The Wordy Shipmates (9 page)

At this point in the story of the founding of Massachusetts Bay, many accounts have a lot of folksy fun with a yarn about how sneaky it was of the Massachusetts Bay Company to “forget” to put into the Charter that the document remain in England, and that the company’s administrative meetings must also be held in England as previous charters had. This allows the company to take the Charter with them abroad, making self-government in Massachusetts possible with little royal oversight. In that scenario, says Michael the archivist, “Winthrop steals the Charter in the dark of night.” So the founding of Massachusetts becomes a Bugs Bunny cartoon—King Charles, in hunting cap, is outsmarted by the wascally Winthrop.

Our folksy fun, however, is ruined by annoying scholars whose painstaking hard work has uncovered the murkier, less dramatic truth, requiring footnotes about the Third Charter of Virginia of 1612 or the East India Company’s royal charter of 1600 allowing its officers to meet “in such convenient place” they “shall think fit.” Librarian Ronald Dale Karr writes, “The omission of a designated meeting place in the Massachusetts Bay Charter of 1629 was thus neither unprecedented nor unusual.” This debunks, says Michael, the myth of “the deviousness of Winthrop.”

If the potential for colonial self-government wasn’t exactly new, Winthrop and Co. still exploited this loophole like none before them had dared.

One innovation in the Charter does afford Americans front-row seats at the birth of the national pastime—regularly scheduled voting. The Charter states that the Massachusetts governor, deputy governor, and the representatives known as “assistants” are to be voted in or out every spring. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison opined, “ The particular feature of this charter which proved so successful and enduring as to become an American institution was the principle of stated elections.” This is, he continues, “in contrast to the English or parliamentary system.”

This is still true. As an American, I am entirely flummoxed by the willy-nilly process by which the Brits acquire a new prime minister. It seems like one afternoon after tea they decide to get rid of the old one, then the majority party in the House of Commons picks the person they most want to yell at on C-SPAN’s
Prime Minister’s Questions,
then the new prime minister goes to Buckingham Palace and for two minutes the whole country politely pretends he was the queen’s idea.

U.S. citizens can thank the Massachusetts Bay colonists for breaking with that tradition. While Americans choose a new president in a process that is as insane as the way the United Kingdom ends up with a new prime minister—given the fact that the Electoral College makes sure our president is chosen by three counties in Florida and Ohio (or nine Supreme Court justices)—at least we can print “Election Day” in our calendars ahead of time. And looking forward to that date circled in November can get a citizen through a lot of cold nights. As Morison noted, the Massachusetts Bay’s “corporate mode of election put an almost continuous check on both executive officers and representatives. It became an essential principle of every state constitution and the federal constitution.”

The Massachusetts Bay Colony becomes, under this Charter, a sort of republic—the most severely limited, totalitarian, closed-minded, vindictive, hard-ass republic possible. But the democratic impulse is a mutating virus that adapts and changes, quickens and grows; it is contagious, and the Charter is one important sneeze.

At first, the General Court in 1630 consisted of eight people—the governor, the deputy governor, and six other magistrates called assistants. But within a year, a hundred others, church members all, known as “freemen,” are sworn in to court; they are granted the power to elect the assistants, who in turn elect the governor. But by 1632, the freemen raise a stink and are allowed to elect the governor directly. They are, however, required to take an oath that they will be “obedient” to the governor and assistants. They also pledge to rat out their neighbors by alerting the governor and assistants “of any sedition, violence, treachery, or other hurt or evil which I shall know, hear, or vehemently suspect to be plotted or intended against the said commonwealth, or the said government established.”

The vow of obedience and that thing about vehement suspicions doesn’t exactly make the democratic idealist in me want to hum the trombone part from “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Still, got to start somewhere. So it’s worth celebrating, a little, that within two years of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s arrival on these shores, a hundred white male religious fanatics get to pick their own dictator in a show of hands. Winthrop will be that dictator on and off until he dies.

Winthrop and the other assistants get their authoritari anism from the same place they derive all their other beliefs—the Bible. Winthrop railed, “If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant in Scripture for it for there was no such government in Israel.” He continues, calling democracy “the meanest and worst of all forms of government . . . a manifest breach of the Fifth Commandment.”

The Fifth Commandment is honor your father and mother. To these people, “father and mother” are not merely biological parents. Martin Luther wrote the best explanation of how the Fifth Commandment extends beyond the nuclear family and into public life:

In this commandment belongs a further statement regarding all kinds of obedience to persons in authority who have to command and govern. For all authority flows and is propagated from the authority of parents. . . . They are all called fathers in the Scriptures, as those who in their government perform the functions of a father, and should have a paternal heart toward their subordinates.

That explanation goes a long way toward explaining Winthrop’s seemingly schizophrenic behavior. By setting limits on dissent, Winthrop’s government is facing a question asked of and by every government. But according to the Puritans’ interpretation of the Fifth Commandment, a governor is also a patriarch. This requires tough love, but love nonetheless. How the Fifth Commandment informs Winthrop’s conduct is best explained in the person of Philip Ratcliffe, he of the sliced-off ears.

Recall that Winthrop was one of the magistrates who convicted Ratcliffe of “scandalous invectives against our churches and government.” Which is to say Ratcliffe broke the Fifth Commandment twice over by failing to honor both his church fathers and his legislative/judicial fathers of the General Court. His punishment, besides the ear lopping and a whipping, is banishment.

Earlier, I mentioned in passing that throughout his tenure as governor, the townspeople accused Winthrop of leniency. The example I gave was the Bostonians’ disgust that Winthrop allowed a couple of men who had been banished to loiter in Boston. Winthrop’s reasoning was that “being in the winter, they must otherwise have perished” if they were forced to hike into the icy wilderness right away.

Well, Ratcliffe was one of those men Winthrop refused to kick out into the cold. And I think it’s because Winthrop takes the Fifth Commandment seriously. He sees himself as a father and the other colonists as his children. Is this condescending? Absolutely. Does it explain his contradictory words and deeds, the disconnect between the ideal of the colonists being “members of the same body” and chopping off a loudmouth’s ears? I think it does. A father sometimes plays the doting dad who buys his son a Popsicle, or he can be the furious punisher of the phrase “wait until your father gets home.” By banishing Ratcliffe, Winthrop was disowning him; by letting Ratcliffe stay in Boston until the weather warmed up, Winthrop was looking out for his safety. Winthrop was one of those parents who never wants to see his kid again but drives him to the bus station to make sure he leaves town warm and dry.

A settler named Thomas Wiggin described Winthrop as “ruling with much mildness” toward the law-abiding. As for troublemakers, Wiggin claimed Winthrop was “strict in execution of Justice . . . to the terror of offenders.”

If the Fifth Commandment accounts for Winthrop and his fellow magistrates’ style of governing, I think it also explains their conciliatory attitudes toward the monarchy and the Church of England—why they are not Separatists like their neighbors in Plymouth. Remember the “Humble Request,” the open letter the colonists sent to King Charles and the Church before their departure? It was addressed to “Reverend Fathers.” It called the Church of England “our dear mother,” proclaiming that their hope for salvation “we have received in her bosom and sucked it from her breasts.”

Also recall the Charter’s description of King James as “our most dear and royal father.”

This paternal and maternal language is not mere empty words to these Puritans. They believe the Fifth Commandment requires them to obey the parental authority of king and church. Or at least appear to.

A
t the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, I visit the reading room. It’s like a cartoon of East Coast finery: dark wood paneling, oil paintings on the wall of illustrious, staring Bostonians whose eyes accuse visitors who went to state schools west of the Mississippi, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

I was there to read John Winthrop’s journal. The actual thing. It’s hard not to look at the water stains and imagine they came from Atlantic sea spray during the crossing. I don’t think Winthrop was any more nervous leaving England than I was leafing through such a brittle, wrinkly, nearly four-hundred-year-old book.

The library assistant, who was helpful and diligent, bordering on liturgical, handed me the first volume, then the third, wincing that the second volume “burned up in a fire.” Which happened nearly two hundred years ago, but this true-blue young archivist is still in mourning.

Winthrop’s handwriting was so dreadful I could only make out a handful of words, from
“Arbella”
on the first page to a “godly” here and a “temptations” there. There is an autograph, “Your loving son, John Winthrop,” pasted in at the end of the third volume by a Winthrop heir who found the signature from Winthrop Jr. to his father and didn’t want it to get lost. For some reason that made them both seem so alive and so odd—to follow an endearment like “your loving son” with a last name, being simultaneously heartfelt and formal—much like Winthrop himself. (The younger Winthrop’s hand is also represented in the first volume’s endpapers, where he drew plans for houses and forts for his father.)

I found myself fixated on the third volume’s sad, blank pages when the diary stops cold in 1649. That’s when Winthrop died. I stared at all that yellowing emptiness and remembered seeing the globe in Will Rogers’s office when I toured his house in Santa Monica; there are pencil marks all over it that Rogers, an avid aviator, made when he was planning his flights around the world, and it’s just so poignant to see those lines, since he died in a plane crash, but it’s even more poignant to think about a kid from Oklahoma who par-layed a few jokes and rope tricks into seeing the world. Just as it is touching to look at Winthrop’s drawings in his diary of the coastlines of Maine and Massachusetts, sketched from the deck of the
Arbella,
and marvel at how far he had come and wonder if he was concentrating on the contours of the shoreline to take his mind off his fear of actually stepping onto the strange new continent before him and commencing his strange new life.

Luckily, the Massachusetts Historical Society has published the entirety of Winthrop’s journals, including the unfortunate second volume, which had already been transcribed before the blaze.

The first journal’s endpapers, where Winthrop jotted down odds and ends of information in preparing for the Atlantic crossing in 1630, document the extremes of what he had on his mind before leaving home.

Winthrop writes down instructions for making gunpowder, putting up a chimney, and building a small boat. He makes lists of the provisions for the voyage, including thirty bushels of oatmeal, forty bushels of peas, two wooden bowls, two barrels of cider, the equivalent of ten thousand gallons of beer, 138 wooden spoons, and “11 Ferkins of Butter,” a ferkin (or firkin) being a “unit of capacity,” according to my dictionary, “equal to half a kilderkin.” (That clears that up.)

But Winthrop also jots down a list of Bible verses having to do with charity and generosity that he will refer to when he writes “A Model of Christian Charity.” These passages include “Give to him that asketh thee” from the Sermon on the Mount; and Isaiah 58, which touts that for those who give their bread to the hungry and clothe the naked, “thine health shall spring forth speedily; and 2 Corinthians 9:7, in which “God loveth a cheerful giver.”

In other words, after Winthrop has acquired all his butter firkins, food stirrers, and beer, along with six dozen candles, twenty thousand biscuits, and twenty-nine sides of beef, he goes through the Bible and writes down a bunch of verses commanding him to be willing to cheerfully give all that stuff away.
My firkin is your firkin
being one of Christianity’s primary creeds. He is simultaneously imagining an idealistic city on a hill, and making sure that city has nine hundred pounds of cheese.