John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father

John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (2003) is a biography by American historian Francis J. Bremer. As governor of one of the earliest major English settlements in America, Winthrop worked to keep the Massachusetts Bay Colony intact amid the furor and resentments of its most extremist Puritan settlers. Though frequently extreme in his religious views, Winthrop is shown here as a moderating force in the colony, laying down some of the civic and societal foundations that would form the bedrock of the United States.

Born on January 12, 1587, Winthrop grew up in a family of means in Suffolk, England. At the age of sixteen, he enrolled at Trinity College in Cambridge, where his father served as a director. Deeply religious from an early age, Winthrop became gripped by "lusts...so masterly as no good could fasten upon me," according to a diary entry from his time at Trinity. According to the author, these lusts—combined with his deep sense of piety—led Winthrop to drop out of school so he could get married and start a family. In April of 1605, Winthrop married Mary Forth, the daughter of a family friend.

As a college dropout with a new family but few job prospects, Winthrop returned with Mary and his young children to his family home in Groton, where he served as Lord of the Manor and handled the financial and agricultural management of the estate. Aside from this, Winthrop studied law but never advanced to the Bar to become a lawyer. Nevertheless, he made a number of social connections in English legal circles that, among other things, helped him secure his third wife, Margaret Tyndal, whom Winthrop married after both Mary and his second wife, Thomasine, died during childbirth in 1615 and 1616, respectively.



By the late 1620s, civic life in England had become increasingly difficult for Puritans like Winthrop. While the Puritans supported the "purification" of the Church of England, ridding it of all Roman Catholic rituals and influences, the new King of England, Charles I, had just married a Roman Catholic. This combined with King Charles's dissolution of Parliament, sparked Winthrop's interest in traveling to America. According to Bremer, Winthrop was selected by the Massachusetts Bay Company to be the colony's new governor mostly because the other two candidates had other professional obligations, and the company doubted their level of dedication to the colony. Thus, Bremer's characterization of Winthrop's ascent to the governorship is framed as that of a man who failed upwards from mediocrity.

During the crossing to the New World in 1630, Winthrop delivered a sermon to his fellow Puritan settlers known as A Modell of Christian Charity. Though the sermon is famous for using the phrase "City upon a Hill" to describe the lofty aspirations of their new colony, the speech is also viewed by modern scholars as a particularly harsh example of Puritan rhetoric. The sermon posits that the poor should serve the rich and that the worse off people are, the more opportunities there are for "mercy" on the part of both rich people and God Himself. Contrary to some historical interpretations, however, Bremer insists that these ideas were not unique to Winthrop. Rather, they represented uncontroversial "boilerplate" concepts of religious servitude that, at the time, were universally accepted by Christians of most sects.

Despite the relative harshness of Winthrop's rhetoric, the author argues that the new governor was a moderating force between the religious hard-liners and the somewhat more liberal members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop, along with most of the settlers who came to Massachusetts around the same time, ascribed to a "Legalist" belief of Christianity, which mandated that Christians must follow the strict rules of the scripture in order to attain salvation. Nevertheless, by 1635, the colony experienced an influx of new immigrants from England who ascribed to the more liberal "Antinomian" view of Christianity, which states that repentance for one's sins and faith in Jesus Christ is enough to secure salvation for Christians. Though Winthrop strongly opposed the Antinomian view of Christianity and doled out his share of harsh punishments to its adherents, he did not want their dispute with the more traditional Puritans to fracture the delicate politics of Massachusetts, which he believed would threaten the survival of the colony. Here, Bremer quotes the historian Michael Winship who wrote, ''If any one of those with a share in fanning the flames of controversy can be given credit for keeping Massachusetts intact during it, Winthrop can.'' Bremer also describes how Winthrop informed his friend Roger Williams that the Puritan hard-liners planned to arrest him, allowing Williams time to escape.



These strong beliefs in civic harmony, public participation, and (sporadic) empathy for one's opponents, are what make Winthrop worthy of the "Founding Father" label bestowed upon him in Bremer's title. As for why he is "forgotten," Bremer attributes this to a strong anti-Puritan movement in the nineteenth century led by figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote The Scarlet Letter. However, while Bremer's book doesn't completely vindicate Winthrop in the eyes of historians, it does at least humanize him for readers.