Winthrop's Journal: Religion, Politics, and Narrative in Early America
[Here, Moseley discusses the ways in which the tone of Winthrop's journal changes from a mere recording of historical fact to a personal, self-conscious narrative.]
John Winthrop has often been portrayed as a self-righteous martinet, a Puritan dictator whose love for power was matched only by his unthinking Calvinist orthodoxy. Yet reading his three-volume Journal enables us to recover a more credible, if more complicated, image of the foremost founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Several years ago historian Edmund Morgan wisely eschewed the authoritarian caricature and, instead, cast Winthrop [in The Puritan Dilemma, 1958] as representative of "the Puritan dilemma," that characteristic tension between the transcendent exuberance of an awakened spiritual life and the mundane requirements of living responsibly in a fallen world. Because Morgan pictured Winthrop as quite thoroughly molded by his spiritual experiences as a young man in England, he tended to read Winthrop's Journal as a straightforward chronicle of how Puritan religious convictions were translated into political realities in early New England. Yet Winthrop did not simply reach his religious conclusions in England and then embark prepared to govern accordingly in the New World. Reading the Journal with an ear for changes in Winthrop's narrative voice reveals that his character, attitudes, and beliefs were not so thoroughly formed by the time of migration as Morgan implied. Indeed, Winthrop's thinking underwent significant transformations in New England, and writing the Journal became his way of making sense of these revisions.
Winthrop's Journal is thus of more than historiographical interest, for it discloses the development of a prototypically American sensibility. Insofar as it represents a more complex Winthrop than previously known, then, the Journal allows us to reclaim one kind of integral response to American experience in religious and political terms which, it can be argued, is presently in danger of being lost to rigid, codified, and inflexible sentiments. Regaining imaginatively the compound of openness and integrity that Winthrop achieved in his Journal thus, presents a possibility of recovery from the ambivalence that suspends contemporary American life between grandiose delusions and austere self-denial.
The current malaise is described well in the recipe for "the minimal self" outlined in Christopher Lasch's recent book [The Minimal Self 1984] about "psychic survival in troubled times," when "self-hood becomes a kind of luxury." Since "emotional equilibrium [now] demands a minimal self, not the imperial self of yesteryear," this leading cultural critic is definitely expressing "no indignant outcry against contemporary 'hedonism,' self-seeking, egoism, indifference to the general good—traits commonly associated with 'narcissism.'" Lasch naturally wishes his contemporaries could do more than merely "survive." Yet he knows that the kind of self-hood that "implies a personal history, family, friends, a sense of place" requires "the critical awareness of man's divided nature," and, short of reading Freud, he can recommend no workable access to this crucial resource. He would like to revise the values of his readers, but he distrusts new visions and despairs of renewing the old. In this predicament, which Lasch describes with uncomfortable accuracy, how can recovery begin? Is there an alternative to "the minimal self"?
Winthrop's Journal shows that the impetus for revision, recovery, and renewal comes not merely in these late bad times but in the beginnings of the national story. It is true that many Europeans came to America seeking a new way of life. But this novelty was not, as it were, de novo. The New World was from its discovery a place of revisioning, a place where the problems of life in the Old World could be corrected or avoided. The ideal of the new was thus consciously or unconsciously formulated in reference to the problems of the old. Few Europeans succeeded in stamping the New World indelibly with the impress of the ideal they brought from the Old, as new geographic and social conditions meant that originating designs had to be recast. Nevertheless, without reference to such ideals novelty overwhelmed, experience became mere flux. Revision, then, was not a static pattern but a living process; revisioning thus integrates action and interpretation into the story of America. Without revisioning, the story disintegrates into wanton dynamism, lifeless traditionalism, or gross self-deceit. While much great American literature has examined the difficulty of integrating the driving energy of the new with the wisdom of respect for the past, the hypothesis here is that in at least one exemplary instance—the Journal of Puritan Governor John Winthrop—revisioning began early and worked well. Indeed, Winthrop's Journal invites revised thinking about the subsequent revisioning of America.
In the early parts of the Journal Winthrop records, as one might in a public diary, the facts and sundry impressions of the transatlantic crossing and the struggle to found a colony in Massachusetts Bay. The reader, then and now, knows Winthrop as a reporter and trusts the factuality of his voice. Within a few years, as Winthrop faces the challenge of chronicling events of greater complexity and duration, the entries are less frequently made and tend to lengthen into stories in which the narrator attempts to re-create mixed motives and to trace the processes of conflicts that defined the terms of life in the Bay Colony. As the Journal progresses, Winthrop begins to leave blanks in the text, spaces to which he can return to add more facts or to ponder the significance of the events he records. Likewise, he begins to refer to previous and subsequent entries, to employ obvious authorial rhetoric, to cover longer spans of time in some entries, and to group events according to their significance rather than to strict chronology. At one point, when dealing with Anne Hutchinson in the retrospection of his prose, Winthrop first attempts to record the events leading to and surrounding her expulsion from the colony; later, he writes a "Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, and Libertines that Infected the Churches of New England." The shift in narrative approach does not necessarily betray a change of mind on Winthrop's part about "this American Jesabel." But it does indicate an awareness that her story, and his involvement with it, requires a new way of recounting the experience.
Such changes are at least as significant, if not more so, than a more superficial change of ideas, for the alteration of narrative forms reveals Winthrop's nascent apprehension that life in America will require new structures of understanding and will repay novel interpretations. By the beginning of what was in his own text the third and final volume of the Journal, Winthrop is more consistently and more fully engaged as the historian of early America, composing a reflective narrative in which it is plain that events are being remembered and reviewed in terms of what the experiences themselves express—instead of simply what they may be construed to mirror in terms of the purposes of a transcendent God. Yet because Winthrop was not a highly self-conscious modern author, it is not surprising to find a mixture of narrative styles in the second and third sections of his Journal. With that caveat in mind, one can begin to see what the patterns of its telling suggest about the meaning of Winthrop's story of New England.
The Puritans went—or, from a contemporary perspective, came—to America with the explicit purpose of revising the practice of religion in England. Their reforming vision was articulated by John Winthrop in a lay sermon, "A Modell of Christian Charity," delivered on board the Arbella in 1630. The basic model was clear: "GOD ALMIOHTIE in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed on the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subieccion." No one in England would have argued with that! The "reasons" behind the model suggest the distinctive mission of the Puritans. As "a Company professing our selues fellow members of Christ" they come "to seeke out a place of Cohabitation and Consorteship vnder a due forme of Government both ciuill and ecclesiasticall." This work will require "extraordinary" means; thus unlike "When we liued in England," now "that which the most in theire Churches maineteine as a truth in profession onely, we must bring into familiar and constant practice." Far from being a project designed and performed by men, Winthrop reminds his fellows that "Thus stands the cause betweene God and vs, wee are entered into Covenant with him for this worke." The covenant means that if God hears our prayers and brings us in peace to our desired place, then he has ratified the agreement and "will expect a strickt performance of the Articles contained in it." In order to muster the requisite love, justice, and humility, "wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man," and then "the God of Israeli … shall make vs a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England: for we must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty vpon a Hill" with "the eies of all people … upon us." Faithfulness to this originating vision, therefore, would spur revision of religion and politics in England and throughout the civilized world.
Much has been written about the Puritans and their "errand into the wilderness," but the purpose here is to look not so much at what "really happened" as into how John Winthrop interpreted the early history of the project he led. It is not that he initially thought the project would require interpretation—far from it. He was so sure of the "modell" and of his own ability to govern that he began a journal simply to keep a record of the way the Puritan plan unfolded. He was ever in the thick of things, usually as governor, always as the recognized leader of the colony. But an interesting thing happened on the way to reforming England and the world. Not only did England have her own revolution and hence need little advice from Massachusetts but also some American Puritans, as the development of Winthrop's Journal reveals, were becoming more committed to revisioning as a process than they were to the society and institutions they set out initially to revise. To be sure, not everyone made this transition. Most were caught up too thoroughly in the rude exigencies of daily life, and those who had visions were generally overpowered by them. As his journal-keeping became an increasingly self-conscious literary project, Winthrop mapped out a "middle landscape," poised precariously between the rampant spirituality and the land-hungry expansionism of his companions. His literary enterprise afforded Winthrop a crucial angle of revision, which if not wholly yet still significantly enabled him to succeed where so many of his contemporaries failed. For Winthrop's writing began to give him a double or combined consciousness of himself both as an active participant in and as an interpretive observer of Puritan life. In the process Winthrop's narrative becomes considerably more than a quotidian chronicle, and the religious and political developments at the heart of his story need to be understood in relation to the changing nature of the narrative itself.
In the first and perhaps most obvious place, in the course of the years covered in his Journal Winthrop moved from a commitment to reform and renew the Church of England toward an affirmation of a new, more characteristically American religiousness. Tension between the old and the new is evident very early on. Thus on 27 July 1630, about a month after landing in Massachusetts, Winthrop observes: "We of the congregation kept a fast, and chose Mr. Wilson our teacher, and Mr. Nowell an elder, and Mr. Gager and Mr. Aspinwall, deacons. We used imposition of hands, but with this protestation by all, that it was only as a sign of election and confirmation, not of any intent that Mr. Wilson should renounce his ministry he received in England." Despite their protestations, such balancing became increasingly difficult.
The original idea was that, while the corrupt Anglicans required purifying, the separatists, such as those at nearby Plymouth, had severed their bonds with the communion of the saints. The Bay Colony was to chart a middle course, and Winthrop and the others were prepared to be welcomed back by a mother country awakened by New England's shining example. But William Bradford visited Boston in 1631, and on 25 October 1632 Winthrop records that when he and John Wilson and two Puritan captains visited the Pilgrims:
The governour of Plimouth, Mr. William Bradford, (a very discreet and grave man,) with Mr. Brewster, the elder, and some others, came forth and met them without the town, and conducted them to the governour's house, where they were very kindly entertained, and feasted every day at several houses. On the Lord's day there was a sacrament, which they did partake in; and, in the afternoon, Mr. Roger Williams (according to their custom) propounded a question, to which the pastor, Mr. Smith, spake briefly; then Mr. Williams prophesied; and after the governour of Plimouth spake to the question; after him the elder; then some two or three more of the congregation. Then the elder desired the governour of Massachusetts and Mr. Wilson to speak to it, which they did. When this ended, the deacon, Mr. Fuller, put the congregation in mind of their duty of contribution; whereupon the governour and all the rest went down to the deacon's seat, and put into the box, and then returned.
Winthrop soon saw the Pilgrims as allies and even spiritual brothers, and he did not return "home" when the Puritans came to power in England. New World associations had replaced ties from the Old.
Then, too, it was useful to convene elders from the various churches for specific causes and occasions, and in such meetings new steps were taken. In November of 1633, for example, Winthrop notes:
The ministers in the bay and Sagus did meet, once a fortnight, at one of their houses by course, where some question of moment was debated. Mr. Skelton, the pastor of Salem, and Mr. Williams, who was removed from Plimouth thither, (but not in any office, though he exercised by way of prophecy,) took some exception against it, as fearing it might grow in time to a presbytery or superintendency, to the prejudice of the churches' liberties. But this fear was without cause; for they were all clear in that point, that no church or person can have power over another church; neither did they in their meetings excercise any such jurisdiction.
By denying so fervently the dangerous extreme of Presbyterianism, they abandoned the middle ground and forthrightly espoused radical Congregationalism. There were indeed no bishops in New England!
The planting of new churches in new settlements seemed natural; nevertheless, in practice, such new developments required monitoring. As Winthrop explains on 1 April 1636, there were good reasons for keeping a close eye even on people led by a man of "bright learning and high piety" such as Richard Mather:
Mr. Mather and others, of Dorchester, intending to begin a new church there, (a great part of the old one being gone to Connecticut,) desired the approbation of the other churches and of the magistrates; and, accordingly, they assembled this day, and, after some of them had given proof of their gifts, they made confession of their faith, which was approved of; but proceeding to manifest the work of God's grace in themselves, the churches, by their elders, and the magistrates, &c. thought them not meet, at present, to be the foundation of a church; and thereupon they were content to forbear to join till further consideration. The reason was, for that most of them (Mr. Mather and one more excepted) had builded their comfort of salvation upon unsound grounds, viz. some upon dreams and ravishes of spirit by fits; others upon the reformation of their lives; other upon duties and performances, &c; wherein they discovered three special erreurs: 1. That they had not come to hate sin, because it was filthy, but only left it, because it was hurtful. 2. That, by reason of this, they had never truly closed with Christ, (or rather Christ with them,) but had made use of him only to help the imperfection of their sanctification and duties, and not made him their sanctification, wisdom, &c. 3. They expected to believe by some power of their own, and not only and wholly from Christ.
Evidently such guidance was effective, for four months later "a new church was gathered at Dorchester, with approprobation of the magistrates and elders." Thus some new form of church order appeared to be in line with God's purposes in New England. Although the full flowering was many years away, some of the seeds of denominationalism—America's distinctive contribution to ecclesiastical organization—found native soil in the early towns of New England.
In religious matters Winthrop entered arguments and made his own beliefs clear but finally moved against only those whose beliefs appeared to threaten the public order. No doubt he was heavy-handed and crude in the ways he orchestrated the removal of Anne Hutchinson and her followers from Massachusetts, but there is also no doubt that he acted in response to what he perceived as the clear and present danger her antinomian teachings involved. She was "a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit," he observed on 21 October 1636, who "brought over with her two dangerous errours: 1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no sanctification can help us to evidence our justification." Winthrop knew instinctively that "From these two grew many branches," which would sprout beyond the bounds of decent communal order.
If they could not be pruned by the elders, the antinomians would have to be removed "root and branch" by the magistrates. As Winthrop saw it, Mrs. Hutchinson did more than sow dissent; she encouraged people to believe that since they were actually one with the Holy Spirit, they could live entirely as they pleased, without need for religious instruction and moral constraint. By December, John Wilson laid the blame for the growing and "inevitable danger of separation" squarely "upon these new opinions risen up amongst us, which all the magistrates, except the governour and two others, did confirm, and all the ministers but two." Winthrop defended Wilson in the church and in writing to the fencesitting John Cotton, but to no avail. Given the spreading disturbances, it is not surprising that Winthrop's party applied increasingly unseemly pressure until Mrs. Hutchinson finally broke down in court, rapturously affirmed her erroneous beliefs, and was banished. Recalling the tenacity of the mainline's counterattack, one has to remember the overwhelming importance of spiritual affairs in Puritan life in order to understand—not to say excuse—Winthrop's treatment of these "familists."
In the heat of the controversy, when the future of the Bay Colony as a coherent religious community seemed most in doubt, one of Winthrop's observations on 17 May 1637 reveals the more constant side of his character: "The intent of the court in deferring the sentence was, that, being thus provoked by their tumultuous course, and divers insolent speeches, which some of that party had uttered in the court, and having now power enough to have crushed them, their moderation and desire of reconciliation might appear to all." Such ambivalent sentiments were not simply for the sake of noble public appearance. In fact, Winthrop's characteristic tendency was toward leniency, as can be seen in his relations with Roger Williams and in Thomas Morton's personification of Winthrop as "Joshua Temperwell." In the entry for 29 October 1645 he points out that "sure the rule of hospitality to strangers, and of seeking to pluck out of the fire such as there may be hope of to be reduced out of error and the snare of the devil, do seem to require more moderation and indulgence of human infirmity where there appears not obstinancy against the clear truth." Thus he was at odds with spiritually adolescent hotheads such as Henry Vane and pedestrian precisionists such as Thomas Dudley. In the heat of the moment, the passionate found Winthrop's temperance objectionable; over the course of his life, though, the people often preferred Winthrop's spiritual moderation to Hutchinson's abandon or Dudley's authoritarianism.
While he could not abide Anne Hutchinson's bold antinomianism, Winthrop was no certain enemy of Roger Williams, who came to consider the governor a wise and trusted adviser. The "inner light," in Winthrop's eyes, needed the focus of orthodox doctrine to produce useful insight, and spiritual heat required the regulation of social sanction to fuel "a Citty vpon a Hill." Thus in late August of 1637 "the synod, called the assembly, of all the teaching elders" met to consider "about eighty opinions, some blasphemous, others erroneous, all unsafe, condemned by the whole assembly; whereto near all the elders, and others sent by the churches, subscribed their names; but some few liked not the subscription, though they consented to the condemning of them."
If theological opinions without critical consideration by the elders might have consequences that were unsafe for the community, outright immorality without clear punishment was at least equally pernicious. On 12 November 1641 Winthrop enables his readers to witness the fate of one Hackett, a young servant in Salem who "was found in buggery with a cow, upon the Lord's day." Even upon the ladder prepared to be hanged, full repentance had not come; "but the cow (with which he had committed that abomination) being brought forth and slain before him, he brake out into a loud and doleful complaint against himself" and was led in prayer by John Wilson and the other attendant elders. Winthrop's observation upon the lad's execution is noteworthy: "There is no doubt to be made but the Lord hath received his soul to his mercy; and he was pleased to lift up the light of his countenance so far towards him, as to keep him from despair, and to hold him close to his grace in a seeking condition; but he was not pleased to afford him that measure of peace and comfort as he might be able to hold out to others, lest sinful men, in the love of their lusts, should set mercy and repentance at too low a rate, and so miss of it when they vainly expect it." With such precise moral calibration, the Bay Colony would be no "burned-over district."
True piety required the guidance of a learned clergy. The weird misbeliefs and violence fostered by Samuel Gorton and his cohorts sprang from the fact, as Winthrop notes on 13 October 1643, that "they were all illiterate men, the ablest of them could not write true English, no not common words, yet they would take upon them the interpretation of the most difficult places of scripture, and wrest them any way to serve their own turns." Nevertheless, Winthrop's goal was not to douse the flame of religious enthusiasm but to sustain it within a steady range. Charismatic spirituality might lead either to disregard for moral regulations or to compulsive moralism. Winthrop wanted to keep true religion alive by avoiding both extremes, and he often found himself needing to protect the unwary from their neighbors' ire. While it certainly had its limits, Winthrop's lenity in such matters did more than get him in trouble with the inflexible among the saints. It also nurtured resources that could be tapped a century later by Jonathan Edwards in the Great Awakening. And the development of these spiritual resources can best be seen in the increasing creativity of the narrative voice in Winthrop's Journal. Looking at Puritan religious life through the changes in the Journal, then, suggests crucial relations between institutional and imaginative expressions of American spirituality.
Because of its overriding religious purposes, the Bay Colony's political life was supposed to be different from what its people had known in the old country. Unlike the factionalism that "hath been usual in the council of England and other states, who walk by politic principles only," asserted Winthrop on 30 October 1644, in Massachusetts:
these gentlemen were such as feared God, and endeavored to walk to the rules of his word in all their proceedings, so as it might be conceived in charity, that they walked according to their judgments and conscience, and where they went aside, it was merely for want of light, or their eyes were held through some temptation for a time, that they could not make use of the light they had, for in all these differences and agitations about them, they continued in brotherly love, and in the exercise of all friendly offices each to other, as occasion required.
But, try as he might to see Puritan politics in terms of religion, Winthrop, as his friends in the ministry had on occasion to remind him, was no theologian; he was a leader of men and manager of worldly affairs, and so it is, in the second place, in the realm of politics itself that one looks for an understanding of the man. Indeed, much of the Journal is taken up with observing the hero's political reasoning and tact in the face of his opponents' passion and contrariness. Just as his style of religion changes, so too in politics the Journal reveals Winthrop's transformation (incomplete but undeniable) from being governor as ruler to being governor as first citizen. The architect of "A Modell of Christian Charity," who sees power rightly held by the governor and dispensed through his wisdom on behalf of the governed, becomes in the press of founding, sustaining, and directing a successful colony the engineer of an increasingly political structure, who writes "A Discourse on Arbitrary Gouerment."
While remaining the elected governor more often than not throughout his life in the New World, Winthrop is continually in the process of giving away political power. In 1631 the people of Watertown agreed to pay their assessment for new fortifications after admitting their misunderstanding of the nature of the Bay Colony's government. "The ground of their errour," Winthrop notes on 17 February, was that
they took this government to be no other but as of a major and aldermen, who have not power to make laws or raise taxations without the people; but understanding that this government was rather in the nature of a parliament, and that no assistant could be chosen but by the freemen, who had power likewise to remove the assistants and put in others, and therefore at every general court (which was to be held once every year) they had free liberty to consider and propound any thing concerning the same, and to declare their grievances, without being subject to question, or, &c. they were fully satisfied; and so their submission was accepted, and their offence pardoned.
This right of the freemen to elect their leaders was important—to Winthrop, to the freemen, and to others within the colony. Virtually from the outset, and then steadily, Winthrop oversaw the expansion of the franchise. During a private meeting of the assistants on I May 1632, "after dinner, the governour told them, that he had heard, that the people intended, at the next general court, to desire, that the assistants might be chosen anew every year and that the governour might be chosen by the whole court, and not by the assistants only." The news distressed at least one of the others, but his objections were "answered and cleared in the judgment of the rest," and Winthrop's information proved accurate. A week later, when the general court met in Boston, the change was made: "Whereas it was (at our first coming) agreed, that the freemen should choose the assistants, and they the governour, the whole court agreed now, that the govemour and assistants should all be new chosen every year by the general court, (the govemour to be always chosen out of the assistants;) and accordingly the old govemour, John Winthrop, was chosen; accordingly all the rest as before, and Mr. Humfrey and Mr. Coddington also, because they were daily expected." For the moment, a more general electoral process was simply a better way of choosing the same leaders. Within a few years, however, religious unrest fueled political passions; new men were elected, and offices rotated among the old guard. By 1644 there was a move to grant the freemen's privileges to non-churchmen, and in May of 1646 the rights of freemen were given to non-freemen as well. Until his death in 1649, Winthrop remained the one most often elected. The people usually trusted his leadership, always respected his judgment, and approved of his judicious broadening of the franchise.
Likewise, Winthrop worked steadily to balance the power of the generally elected "assistants" and the locally representative "deputies," never yielding enough to satisfy the more "democratical" deputies, nevertheless leading toward a form of legislative power that was fully bicameral by 1644. Then, too, while seeking to retain an arena for judicial discretion, he oversaw the formulation of a general body of laws for adjudication within the colony—never minutely specific enough to satisfy the precisionists but nevertheless far from the arbitrariness of autocracy.
In politics as in religion, Winthrop was characteristically ambivalent. On the one hand, as a good Calvinist, he agreed with the elders who affirmed on 18 October 1642 that "in a commonwealth, rightly and religiously constituted, there is no power, office, administration, or authority, but such as are commanded and ordained by God" and that the political institutions of such a commonwealth "ought not to be by them either changed or altered, but upon such grounds, for such ends, in that manner, and only so far as the mind of God may be manifested therein." Yet on the other hand, compassion for others led him on 18 January 1635 to profess "that it was his judgment, that, in the infancy of plantations, justice should be administered with more lenity than in a settled state, because people were then more apt to transgress, partly of ignorance of new laws and orders, partly through oppression of business and other straits." Given the ongoing tug-ofwar between antinomians and precisionists, Winthrop's ambivalence embroiled him in—and saw the colony through—many controversies. In all he sought balance: in "a little speech" in 1645 Winthrop reminded the people, as he notes on 14 May, "so shall your liberties be preserved, in upholding the honor and power of authority amongst you." And he welcomed the development in 1643 of an intercolonial government called the United Colonies, with its own commissioners—elected by all freemen by May of 1645—to resolve disputes between the several colonies of New England and to coordinate their common defense. On the one hand, yielding power seemed to increase Winthrop's authority; on the other, in all these ways he was preparing the colony for orderly continuity following the passage of his personal charisma.
Caught in a tug-of-war between enemies in England who wanted to install a "general governor" over all the colonies of New England and the deputies from the several towns who wanted more democratic decisionmaking, Winthrop moved from advocating aristocracy to supporting a mixed government, or "buffered democracy," at its heart much like the concept developed a century and a half later by the more conservative among the founders of the American republic. On the one hand, Winthrop suggested the expansion of the franchise, the development of a bicameral legislature, the formulation of a general body of laws, and the constitution of an intercolonial government. Yet he did not go as far in any of these matters as their proponents wished. For, on the other hand, he believed that an excess of democracy would lead to instability. He agreed with those who spoke for the rights of the minority in a church dispute in September of 1646 "that it was not to be expected, that the major party should complain of their own act, and if the minor party, or the party grieved, should not be heard, then God should have left no means of redress in such a case, which could not be." This particular case had a Winthropian happy ending, for "some failing was found in both parties, the woman had not given so full satisfaction as she ought to have done, and the major party of the church had proceeded too hastily against a considerable party of the dissenting brethren, whereupon the woman who had offended was convinced of her failing, and bewailed it with many tears, the major party also acknowledged their errour, and gave the elders thanks for their care and pains." Thus it seems possible that Winthrop's changing attitudes toward governance may provide a clue for interpreting relations between the federal theology of the Puritans and the federalism of such "revolutionaries" as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. In the later stages of his Journal Winthrop moves from reporting events to telling stories that let the experiences of various characters speak increasingly for themselves. This move reflects his growing willingness to give the people and their deputies a voice in government, and so it is through the Journal that one begins to observe connections between the political, religious, and imaginative forms of the American story.
Winthrop's sense of vocation evolves in several stages. While still in England, when the altogether prepared but somewhat skeptical and unwilling Winthrop is recruited, he joins the Puritan project with a plan for action. As the chief actor, formed for heroic leadership, he has a design, or "modell," with which he informs and charges the group's sense of common purpose. Then, in the New World, he guides his model into action, usually playing the hero but sometimes forced into a supporting role—a new stance which, by making him from time to time an observer, heightens his powers of perception and gives him a crucial angle of interpretation through which to view the development of his design. Thus in December of 1636, in the midst of the antinomian turmoil, while Winthrop is out of office he has time to write a long entry describing Henry Vane's petulant attempt to resign as governor and relating his own and John Wilson's wise probity during the turbulence surrounding Anne Hutchinson.
As Winthrop begins to see himself as both interpreter and actor, he examines the people whose actions he records with increasing attention to their unique circumstances and personal complexities. Winthrop's entry for 9 November 1641 begins with "Query, whether the following be fit to be published," indicating an increasingly discriminating awareness of his role as a writer, and then proceeds to recount how Governor Bellingham stole the affections of a young woman residing in his own house and induced her to marry him instead of the man to whom she was betrothed. The relation of this compromising incident, which led perhaps to Winthrop's becoming governor again at the next election, is followed three days later by another tale of infidelity:
Mr. Stephen Batchellor, the pastor of the church at Hampton, who had suffered much at the hands of the bishops of England, being about 80 years of age, and having a lusty comely woman to his wife, did solicit the chastity of his neighbour's wife, who acquainted her husband therewith; whereupon he was dealt with, but denied it, as he had told the woman he would do, and complained to the magistrates against the woman and her husband for slandering him. The church likewise dealing with him, he stiffly denied it, but soon after, when the Lord's supper was to be administered, he did voluntarily confess the attempt, and that he did intend to have defiled her, if she would have consented. The church, being moved with his free confession and tears, silently forgave him, and communicated with him: but after, finding how scandalous it was, they took advice of other elders, and after long debate and much pleading and standing upon the church's forgiving and being reconciled to him in communicating with him after he had confessed it, they proceeded to cast him out.
Winthrop notes that "after this he went on in a variable course" and finally nearly two years later "he was released of his excommunication, but not received to his pastor's office." In this narrative, told primarily for the sake of its own interest, though perhaps in some measure also to document the scandals occurring during Bellingham's administration, Winthrop uses adjectives deftly to delineate a memorable character, and he compresses events of two years' duration into a coherent short story.
This little story within a story is followed by a fourpage tale of "a very foul sin, committed by three persons" involving the debauchery of a young girl who was abused "many times, so as she was grown capable of man's fellowship, and took pleasure in it." Then, following an authorial observation that "as people increased, so sin abounded, and especially the sin of uncleanness, and still the providence of God found them out," Winthrop tells the story of poor Hackett and the cow, and various other tales of disorder before this long entry is completed. By this time Winthrop is more than governor; he is working consciously as the author of early New England. By 1642 the form of his work is no longer that of journal entries; Winthrop begins simply to intersperse dates in the text of a flowing narrative. In 1643 a single entry covers two months, looking back in time in order to show present events in their proper light. And the entries themselves lengthen, with those of May 1645 and November 1646 surpassing twenty pages each. Thus in terms of particular literary devices, such as characterization, retrospective narration, and the avoidance of authorial intrusion, as well as in terms of the increasing flow and continuity of the narrative as a whole, Winthrop's text ceases to be a matter of recordkeeping and becomes a matter of history as literature.
More nuanced characterization of others and more awareness of their roles in the drama of the Bay Colony as a whole provide Winthrop an increasingly distanced perspective on his own motives and actions as a character in the story he tells. The decency and sympathy with which he treats the characters in his Journal is perhaps related to his characteristic leniency toward those in trouble and his urge to understand their motivations—tendencies which sometimes cost him his office when public passions ran high but which also made him a better writer. While in roughly equal measure hero and narrator, Winthrop develops a literary form that can embrace confrontations and hence a narrative vision that sustains and includes challenges in ways beyond his capacities as one of the actors in the drama of the Bay Colony. On 12 June 1643 Winthrop records his apology for the style of one of his writings in which he had made "appeal to the judgment of religion and reason, but, as I there carried it, I did arrogate too much to myself and ascribe too little to others." A few months later, on 14 July, he notes in his Journal one of his failings as governor: "this fault hath been many times found in the governour to be oversudden in his resolutions, for although the course were both warrantable and safe, yet it had beseemed men of wisdom and gravity to have proceeded with more deliberation and further advice." Thus sometimes directly in power and sometimes not, Winthrop emerges more as narrator than as actor, freer to tell the history of early America in its own terms, still bearing witness to the motivating power of his original model but more intrigued now with discovering what the model has engendered than with forcing the New World's light through the prism of his initial design. As he observes on 12 November 1641, "God hath not confined all wisdom etc. to any one generation, that they should set rules for others to walk by."
Winthrop's opponents seem to have been people of single visions. As a man of action and of observation, however, Winthrop learned that the spiritual power of a vision lives only in the ongoing revisioning it engenders. When visions are codified and institutionalized, they begin to die as authority degenerates into control. Models imposed on experience stifle vitality and become relics, whether venerated or despised. In some crucial ways a moderate from the outset, Winthrop discovered in writing his Journal that interpretation, through reference to a past ideal of the future, yields a kind of authority that need not violate the experience of the present. The ideal is reshaped as experience is represented. As a writer, Winthrop was able to respect the integrity of the present without losing sight of the ideal and without using the ideal to disfigure the vitality of the present. Like his movements in religion and politics, in his Journal Winthrop moves toward freedom even while he gains authority. It is in the product of his double vision, the text itself, that all the people of single vision continue to live for us. Their descendants made the jeremiad the literary form most characteristic of second—and third-generation Puritans. For them, as Sacvan Bercovitch says [in The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 1975], "every crisis called forth a reassertion of the design." In contrast, Winthrop kept the design alive by remaining open to the unexpected. Vision endures in revision; as he said on 12 November 1641, "for history must tell the whole truth."
The whole truth can be neither wholly expressed in action nor fully relished in observation. As a certain kind of conscious and unconscious experience, Winthrop's changing engagement in and interpretation of life in the New World generated a new literary form. Hence we might see the Journal as the first example of what Sacvan Bercovitch calls "auto-American-biography," the telling of one's own and America's story in the same imaginative act. Or we might consider Winthrop's Journal to be something like the first American "novel," especially insofar as the meaning Winthrop articulates as narrator is generated from the alteration of his original governing design and therein initiates what David Minter [in The Interpreted Design, 1969] calls "the interpreted design as a structural principle in American prose." In any case, in Winthrop's Journal this is all rudimentary rather than fullblown. On the one hand, when we see Winthrop as an actor who begins with a design upon the world and ends as a narrator or historian, we are not yet dealing with the developed literary genius of Hawthorne, James, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner that Minter explicates. Yet on the other hand, there is in Winthrop's Journal something akin to the impulse that led Norman Mailer to call the major sections of The Armies of the Night [1968] "history as a novel" and "the novel as history." There are certainly few other than inverse personal comparisons to be drawn between Mailer and Winthrop, but Mailer's intuitions about America hark back to an ancestry that might surprise him. Mailer and other recent keepers of the American dream have, like Winthrop, discovered that politics, religion, and narrative are modes of power, ways not only of responding to experience but also ways of controlling life by shaping its manifold energies into tractable, intelligible, forms. Revisioning America involves charting their ebbs and flows.
Recovering a sense of Winthrop's compound of integrity and openness yields resources for recovery from the ambivalent malaise of contemporary American life. Because he charted a course between the whirlpools of spiritual exuberance and the stagnation of moral precisionism, Winthrop's project suggests a strategy for coping with the expansive religious and political visions of Anne Hutchinson's cultural descendants and with the self-centered programs of latter-day Thomas Dudleys. Neither the grandiose delusions of religious and political imperialism nor the cunning austerity of an individual and cultural style that is "taut, toned, and coming on strong" will suffice to sustain a sense of purpose commensurate with American promise. Christopher Lasch's recipe for "minimal self-hood," for example, is more puritanical than authentically Puritan; Lasch's work, like much neoconservative cultural criticism, follows the form of the jeremiad while lacking its theological substance. Winthrop's revisioning defines an alternative to Lasch's studied pessimism as well as to the wistfully Emersonian optimism in many dreams of a larger and better life. Winthrop knew the answer to Emerson's Transcendentalist query, "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Such dreams for a larger and better life are inevitably fashioned from fallible, if not meretricious, materials. An original relation to the universe, like the Puritans' "Modell of Christian Charity," is already unreachably in the past. Although it is a lesson remembered usually in—or just after—times of crisis, revisioning is the only real way of having America at all.
Pointing to "some strange resistance in itself," Robert Frost says [in "West-Running Brook"], "It is this backward motion toward the source, / Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in, / The tribute of the current to the source." Readers who recall the elegiac ending of The Great Gatsby—Nick Carraway's remembrance of "a fresh green breast of the new world" that "had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder"—such readers will confront Winthrop's journal entry for Tuesday 8 June 1630 with a start of recognition:
The wind still W. and by S. fair weather, but close and cold. We stood N.N.W. with a stiff gale, and, about three in the afternoon, we had sight of land to the N.W. about ten leagues, which we supposed was the Isles of Monhegan, but it proved Mount Mansell. Then we tacked and stood W.S.W. We now had fair sun-shine weather, and so pleasant a sweet air as did much refresh us, and there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.
There came a wild pigeon into our ship, and another small land bird.
The Puritan imagination was saturated with Old Testament images: the birds present an antitype of the end of the Flood, and days of rain and fog end when sight of land is coupled with new sunshine and the smell of a garden!
Winthrop began with a vision and discovered the value of revisioning. Revisioning is where Americans begin. While "we can believe only by interpreting," Paul Ricouer points out [in The Symbolism of Evil, 1967], that "it is by interpreting that we can hear again." Or as Nick Carraway concludes, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Thus recovering Winthrop involves more than pointing to the Puritan foundation of the American cultural edifice. Winthrop's achievement, the commitment to revisioning that informs his Journal, is more model than monument. He kept in play certain contradictory attitudes—individualism and communalism, innocent optimism and studied pessimism, interpretation and action—that work as antinomies throughout subsequent American cultural history. Neither in politics nor in literature was his work complete: governance of the Bay Colony often lacked Winthrop's guiding moderation, and his Journal is unabashedly an unfinished text. What can be recovered by looking backward at this curious blend of authoritarianism and moderation, of involvement and detachment, is the knowledge that the return of possibilities comes in the process of revisioning.
However much Americans now may wish for a reappearance of leadership with Winthrop's balanced sense of purpose, such renaissances depend on complicated historical and psychological processes that scholarship can investigate but not generate. Historical scholars contribute best to cultural recovery by rethinking the kind of history they write. The world of recent historical inquiry has been divided, if not between spiritual visionaries and moral precisionists, then between "humanists" who love theory and interpretation and "social scientists" who thrive on statistics and facts. Clifford Geertz is right to celebrate the blurring of these genres, and one goal of the present essay is to suggest that to undertake such interdisciplinary analysis—blending together in this case thinking about religion, politics, and narrative—is simply to render scholarship apposite to the variegated stuff of historical experience. The inability ever completely to fulfill such complex hermeneutical goals is the unavoidable price of wanting to see whole; to attempt, and thereby to achieve, less is the greater failure.
Study of the past may be hampered by artificial boundaries between various areas of life, and attempts to see the past whole may disclose distinctions more important than those made between academic disciplines. There is an irony, for example, in seeking faultless political candidates and then castigating them when their deficiencies inevitably appear. As Lewis Lapham asks [in Harper's, Dec, 1985], "who could bear the thought of being governed by human beings, by people as confused and imperfect as oneself? If a politician confessed to an honest doubt or emotion, how would it be possible to grant him the authority of a god?" In contrast, after being acquitted in an invidious political trial, on 14 May 1645 Winthrop reminds his fellow citizens that "it is you yourselves who have called us to this office, and being called by you, we have our authority from God" and then entreated them "to consider, that when you choose magistrates, you take them from among yourselves, men subject to like passions as you are. Therefore 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 like infirmaries in yourselves and others." Winthrop does not distinguish between the people and their leaders in terms of moral quality. He draws the line elsewhere:
The covenant between you and us is the oath you have taken of us, which is to this purpose, that we shall govern you and judge your causes by the rules of God's laws and our own, according to our best skill. When you agree with a workman to build you a ship or house &c. he undertakes as well for his skill as for his faithfulness, for it is his profession, and you pay him for both. But when you call one to be a magistrate, he doth not profess nor undertake to have sufficient skill for that office, nor can you furnish him with gifts &c. therefore you must run the hazard of his skill and ability. But if he fail in faithfulness, which by his oath he is bound unto, that he must answer for. If it fall out that the case be clear to common apprehension, and the rule clear also, if he transgress here, the errour is not in the skill, but in the evil of the will: it must be required of him. But if the cause 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.
Assessing leaders in Winthrop's way would require continual self-assessment, which is always difficult, and might improve the quality and realism of American political discourse.
If self-scrutiny is the price of revisioning America, some things have not changed. For, as Winthrop went on to say, "concerning liberty, I observe a great mistake in the country." American life is still bedeviled by this mistake, although most people may no longer—perhaps for good reasons—be able to acknowledge it. As a true son of the Reformation, Winthrop distinguished between two kinds of liberty. On the one hand, there is everyone's "natural" liberty "to do what he lists." Such freedom to "do your own thing" is one of the few values Americans today now hold in common, even while rcognizing that this "is a liberty to evil as well as to good" and that "this liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority." Unlike Winthrop, however, Americans now reject authority that curtails freedom. Certainly no one wants to reinhabit the cramped moral space of early New England. Yet in taking a stand for freedom, Americans may have forgotten what Winthrop envisioned, on the other hand, as the true form of liberty:
The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral, in reference to the convenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions, amongst men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of your good, but) of your lives, if need be. Whatsoever crosseth this, is not authority, but a distemper thereof. This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.
Without something like "civil" or "federal" or "moral" liberty, as Winthrop wrote on 22 September 1642, the Puritan community could not endure:
Others who went to other places, upon like grounds, succeeded no better. They fled for fear of want, and many of them fell into it, even to extremity, as if they had hastened into the misery which they feared and fled from, besides the depriving themselves of the ordinances and church fellowship, and those civil liberties which they enjoyed here; whereas, such as staid in their places, kept their peace and ease, and enjoyed still the blessing of the ordinances, and never tasted of those troubles and miseries, which they heard to have befallen those who departed. Much disputation there was about liberty of removing for outward advantages, and all ways were sought for an open door to get out at; but it is to be feared many crept out at a broken wall. For such as come together into a wilderness, where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men, and there confederate together in civil and church estate, whereby they do, implicitly at least, bind themselves to support each other, and all of them that society, whether civil or sacred, whereof they are members, how they can break from this without free consent, is hard to find, so as may satisfy a tender or good conscience in time of trial. Ask thy conscience, if thou wouldst have plucked up thy stakes; and brought thy family 3000 miles, if thou hadst expected that all, or most, would have forsaken thee there. Ask again, what liberty thou hast towards others, which thou likest not to allow others towards theyself; for if one may go, another may, and so the greater part, and so church and commonwealth may be left destitute in a wilderness, exposed to misery and reproach, and all for thy ease and pleasure, whereas these all, being now thy brethren, as near to thee as the Israelites were to Moses, it were much safer for thee, after his example, to choose rather to suffer affliction with thy brethren, than to enlarge thy ease and pleasure by furthering the occasion of their ruin.
The notion that freedom means staying rather than moving on, accepting hardship and confinement rather than seeking openness and a better life, is an idea that Americans learned to admire but not to emulate, a sentiment that makes the seventeenth-century mind remote from modern sensibility. Winthrop's commitment to such ideas is what makes it inappropriate, finally, to read him as a proto-Romantic who found change exhilarating. However much he made way for novelty, Winthrop's steadfast Puritanism cannot be overlooked. In fact, to interpret him as more modern than he was would be to miss the ways his life and work calls ours into question.
It is only by honoring his irreducible otherness that we can appreciate his way of revisioning America. Without his originating beliefs, his revisions in religion, politics, and narrative make the wrong kind of sense. Revision for its own sake keeps little but criticism alive; in this sense it is still true that where there is no vision, the people perish. Hence if we lack a coherent sense of purpose as a people, we could do worse than hypothetically to adopt Winthrop's model of civil liberty. It is so different from our conventional ideas that it might force us to begin the process of revision. Winthrop's Puritan vision will not provide the answers we need, but by framing the right questions it might inaugurate our own revisioning. The will for that task, and a steady commitment to it, is what Winthrop's Journal has to offer. In undertaking it, we keep something alive that is more important, finally, than any particular origin.
In life as in scholarship, possibilities come into focus only when limitations are recognized; one never grasps them whole, yet one doesn't simply have to get by without them. If historian John P. Diggins is right about "the lost soul of American politics," Winthropian revisioning presents a real alternative to the apparent contemporary options of nostalgic communalism and narcissistic individualism. Our world is different from but not more difficult than that of the Puritans. Winthrop sold all that he had to come to America and lost most of what he acquired here. Our sacrifices are more subtle but no less uncomfortable. Revising America will cost more than we imagine and require resources beyond ourselves. There is no other way to keep the dream alive. History that tells the whole truth is a rock against the current as it runs away. Resistance is all. Revisioning is most us.
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