The Wordy Shipmates (5 page)

The following words are written next to that bloody map of the Americas in the National Museum of the American Indian: “ That initial explosion of death is one of the greatest tragedies in human history because it was unintended and unavoidable, and even inevitable. But what happened in its wake was not.”

J
ohn Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” would not be published until 1838, 208 years after it was written. That was the year Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii, was born in Honolulu; by century’s end, she would be ousted in a coup d’état by the white sons of New England missionaries; eventually, her kingdom became the fiftieth of the fifty states. Eighteen thirty-eight was also the year my Cherokee great-something grandparents were trudging west at gunpoint so the white citizens of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee could take their land.

Thus Winthrop’s lay sermon, with its now famous proposal that Massachusetts should be “as a city upon a hill,” resurfaced just in time for John L. Sullivan to declare that the United States had a right to “the whole of Oregon” because it is America’s “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

Entrusted by whom? By God. The same “God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence” Winthrop praises for sailing the
Arbella
to New England.

Legend has it Winthrop wrote and delivered “A Model of Christian Charity” on the
Arbella
in the middle of the Atlantic in 1630. Some scholars now contend he wrote it in England and delivered it back in Southampton before shoving off, perhaps on the very same occasion as Cotton preached his farewell sermon, “God’s Promise to His Plantation.” If that Winthrop-Cotton double bill is true, the only thing that would make the program a more exceptional event in the history of American exceptionalism is if Theodore Roosevelt showed up to conduct a brassy version of “America the Beautiful” performed by the United States Marine Corps Band.

Wherever Winthrop wrote or delivered “Christian Charity,” it is up for debate. This isn’t: at the time, nobody cared. Winthrop’s biographer, Francis J. Bremer, notes that

not a single individual recorded in letter, diary, or other source having heard Winthrop deliver the sermon. The only contemporary reference to the sermon that survives is the Reverend Henry Jessey’s request that John Winthrop Jr. send him copies of a number of papers relating to the colony, including “the Model of Charity.” Whereas Cotton’s farewell was published soon after it was delivered, “Christian Charity” was not. Indeed, only one contemporary manuscript copy of Winthrop’s work survives, and it is not in his handwriting.

When Bremer says the sermon is not mentioned in any diary, he is including Winthrop’s own journal. No
I killed with my charity bit on the Lido Deck tonight
to be found.

Bremer and others contend that Winthrop’s sermon didn’t make much of a splash at the time because the governor wasn’t saying anything the average Puritan hadn’t heard in many a fortnight.

Reading Cotton’s “God’s Promise to His Plantation” alone hints that dissenting English Protestants had plenty of we’re-God’s-special-chosen-people talk to go around. So maybe Winthrop co-opting the image of a city on a hill from the Gospel of Matthew was just one more metaphor for the pile. Maybe that was the hill the city would be built on—a teetering stack of self-congratulatory biblical comparisons.

“Christian Charity” begins: “God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.”

Winthrop couldn’t know that overturning what he just said would become the definition of the American dream. Compare his hard, cold fact that “some must be rich, some poor” to the shocking second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, written 146 years later: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” By 1776, the Creator seems to have learned to delegate some of His authority to His creations.

In 1630, however, the truth that all men are created equal is far from self-evident. Winthrop is saying the opposite—that God created all men unequal. To Winthrop, this is a good thing, especially since he’s in charge. The beauty of this inequity, he claims, is “that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.” To a modern reader, this social theory smacks of “I need you to mow my lawn and you need me not to report you to Immigration.” But to Winthrop, the societal food chain is more sentimental. More than anything, “A Model of Christian Charity” is a declaration of
de
pendence.

One of his shipmates on the
Arbella,
budding poet Anne Bradstreet, would echo Winthrop’s sentiment later on to the extent that it might be proof that someone on the boat actually heard him. She wrote, “As it is with countries, so it is with men: there was never yet any one man that had all excellences,” and so “he stands in need of something which another man hath. . . . God will have us beholden one to another.”

Because of the “city upon a hill” sound bite, “A Model of Christian Charity” is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It’s called Canada.

Every settler on the Winthrop fleet automatically became more important, more necessary, just by leaving England. That is true for Winthrop most of all. In Massachusetts, he will be governor—the highest authority in the land. In England, he is at best a middling sort—an average member of the landowning gentry. He is a justice of the peace in his run-of-the-mill county in East Anglia; he keeps having to divvy up amongst his sons the estate his father acquired from Henry VIII after Henry booted all the Catholic monks from their monasteries; he travels frequently to London for his job as a workaday real estate attorney at the king’s court; he is only friends with Members of Parliament, not a member himself, and if he had ambitions to become an MP, they were surely dashed when Charles I scrapped Parliament altogether.

Winthrop’s friends in the Massachusetts Bay Company were shrewd talent scouts who saw something in Winthrop, some potential greatness, and recruited him to emigrate and become their CEO. Winthrop sees the faith of his peers as a revelation of God’s calling. It is, to him, a promotion. And not just an upgrade in social status. The governorship is an opportunity to better serve God. “When a man is to wade through a deep water,” wrote Winthrop when he was mulling over the move, “there is required tallness.”

This contradiction—between humility before God and the egomania unleashed by being chosen by God—is true of both Winthrop and the colony of Massachusetts itself. This man hopes for tallness for himself as well as for his future city, pitched, in his mind, above sea level, on yonder hill.

It is no accident that Winthrop speaks of “God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence” at the sermon’s start. The English Puritans were obsessed with the idea of providence, and that word is more ominous to them than it sounds to us. It means care, but it also means control. It does not just mean that God will provide. It means that God will provide whatever the hell God wants and the Puritans will thank Him for it even if He provides them with nothing more than a slow death in a long winter. It means that if they’re scared and small and lowly enough He just might toss a half-eaten corncob their way. It means that the world isn’t fair and it’s their fault. It means that God is the sovereign, the
authority.
It means manna from heaven, but it also means bow down.

The Puritans live and worship within a specific subset of the Protestant Reformation—Calvinism. After Mary Tudor assumed the English throne in 1553, she reinstated Catholicism as the state religion and persecuted Protestants. For this the queen acquired the nickname “Bloody Mary.” To avoid being burned at the stake, many English Protestants fled to Europe, especially to John Calvin’s church in Geneva. There, a committee of them wrote, edited, and revised a new version of the Bible in English, published in 1560. Its margins were annotated with especially Protestant interpretations of Scripture. For example, the note to Revelation 11:7 claims that the beast in the bottomless pit mentioned in the verse is “the Pope, which hath his power out of hell.” Or the note on Revelation 17, which claims that the woman wearing scarlet riding a scarlet beast is “the Antichrist, that is, the Pope, with the whole body of his filthy creatures.”

The Geneva Bible was in fact the inspiration for the King James Bible, the version authorized by that monarch in 1611. James was infuriated by the notes in the Geneva Bible because he thought they undermined belief in the divine right of kings. He especially hated the note in the first chapter of Exodus, in which Hebrew midwives defied the king’s mandate to kill all male Hebrew babies. The Geneva note claimed that the midwives’ “disobedience was lawful.”

Even though the King James Version was available to them, the Geneva Bible is the one the Calvinists on the
Mayflower
and most travelers in the Winthrop fleet carried with them to America.

Winthrop and his fellow Calvinists believed in the doctrine of predestination. Since God decides everything, God decides whether a person will end up in heaven or hell before the person is even born. The people who are going to heaven are called “the Elect.” This is God’s own aristocracy. And if that sounds like some frolicsome foxhunt, understand that to be a Calvinist is to be the Duke of Discomfort or the Duchess of Fear. Because here’s the thing: How does anyone
know
? How does anyone know if he’s saved? He can’t. What he can do is work, try, believe, repent, love God, and hate himself. The diligent, hardworking, and pious are the “visible saints.” If a person
seems
saved, odds are he is saved. Thus, he will spend every waking hour trying to seem saved, not just to others but to himself. Because if he says or does or even thinks heretical things, isn’t that just proof he was never saved in the first place?

Let’s hazard a guess that some people are not going to be up for this. The constant uncertainty—is it streets of gold for me or am I merely lighter fluid for the flames of hell?—weighs on the believer. Even John Calvin himself, the French theologian who popularized this school of thought, wrote the following in his last will and testament:

The will I have had, and the zeal, if it can be called that, have been so cold and sluggish that I feel deficient in everything and everywhere. . . . Truly, even the grace of forgiveness [God] has given me only renders me all the more guilty, so that my only recourse can be this, that being the father of mercy, he will show himself the father of so miserable a sinner.

So if John Calvin doubts he’s a good enough Calvinist—which is of course the most Calvinist thought he could have—imagine the jangling nerves of John Q. Puritan. In his journal, Winthrop writes the following about an acquaintance who was driven mad by spiritual doubt and took action to decide her fate once and for all:

A woman of Boston congregation, having been in much trouble of mind about her spiritual estate, at length grew into utter desperation, and could not endure to hear of any comfort, etc., so as one day she took her little infant and threw it into a well, and then came into the house and said, now she was sure she should be damned, for she had drowned her child.

That’s how heavy the weight of Calvinism can be—that a mother would seek relief in murdering her own offspring.

But for John Winthrop and the men and women like him, this way of life is a stirring challenge, a thrilling project, and sometimes even a joy. Tallness! Get up early! So much to do! Never bored! Reflect! Overthink! Repent!

In his sermon “A True Sight of Sin” Thomas Hooker revels in the effort of self-examination. A half-hearted Christian sits in a comfortable chair and peruses his own sins “by his fireside and happily reads the story of these in a book.” A true Calvinist, on the other hand, is a kind of war correspondent on the move, one who has “passed through many countries” of “barrenness and meanness” and witnessed “ruin and desolation.” By going to the trouble of taking a hard look at his own crimes against God, the Calvinist knows “what sin is and what it hath done, how it hath made havoc of his peace . . . and made him a terror to himself.” Which, to these people, is a good thing. This is the terror that keeps the sinner awake to his own shortcomings. And with fear comes adrenaline.

In the spiritual diary Winthrop started keeping in 1606, he wrote a pious to-do list on May 23, 1613. He was twenty-six. He pledges to God that he will “carefully avoid vain and needless expenses.” He promises to “diligently observe the Lord’s Sabbath.” To try and keep his mornings “free for private prayer, meditation and reading.” He “will flee idleness and much worldly business.” He “will often pray . . . with my wife.”