John Winthrop

John Winthrop led the Puritan migration to Massachusetts and governed the colony for most of its first two decades. Born in Suffolk in 1588 to a prosperous landowning family, he studied briefly at Cambridge, trained in law, and worked as an attorney at the Court of Wards. He was a serious Puritan who came to believe by the late 1620s that England was under divine judgement, and he had lost his court position. In 1629 he joined the Massachusetts Bay Company and was elected governor of the venture, insisting that the charter itself be carried to America — which removed the company's government from English oversight and made the colony effectively self-governing. He sailed in 1630 with the Winthrop Fleet, about seven hundred settlers in eleven ships, and delivered or wrote the lay sermon A Model of Christian Charity, which describes the community as a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon it. The phrase entered American political rhetoric permanently, and the sermon's actual argument is about mutual obligation and the sharing of burdens rather than about exceptional destiny. He served as governor or deputy governor for nineteen years, and his journal is the principal source for the colony's early history. His government was not tolerant, and did not claim to be. Roger Williams was banished in 1635 for arguing that the magistrate had no authority over belief, and Anne Hutchinson was tried and expelled in 1638 for holding religious meetings and claiming direct revelation. He argued for a limited franchise restricted to church members, and against pure democracy. He died in 1649.

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