John Winthrop

John Winthrop grew up gentry, not self-made. His father, a Suffolk lawyer and landowner, left him Groton Manor in 1613, and Winthrop trained at Trinity College, Cambridge, then read law at Gray's Inn before taking a post at the Court of Wards in London. He buried two wives before he was thirty, Mary Forth in 1615 and Thomasine Clopton the year after that, and married a third, Margaret Tyndal, in 1618. He was forty-one and comfortably established when Charles I's crackdown on Puritan nonconformists cost him his post at court. Rather than wait for worse, he sold what he could, helped organize a fleet, and in October 1629 let the Massachusetts Bay Company elect him governor before a single ship had sailed.

He governed Massachusetts Bay for twelve of its first twenty years, elected and re-elected eighteen times as governor or deputy governor between 1629 and 1649. Before the fleet reached Salem in June 1630, he is credited with a lay sermon describing the colony as a city upon a hill, watched by the world, its people bound together as one body. In office he scattered settlers into a ring of towns around Boston for defense, sat on the council that authorized the destructive 1636 campaign against the Pequot, fought off a 1645 impeachment attempt over an arbitrary arrest and won acquittal by arguing that magistrates needed discretion, and kept a private journal, later published as The History of New England, that remains the primary record of how the colony actually ran itself.

The man who preached charity also owned people. After the 1637 campaign that all but destroyed the Pequot, Winthrop kept a Pequot man and two Pequot women as slaves in his household, and held that land Native peoples used only seasonally was legally empty and open to English settlement. He presided over the council that convicted Anne Hutchinson of heresy and banished her into a New England winter, pregnant, with six children, though he did warn Roger Williams of his own coming arrest, letting Williams run rather than stand trial. Winthrop also opposed the colonists' demand for a written law code, preferring magistrates' discretion, and called democracy, among most civilized nations, the meanest and worst form of government. He sat on the committee that wrote the code anyway.

Winthrop died in Boston on March 26, 1649, and his journal sat unpublished for a century and a half until Noah Webster printed it in 1790, after which it became the main source historians use for how the colony actually worked. The phrase about a city upon a hill outlived the sermon by three centuries: John F. Kennedy quoted it, and Ronald Reagan quoted it and called Winthrop an early Freedom Man, each pulling out the aspiration and leaving the sermon's warnings about hierarchy and judgment behind. Historians increasingly read him not as a founder to celebrate but as a man who built both the country's best instincts and its worst into the same institutions.

John Winthrop's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Winthrop Fleet mission
  Led about 700 colonists from England to Massachusetts Bay 1630
• A Modell of Christian Charitie speech
  Contains the "city upon a hill" image — authorship is disputed 1630
• The History of New England book
  Kept as a private journal 1630-1649 — published posthumously by Noah Webster 1790
• Massachusetts Body of Liberties law
  Served on the drafting committee despite preferring common law to a written code 1641

• January 12, 1588 aged 0 Born in Edwardstone, Suffolk, England
• 1613 aged ~25 Inherits Groton Manor
• April 29, 1618 aged 30 Marries Margaret Tyndal, his third wife
• October 1629 aged 41 Elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in London, before the fleet sails
• June 1630 aged 42 Leads the Winthrop Fleet, about 700 colonists, to Massachusetts Bay
• 1636 aged ~48 Sits on the council that authorizes war against the Pequot He later kept Pequot captives as slaves in his household.
• November 1637 aged 49 Presides over Anne Hutchinson's trial and banishment
• 1641 aged ~53 Serves on the committee that produces the Massachusetts Body of Liberties
• March 26, 1649 aged 61 Dies in Boston after eighteen terms as governor or deputy governor

• Anne Hutchinson 1591–1643
  Religious dissenter whose trial and banishment exposed tensions over authority, gender, and conscience in Puritan New England. banished
• Roger Williams 1603–1683
  Founder of Rhode Island and early advocate of religious liberty and separation of church and state. warned and let escape
• William Penn 1644–1718
  Founder of Pennsylvania who advanced representative government and religious toleration in colonial America. later built a rival colonial model
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. invoked his city upon a hill phrase