John Winthrop

by Francis J. Bremer

Start Free Trial

John Winthrop Writes His Journal

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: "John Winthrop Writes His Journal," in The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, Vol. XLI, No. 2, April, 1984, pp. 185-212.

[In the following essay, Dunn examines the style, structure, and content of the journal Winthrop kept between 1630 and 1649.]

Stored in the manuscript vault of the Massachusetts Historical Society within a locked case of handsome Victorian design are two fragile vellum-covered notebooks in the distinctive and devilishly difficult handwriting of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts. These are the first and third manuscript volumes of Winthrop's journal, the prime source for the history of the Bay Colony from 1630 to 1649. In the first of these notebooks, measuring 7 1/4" × 5 3/4" and containing 188 pages, Winthrop made 169 pages of entries, starting on March 29, 1630, and running to September 14, 1636. There was once a second notebook with 358 pages of entries running from October 1636 to December 8, 1644; this volume was accidentally destroyed in 1825. The third notebook, measuring 10" × 6 3/8" and containing 186 pages, was only two-thirds filled when Winthrop died; he made 128 pages of entries in it, running from September 17, 1644, to January 11, 1649. This set of texts is surely the most baffling of all major early American documents to decipher or to edit. The handwriting in the two surviving volumes is notoriously hard to read, the ink is faded, the paper is often stained, worn, or torn, and the text is studded with marginalia, insertions, cancellations, and underscorings. Since the middle volume (containing 52 percent of Winthrop's text) is lost, the reader has to use a modernized transcription for this section, published by James Savage in 1825-1826, that obliterates many of the nuances in the original manuscript. It is safe to say that no one will ever publish a satisfactory edition of this remarkable document.

Problems start with the title. The work is alternatively known as The Journal of John Winthrop or as History of New England. Winthrop himself did not call it a journal, at least directly, but he did call it a history and also an annals. When he began writing in his first notebook, he supplied no title but plunged directly into the opening entry:

Anno domini 1630: march 29: mundaye.
Easter mundaye:


Rydinge at the Cowes nearest the Ile of wight in the Arbella, a Shippe of 350: tunes whereof Captaine Peter Milborne was master….

As Winthrop moved to his second notebook he wrote at the top of the opening page, "A Continuation of the History of N: England," and when he reached the third notebook he wrote on the outside cover, "3: vol booke of the Annalls of N: England," and inside on the opening page, "A continuation of the Historye of N: England." The dictionary definitions of these terms overlap, but the essential feature of a journal is that it is a daily or regular record of events noted down as they occur, whereas a history is a more formal narrative of events arranged systematically and usually after the fact and an annals has the added characteristic of being written year by year or arranged in yearly sequence. The trouble with Winthrop, as we shall see, is that he began by keeping a daily journal in 1630 and then recorded entries less frequently and regularly and wrote them up at greater length, so that by the 1640s he had converted his work into a form of history.

Over the years many people have endeavored to read, transcribe, and edit Winthrop's notebooks. For 150 years after the governor died in 1649 no one attempted publication, but such worthies as William Hubbard, Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, Ezra Stiles, Jonathan Trumbull, and Jeremy Belknap borrowed the manuscript volumes from the Winthrop family for extended periods. From about 1755 to 1816 the third volume disappeared among Thomas Prince's books in the tower of Old South Church. Thus when Ezra Stiles copied from the manuscript in 1771 and Governor Trumbull and his secretary John Porter transcribed it in the 1780s and Noah Webster finally published it in 1790, these four gentlemen had only the first two volumes to work with. Webster's edition was entitled A Journal Of the Transactions and Occurrences in the settlement of Massachusetts and the other New-England Colonies, from the year 1630 to 1644: written by John Winthrop, Esq. First Governor of Massachusetts: And now first published from a correct copy of the original Manuscript. Webster had not read Winthrop's manuscript. He printed a transcription of the first two volumes by Porter, who was a much more exact transcriber than Stiles but whose copy was not as "correct" as Webster claimed, for it was marred by many hundred misreadings and omissions. The first two notebooks were given to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1803 by the Winthrops, and the third in 1816 after it was discovered in Prince's library. When the task of transcribing this third book for publication "seemed to appall several of the most competent members" of the Society, James Savage (the librarian of the organization) undertook the job. He soon decided to prepare a new edition of the entire work, which he published in 1825-1826 under the title The History of New England from 1630 to 1649. By John Winthrop, Esq. First Governour of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay. From his Original Manuscripts. In 1853 Savage reissued his edition with the same title and text but expanded annotations. He was a very painstaking, dogged, and shrewd judge of Winthrop's hand, and his reading of the text was a vast improvement over Porter's. But Savage did not make a complete transcription, for he ignored many of Winthrop's marginalia, memoranda, and cancellations as unimportant. He took liberties with Winthrop's language, and unhappily he also took the liberty of borrowing Winthrop's manuscript from the Society in order to work on it in his office, where on November 10, 1825, a fire destroyed the second volume. Thus Savage was both the first and the last editor to study all three of Winthrop's notebooks.

In 1908 James Kendall Hosmer published what was in effect a streamlined version of Savage's edition under the hybrid title Winthrop's Journal, "History of New England," 1630-1649. Hosmer made no effort to reread the two surviving notebooks, but he reproduced Savage's text in larger print, with simpler annotations and a better index. He divided the narrative into chapters, one per year, which Winthrop had not done, and he expurgated a few passages that he considered "repulsive," such as Anne Hutchinson's monstrous birth, or too sexually explicit, such as William Hatchet's copulation with a cow. In 1931 the Committee of Publication of the Massachusetts Historical Society took a quite different approach. These editors decided, like Hosmer, to publish The Journal of John Winthrop (as they called it) in chapters or annual installments, but they intended to intersperse these installments among the governor's correspondence and other writings in the Winthrop Papers series and to reproduce the author's language as literally as possible. Only the first installment of this edition appeared: Winthrop's journal for 1630 in the Winthrop Papers, Volume II. Now, more than half a century later, Laetitia Yeandle and I have prepared a fifth edition of Winthrop's magnum opus. Drawing heavily upon the cumulative labors of our predecessors, we have devised a compromise text in which the opening and closing sections follow the original manuscript more closely than the middle section in Savage's modernized style; our edition will be published under the title The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649.

Living closely with Winthrop's text, as I have been

forced to do, has convinced me that the governor's notebooks offer an exceptional opportunity to study a seventeenth-century author at work. This opportunity is especially rewarding in the case of Winthrop, since he was both chief actor and chief recorder in Massachusetts for two crucial decades. He did more than any of the other Puritan founders to shape events and also to shape the historical perception of those events. One could doubtless learn a good deal more about Winthrop as a writer if the middle volume of his manuscript had not been burned. But it is possible, through examination of the two surviving volumes and related manuscripts at the Massachusetts Historical Society, to discover quite a bit about the governor's method of composition, to trace how he changed his method over time, and to demonstrate that these changes considerably affected the content and style of his narrative.

In March 1630, when Winthrop boarded the Arbella and opened his journal, he was a forty-two-year-old landed gentleman who had never participated in overseas colonization and whose interest in New England was extremely recent, but he brought to his task extensive expertise as a country squire, a city lawyer, and a Puritan activist. Born on January 12, 1588, in Edwardston, Suffolk, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, studied the law at Gray's Inn, served as attorney at the Court of Wards and Liveries in London and as justice of the peace in Suffolk, and inherited his father's position as lord of Groton manor. In his youth Winthrop became a dedicated convert to Puritanism, and over the years he formed a wide network of alliance with fellow Puritans. By 1630 he had a considerable family to provide for: he was married to his third wife, Margaret, and had seven living sons and one daughter. Groton manor contained some 515 acres and produced about £430 in annual income, placing Winthrop among the few thousand wealthiest men in England. But 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 completely with his Puritan critics in Parliament in March 1629, Winthrop decided to emigrate to America. He joined the Massachusetts Bay Company, which had just received a royal charter granting broad powers of self-government. On August 26, 1629, he signed the Cambridge Agreement in which he pledged with eleven other Puritan gentlemen to move with his family to Massachusetts if the company government and charter were also transferred to America. The company shareholders accepted this plan, and on October 20, 1629, they chose Winthrop as their new governor. In the winter of 1629-1630 he organized a migration of about a thousand persons who would sail to Massachusetts in seventeen ships during the following spring and summer:

Winthrop had published no books or pamphlets when he started his journal, but he was a very experienced writer. His surviving papers from the 1620s, which are manifestly incomplete, include letters, diaries, treatises, and notebooks in a wide range of styles. To his wife, his children, and his dearest friends Winthrop could write rapturous and intimate letters in biblical cadences of love, reverence, and exaltation, but he was extremely careful never to employ such language in his journal. At intervals between 1607 and 1637 he also kept a private spiritual diary, which he called "Experiencia," written partly in cypher, with many pages torn out and others obliterated. This notebook was his confessional, and it also was antithetical in style and content to the public journal he began in 1630. For example, in "Experiencia" he recorded in wrenching detail his deathbed parting with his second wife, Thomasine, in 1616, whereas in his journal he permitted himself only a succinct marginal memorial in 1647 to his beloved third wife, Margaret: "14 (4) In this sicknesse the Gouernors wife daughter of Sir Jo Tindale knight left this world for a better, beinge about 56. yeares of age: a woman of singuler vertue, prudence, modesty, and piety: and specially beloued and honored of all the Contry." But if Winthrop's "Experiencia" and his letters of love provided no models for the journal, other kinds of writing he pursued in the 1620s were more pertinent. As an attorney at the Court of Wards and Liveries from 1627 to 1629, Winthrop kept a docket of court cases in which he made summary digests of legal briefs—good training for the precise, terse, and sober expository style he aimed for in the journal. In 1627-1628 he compiled a notebook full of abstracts of sermons he had listened to, in which he reduced the preachers' lengthy expositions to lucid summaries—good training for the compact presentation of religious and political ideas and arguments in the journal. And in 1629, when he was trying to recruit emigrants to New England, he wrote a series of treatises designed to circulate in manuscript among fellow Puritans, in which he presented reasons for colonization, raised objections to these reasons, and answered the objections—good training for the gambit he adopted throughout the journal of stating both sides of an argument and then winding up emphatically in favor of the "correct" position.

Around October 1629, when Winthrop was elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, he started to make entries in a new notebook, jotting down twelve pages of miscellaneous data concerning preparations for his trip to America. Among other things he noted the company's purchase of the Arbella for £750 and its contracts with a baker and a butcher in November 1629 to provide biscuit and salt meat for the voyage; he listed some of the people who were emigrating with him to Masscahusetts; and he drew a chart of the Massachusetts coastline from Gloucester to Salem (which he probably traced from a map supplied by Capt. Thomas Beecher, who had sailed to Massachusetts in the summer of 1629) to aid the last stage of the Arbella's navigation to the company's American headquarters at Salem. Although none of these entries is dated, they all appear to have been made between late October 1629 and early March 1630. Winthrop arrived at Southampton by March 14, 1630, boarded the Arbella about March 20, and sailed across the Solent to anchor at Cowes, a port on the Isle of Wight, by March 22. One week later, on March 29, he flipped over the notebook he had been using and started his journal from the other end, so that his miscellaneous entries of 1629-1630 are now found upside down in reverse order at the back of the book.

Why did he start his journal on Easter Monday? Back in 1962 when I first commented on Winthrop's journal, I supposed that he chose this date as symbolic of the new life he was entering in moving from corrupt old England to a convenanted community in New England. But I now believe that Winthrop had a more prosaic reason: he supposed that his fleet would sail the morning. In fact, because of contrary winds the Arbella did not sail until April 8. The larger question, of course, is why Winthrop decided to keep a journal at all, and here I believe that his initial purpose was simply to record the daily experience of what he knew would be a long and terrifying ocean voyage for the information of family and friends still in England who would be sailing in 1631 or after to join him in America. The year before, on April 25, 1629, Francis Higginson had started just such a sea journal when he crossed the Atlantic to join the Massachusetts Bay Company's advance settlement at Salem; Higginson finished this "True Relacion of the last Voyage to New England" (as he called it) on July 24, 1629, when he reached his destination, and sent it back to the company officers in London. Higginson's narrative made quite an impression on Winthrop. In October 1629, shortly before he was elected governor of the company, Winthrop sent from London to Suffolk a "booke" that can be identified from his description as Higginson's sea journal for his wife and children to read, and he asked his son Forth to copy part of it for distribution among neighbors "that haue a minde to N:E:" Between October 1629 and March 1630 Winthrop had been frantically busy with preparations for the trip. But now that he was on shipboard and could look forward to some enforced leisure during the voyage, he was in a position to perform the same service as Higginson.

The opening twenty-four manuscript pages in Winthrop's first notebook constitute his sea journal, which runs from March 29 to June 14, 1630, and systematically reports the events of every single day of the seventy-eight until the Arbella anchored at Salem. By inspecting the manuscript, noting the color of the ink, the thickness of the pen nib, the size of Winthrop's writing, and the slant of his hand, one can tell that he composed this sea journal directly as events occurred. He wrote the entries for fifty-seven days at fifty-seven sittings, and he wrote up the remaining twenty-one entries two or three days at a time. On April 15 Winthrop encountered his first Atlantic storm, and his notebook bears mute witness to this rough weather. The governor's hand danced about the page as he wrote: "About 10: at night the winde grew so highe and rayne withall, that we were forced to take in our toppsayle, and havinge lowed our maine saile and foresayle the strome was so greate, as it splitt our foresayle, and tore it in peeces; and a knott of the sea washed our tubbe overbord wherein our fishe was a wateringe." In narrating this sea journal Winthrop adopted the first person plural, a practice he generally followed thereafter. He referred to himself as "the governor" only twice and to himself as the author only four times, and he focused fat more on the actions of Capt. Peter Milborn, the commander of the Arbella. Winthrop's account contains much more concrete information than Higginson's journal of 1629 but offers fewer touches of drama or romance. His essential purpose was to record weather conditions and the ship's position, and he was so circumstantial that the Arbella's route in 1630 can be traced with considerable accuracy. When he finally sighted the Maine coast on June 8, he expressed his joy in characteristic style: "we had nowe faire sunneshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet ethere, as did much refreshe vs, and there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden."

On reaching Massachusetts, Winthrop again followed Higginson's example and composed an account of the Atlantic crossing that he sent back to England. He reported to his son John on July 23, 1630, "for the Course of our voyage, and other occurentes you shall vnderstande them by a iournall which I sende with my letters to your vncle D"—that is, to Winthrop's brother-in-law Emmanuel Downing in London. In other letters Winthrop described this account as "a iournall and relation" and a "larger discourse of all thinges." He also sent home a chart of the Arbella's route, prepared by Captain Milborne, and he directed that copies of his "iournall" be distributed to members of the family and friends. Since this "iournall" no longer survives, one can only speculate whether Winthrop copied it directly from his notebook sea journal. He cannot have added much new material, for he told his son John on August 14 that he had no time on first arrival to "make any perfect relation," and that he was still far too busy, so I must referre you and all my freindes to my former reporte as it is."

Distracted though he was by the problems of settlement, Winthrop made the crucial decision to continue keeping a journal after he landed in Massachusetts. He never discussed his reasons for doing this in surviving correspondence, but he was clearly taking notes on events of public interest so that when he had the leisure he could write an account of the founding of the colony to be circulated like his sea journal. Winthrop had a fully developed conceptual framework within which to work. During the voyage he had composed "A Modell of Christian Charity," his most celebrated and frequently quoted treatise, in which he explained to his fellow passengers their divine mission to create "a Citty vpon a Hill." He took it for granted that in Massachusetts, as in all societies, the leading men (such as himself) were endowed by God with riches, power, and dignity, while the followers would be poor, mean, and in subjection. But Massachusetts was also a community of Christians in collective covenant with God, so that the colonists had a special vocation to love and support one another and to obey the Lord's commandments. Should they serve the Lord faithfully, He would bless their efforts; should they deal falsely, He would destroy their plantation. Thus Winthrop's object in his journal was to chart the colonists' progress on their divine mission and to collect evidences of God's mercy and wrath.

However grand Winthrop's purpose, his entries during the first months in Massachusetts are maddeningly brief and irregular. Between June 17 and October 25, 1630, he recorded only two manuscript pages of entries, and he was not much fuller in November and December 1630. In skeletal form he noted some of the basic events: the arrival of thirteen ships, the first meeting of the Court of Assistants, the formation of Boston church, the imprisonment of Thomas Morton of Merrymount, the deaths of several leading planters. On July 2 he also recorded a bitter personal blow: "my sone H[enry] Wfinthrop] was drowned at Salem." He jotted a few entries once or twice a month, to judge by his handwriting and the color of the ink, and he left blank spaces for additions that he never filled in. Winthrop by no means conveyed the full gravity of the colonists' predicament in 1630. He never mentioned it in his journal, but he found on arrival that the servants sent ahead by the company in 1628-1629 had done almost nothing to prepare for the thousand new arrivals of 1630; they had not even raised enough crops to feed themselves. Winthrop was forced to release these servants from their indentures because he had brought no supplies to support them. The passengers on the Winthrop fleet were likewise short of food, the growing season for 1630 was well advanced, most of the livestock transported from England had died in transit, and shortly after landing the new settlers began to die of dysentery and scurvy. Amid these problems Winthrop supervised the settlement of six towns ringing Boston harbor, set up the colony government, traded with the Indians for corn and fish, and dispatched a ship back to England for emergency provisions. Massachusetts might well have collapsed completely had the governor been less resourceful and courageous.

Winthrop's meager entries are particularly regrettable because other accounts of the formation of the Massachusetts system of towns and churches in 1630 are also extremely skimpy. Had he had more leisure, he might have explained why the incoming colonists created so many towns instead of all living together, why each town had its own gathered church of self-nominated saints, and why Winthrop himself as governor chose first to settle at Charlestown and then moved to Boston. But even if he had had the leisure, he would never have described the physical process of settlement—the way in which the colonists built houses and started farms in the widerness—for he always excluded such mundane matters from his personal correspondence and his journal. And he had his reasons for silence on many other issues. The journal was a semi-public statement by the leader of the colony, and in the crisis months of 1630 he reported nothing that might get him in trouble with his fellow colonists or with the company at home or with Charles I's government. Winthrop probably privately blamed John Endecott for mismanaging the advance settlement at Salem, but he said nothing about it. Naturally he did not care to advertise that some 200 settlers died within the first year and that another 200 left in dismay. He probably also purposely omitted mention of the chief political event of 1630, the General Court of October 19. There Winthrop and his fellow magistrates pushed through new company rules whereby the magistrates' powers were expanded and the freemen's powers were restricted.

By the winter of 1630-1631 Winthrop was finding a little more time and inclination to make entries. He remarked with surprise on the bitterly cold weather and composed his first extended anecdote, which was about the harrowing mishaps of six Bostonians shipwrecked on Cape Cod, four of whom froze to death. In February 1631 he reported jubilantly on the return of the Lyon from England with the supplies he had or dered and twenty new colonists; he did not report that the Lyon carried more than eighty disgruntled old col onists back to England on her return voyage. Winthrop must now have felt confident that the survival crisis was ending. At the height of the crisis he had insisted in private letters to his wife that he did not repent coming, for he saw the sickness and mortality as God's mode of testing the colonists' corrupt hearts. Now he spoke openly on this subject in his journal. "It hather been allwayes observed here," he noted in February 1631, "that suche as fell into discontente and lingered after their former Conditions in Englande, fell into the skirvye, and died." From 1631 onward, a persistent theme running through Winthrop's narrative is that any colonist who deserts Massachusetts or who dares to quarrel with the colony government will be punished by God for his wickedness.

During 1631 Winthrop settled into a new form of record keeping, in which he took up his notebook two or three times a month, composed several entries at a time, and wrote at greater length than in June-October 1630. As he continued to work on the journal in 1632 and later years, he cut down on the number of dated entries but inserted more undated ones and said more each time he wrote, so that by the mid-1630s he was averaging nearly a full page each time he put pen to paper. The changes year by year in his mode of composition as he worked through his first notebook are summarized in the following tabulation:

Period MS pages Dated entries Apparent writing sessions
Mar. 29-June 14 1630 24 78 66
June 17-Dec. 26 1630 4 26 11
Jan.-Dec. 8 1631 11 52 32
Jan. 27-Dec. 5 1632 20 44 28
Jan. 1-Dec. 27 1633 22 30 29
Jan. 21-Dec. 22 1634 32 44 45
Jan. 13-Dec. 10 1635 29 37 37
Jan.-Sept. 14 1636 27 34 6

Obviously, Winthrop never resumed the daily reports of his sea journal but decided instead to focus on three or four events per month, which he often wrote up at considerable length. There is almost no evidence in his first volume that he wrote retrospectively. At most, he discussed incidents a month or two after they occurred. Hence throughout this section of the journal we are introduced to events as witnessed firsthand, without benefit of hindsight. Furthermore, Winthrop seldom tinkered with his text after he set it down. He made many small stylistic revisions as he shaped his presentation, and he inserted occasional new material in the margin or in the text to complete a story or to make a cross reference, but only rarely did he introduce substantive changes in interpretation.

Did Winthrop have a historiographical model for his narrative? Clearly, he was little influenced by the pagan historians of classical antiquity or by such secular English chroniclers as Holinshed, Hakluyt, or Capt. John Smith. In the 1640s he cited Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) approvingly, but Raleigh's all-embracing epic was no model for him. Doubtless he admired John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563), a longtime favorite among Puritan readers, but this work too was of little help, for Foxe memorialized the sufferings of individual Protestant heroes whereas Winthrop was describing an organic community in action. His design was much closer to William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, and Winthrop very likely consulted with his Pilgrim neighbor as he wrote. The two men met in December 1631 and visited each other thereafter. Bradford tells us that he started to compose his history "about the year 1630," and he kept working on it at intervals until about 1647, two years before Winthrop's death. But Winthrop had a more obvious and powerful model than Bradford: the Bible. In the historical books of the Old Testament, most particularly Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Judges, he could find a story exactly to his purpose, recounting amid plentiful evidences of human backsliding and divine wrath how God's chosen people escaped from captivity and came to the promised land.

As he composed his first notebook Winthrop gradually changed his perception of his own role as author-actor. In large part he responded to changing circumstances. From March to June 1630, on board the Arbella, Captain Milborne was in command and the journalist kept himself in the background. Then for nearly four years, from June 1630 to his electoral defeat in May 1634, Winthrop was governor of the colony and very much the central figure in his own story. From May 1634 to his electoral victory in May 1637 (which occurred after the completion of the first notebook), he was demoted to magistrate or assistant for two two years and deputy governor for one year; he was no longer in charge nor always in agreement with governmental policy. The changes of june 1630 and May 1634 required adjustments in his presentation. Once he landed in Massachusetts, the governor could no longer stay in the background and had to determine how to write up his own public actions and attitudes, and how much attention to give to his personal experiences and private thoughts. When he was demoted in May 1634, he had to decide whether to continue to report as an insider and how much to distance himself from the new colony leaders.

As we have seen, on arrival in Massachusetts Winthrop was both brief and evasive. As he resumed reporting at greater length in 1631 and 1632 he wrote at first more freely about his personal experiences than about his public actions. He reported the adventurous night he spent lost in the woods near Mystic (October 11, 1631), his joyous reunion with his wife and children when they arrived from England (November 2-11, 1631), his explorations into the back country beyond Watertown and Medford (January 27 and February 7, 1632), and the birth of a son (August 20, 1632); however, he made no mention of the General Court's key decision of May 1631 to bar non-church members from becoming freemen or exercising any voice in the government of the colony. Gradually Winthrop stopped saying much about his private affairs and focused more on public policy, and he soon was reporting controversial matters that are not mentioned in the official records of the General Court or the Court of Assistants. Only through the journal do we learn that on April 12, 1631, the magistrates reprimanded Salem church for choosing Roger Williams as their minister, or that between April and September 1632 Winthrop had a series of ugly confrontations with the deputy governor, Thomas Dudley. Winthrop is especially frank and explicit in describing his quarrel with Dudley. On May 1, 1632, he criticized the deputy governor for resigning from office ("desertinge his place" was Winthrop's phrase) and accused him face to face of greed and ostentation in his personal habits. On August 3, 1632, Dudley counterattacked with a barrage of charges that Winthrop was exceeding his authority and misgoverning the colony. At one point "the deputye rose vp in great furye and passion and the Governor grewe verye hott allso, so as they bothe fell into bitternesse." Winthrop devoted more than five pages to a recital of Dudley's complaints and his responses, thereby disclosing a number of administrative actions not previously reported in the journal or the colony records.

Why did Winthrop write so candidly and fully on these sensitive issues? Obviously, Dudley's charges touched a raw nerve, and he wanted to dispose of them as systematically as possible. By talking the issues out he could hope to win over the reader even if he could not convince Dudley, and he could also display his integrity as a reporter. Furthermore, by exposing Dudley's faults and demonstrating the triviality of his complaints, Winthrop was making the point that the deputy governor was much his inferior as a statesman. The two men became lovingly reconciled, according to Winthrop, and indeed the record shows that they were usually allies after 1632. But the portrait that Winthrop sketched of Dudley as a jealous, irascible colleague is bound to linger in the consciousness of any reader. It is the first of a long series of unflattering vignettes in the journal. Winthrop was not a real portraitist; he never described people in three-dimensional detail. But like Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, he had the trick of 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, Sir Christopher Gardiner, John Mason, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Roger Williams, John Wheelwright, Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, John Underbill, Samuel Gorton, Peter Hobart, and Robert Child. But he was seldom unequivocally positive about his fellow magistrates. John Endecott was rash and blundering, Roger Ludlow was intemperate, John Haynes was too rich, Henry Vane was a spoiled youth, Israel Stoughton and Richard Saltonstall were dangerous incendiaries, John Humfrey was a deserter, Richard Bellingham was dishonest. Likewise among the clergy, John Cotton was unsound, John Eliot was naïve, Thomas Hooker was aggressive, the Rogers brothers were quarrelsome, Hugh Peter and Nathaniel Ward were meddlesome. To be sure, Winthrop seldom dwelt on these criticisms; he had much more praise than blame for most of his colleagues and he 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.

By 1632, one of Winthrop's chief purposes in the journal was to explain and defend his administration, and as he pursued his critics his interpretation became increasingly one-sided. For example, on February 17, 1632, he described his victory over the people of Watertown who had refused to pay taxes levied by the magistrates because they had no representatives at the General Court. According to Winthrop, these people were finally convinced of their error, "so their submission was accepted, and their offence pardoned. 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 court records the two spokesmen for Watertown were listed first, ahead of the representatives from the seven other towns. This modest concession satisfied the freemen for two years, but in the spring of 1634 they agitated for a larger share of power. Winthrop is our chief source on what happened next. On April 1 the representatives from the several towns asked to see the company charter and, when they read it, discovered that the freemen were authorized to meet four times a year to make laws. Winthrop tells how he explained to the representatives that this procedure could not work because the freemen were too numerous and were not properly qualified to choose "a select Companye" (that is, deputies from each town), to legislate; furthermore, such a legislative assembly would consume too much time. When he wrote this entry Winthrop mistakenly supposed that he had settled the matter. But on May 14, 1634, the General Court voted to give the freemen appreciably more power and the magistrates less. It was agreed that the General Court had the sole power to legislate and tax, that this body was to meet four times a year rather than annually, and that the freemen in each town were to choose deputies to represent them in these meetings. Those freemen who attended the May 1634 court of election voted by secret ballot for the first time, and they chose Thomas Dudley as governor and Roger Ludlow as deputy governor. There was apparently a move to drop Winthrop from the board of magistrates, but John Cotton preached an election sermon against this, and Winthrop was kept on.

The General Court of May 1634 was Winthrop's worst defeat. The constitutional change was a greater blow than the electoral change, because Winthrop could not 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 at the moment of defeat he concealed his feelings. One week after this court session he wrote a very positive description of life in Massachusetts for an English correspondent, explaining that "Our Civill Government is mixt," with power divided among the magistrates, deputies, and freemen. He seems to have wavered a bit before deciding just what to report in his journal. First he made two entries about minor proceedings in the May court, leaving two large blank spaces that he never filled in. Then he turned the page and wrote out a full account of Cotton's sermon, the election results, and the constitutional change. "Manye good orders were made this Court," he concluded; "it helde 3: dayes and all things were Carried verye peaceably: notwithstanding that some of the Assistantes were questioned by the freemen for some errores in their government and some fines imposed, but remitted again before the Court brake vp: the Court was kept in the meetingehowse at Boston," It would be interesting to know whether Winthrop was among those questioned and fined, and why he canceled his concluding testimonial of harmony. Perhaps he found it too self-seeking. Certainly, one of the "good orders" of the May court was very irritating to him: a directive that ex-governor Winthrop make an account of all public monies and goods he had received and paid out during his administration. Winthrop does not say so in the journal, but he entered a statement into the court records in which he pointed out testily that he had disbursed over £1,700 for public use and received less than £400 in compensation.

The next three years of the journal, from May 1634 to May 1637, composed when the author was out of power, constitute the most interesting section of the entire narrative. Winthrop now wrote at somewhat greater length than before and concentrated on political events, and perhaps because he was no longer defending his own record he supplied more inside information about the controversial issues of the day. These were difficult years for the Bay Colony. In England, Archbishop William Laud's new Commission for Regulating Plantations served a writ of quo warranta against the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the Court of King's Bench ordered the company's franchise seized into the king's hands. In America many of the Massachusetts colonists joined Thomas Hooker and John Haynes in an exodus to Connecticut, Roger Williams was banished and fled to Narragansett Bay, the Massachusetts government plunged into a bloody war against the Pequot Indians, and in October 1636 the Antinomian controversy exploded in Boston. Modern commentators have questioned whether these events would have taken place, or would have been so disruptive, had Winthrop remained in charge. The journal encourages such sentiments by hinting (and sometimes openly stating) that matters in 1634-1637 could have been much better handled.

Yet Winthrop was neither as full nor as frank a writer as he later became. For example, his series of thirteen succinct entries on Roger Williams's stormy career, from the day that Winthrop welcomed this "godly minister" in February 1631 to the news of his mysterious disappearance from Salem in January 1636, raises doubts about what really happened and why. Winthrop presented Williams's rebellion against the Masschusetts church-state system as the work of a rigid and isolated fanatic who enjoyed no support outside Salem. In January 1636 Winthrop seemed quite as eager as any of his fellow magistrates to ship the banished man back to England. And yet Williams later claimed that Winthrop "privately wrote to me to steer my course to Narragansett Bay and Indians, for many high and heavenly and public ends, encouraging me, from the freeness of the place from any English claims or patents." The letters that Williams sent to Winthrop in 1636-1637, just after he came to Narragansett Bay, do read as though he regarded the ex-governor as his benefactor and friend. And was it just coincidence that the leading Bay magistrates and clergy convened a private meeting on January 18, 1636, a week or so after Williams's flight, and roundly criticized Winthrop for his "ouer muche lenytye and remissenesse"? Did they suspect him of giving covert aid to Williams?

On another sensitive topic, the exodus from Massachusetts to Connecticut in 1635-1636, Winthrop by no means "told all" in his journal. It is clear from his report of a week-long debate in the September 1634 General Court on whether Thomas Hooker and his followers in Newtown (Cambridge) should be allowed to go to Connecticut that feelings ran high on this subject and that Winthrop strongly opposed the move. The court records are silent about this debate, but Winthrop reported that the Newtowners finally bowed to the magistrates' opposition, "so the feare of their removall to Conectecott was removed." Unfortunately, he never explained when or why this decision was reversed. In the summer of 1635, as the migration began, Winthrop wrote cheerfully to an English correspondent, "we are putt to rayse new Colonys about 100 miles to the west of vs, upon a very fine river and a most fruitfull place"; he added that Hooker was going next year, but certainly not because of any quarrel he had with John Cotton. Winthrop's truer feelings emerged as he made a series of dolorous journal entries between October 1635 and November 1636 about the misadventures of the Connecticut pioneers, who nearly froze and starved in their new milieu and lost all their cattle. Clearly, neither the Lord nor John Winthrop was pleased with this migration.

The journal reaches its most dramatic point in 1636-1637 with the Pequot War and the Antinomian controversy. Winthrop narrated both crises as they developed, without knowing how either of them would turn out. In July 1636 he learned that a trader named John Oldham had been murdered by Indians from Block Island, and he quickly filled the closing pages of his first notebook with entries on the Bay government's efforts to track down the murderers and on Endecott's expedition of August 24—September 14 against the Block Island and Pequot Indians. Taking up another notebook, the lost second volume of the journal, Winthrop continued his story in the four opening entries of the new book, dated in October 1636, which describe the expansion of the war in Connecticut. Then in late October he made his first report on "One Mrs. Hutchinson," and it soon became evident to him that this "woman of a ready wit and bold spirit" was an even more dangerous adversary than the Pequots. During the next months he focused primarily on the Antinomians but supplied periodic progress reports on the Indian war until the Pequots were vanquished in August 1637 and he could concentrate full measure on Mrs. Hutchinson and her followers. Much was at stake for Winthrop in this contest. Anne Hutchinson's strong-hold was Winthrop's own Boston church, and her supporters initially included John Cotton as well as John Wheelwright and Governor Vane. She and her followers were zealously bent on driving such pharisees as Winthrop out of office, if not out of the colony. According to the journal, Winthrop was the chief opponent of the Antinomians: in the Boston church he alone defended the beleaguered pastor, John Wilson, and blocked the appointment of Wheelwright as an additional minister of the church. At the magistrates' meetings he stood up to Vane. Winthrop reported that he also stood up to John Cotton, and he seems to have supplied much of the pressure that persuaded Cotton to switch sides. At the May 1637 General Court, Winthrop 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 Antinomain magistrates from office. In November 1637 the General Court consolidated this victory by banishing Hutchinson and Wheelwright and disarming or disenfranchising seventy-five of their supporters. In March 1638 the Boston church was finally persuaded to excommunicate Hutchinson.

Once restored to power, Winthrop used his journal more aggressively than in the early 1630s to defend his record and denounce 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 examined witnesses, had the corpse of Dyer's child exhumed, and entered full descriptions of both "monstrous births" into his journal as proof positive that God had turned against the Antinomians. However, even at this time of passionate controversy, when he was pursuing through the pages of his journal a woman whom he detested, Winthrop kept his language sober and controlled. The fiercest denunciation of Hutchinson is found, not in the journal, but in a separate account of the Antinomian controversy that Winthrop assembled and sent to England in the spring of 1638; this account was eventually published anonymously under the title A Short Story of the Rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines, that infected the Churches of New-England (London, 1644). Winthrop's Short Story is a patchwork compilation of documents enumerating the theological errors of the Antinomians and elaborating his journal account of how and why the Massachusetts government and clergy passed sentence against them. Whoever found Winthrop's manuscript in London in 1644, and published it six years out-of-date, certainly garbled parts of the text and possibly inserted the most vituperative passages in order to enliven the piece. However that may be, Anne Hutchinson in the Short Story became an "American Jesabel," "a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage" who was "more bold than a man," a "great imposter" who gloried in her excommunication, and an "instrument of Satan" who poisoned the churches of New England. Winthrop was certainly capable of this language, but he was careful to avoid such polemical terms in the journal when reporting on Anne Hutchinson or any of his other adversaries.

Winthrop's manuscript journal for this particular period can no longer be examined, because he entered the section from October 1636 to December 1644 in the lost second notebook. We know from descriptions by Ezra Stiles (who read it in 1771) and by James Savage (who worked with it from 1816 to 1825) that this book was a substantial volume, about double the size of the first, with 366 pages of text and end notes. Winthrop appears to have used it for other purposes before he began making journal entries in it. At one end of the book, starting in May 1636 (immediately after his election as deputy governor in tandem with Vane), he kept notes on some of the executive decisions made by the governor and magistrates, and he continued to keep this informal record until April 1638. At the other end he started a list of "Gifts bestowed upon this Colony from 1634," and he seems to have recorded the first several of these gifts in 1635-1636. But he did not need a thick book for this list, and so he turned over a few blank leaves and took up his journal. As we have seen, he supplied a title for his work: "A Continuation of the History of N: England." At the outset of the second volume he still organized his text in the format he had been using since 1632, with three or four dated entries per month. But as he kept working, this format gradually changed. By 1639 he had only two dated entries per month, and in 1641 only one per month. He never abandoned dated entries altogether, and throughout the 1640s he kept inserting one or two dates per month; but the majority of entries were now undated, and increasingly he wrote for several consecutive pages on the same topic, so that his narrative became less segmented and more continuous: in short, more of a history.

It must be remembered that Winthrop was the governor of his colony for twelve of the nineteen years he kept the journal, and that he was continually a magistrate; he was in charge in 1630-1634, 1637-1640, 1642-1644, and 1646-1649. By the late 1630s he was clearly drafting the official history of his administration, and as he continued this task he became bothered by three problems that have agitated many historians: how to praise the virtues of living men, how to discuss human errors without prejudicing the reputations of those involved, and whether to reveal "secret hid things which may be prouoking"—in particular, Massachusetts's policy of evading and rejecting orders from the home government. In January 1640 he asked Thomas Shepard's advice on these points, and Shepard urged him to be candid "in the compiling of the History" and to leave tricky points for possible revision before publication. Basically, Winthrop followed Shepard's advice. As far as one can tell from Savage's transcript of the second notebook, the governor deleted or queried only a few critical remarks about Vane, Hooker, Bellingham, and the French Acadian commander Charles de La Tour, together with a few references to himself that could be construed as too personal and prideful. Reporting on the General Court of December 1641 "(for history must tell the whole truth)," he devoted several pages to Bellingham's misconduct as governor of the colony. To balance things he also blamed himself (but more briefly) for plunging into an alliance with La Tour in July 1643. While he was writing, Winthrop made occasional notes to himself on where to add further documentation. For example, on September 21, 1638, he reported that Charles I's Committee for Regulating Plantations had ordered the colony to send home the royal charter, and that the General Court sent a humble petition instead. "These instruments are all among the governour's papers," Winthrop noted, "and the effect of them would be here inserted." At the back of his notebook he filed two documents that he may have planned to insert in his narrative: a set of sixteen questions posed to Cotton in 1637 and a letter from Dudley in 1638. By the time he reached 1643 and 1644 Winthrop was copying into his text verbatim transcripts of such important documents as the Articles of Confederation among Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven in May 1643, the submission of two Narragansett sachems in June 1643, and Massachusetts's treaty of October 1644 with the French commander Charles d'Aulnay. Two comments should be made about these transcripts. First, whenever they can be checked against the originals or against contemporary copies they prove to be remarkably accurate. Second, Winthrop was surprisingly catholic in his choice: a verbatim copy of his own speech rejecting Goody Sherman's charges that the rich merchant Robert Keayne stole her sow is no surprise, but why did he transcribe Parliament's letter of safe conduct for Roger Williams, with its praise for Williams and its stinging rebuke to the Bay government for persecuting fellow Puritans? One can only regret that he had not started this practice much earlier.

Winthrop changed his method of composition in another, more fundamental way during the course of his second notebook. He began to write lengthy sections of his narrative at a sitting, some time after the events described had taken place. This point cannot be proved incontrovertibly, since the original manuscript is destroyed, but close examination of Winthrop's 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. The opening forty or fifty pages of the second notebook, running from October 1636 through November 1637, read as though the author was continuing his practice in the first notebook: he was making frequent entries as things happened or very soon after. He jumped back and forth between the Antinomian and Pequot crises in tune with the latest developments, he changed his mind several times about whether the Antinomian crisis was dying down or heating up, and he altered his portrayal of several characters as his story line changed course. In November 1636 Governor Vane was a "wise and godly gentleman," in December he became a petulant child who burst into tears and flew into rages, and as he quarreled more and more openly with Winthrop he went from bad to worse. John Cotton was evasive in October 1636, belligerent from December 1636 to April 1637, cautious in May, and reconciled to the other clergy in August, at which point Winthrop wrote: "this sudden change was much observed by some." Finally, the Lord Ley "showed much wisdom and moderation" on first arrival in June 1637, but within a month turned into a confederate of Vane's.

When we move ahead four years and examine Winthrop's text from September 2, 1641, to May 18, 1642, it appears that this entire section of about twenty manuscript pages was composed in May 1642 or after, since it contains repeated references to the General Court of that date. And when Winthrop reached the summer of 1643, he abandoned strict chronology. He discussed his diplomatic negotiations with La Tour (June 12—July 14, 1643) before taking up the Goody Sherman sow case (October 1642—May 1643) or the debate over the magistrates' "negative voice" or veto power in legislative proceedings (October 14, 1642—June 5, 1643). I believe that the long interlocking section of Winthrop's text from May 10, 1643, to October 12, 1643, which must have filled nearly fifty pages, was all composed at about the same time, probably in late 1643. Looking back over the complicated developments of the previous months, Winthrop evidently decided to explain his support for La Tour and his opposition to Goody Sherman as fully and systematically as possible because he had been roundly attacked for mishandling both situations. At this stage, I think he was still writing fairly close to the events described. When he narrated the Massachusetts government's invasion of Rhode Island in October 1643 to seize the radical Puritan Samuel Gorton, he did not yet know that Gorton would be released from imprisonment in March 1644. However, sometime between October 1643 and September 1644 Winthrop seems to have stopped working on his notebook for a long period. When he came to reporting on the imprisonment of another enemy, Thomas Morton, in September 1644, he also reported Morton's release in 1645 and his death "within two years after," or about 1647, all in the same paragraph. Unless he inserted this paragraph later (a possibility not mentioned by Stiles or Savage), he composed the closing pages of his second notebook in 1647 or 1648.

My argument that Winthrop changed his method of composition during the course of the second notebook is admittedly conjectural, but I reach firmer ground with the third notebook, which carries the narrative from September 1644 to January 1649. Inspection of Winthrop's manuscript indicates that he wrote 129 pages of entries in only about fifteen sessions; he seems to have set down 20 pages at one stretch, and 15 pages on three other occasions. Obviously, he was working very fast, and in consequence he made more slips and errors than previously. He wrote up ten entries twice over, deleted seven of these repetitions, but did not notice the others. Sometimes he got his dates wrong, especially toward the beginning where he placed three incidents in 1645 that actually occurred in 1644, and he similarly mixed up several events in 1647 and 1648. He filled up much space with verbatim transcripts of important documents; the twelve documents copied into the third book account for one-quarter of the text. Winthrop's style betrays haste; he has lost the compact precision, immediacy, and variety of expression characteristic of the entries from the 1630s. He may have felt that he had no time to lose, because he appears to have composed most or all of this notebook during the last few months of his life. He cannot have started it immediately after completing the second, because his initial page on the arrival of Madame de La Tour, dated September 17, 1644, repeats an episode already described in the closing pages of the second book. He cannot have started the third book in 1644 or 1645 because he misdated too many of the opening entries: And in three places he looked well ahead to future events. On the twelfth page of this volume, under the date July 3, 1645 (actually July 3, 1644), when discussing the erection of free schools, he made reference to a General Court order of November 11, 1647. Un der the date July 1, 1645, when discussing the Cambridge synod, he made a reference to May 1648. And under the date November 5, 1645, when discussing Henry Greene's ordination, he noted Greene's death in October 1648. None of these references was inserted later. Thus Winthrop not merely abandoned his former habit of day-by-day or month-by-month record keeping; he started the third volume three or four years after the events described, and he composed nearly two-thirds of it between mid-October 1648 and early March 1649, when he became fatally ill and too weak to write any more.

Fortunately, there is a further clue to Winthrop's method of composition in the late 1640s. When Ezra Stiles read the second notebook in 1771 he found several loose papers tucked into the book, including a "single sheet" that contained "sundry Entries in the Governor's Hand continuing the Memoirs to 1648," and he copied several of these entries. Jeremy Belknap, who had possession of the second notebook in the 1780s and 1790s, removed the loose papers so that these documents escaped destruction in 1825 and are now among the Belknap Manuscripts in the Massachusetts Historical Society. The "single sheet" of "Memoirs to 1648" is a large piece of paper folded twice to make eight pages, on which Winthrop jotted notes. The first four pages list eighty-five incidents that Winthrop apparently intended to discuss in his narrative, arranged chronologically from July 1643 to May 15, 1648. The remaining four pages contain his reflections on sacred and profane history. Winthrop seems to have jotted down his list of eighty-five items at various times, to judge by his handwriting, and he crossed off the ones that he incorporated into his text. I believe that he began keeping these notes when he laid aside his journal/history so as to jog his memory when he went back to work. Although the first two items date from 1643, the list starts in a systematic way in June 1644; this supports my contention that Winthrop stopped work on his second notebook temporarily at about that date. There is a note on the burial of George Phillips, July 2, 1644, worded almost exactly the same as Winthrop's entry on Phillips in his second notebook; when the governor took up his narrative again he evidently transferred this note directly into his text. Seven other items from the "Memoirs" list are incorporated into the closing pages of the second notebook. But the chief value of this little list was that it provided a skeletal outline for the third volume. The last item on the list dates from May 1648, supporting my contention that Winthrop wrote most or all of the third volume after that date. Certainly, he made heavy use of the "Memoirs" list; he incorporated sixty-three of these items into the third volume, sometimes copying them verbatim. The "Memoirs" page of notes for 1647 and 1648 is headed "not yet entered," but actually Winthrop did incorporate eleven of the fifteen incidents listed on this page. Altogether, he omitted only fourteen items from the "Memoirs" list.

Winthrop's four pages of reflections on sacred and profane history in the "Memoirs" are also very interesting because they help to elucidate his purpose in writing the journal/history. He scornfully denounces "heathen storyes (which are of so greate esteeme amonge men)" because the principal function of these secular histories is to narrate the reign and exploits of Satan, "where nothinge is to be seene but the boysterous and ambitious spirittes of Princes, the salvery and foole hard[i]nesse of their Captains and soldiers wherby millions of men are destroyed, and sent to hell before their tyme." The wars and battles celebrated by "heathen" historians are unnatural as well as vicious in Winthrop's eyes, because nature teaches all creatures to avoid destroying their own kind. Only Satan could have inspired the princes and captains to commit such carnage and imperil the human race. For Winthrop the truly glorious human actors are the saints who serve the King of Kings: their deeds, sufferings, and triumphs are the true stuff of history. The only "good use" of profane history is when it sets forth the wisdom, power, justice, and clemency of God and discovers the malicious practices of Satan.

Winthrop certainly believed that he was recording a chapter in the endless contest between God and Satan, and he certainly supposed that his purpose was to document God's design in bringing His people to New England while testing them with many challenges. But when he began his journal he rarely discussed teleology. One of the few times he did so was in July 1632, when he reported "a great combate between a mouse and a snake" at Watertown in which the victorious mouse symbolized "a poore contemptible people which God had brought hither," and the dead snake was the Devil. Winthrop knew, of course, that the Devil would not stay dead, and in his second volume he recorded many evidences of Satan's efforts to destroy Christ's kingdom in New England through such agents as the Pequot Indians, the Antinomians, and the Gortonists. God and Satan figure even more actively in the third volume. Winthrop saw the mutiny of the town of Hingham against the magistrates in 1645 as "the workinges of Sathan, to ruine the Colonies and Churches of Christ in New England"; he rejoiced in God's displeasure with Dr. Robert Child and the Remonstrants, who had dared to petition Parliament against the colony government in 1646; he reported that a clergyman attending the Cambridge synod of 1648 killed another snake that invaded the meeting house; and he punctuated his manuscript with examples of providential deliverances and punishments. His final entry, dated January 11, 1649, told about five persons who had recently drowned by "the righteous hande of God."

Winthrop, in common with the heathen story tellers he scorned, 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 hardly the same as theirs. When he reported that William Plain of Guilford was executed for masturbating 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 birth in 1638 and then her murder by Indians in 1643. John Humfrey, who deserted Massachusetts for the West Indies in 1641 and took many other colonists with him, was also severely punished: a barn fire destroyed his hay and corn to the value of £160, and three child molesters repeatedly raped his little daughter. Dr. Child, the chief of the Remonstrants in 1646, was publicly humiliated on the streets of London, "and besides God had so blested his estate, as he was quite broken." Ironically, Winthrop's own estate had been blasted a few years before this; in 1639 his bailiff, James Luxford, contracted debts in his name totaling £2,500, and Winthrop was forced to sell much of his property. The Massachusetts freemen dropped him from the governorship for two years after this happened, and one of the deputies tried in 1641 to have him dropped from office altogether because he was "grown poor." But 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 refused to accept his property loss as a providential sign.

The final volume was definitely more a history than a journal. On the cover and the first page of this volume, as we have noted, Winthrop supplied two variant titles for his work: The Annals of New England and History of New England. The first is a misnomer. Winthrop never wrote up the events of a given year as a separate unit or chapter, the way a proper annalist like Bradford organized Of Plymouth Plantation, and in the third volume it is not always clear which year he is talking about. One can also quarrel with his second title, since Winthrop viewed developments beyond the borders of Massachusetts with deep suspicion. His news bulletins from Maine, New Hampshire, Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven were mainly reports of crimes and disorders. Winthrop's prime topic in his second and third volumes was Massachusetts politics, and on this subject he was particularly concerned to answer each and every challenge to his administration. The two great set pieces in his third volume are the Hingham mutiny of 1645 and the Remonstrants' protest of 1646. Winthrop deliberately magnified both events. He was furious at the Hingham petitioners for bringing charges against him at the General Court, and he was furious at the deputies for entertaining these charges, so he wrote up his impeachment trial as a humiliating personal ordeal. He described very particularly how he sat through the trial as an accused criminal, below the magistrates' bench and with his hat off. He described how the magistrates eventually persuaded the deputies to exonerate him and fine the petitioners (this decision was less clear-cut than Winthrop reported), and he described how he resumed his magistrate's seat and lectured the court after the trial. Indeed, he inserted into his narrative the whole text of this masterful "little speech" on the liberty of the people and the authority of the magistrates.

In discussing the Hingham case, Winthrop criticized Peter Hobart and the other town leaders with particular sharpness. Perhaps he was thinking of Hobart when he wrote the following in his "Memoirs" statement on sacred and profane history:

If the Author sometymes mention the faylings of magistrates and Elders by name, he is not to be blamed 1: because the Historyes of the Scripture doe it frequently. 2: they were public, and therefore could not be concealed: 3: he mentions his owne faylings as well as others. 4: It is for edification to knowe that all godly men in all places and tymes have their infirmytyes. 5: this wilbe a meanes to cleare them from more and greater evills which have been charged vpon them by malignant toungues. 6: this will helpe to cleare the truethe of their profession, when thoughe they have had their errors etc. yet they have not approved allowed themselues to continue in them, or to lustife them.

When he came to deal with the Remonstrants, Winthrop had no compunctions about disclosing the failings of Child and his six colleagues, because these people were outsiders who were trying to subvert the colony government and place it under parliamentary supervision. In 1646 the Remonstrants' petition to the General Court posed a serious threat, because Parliament had already intervened on behalf of Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton and might well do so for Child. But Winthrop did not write up the Remonstrants' protest until late 1648 or early 1649, and by this time he knew that Parliament had rejected Child's appeal. Yet he filled twenty-two pages of his third notebook with a blow-by-blow account of the General Court's proceedings in order to justify and explain the court's actions. Perhaps he thought that these actions looked a little severe. The Remonstrants had been held in jail for months in order to delay their appeal to Parliament, and they were collectively fined nearly £1,000, which was more than the colony's annual revenue.

As Winthrop changed from a journalist into a historian he wrote more voluminously: his treatment of the years 1643-1646 is over twice the length of his treatment of the years 1633-1636. He focused more on political developments and narrated them in greater detail, perhaps because he had more victories and fewer defeats to report in the 1640s. Winthrop's electoral defeat in May 1634 had been at least as important, both to him and to the colony, as his victory over the Hingham petitioners in 1645, but he wrote up the 1634 episode in two pages and the 1645 episode in seventeen. In the early 1630s he had been silent or evasive on controversial issues, but by the late 1640s he pursued such topics with special zest. One of the great features of the journal/history, especially in the second and third volumes, is that the author reveals so many of the friction points in his society; yet of course he was not trying to establish objectivity but to prove the correctness of his own position. For as Winthrop engaged in one political battle after another, and as he grew more candid in discussing the issues at stake, he also became increasingly doctrinaire, not to say self-righteous, in his prosecution of the men and women he silenced or banished. Thanks to his narrative, it is very easy to recognize the lasting significance of events in early Massachusetts and very difficult to remain neutral on the subject of Winthrop's own leadership. For some, he is one of the great figures in American history. For others, he is the kind of man you love to hate.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

John Winthrop: The Statesman

Next

'This Great Household upon the Earth'