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Edmund S. MorganThe Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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BetaChapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Leniency Rebuked”
Winthrop had faults. He was intelligent, especially in practical matters, without being brilliant or original. He was quick to look down on those who came to grief after disagreeing with him. The short temper of Endecott and Dudley’s inflexibility in interpretating scripture and law posed more challenges to judicious use of the government’s nearly absolute power. Dudley and Winthrop increasingly found themselves at odds, beginning with the decision to relocate headquarters from Cambridge to Boston. Winthrop tore down his house and moved, while Dudley remained and felt rejected as a neighbor.
Dudley deplored Winthrop’s moderation on matters ranging from giving special permission for a new fish weir to allowing expelled settlers weeks or months to relocate. For Winthrop, a new settlement required leniency and flexibility to grow; for Dudley, stricter laws were essential for a Puritan community. In 1632, Dudley openly accused Winthrop of abusing his authority to pander to the people and challenged the source of his authority. If it came from the election of the people, then arguably Winthrop had violated the royal charter; if it came from the company charter, then Dudley doubted the governor had any more authority than the assistants. Winthrop tried to dodge the question at first, then said the charter supported him. He triumphed temporarily but the conflict caused unrest.
One early protest came from a congregation at Watertown against paying taxes for a fort, since they had no regional representative to consent for the people. Winthrop defused this crisis by pointing out that the innovation of electing the governing assistants through the first election had not yet taken place. Since assistants would be elected at large from the colony, unlike local representatives in England’s Parliament, the General Court soon decreed that two deputies should be chosen from each plantation as consultants to ensure local assent to further taxation. The General Court also provided that freemen could directly elect the governor. Winthrop agreed with both measures.
The larger crisis came in 1634 when these new consultants asked to inspect the charter and discovered that all freemen had power in the General Court to vote on legislation. Winthrop and the assistants had reserved that power to their offices when extending the position of freeman beyond the company’s shareholders. Winthrop offered concessions, but failed to realize how suspicious of despotic government these immigrants had learned to be in England. The freemen wanted a popular assembly that could pass legislation that would guide and restrain the governor and assistants.
Winthrop’s proposals fell short. He finally had to bow to public pressure. The quarterly General Court would include two deputies from each town, and all freemen could vote on legislation at the General Court with annual elections. The freemen elected Thomas Dudley as governor in Winthrop’s place. Winthrop remained an assistant, however, and an influential voice in both governance and in resolving private disputes. He humbly accepted the decision of his peers and uttered no word of complaint that has been recorded.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Separatism Unleashed”
Winthrop’s successors as governor proved inflexible, “easily intoxicated by their own righteousness” (115). They thought they knew what godliness meant and woe to settlers who had a different conception of it. However, diverse opinions abounded among the independent colonists, and many felt no fear of confronting an unjust government.
The biggest challenge came from Roger Williams, a likeable and stubbornly principled separatist minister. Williams refused to officiate at the church in Boston until it officially renounced the Church of England—a demand Winthrop vehemently argued against. Williams found a home at the neighboring colony of Plymouth. After three years, however, he left them for admitting members still in communion with the Church of England and (according to a much later source) using “Goodman” to address unregenerate persons (that is, those not saved). He returned to Salem in Massachusetts.
Then Williams challenged the whole basis of the colony by doubting the authority of the king to grant them the Indigenous peoples’ land in America. The king’s charter claimed that he could give away the land as the first Christian monarch to discover it; Williams called this a solemn lie since he considered the king’s faith a mockery of “true” Christianity. Winthrop, as always, prepared rational arguments in response, citing scripture on God-given authority that even unjust rulers possessed, and arguing God had given them their new land anyway. He also summoned Williams to appear before the General Court. There, Williams agreed to profess loyalty to the king.
Under Dudley’s governorship, Williams again began declaring the royal authority to be a lie. Dudley rejected the request of John Cotton and other ministers to privately mediate the matter, but the General Court overruled him. A temporary respite prevailed until Williams started to preach that the elect should never pray with the unregenerate, even their own family. The unregenerate ought not even to take an oath before a regenerate magistrate. He also challenged the right of civil authority to enforce religious laws, even concerning the Sabbath.
Salem accepted his teaching and made him their minister. Other ministers urged the civil authorities to depose him, while Salem appealed to the principle of Congregationalism to keep their own minister. Williams brought the matter to a head by insisting that Salem withdraw from communion with the other churches of Massachusetts. That was a step too far, and Salem refused. The General Court expelled him from the colony.
Instead of leaving for England, Williams gathered a small band of followers and slipped away to found a new colony in Naragansett Bay (modern-day Rhode Island). He later wrote to a friend that Winthrop had encouraged him to do so. Winthrop and Williams exchanged cordial letters after he left, in which Winthrop gently challenged Williams’s separatism without effect. Williams, meanwhile, found his new church still too impure.
Eventually, Williams realized no church in the world could have the purity he craved, deciding he had to rub shoulders with the unregenerate even in worship. That, combined with his principle of congregational independence from civil authority, led him to become an unexpected champion of religious freedom. Since no church could be righteous, then each could follow its own inclinations despite inevitable errors and sins. Winthrop rejected this liberalism as a surrender in the fight to create a Christian world, however imperfect the result.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Seventeenth-Century Nihilism”
The next crisis revolved around Anne Hutchinson, a woman of stubborn principle and remarkable intelligence—though the gender prejudices of the time prevented Winthrop and others from fully acknowledging her gifts. She and her husband came to Boston in 1634 to follow the Reverend John Cotton, their former minister from England. Cotton, a preacher and scholar respected by all, emphasized the inability of people to merit or even prepare themselves for God’s free gift of saving grace. Winthrop considered him one of the colony’s leading lights.
Hutchinson began to lead a small group that met at her house to discuss the previous Sunday’s sermon. She took the Puritan embrace of Calvinist predestination and human helplessness to a logical conclusion. Since sinful people were helpless to choose good, then God must place the Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit) in a person to direct their actions. If the Holy Ghost animated his saints, however, then it seemed they had access to their own private revelation rather than simply trusting the Bible (contrary to Puritan doctrine).
She argued additionally that, since a person’s actions had no effect on God’s choice to save them by grace, the appearance of a holy life revealed nothing about whether or not a person was one of God’s elect. Most Puritans believed that people on whom God bestowed saving grace would try to lead a holy life, so a holy life was strong evidence of predestination to salvation (albeit not proof). This was the basis of choosing who to admit into their churches. Hutchinson condemned their mentality as still being that of Christians who thought to earn salvation by their actions. However, she thought that the truly saved could, by virtue of the Holy Ghost in them, accurately discern others whom God had chosen.
Accordingly—and dangerously in the eyes of Winthrop—she began to categorize the people of Massachusetts into the truly saved (those “under a covenant of grace”), and the deluded damned who lived “under a covenant of works”— including most ministers. Her sharp distinction between a holy life (“sanctification”) and salvation (“justification”) also could be interpreted as questioning whether the public enforcement of morals had any utility at all; Morgan suggests that her view was only step away from later nihilist philosophies.
As Hutchinson’s popularity in Boston grew, her faction attempted to install her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, as a minister at the church in Boston alongside Cotton and the original minister. Winthrop, though no longer governor, managed to put together a coalition to stop him, but at the cost of alienating friends.
Soon the colony was divided between Hutchinson’s group and the rest of the colony. The General Court convicted Wheelwright of sedition. Cotton remained neutral. As this crisis grew, the freemen ousted the pro-Hutchinson governor and returned Winthrop to his former office in 1637. Winthrop initially sought reconciliation, even suspending Wheelwright’s sentence. The Boston community, however, snubbed him. Winthrop then convened a synod of ministers. They, including Cotton, unanimously signed a declaration of faith and list of heretical propositions. Only Wheelwright refused to sign. Winthrop then declared that the sentence of banishment against him would be enforced.
When the General Court brought Hutchinson to trial, they found themselves in difficulties. She had been careful not to put her name to anything seditious and had prepared scriptural justifications for actions that the judges considered unseemly (such as a woman teaching others in her home). She managed to parry every accusation with wit and logic, leaving the judges fuming (Winthrop included).
In the end, however, Hutchinson also lost her temper and claimed God spoke directly to her in special revelation beyond anything in scripture. This constituted heresy and provided the court with a basis for banishing her. Even the church in Boston decided to excommunicate her when she held to her claims. She and a handful of followers left for Rhode Island. Winthrop felt vindicated, but posterity has judged him harshly for his heavy-handed use of authority against a brilliant woman.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Morgan introduces Hutchinson’s trial as “the least attractive episode in Winthrop’s career” (147), as it seems to challenge Morgan’s usual purpose of Rehabilitating the Puritans. He uses negative words such as “libel” (134) to characterize Winthrop’s attacks on her, noting that she possessed a theological intellect that dwarfed Winthrop’s own, even though Winthrop’s prejudices meant he did not acknowledge it. In making these statements, Morgan indirectly acknowledges that most histories paint Winthrop as the heavy-handed villain and Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams as heroes of the kind of religious tolerance that would become a hallmark of American democracy.
Morgan concedes both these opponents were talented, principled, and attractive people. In the case of Hutchinson, he also admits that Winthrop’s acceptance of his era’s gender stereotypes led him to have less respect for her and to adopt a more authoritarian approach than he would have had in dealing with a man. One might expect that Morgan’s analysis then would focus on why Winthrop made an uncharacteristic mistake in dealing with them. However, the contrary is true: Morgan shows how Winthrop had (at least in his own eyes) rational justification in seeing each as a threat. Morgan argues that he used his characteristic moderation as far as possible, and that other leaders of the colony made the mistakes that precipitated the crisis.
Morgan’s sympathetic presentation of Winthrop’s handling of the crisis revolves around the key historiographical tactic of understanding people’s actions within the context of their time, and not reading modern values or later developments into their motivations. He frames his discussion of Williams and Hutchinson are part of the Puritan dilemma of Isolation Versus Worldly Engagement.
Roger Williams, for example, has been held up as a champion of religious freedom and the Indigenous Americans’ rights to their own land. Morgan argues that Roger Williams was instead a champion of an intolerant separatism, a more zealous Puritan than Winthrop. Williams, as Morgan’s narrative stresses, only embraced religious freedom years after being exiled. His opposition to the king of England granting colonists land in the Americas stemmed from his self-righteous disdain for the king’s Christianity, rather than respect for Indigenous Americans. Similarly, Morgan argues that Hutchinson also was a divisive separatist who placed her followers above their neighbors.
Morgan’s interpretations here could be debated. Williams did cultivate good relations with the Indigenous peoples. His early insistence on the independence of his separatist churches from the state and suspicion of state enforcement of religious laws have much in common with the idea of religious tolerance. Hutchinson also had sophisticated ideas that echo later religious tolerance. However, as Morgan accurately narrates, neither Williams nor Hutchinson would have accepted contemporary secular notions of religious tolerance at the beginning of their careers. Just as Winthrop’s limited attempt to expand voting rights came from religious rather than democratic ideals, so too did a vehement Puritanism inspire Williams’s and Hutchinson’s original championing of ideals whose practical effects seem similar to religious tolerance.
Especially in the case of Williams, Morgan also stresses Winthrop’s dedication to Moderation and Consensus in Successful Leadership. Williams tried reasoning and discussion first in all these crises. He gathered ministers together to create a consensus and invited the few dissenters to join the community. He suspended the sentence of Hutchinson’s brother-in-law to give reconciliation a chance. His rejection of Williams’s concerns about the land grant were rooted in the practicality of not wanting to endanger a colony of thousands of people.
Morgan eagerly embraces the possibility that it was Winthrop who suggested that Williams establish a colony at Rhode Island. Winthrop certainly maintained correspondence with the exiled Williams, seeking to still find a way of including him in the broader community. His moderation failed with Hutchinson, though ultimately the fact that her own church eventually renounced her shows the fruits of Winthrop’s attempts to find consensus, and his waiting to banish her until she declared radical beliefs.
In short, Morgan admits that the banishment of Williams, Hutchinson, and their followers was not an admirable moment in Winthrop’s story. He does show, however, that Winthrop’s actions were reasonable in light of the proper historical context of separatist religious conflict. Most importantly from Winthrop’s perspective, he managed to hold together most of the people of Massachusetts. Ultimately, only a few abandoned his leadership for that of the exiles.
