boston church, and her supporters included John Cotton and Governor Vane. Winthrop presents himself in the journal as the Antinomians' chief opponent. And at the May 1637 General Court, he scored the most satisfying triumph of his career when the freemen in a tense and stormy meeting elected him governor and dropped Vane and two other Antinomian magistrates from office (p. 119). In November 1637 the General Court consolidated this victory by banishing Hutchinson and Wheelwright and disarming or disenfranchising seventy-five of their supporters (pp. 132-133). In March 1638 the Boston church was finally persuaded to excommunicate Anne Hutchinson (pp. 139).

Once restored to power, Winthrop used his journal more aggressively than in the early 1630s to denigrate his opponents. In January 1638 he made a list of the “foul errors” and “secret opinions” of the Antinomians. In March 1638 he discovered that Mary Dyer, one of Hutchinson's supporters, had been delivered of a deformed stillborn fetus, and in September 1638 he heard that Hutchinson herself had a somewhat similar stillbirth after she was exiled to Rhode Island, whereupon Winthrop entered full descriptions of both “monstrous births” into his journal as proof positive that God had turned against the Antinomians (pp. 141-142, 146-147). By this time, Winthrop was clearly drafting the official history of his administration. He began to make notes on where to add further documentation when he got around to expanding his narrative, and he sometimes pointed out controversial issues, as when in 1641 he wrote: “Query, whether the following be fit to be published”—and then reported how Governor Bellingham improperly pursued and married a young lady who was pledged to another man (p. 192). Winthrop consulted with Thomas Shepard about how to present topics such as this, and Shepard—who told Winthrop that “you will have the hearts and prayers of many in the compiling of the History”—urged him to be completely candid: “Surely Sir,” he wrote, “the work is of God.”⁶

As Winthrop composed his narrative, he not only changed his mode of composition, and his perception of his personal role as author-actor, but also revised his understanding of God's design in bringing His chosen people to New England. Initially, he believed—as he stated in “A Model of Christian Charity”—that God intended the colonists to build a united covenanted community in Massachusetts, knitted together by bonds of brotherly affection. Through the first two years of his journal he played up the external challenges that the colonists faced, and played down the internal divisions among them. But by the mid-1630s he was focusing on Puritan troublemakers like Roger Williams, and when the Pequot War and the Antinomian controversy broke out simultaneously in 1636-1637, he saw that Satan was trying hard to destroy Christ's kingdom in New England. The Pequot War sharpened his hostility toward the Indians, and led him to conclude that the English could never live in settled peace with the natives unless they expunged their aboriginal culture. Much more important to Winthrop, the emergence of Puritan fanatics such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson forced him to abandon his hope that the English colonists could live together in loving harmony. Williams and Hutchinson (in his view) were so utterly self-deluded that they not only rebelled against sound Christian policy but entered into active alliance with Satan. From 1638 onward, Winthrop viewed developments in Rhode Island (where most of the banished Puritan fanatics had gone) or in New Hampshire and Maine (where most of the anti-Puritan colonists were clustered) with the deepest suspicion. His reports on events from beyond the Massachusetts borders became news bulletins of abominable crimes and miserable disorders. Even within Massachusetts, “the devil would never cease to disturb our peace, and to raise up instruments one after another” (p. 149).

This sense of perpetual contest between the forces of good and evil was sharpened after 1640 when Charles I was forced to summon Parliament. Naturally Winthrop sided with the king's parliamentary critics, but he was greatly distressed when the expectation of reform at home stopped the Puritan migration to New England and persuaded many colonists to return to old England. And as civil war broke out between Parliament and the king, Winthrop discovered to his horror that the Puritans in London were entertaining radical ideas that had been banned in Boston in the 1630s, and that Parliament in 1644 and 1646 actually protected his Rhode Island adversaries Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton when they went to England and complained of being harassed by Massachusetts. Thus the revolutionary crisis at home deepened his conviction that Massachusetts must be ever vigilant in dealing with so-called friends as well as enemies. And as he interpreted the troublesome events of the 1640s, he found a powerful model in the historical books of the Old Testament, most particularly Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Judges. Here Winthrop could find a story line exactly to his purpose, recounting how God's chosen people—despite plentiful evidence of human backsliding and divine wrath—escaped from captivity and came to the promised land.

As Winthrop changed from a journalist to a historian, he not only wrote more belligerently but more voluminously: his treatment of the years 1643-1646 is more than twice the length of his treatment of the years 1633-1636. He explained his support for the wily French commander La Tour and for the grasping Boston merchant Robert Keayne in 1643 very fully (pp. 224-231), because he was criticized for mishandling both situations. And in his third volume, he deliberately magnified the Hingham mutiny of 1645 (pp. 274-284) and the Remonstrants' protest of 1646 (pp. 306-318) in order to demonstrate the baseness of his critics. He wrote up his impeachment trial of 1645 as a personal ordeal and vindication, and included the full text of his masterful “little speech” in which he lectured the court on the meaning of liberty and authority. Winthrop's electoral defeat in 1634 had been at least as important, both to him and to the colony, as his victory over the Hingham petitioners in 1645, yet he wrote up the 1634 episode in two pages and the 1645 episode in seventeen. And he was even more circumstantial in denouncing Dr. Robert Child and his fellow Remonstrants, who tried to subvert the colony government by appealing to Parliament.

Winthrop devoted much attention in his second and third volumes to sexual scandal—to cases of rape, fornication, adultery, sodomy, and buggery—but of course his purpose was not to titillate. When he reported that William Hatchet was executed for copulating with a cow or that George Spencer of New Haven was executed for siring a piglet with human resemblances, he was exhibiting these specimens of human depravity as proof that even in godly New England the Devil was continually at work. He dwelt as much on the penitential scaffold scenes as on the crimes, for God always searched out these sex offenders and punished them justly. Winthrop also reported on the punishments that God meted out to the political and religious rebels who rejected the Massachusetts church-state system. Anne Hutchinson, the greatest rebel, received the harshest judgment: first her monstrous childbirth in 1638 and then her murder by Indians in 1643. John Humfrey, who deserted Massachusetts for the West Indies and took many colonists with him, was punished by a fire that destroyed his barn and his stored crops, while his little daughter was raped by child molesters. Dr. Child was publicly humiliated on the streets of London, “and besides God had so blasted his estate as he was quite broken, etc.” (p. 338). Winthrop might have observed that his own estate had also been blasted; in 1639 his bailiff contracted debts in his name totaling £2,500, forcing Winthrop to sell much of his property. The Massachusetts freemen dropped him from the governorship for two years after this happened, and in 1641 one of the deputies wanted to drop him from office altogether because he was “grown poor.” Yet Winthrop barely mentioned his financial troubles, and then mainly to grumble that the colonists only raised £500 in a voluntary contribution to help him, for he categorically refused to interpret his own property loss as a providential sign.

It is striking to follow our author, who had been silent or evasive on controversial issues in the early 1630s, as he pursued such topics with special zest during the later 1640s. One of the great features of his journal/history, especially in the second and third volumes, is that Winthrop reveals so many of the friction points in his society. Surely few writers have adopted a more pugilistic mode of conflict resolution. Taking pains to identify the issues causing conflict, and to report the public debate over these issues, Winthrop argued for the correctness of his own position and then showed how his adversaries were deservedly punished for their sins. Writing in this aggressive fashion, he built lasting significance into the seemingly small-scale actions of a few thousand colonists in early New England. Which is why his journal will always remain the central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s. And why readers of today, as in past generations, will find themselves engaged—and sometimes repelled—by John Winthrop's militant view of his world.

Notes

1. The 1790 edition, published by Noah Webster, is incomplete and full of textual errors. The 1825-1826 edition, prepared by James Savage and reissued in 1853, has a much sounder text but eccentric and outdated annotations. The 1908 edition, prepared by James Hosmer, reproduces Savage's text with a few expurgations, and has minimal annotations. The Massachusetts Historical Society began to publish an old-spelling fourth edition in 1931, but abandoned this project after printing the first year of the journal.

2. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

3. For further background, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), ch. 1-4; Lee Schweninger, John Winthrop (Boston: Twayne, 1990), ch. 1-3; and James G. Moseley, John Winthrop's World: History as a Story; the Story as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), ch. 1.

4. For a fuller discussion of Winthrop's changing method of composition, see the Introduction to the unabridged edition.

5. Winthrop's terminal date of composition cannot be established, except that the final entry is dated 11 Jan. 1649. Winthrop became bedridden in early Feb., and by 14 Mar. he was too weak to write. See [Winthrop Papers] WP, 5:311-312, 319, 325.

6. Shepard to Winthrop, 27 Jan. 1640, WP, 4:182-183.