As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon

By Daniel T. Rodgers

How an obscure Puritan sermon came to be seen as a founding document of American identity and exceptionalism

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England’s founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop’s long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea. In doing so, he brings to life the ideas Winthrop’s text carried in its own time and the sharply different yearnings that have been attributed to it since.

As a City on a Hill shows how much more malleable, more saturated with vulnerability, and less distinctly American Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” was than the document that twentieth-century Americans invented. Across almost four centuries, Rodgers traces striking shifts in the meaning of Winthrop’s words—from Winthrop’s own anxious reckoning with the scrutiny of the world, through Abraham Lincoln’s haunting reference to this “almost chosen people,” to the “city on a hill” that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia, to the era of Donald Trump.

As a City on a Hill reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop’s words came to lodge in American consciousness. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of “timeless” texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780691184371

Book preview

FIGURE 1. John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity, p. 39: for wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god … can be made out in the last four lines.

John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, 1630; from BV Winthrop, John; image #79597d, New-York Historical Society.

AS A CITY

ON A HILL

The Story of America’s Most

Famous Lay Sermon

Daniel T. Rodgers

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

LCCN 2018942281

ISBN 968-0-691-18159-2

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Brigitta van Rheinberg and Amanda Peery

Production Editorial: Debbie Tegarden

Jacket design: Emily Weigel

Jacket image: "A modell of [Chris]tian charity: Written on board [the] Arbella, on [the] Atlantic Ocean," John Winthrop, 1630. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society

Production: Jacquie Poirier

Publicity: James Schneider

This book has been composed in Adobe Caslon Pro and Arno Pro

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To the memory of four of my teachers:

William G. McLoughlin

George W. Morgan

Edmund S. Morgan

C. Vann Woodward

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Most Famous Lay Sermon in All of American History 1

PART I TEXT

1 Writing A Model of Christian Charity 13

2 We Shall Be as a City upon a Hill 31

3 A Chosen People 44

4 New England in a World of Holy Experiments 58

5 Left All Alone in America 71

6 Love Is a Bond or Ligament 86

7 Moralizing the Market Economy 96

8 The Poor and the Boundaries of Obligation 107

PART II NATION

9 Inventing Foundations 123

10 Mobile Metaphors of Nationalism 133

11 From the Top Mast 146

12 Constructing a City on a Hill in Africa 158

13 The Carnage of God’s Chosen Nations 171

PART III ICON

14 The Historical Embarrassments of New England 189

15 Puritanism in an Existentialist Key 204

16 Arguing over the Puritans during the Cold War 217

17 Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill 233

18 Puritan Foundations of an Exceptionalist Nation 247

19 Ambivalent Evangelicals 264

EPILOGUE

Disembarking from the Arbella 280

APPENDIX

John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity: A Modern Transcription 289

Notes 309

Acknowledgments 341

Index 345

INTRODUCTION

The Most Famous Lay Sermon in All of American History

FOR THE LAST SIXTY YEARS, a story has been told about the origins of America. Like many historical stories, it is told as a parable: deep and timeless continuities flow out of the specifics of time and place. It is an uplifting story and a haunting one. And it is at least half wrong.

The setting is a vessel in mid-passage on the Atlantic Ocean. The year is 1630. Fast-forward another decade and a half, and a revolution among those passengers’ countrymen would turn the political and religious order of absolutist England upside down. But the voyagers aboard the Arbella were seeking out a new place of settlement in part because they did not believe such a striking break in human affairs was possible. Balancing hope against despair, they were headed instead for North America.

Somewhere in that mid-ocean passage, their elected governor, John Winthrop, confident and commanding in his presence, rose to deliver an address in which he outlined the purpose of their undertaking. A Model of Christian Charity Winthrop’s text would come to be titled. A lay sermon, historians since the middle of the twentieth century have called it: the most famous lay sermon in all of American history.¹ In it Winthrop confirmed these new Americans’ commitment to a new life of obedience, love, and mutual affections. He reminded them that they sailed not on their own whim or private ambitions but under a covenant with God: a commission as clear as God’s covenant with biblical Israel. Their responsibilities to each other were intense, and the risks of failure were, literally, terrifying. But in return, Winthrop offered a promise. If they should keep true to their purposes they would not only overcome the hardships the future held for them in New England. The eyes of all people would be upon them. They would be made a praise and glory. And they would be as a city upon a hill to the world.

This story of John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity has been repeated over and over in the history books and in the civic creed of Americans. It has been celebrated not only for its elements of drama—dangerous ocean passage, inspired words, and exalted sense of purpose—but as the origin story of the nation that the United States was to become. Ronald Reagan made a sentence-long extract from Winthrop’s Model—we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us—into the signature line of his presidency. Preached to a little band of settlers crowded onto the tiny ship bearing them across the Atlantic, as Reagan saw the event in his mind’s eye, the Model set the vision to which our people always have held fast … since our first days as a nation—that they were destined from their origins to be a beacon of hope and liberty to the world, a model to all nations. It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began, Barack Obama told the graduating class at the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 2006 in the same vein. It was right here that the earliest settlers dreamed of building a City upon a Hill … and the world watched waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed.²

This origin story is so familiar that it barely seems to invite question. Virtually no modern high school or college textbook on American history or the American political tradition fails to mention Winthrop’s words or impress upon students their enduring importance. A Model of Christian Charity has been heralded as the nation’s point of departure, as the founding text in American political rhetoric, and the key script in the founding moment of American civic republicanism.³ City on a hill is now an instantly recognizable phrase in the vernacular of American nationalism. Thousands of other lay sermons preached in a future United States would outstrip the original circulation of A Model of Christian Charity. But Winthrop’s Model is the statement that we have made foundational to the idea called America. In relation to the principal theme of the American mind, the immensely influential Harvard historian Perry Miller declared in 1954, Winthrop stands at the beginning of our consciousness.⁴

There are powerful reasons behind these judgments. The sense of national mission that marks American civic-political culture, its confidence, and its fervent sense of exception from the lot of all other nations: From what source could these have flowed except from that first, origin moment, when a sense of acting on a special covenant with God became fused with the experience of America? Winthrop’s we shall be as a city upon a hill seems to hold in its grasp what the future would bring for the United States: its magnet status for a world of immigrants, its economic ascendancy, and its rise to world leadership. The nation’s moralism, its Wilsonian idealism, the endurance of its religious cultures, and its certainty that it had been granted a unique and special part in the unrolling of human history all seem presaged in Winthrop’s text. Critics see less attractive traits of American national culture embedded there as well: the self-righteousness with which the Americans would roll across the continent and project their power throughout the world as if they and God were working hand in hand to expand the special promises of America. All this has been traced to the Puritan origins of America and the mission statement that John Winthrop wrote for it.

No serious observer claims that A Model of Christian Charity holds all the elements of the nation the United States would become. There would be trial and error in the American future and furious contention as well. But since the middle of the twentieth century Winthrop’s Model has seemed to hold in embryo the nation’s most powerful and distinctive threads. To begin at the American beginning is to begin with a text in its mid-oceanic setting, just before its words and its promise to be a city upon a hill would begin to be etched on the land.

Most of this is a modern invention and much of it is wrong. None of those who voyaged with John Winthrop to the Puritan settlement in New England left any record that they heard Winthrop’s words in mid-passage. Most likely A Model of Christian Charity was never delivered as a sermon at all. Although copies of Winthrop’s text circulated in England during his lifetime, by the end of the seventeenth century they had all literally vanished from memory. One of those long-forgotten copies was discovered in a bundle of old sermons and documents of New England history in 1809, but it was not put into print until 1838. And then it lapsed from sight again almost as completely. An occasional nineteenth-century historian mentioned Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity, but most did not and none pulled it—or its city upon a hill line—out of the mass of other colonial American documents as especially important. Through the 1970s mention of A Model of Christian Charity was a hit-or-miss affair in standard histories of the United States. It was only in the decade of the 1980s, three hundred and fifty years after its writing, that the incongruously parallel work of a conservative Cold War president, Ronald Reagan, and a radical, immigrant literary scholar, Sacvan Bercovitch, combined to make Winthrop’s text and metaphor famous. A Model of Christian Charity is old, but its foundational status is a twentieth-century invention.

The meanings we now grasp for so eagerly in Winthrop’s words are largely twentieth-century inventions as well. John Winthrop never doubted that he and his fellow New England Puritans sailed under the seal of a covenant with God. Of nothing was he more confident than that they had a key part to play in God’s scheme of history. But in its own time, the call to greatness in Winthrop’s city upon a hill line was vastly overshadowed by its reminder of the settlement project’s immense vulnerability. Caution saturated his city upon a hill metaphor. It did not promise these incipient Americans that they were destined to be a radiant light to the world but that they would need to work out their ambitions under the world’s most intense, critical scrutiny. The core theme that laced the Model’s words together, from its opening statement of the mutual relations between rich and poor to its fervent closing peroration, was not nationalistic but local and intense: an insistence on love and the obligations of social solidarity that would be often sharply at odds with what capitalist America would become.

The conventional story of Winthrop’s city on a hill text is wrong in still other ways. Its current status as a founding statement of American exceptionalism to the contrary, almost none of the themes that circulated through Winthrop’s text were unique to the nation that would become the United States. Dreams of founding a new and purer Israel circulated all across the early modern Atlantic. During the long nineteenth-century era of economic and imperial expansion, conviction that a nation’s people had been uniquely commissioned to lead God’s forces of good and civilization played a bedrock role in patriotic cultures far beyond the United States. Even the idea that nations owed their essential character to a foundational moment, to a timeless and enduring origin statement, is far less unique to the United States than is typically acknowledged.

Most conspicuously of all, the phrase city on a hill was itself a borrowing, a repurposing for Winthrop’s occasion of the one of the Bible’s most familiar metaphors, which was to be repurposed hundreds of times again, in and far beyond the United States. The importance of Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity is not that it broached ideas and themes exceptional to the history of the United States but that it was, from the beginning, so deeply enmeshed in the world around it.

Above all, to read Winthrop’s city upon a hill seriously we need to disentangle ourselves from the lure of simple origin stories. Texts live in and through time. A certain kind of nationalism recoils against that assumption. It strains to fix the nation to a foundational moment or proposition or text as if the idea of the nation—whatever its actual missteps or temporary disruptions—could be held exempt from history itself. But no words or text can be insulated from time. Their occasions change, the possibilities others see in them change, sometimes radically. Every subsequent use is by necessity a rewriting, a reinvention for new hopes, new conditions, and new contentions. To take a key historical text seriously is not to shove these afterlives aside as a debris of misreadings. It is not merely to sketch a history of reception, circulation, or influence, important as these themes may be. Texts endure only through their continuous reappropriation for inescapably shifting times and purposes.

The point is true of every document a nation holds sacred. The Declaration of Independence whose words reverberate through American culture now is not the Declaration of 1776. It is not the radically different Declaration that Thomas Jefferson’s political allies fashioned, taking his all men are created equal line out of the sidebar place it occupied in his original text and turning it into a political slogan. Nor is it the yet more sweeping Declaration that antislavery activists would make from a slaveholder’s words or rights activists would construct in the twentieth century. Into our own day the Declaration of Independence has been simultaneously an object of veneration and a site for fierce, vitally important contention over the shapes and forms of justice. The living Constitution is, by the same token, not simply a phrase for loose constructionists. Even before its adoption, the U.S. Constitution was being reworked, its silences fleshed out, its ambiguities debated, and its elasticities contended for. Reinvention of their core texts is part of the work that nations do. There is potential chaos in this, of course. But without it there can hardly be any serious public life at all.

Pushing back against the origin myths that have obscured it, this book tells the story of the lives of a text that many twentieth-century Americans would construct to be foundational to the idea of America. It is a story of disappearance and revival, long absence and neglect, and successive modern reinventions.

Part I, Text, reconstructs the meanings of Winthrop’s words and metaphors in his own seventeenth-century setting. It begins with the occasion of Winthrop’s writing and the key terms he injected into A Model of Christian Charity—city upon a hill, chosen people, covenant, charity, and history. Set against the background of an Atlantic culture filled with model cities on a hill, scores of them more prominent in their time than New England, Winthrop’s phrases take on much less triumphant meanings than the standard Arbella story has it. Charity was the Model’s most important keyword. For Winthrop, it meant that the rule of love and mutual obligation must take precedence above mere calculus of price and market return whenever the public weal is at risk. From what occasion did that startling premise arise and how was it worked out in the day-to-day practice of economic life?

In part II, Nation, a second phase of the story of A Model of Christian Charity begins. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the text itself was all but forgotten. But as nationalism swept across Europe and the Americas, some of the themes that had lodged a century earlier in Winthrop’s text sprang into circulation all the more vigorously. Patriotic cultures fanned desires for origin stories and foundational texts. Empires were constructed on new convictions of divine-historical destiny. Critics turned the chosen people idea into a tool of dissent. African Americans carried the city upon a hill metaphor to the new black republic of Liberia. On the dying fields of World War I, where part II concludes, these globally circulating reverberations of the covenant idea played themselves out in a key of high tragedy.

Finally, in part III, Icon, Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity and its city upon a hill phrase finally slips into the place that modern nationalism had already made for it: as an invented foundation for the new world colossus that the United States had become. Cold War American writers made the Model into the defining document we now take it to be. They did that in part by canonizing it and in part by unexpectedly remaking Winthrop’s New England Puritans, whose reputation had long been buried under the burdens of their religious intolerance and labyrinthine theology, as the nation’s true Founders. Then, in the 1980s, Winthrop’s text suddenly swept from the domains of the scholars into the White House and the rhetorical center of modern American politics. No presidents before Ronald Reagan had used the phrase city on a hill to define the very character of the American nation and its place in the world. After Reagan, virtually no serious political figure could escape the obligation to quote it.

But the Model’s story had not reached an end. Social scientists attached a new term—exceptionalism—to Winthrop’s text, even as the exceptional post–World War II character of the United States was visibly eroding beneath them. Evangelical Protestants struggled to decide if the America to which they were so deeply attached and yet with which they were so deeply in quarrel was properly called a city on a hill. And in 2016, the nation elected to the presidency a man who did not like the phrase at all—who, turning the Model on its head, made not America’s shining example but rather the nation’s manifold disasters his signature trope.

Through these shifts and turns in uses and meaning, the career of Winthrop’s text runs as a skein of threads through the American past. A forgotten document would arc, much later, toward iconic status. A biblical image would become a metaphor for a settlement project, a free-floating cliché, an element in the transnationally circulating vocabulary of civic patriotism, a statement of high Cold War purpose, and the creedal foundation of a truly exceptional nation. Even in Winthrop’s day, his Model of Christian Charity carried no single, stable message. The American point of departure would be what people would make of it. Braiding together three centuries of making and remaking, this book tells the story of a text that we think we know so well that we barely know it all it.

PART I

Text

CHAPTER 1

Writing A Model of Christian Charity

FOR ALL THE HISTORICAL WEIGHT that has been placed on John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity, the text itself carries an unexpectedly modest, even mysterious appearance. No special rotunda exhibits it. Winthrop’s city upon a hill statement does not rise out of an underground vault each morning for display, honored by flags and guarded by soldiers, as the Declaration of Independence did in the years of the high Cold War. The only surviving copy is housed in the New-York Historical Society in a small archival box, barely five by seven inches. Bound as a pamphlet, it is the seventeenth-century version of a slim modern paperback.

At first glance, Winthrop’s words seem barely touched by history’s passage. The National Archives’ copy of the Declaration of Independence, its ink faded with age, is now an almost completely illegible ghost of the parchment that its endorsers once signed. By contrast, A Model of Christian Charity, although almost a century and a half older, initially seems immune from change. The Model’s words flow over the pages in confident lines of loops and flourishes. The letters s and f blossom into extravagant swirls of form. The p’s shoot down below the line of text like daggers. The word the is condensed into a special symbol of its own, like a character in a modern text message. No special emphasis marks off its city upon a hill line, tucked into a sentence three pages from the end; but the h in hill soars and dives like an elegant bird in flight. All seems certain and dependable.

But a second glance disrupts that first impression. Marks of time and alteration, in fact, lie all over the manuscript. None of this lettering is Winthrop’s own work. His handwriting was much less fluid than this and far harder to read. This is a copyist’s output: a product of the system of scribal publication through which hand-copied editions of a seventeenth-century text were moved into circulation without the costly intermediation of a printing press.¹ How many copies this or other copyists made or how widely they were distributed we will never know, just as we will never know what Winthrop’s original looked like. All these have disappeared. This is the only seventeenth-century version of the Model that has survived into our day.

The copyist’s pen moves confidently across the page but then, suddenly, you see the copymaker stumble. There are places where, working too fast, the copyist left something out and came back with a caret mark to insert it. On one page most of a line is crossed out and corrected as if the copyist had momentarily mistaken his place or let her attention slip. A later hand corrects a word. Most striking of all, a whole word was washed out from the sentence just before the city upon a hill line. If we hold fast to our purposes, the text reads, the Lord shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations, the Lord make it like that of New England. But New England, inked in by a much cruder hand, was written over top of something else. What had been blotted out so determinedly as to leave only the faintest traces? A set of scans reveal that the original word had been Massachusetts. Why did the alteration matter so much to whoever came along later to make it? Why the hurried corrections? Why the text’s blank spaces, as if the original’s words, even then, could not be fully deciphered? Why the nagging mysteries? Coming in search of origins and certainty, you find everything—text, identities, keywords, and meanings—in motion.

Motion, of course, shaped every aspect of the composition of A Model of Christian Charity. The English in the early seventeenth century were a restlessly mobile people. London in the early modern era swelled with uprooted countryfolk. Scots and English migrants swarmed by the scores of thousands into Ireland. Across the course of the seventeenth century almost four hundred thousand English and Scots emigrants would embark for the new settlements of British North America, half of them headed for the mainland, half for the West Indies. John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Company took shape within this larger pattern of displacement. The Massachusetts colony was not the first deliberately planned English settlement in North America, but with almost a thousand voyagers under sail in 1630 under the moral and financial sponsorship of its godly Puritan organizers, it was the largest to date and the best organized. Over the next decade, another ten to twenty thousand English folk would follow them to raise new churches and villages and work to plow out new farms from the resistant soils of New England.² There would be social and political turmoil to come, too, before John Winthrop’s dream of a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical would be solidified.

Still, within this swirl of motion, what place did this text occupy? When and for what purposes was it written or spoken? What was its setting? We see the famous story in our mind’s eye: the ship, the piously gathered people, and their collective assent to the mission that their governor, John Winthrop, spelled out for them. In our inner ear, we already hear the repercussions echoing through the centuries. We see the story of America begin. But urgently as these images press on a reader’s mind, the copyist’s text gives no hint of them.

The absence is striking. Christian Charitie / A Modell hereof, the text is headed. As it was originally copied out, it carried no author, date, or context. We know that the Model was in circulation among English Puritans as early as 1635, when a friend of Winthrop’s eldest son asked for a copy of the Model of Charity along with a half dozen other documents from the Massachusetts colony’s founding.³ We know the authorship of the Model of Christian Charity, too, for there are enough traces from Winthrop’s earlier writings to make us certain that the Model was his own work, even if it originally circulated anonymously. But for the occasion for its writing we have only the word of a second, later document, a cover sheet written in a different, much cruder hand than the copyist’s.

It was the cover sheet writer who added, Written on Board the Arrabella on the Atlantick Ocean By the Honorable John Winthrop Esq. In His passage with the great Company of Religious people of which he was the Governor, from the Island of Greate Brittaine to New-England in the North America. Anno 1630. And when this did not seem sufficient, it was the cover sheet writer who went back later in parentheses and interlining to stress that these were Christian Tribes of which Winthrop was the Brave leader and famous governor. Though it is now bound into the copyist’s text, the original pamphlet did not carry this cover page. A bit of wax, the seventeenth-century equivalent of a paper clip, Ted O’Reilly, head of the Manuscript Department at the New-York Historical Society explains, stained the first page. But there is no corresponding stain on the cover sheet. The cover sheet identifying the authorship of the now famous Winthrop, placing the composition of the Model in the Atlantic Ocean and setting the scene that has become all but inextricable from the Model’s story was the work—if not the fiction—of a later time.⁴

The first historians to take John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity seriously did not pause to question this setting of the Model’s composition. Knowing what they were looking for, they found it in the cover sheet writer’s on the Atlantick Ocean assertion. As Perry Miller, the leading mid-twentieth century scholar of New England Puritanism, taught generations of historians to read it, A Model of Christian Charity was a mission statement for the society that Winthrop and his fellow voyagers would build in their new world. It stood at a doorway between mental frames, at the threshold of a new consciousness that was no longer English but on its way to becoming American. The shores of a new historical destiny lay right over the horizon. Where else could it have been written and assented to but on the open, yet undefined space of the sea: in the broad Atlantic, halfway between the Old World and the New, [where] nothing was settled?⁵

Others writing after Miller would draw this origin scene even more vividly and push it still closer to the moment of American arrival. One of Ronald Reagan’s early speechwriters envisioned the Model delivered on the tiny deck of the Arabella off the coast of Massachusetts where a little band strained to hear, against the stormy seas raging around them, what their new life had in store for them.⁶ In the leading textbook account of American religious history, Jon Butler and his coauthors set the Model literally at the moment of the Winthrop fleet’s entry into their new world, preached while the Arbella lay at anchor off the Massachusetts coast, just before its passengers disembarked into their new tasks and new identities.⁷

More recently historians have grown skeptical of the literal truth of the Model’s on the Atlantic ocean setting. John Winthrop began writing his Journal, from which so much of what we know about Puritan New England derives, when he boarded the Arbella in the English Channel in late March 1630. Sketchy though Winthrop’s subsequent entries were, he made them faithfully virtually every day. He noted the sighting of a spouting whale and the case of a maidservant who drank so much strong water that she almost died. He noted days in which sermons were preached and other days when both minister and people were too sick for any sermons.⁸ But no hint of A Model of Christian Charity appears in any of Winthrop’s seaboard entries. The Model’s text is not wholly consistent in its allusions to time and place, but its reference to the sufferings experienced by some of our forefathers here in England, historians now object, is hard to square with composition in the mid-Atlantic, much less just off the shores of New England.⁹

But even those who push the Model’s composition point back to England, just prior to the emigrants’ departure, have a hard time envisioning it as anything other than a publicly witnessed threshold utterance: the moment when, figuratively speaking, Winthrop’s company of New England–bound Puritans walked through the door to the America that the Model framed for them. John Winthrop’s most distinguished modern biographer candidly invents such a setting. Winthrop preached the Model, Francis Bremer writes, under the Gothic roof of the Holy Rood Church in Southampton, England, rising to do so right on the heels of John Cotton’s much more widely distributed farewell sermon—though Bremer admits there is no hard evidence that any such gathering took place there, much less that Winthrop had any such part in it.¹⁰

In all these imagined settings, whether on the sea or in sight or smell of oceans, A Model of Christian Charity marked a moment of social identity’s remaking. Its imagined setting, its city upon a hill line, and its message of a new-made people mirrored and reinforced each other. A people gather to hear a text, to embrace their mission in history, as some of their descendants would gather, almost a century and a half later, to hear a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. It is as close to a foundational scene as early American history possesses.

So runs the myth. But, in fact, by the time of the Arbella’s sailing A Model of Christian Charity had already been months in composition. Parts of it had been framed in Winthrop’s mind during the fall and winter of 1629–30, well before the New England Puritans’ departure in March—before it was even certain that there would be a departure at all. The Model was not written all of a piece at the doorway to America. Different audiences had heard different pieces of it. Most of Winthrop’s fellow passengers to Massachusetts Bay almost certainly never heard it all. Modern readers yearn for it to lead us back to an origin point in the American experiment. But its words were not shaped in a single sitting, either at the English seaport of Southampton or in a liminal Atlantic.

Evidence for the serial process by which the words and themes of A Model of Christian Charity came to Winthrop lies right in the text itself. The copyist’s determination not to waste paper on section breaks and section headings does not disguise the fact that the Model falls into four clearly distinct segments, only one of which looks explicitly toward America. The first and shortest of the Model’s parts is its opening premise, whose utter, uncompromising certainty almost inevitably jars on modern ears: 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. From that unchangeable fact of human inequality, charity descends. The Model’s second part outlines the practice of that charity, drawing out of a cluster of biblical examples the demanding rules that a godly community must observe in lending, loan forgiveness, and generosity both in normal times and in times of peril. The third and longest part explains the engine of that charity: the love and sympathy that binds each one to others.

It is in its fourth part that the Model shifts abruptly in tone and language to apply these rules of heart and practice to the project at hand. As a covenanted people in a new land, where subordination of all private respects to the care of the public will be all the more required, the emigrants will live under a stricter charge of unity and love than they had ever practiced before in England. The burden of their special covenant with God swells into prominence. The voyagers’ responsibilities are fearsome. They will stand, above the common lot of mankind as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. In the last part of the Model, Winthrop’s imagination leapt ahead to the settlement that he and his fellow colonizers would struggle to create. But the first three parts of the Model had already congealed in Winthrop’s mind months before the voyage to New England began.

When John Winthrop wrote in the Model’s opening sentence that society was so disposed that some must be rich, some poor, he was writing as much from personal experience as from abstract social theory. That he himself belonged to the high and eminent fraction of humankind was beyond question. His grandfather had been a successful London clothing merchant who rose to become a master of the city’s Clothworkers’ Guild and, from there, had made his way into the English gentry by investing in manor properties in East Anglia. In his mid-twenties John assumed possession of his family’s landholdings at Groton, England, together with its tenants and servants, its church, and the responsibilities of presiding over the manor court that went with it. He studied at Cambridge’s Trinity College and at one of the Inns of Court in London. He would bring as many as eight servants with him to Massachusetts in 1630. Sometime before departure, he posed for an elegant oil portrait, his face framed by a high ruffed collar, his hand holding a silk glove.¹¹

The great majority of those caught up in the currents of the new Protestant piety that swept over England in the 1610s and 1620s came from much humbler backgrounds than Winthrop. Small farmers, agricultural leaseholders, artisans, servants, and their wives and children formed the bulk of the English folk who would emigrate to New England in the 1630s. Some were drawn by promoters’ promises of abundant soils and fisheries. Some were recruited for their artisan skills. Many came through family and kinship ties. Those who set the dominant tone of the emigration yearned most of all for a more pious and godly community: its churches restored to what they imagined to be Christianity’s original practices, purged of the novelties of Catholic invention, and its mores purged of lawlessness and corruption. Within these ranks, Winthrop knew that he was among those whom God had designated for