The Historical Embarrassments of New England
ON THE THREE HUNDREDTH anniversary of the Winthrop expedition’s landing in Boston, the city threw itself a mammoth birthday party. The celebration climaxed on September 17, 1930, with a parade of over forty thousand marchers that took almost six hours to pass the million persons who were said to have lined the streets, some of them peering through showers of ticker tape for a glimpse of the spectacle. Rank upon rank of war veterans, some of them survivors of the brutal trench warfare in France, led off the procession. They were followed by scores of school children’s groups, rafts of women’s and men’s fraternal club members, church and civic associations, immigrant and ethnic societies, factory and department store employee groups, police and public servants. Carefully prepared historical floats depicted Winthrop’s Arbella, the Puritans’ landing on the Boston peninsula, Puritan home life and customs, an early town meeting, the Boston Tea Party, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts’s ratification of the Constitution, and the founding of the nation’s first free public school. From the grand ceremony’s tributes to its Puritan founders to its displays of the latest in traffic lights, up-to-date commercial buildings, and modern oil refinery methods, the Boston Day parade made a bid for recognition of the city’s importance all across the nation’s past and future.1
The day before, in a smaller but equally impressive ceremony, the city had dedicated a new “Founders Memorial” on the Boston Common. Charles Francis Adams, great-great-grandson of the nation’s second president, gave the dedicatory oration. A direct descendant of the Winthrops pulled the cord to release the flag draping the monument. The sculptor was one of Boston’s favorite sons who had already given the city monuments to Lafayette and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The “people’s poet” Edwin Markham composed an ode for the occasion: “Thus the new epic of the world began / Where there was room for a man to be a man.… ‘Not a new country only—a new mind!’ ”2
In the focal center of John Francis Paramino’s bronze relief, John Winthrop and Boston’s first minister, John Wilson, strode confidently up from the shore to shake the hand of the lone-living earlier arrival, William Blaxton, who had agreed to let a part of the 1630 expedition settle around his land and freshwater spring. On the reverse side, fronting Beacon Street, the memorials committee inscribed a line from William Bradford’s History and these now-famous words of Winthrop’s: “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 in this worke we have undertaken, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”3
It was the first occasion on which any piece of “A Model of Christian Charity” had escaped the history books’ and literary anthologies’ extracts, the obscure journal and the antiquarian pamphlet. On the Boston Common what is now the most quoted fragment of the text went public, visible to any casual passerby. In the hoopla of that “Boston Week,” amidst the skirling bagpipes and marching bands, the three thousand Knights of Columbus paraders, the special radio link that allowed Mayor James Curley to share an amplified real-time conversation with his counterpart in Boston, England, and amidst the other dozen memorial plaques being mounted across the state and the city, it is hard to know how many Bostonians paid attention to Winthrop’s words or tried to imagine their meaning. What we do know is that in 1930 Boston’s political and cultural elite bid to give them iconic status in their—and the nation’s—history.
The Boston tercentennial was not the first time that New Englanders had staged a pageant for themselves or undertaken to fix their place as Founding Fathers of the nation. Cultivation of the region’s heritage had been a major project of New England’s cultural and literary elite for over a century. Celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth had been an important undertaking in 1820. Five years later, the fiftieth anniversary of the battle that had opened the War for Independence at Bunker Hill had been an even grander affair. Five thousand persons marched in the great parade; 4,400 sat down for dinner afterward under a field of tents; some 15,000 were said to have strained to hear Daniel Webster’s address. The monument that New England’s boosters completed near the battle site in 1843 was the nation’s tallest and most imposing historical marker until the Washington Monument was finally finished some forty years later.4
Still more lasting than parades and monuments were the New Englanders’ celebrations of their history in print and speeches. Oration-filled observances of Forefathers’ Day on the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing were sustained annually from 1798 on. Starting with the founding of the New England Society of New York in 1805, elite out-migrants from the region met regularly to congratulate themselves and the exceptional virtues of New England. Most consequential of all was the capture of history-book writing by New England authors and publishers who stamped New England historical self-consciousness into primers and schoolbooks sold across the country.5
An essential part of the New England elite’s project lay in celebrating the region’s distinctiveness and superiority. Writers and artists broadcast idyllic scenes of New England’s compact towns, with their village greens and arching elms, steepled churches and whitewashed fences. A pious and orderly folk, conscience-driven and hard-working, transacting their public business in the simple democracy of their town meetings, scornful of pretense but committed to high ideals and widespread learning: part-fiction though it was, this picture of regional distinctiveness spread as far as New England emissaries could carry it.
But these efforts to carve out a place of clearly defined regional character comprised only half the project. The other half, already in full gear by the 1820s, was to insist that the nation itself—or at least its best and most important characteristics—had been formed from seeds planted first in New England. Theirs was not a sectional project only but, in Harlow Sheidley’s words, a project of “sectional nationalism”—a bid for Founders’ status, for cultural ownership of the American past and leadership of its future.
The notion that any nation has a distinct site of its foundation is a self-serving myth, of course—especially so in the case of a nation as plural and complex in its origins as the United States. The most obvious obstacle to the New Englanders’ efforts to write themselves into the role of the nation’s founders was that the Virginia settlement had been established first.6 Planters and profit seekers, indentured laborers, and the first of what was to be the importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans—all had a better historical claim to Founders’ status than the New Englanders. Not all New England orators denied the point. Neither did they deny the way in which the unexpected strength of the alliance between Northern and Southern colonists, thwarting the British hopes to drive the rebellious Americans into fragmented regional camps, had been instrumental in securing the struggle for independence. The New England–born historian George Bancroft was among the celebrators of that transregionalism theme. The establishment of the Virginia General Assembly in 1619 and the Massachusetts Bay Company’s reorganization as a general assembly of the colony’s freemen in 1634 flowed equally from the same germ of civic republican instincts, Bancroft wrote. “Thus early did the freemen of Massachusetts unconsciously echo back the voice of the people of Virginia; like the solitary mountain, replying to the thunder, or like deep, calling unto deep.” Thus did “the epidemic of America break out.”7
But much more common among New England writers was to dismiss the Virginia project as a false start, an illegitimate line of descent. The Virginia settlement had its origins not in ideals but in mere self-interest, they emphasized. Dominated by rogues and adventurers, “idle and dissolute persons” with illusions of immediately gotten riches, it was no wonder that Virginia had so quickly descended into “disorder” and “anarchy,” that only by accident had its first colonists been intercepted on the brink of abandoning the venture altogether and sailing back to England.8 It was not just empty coincidence, in their eyes, that in 1820, as New England’s boosters descended on Plymouth Rock to celebrate their past, there was nothing left of Jamestown; burned in a rebellion in 1676, then rebuilt, it had been all but abandoned by1699.
The true foundations of the American republic, New England publicists insisted, were laid by the first New Englanders. The American model for constitutional self-government had originated among them. Travel to the nation’s capital, H. A. Scudder declared in 1853, and you would “there behold her noblest institutions based upon the principles of that compact originally signed … in the cabin of the Mayflower.” The struggles that coalesced into the Revolution had begun there as well. “I presume it will be admitted by every philosopher, every honest and judicious politician,” the New England Society of Charleston, South Carolina, orator for 1835 affirmed, “that from the character of the first settlers of Virginia and New-York, we should never have existed as an independent nation.” Robert C. Winthrop echoed the point in 1839. The influences of Plymouth and New England have “pervaded our Continent.… The seeds of the Mayflower … have sprung up in every latitude … and though so often struck down and crushed beneath the iron tread of arbitrary Power, they are still ineradicably imbedded in every soil.” It was the great boon of America that “the corner-stone of our Republican edifice” was quarried out of the old, original, New England rock.9
One of the New England elite’s prized catches in their desire to insert themselves into American history as the template on which the republic had been built was the young visiting Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. Taken in by Boston’s Harvard-educated ministerial and merchant class, Tocqueville concluded after a month in New England that he had discovered, finally, the secret of American democracy. It lay in New England’s institutions of town governance. A suggestion given to him by the Boston historian Jared Sparks, it made all the more powerful an impression on an observer used to the political authority of much more highly centralized France. Not in the much-vaunted constitutional system established in 1789 but the institutions of local township deliberation, carried to New England by its earliest Puritan settlers, Tocqueville was sure, lay the seeds of a political democracy inoculated against the excesses that had run riot in Revolutionary France.10 From these beginnings, “the principles of New England spread first into neighboring states; then, one by one, they reached the most distant states and finished, if I can express myself in this way, by penetrating the entire confederation.… The civilization of New England has been like those fires kindled on the hilltops that, after spreading warmth around them, light the farthest bounds of the horizon with their brightness.” “The whole destiny of America,” Tocqueville summed up what he thought he had learned, was “contained in the first Puritan who reached its shores.”11
The term “Founding Fathers” was not to be invented until the twentieth century.12 But the yearning of the nineteenth-century New England elite for Founders’ status can hardly be exaggerated. They had a stock of stories and myths at hand. They had the local institutions that Tocqueville idealized and admired. They had the Mayflower Compact and the Battle of Bunker Hill. They had “A Model of Christian Charity,” too, if anyone cared to notice.
But assertion of Founders’ status by the New Englanders, however fervently they hungered for it, was not the same thing as achieving it. There were deep embarrassments along the path.
The first of those embarrassments was that the place of New England in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America was much more marginal than its boosters chose to imagine it. Virginia may have been a colony on the verge of anarchy in its first years, preserved only by imposition of authoritarian rule in the 1610s, but it grew to be the single most important engine of colonial North American economic and demographic growth. By 1775 its capital-intensive, labor-exploiting economy had made it the wealthiest and most populous of the colonies of the nascent United States. The per capita wealth of free white persons in the colonial American South was more than twice that in the middle colonies or New England. Estimates of the relative living standards of common, small farmers are harder to make, but Virginian military recruits were taller on average than New Englanders by the end of the eighteenth century, presumably an indicator that they were better fed. Whatever the case, the disparity in immigrants’ destinations is clear. Immigrants looking for opportunities in colonial America sailed for Pennsylvania or, in still greater numbers, the slave South or the West Indies; these were the New World’s magnets. After the initial Puritan exodus, they rarely chose New England.13
In time, New England’s turn to the sea for wealth, through cod fishing, whale oil hunting, shipbuilding, food exports to the West Indian slave and sugar islands and, later, direct traffic in African-captured slaves, revived the region’s economy. But on the eve of the American Revolution, Philadelphia had eclipsed Boston as the colonies’ leading seaport. If diversity, toleration, and eagerness for ambitious immigrant populations held the key to the nation’s future, its foundations were laid in Penn’s colony, not in the thin soils and culturally insular towns of New England.14
Political dynamics were more volatile than demographic or economic trends. Had it not been for the quickness of Boston’s artisan and sailor crowds to mobilize against new tax impositions, the tacit approval that many of the merchants gave to the eruption of street politics, and the anger in the New England towns over the heavy-handed measures by which the British tried to subdue the protests, the Revolution would not have unrolled in the 1760s and 1770s as it did. New Englanders played a leading role in pressing for resistance and ultimately for independence. But despite the influence of John Adams’s writings on the principles of constitutional design, New Englanders did not take a vanguard part in the framing of the Constitution in 1787, whose impetus had come far more strongly from the middle and southern colonies than from New England.
In the decades to come, moreover, the region’s devotion to the new government was much less firm than the later New England historians would acknowledge. During “Mr. Madison’s War” with Britain in 1812–15, New England authorities not only sharply criticized federal policy as highly injurious to the region’s interest but they also publicly discouraged enlistments in the army, refused direct requisitions of their state militias by the War Department, and urged the withholding of taxes and loans to the national government. Representatives from New England were meeting in a secret convention at Hartford to debate outright nullification, perhaps even secession, when the war officially came to an end. But that did not prevent them from presenting a series of constitutional amendments that would have required a two-thirds majority in Congress (that is to say, the assent of New England’s representatives) to authorize any future war, any future embargo, and admission of any future state from the territories.
In the wake of the embarrassments of the Hartford affair, the New England elite undertook to make themselves over as if they had been, all along, the nation’s cultural bedrock. But the conditionality of New England loyalty did not go away. With the White House locked in a virtually unbroken dynasty of Southern slave holders, with Southern expansionists pressing relentlessly for more territory for slave-labor production, with New England’s influence in Congress undergoing steady dilution, and with mounting fears of a “slave power conspiracy” that would ultimately make them “enslaved” to slavery, talk of resistance, even of disunion, ran almost as hard in sectors of New England as in the South right up to the opening shots of the Civil War. Northern victory in that war brought discussion of a breakup of the nation to a close, but the prickly, independent, self-righteous streak in New England politics, and what seemed to others a blatant preference for self- and regional interests over the national good, added further embarrassments to New Englanders’ quest for recognition as the nation’s Founders.15
And then there were the witches, the banished Antinomians, and the Quakers stripped and flogged and hanged in Boston. Witch-hunting frenzies of the sort that so famously consumed Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692–93 were in no way unique to the New England Puritans. Far more persons were executed in spasms of witchcraft accusations in Catholic Salzburg and in Lutheran Sweden in the late seventeenth century than in Massachusetts. In Geneva, public authorities had burned and executed heretics who mistakenly imagined that Calvin’s “city of refuge” might be a refuge for them. Still, by the nineteenth century, intolerant, prosecutorial zeal was the skeleton in New England’s closet. Critics from other regions knew it, and pressed its embarrassments home. New England writers knew it as well. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s angry sketch of Puritan zealotry in The Scarlet Letter through New England’s critical historians of the 1880s and 1890s, whose detailed documentation of their ancestors’ religious persecution grew into a literature of apology and purgation, the fierce intolerance of the Puritans was a fixed a point in the public imagination.16
In 1883 one of the late nineteenth-century’s leading American sculptors, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was commissioned to cast a statue of one of the prominent early settlers of Springfield, Massachusetts. Reproduced many times over, the sculpture quickly became known simply as “The Puritan.” His steepled hat and the great Bible under his arm were not the telltale clues to his identity as much as the “unbending and militant force of the Puritan” that Saint-Gaudens was praised for capturing. A writer in the Century declared: “Surely those old searchers for a ‘liberty of conscience’ that should not include the liberty to differ from themselves could not fail to recognize in this swift-striding, stern-looking old man, clasping his Bible as Moses clasped the tablets of the law, and holding his peaceful walking-stick with as firm a grip as the handle of a sword—surely they could not fail to recognize in him a man after their own hearts.”17
By the middle years of the nineteenth century, a major flowering of learning and literature had begun to be born from New England’s cultural soil. But to the region’s critics, the scars of its older mores endured in its unbending rigidity, self-righteousness, and self-repression. New England’s founders were a people of “negation,” William Carlos Williams put the critical case most vividly as the early twentieth century’s culture wars over prohibition and artistic censorship escalated: a people empty and terrorized by the world who, in response, “praised a zero in themselves.”18 The competing stereotypes gained force from their very exaggerations. But however one cut through the storm over the Puritans, by the 1920s their mantle as bearers of liberty to the New World had been severely undermined.
It was left to Samuel Eliot Morison, the young Harvard historian of early America, to sum up the balance. The New England Puritans, he wrote in 1931, were not democrats; they did not believe in religious liberty as later Americans would come to understand it. At root, they were persons who still lived in the Middle Ages, closer in their religious ambitions to St. Augustine than to modern Protestants. It was “moonshine” to think they brought ideas of market price or economic ambition with them. Although they valued the principle of election, they took “heavy precautions … against the popular will’s having a chance to express itself.” They had no faith in the average person’s capacity for government. “Even the vaunted town meeting was almost always controlled by the squire, the shipowner, or the money lender.” They brought many things of value to their foothold in New England: public spirit, respect for learning and popular education, an aesthetic of usefulness and the fitness of objects to their tasks. But the germs of modern America that nineteenth-century New England historians had emphasized had seeped into the country despite them. “These stern founders had a faith that is not ours.”19
On all these counts, John Winthrop himself was a particular embarrassment. More vigorously than any of his peers in the colony’s early leadership, he had labored to preserve religious orthodoxy in early Massachusetts. He had articulated more clearly than any of the others the closed character of the colony and bounded nature of what the Puritans imagined by liberty. He had spoken more articulately than any other early New Englander in defense of status and authority. In the New Englanders’ quest to be recognized as laying the cultural and political foundations of the nation, Winthrop was a liability.
In Winthrop’s place New England boosters thrust other figures from the region’s past. The Pilgrims, the Massachusetts Bay colony’s much smaller and weaker neighbors to the southeast, were early candidates. Less powerful, less prideful, and less self-righteous than the Puritans, the Pilgrims had occupied a side venue in early Puritan history writing. The agreement they signed, after first pledging their loyalty to the British crown, to “combine ourselves into a civil body politic” was not singled out for particular attention until the late eighteenth century. But by the early nineteenth century, the Mayflower Compact was being celebrated by New England historians as the formative act of self-government in American history. An outlier like John Lothrop Motley might dismiss it as an agreement “among a very few individuals.” But the much stronger tendency was to see the Constitution, the nation, and the principle of representative government itself as already foreshadowed in that shipboard action.20
More striking than the history schoolbooks’ singling out of the Pilgrims for a devotion to liberty far stronger than the dogmatic founders of Boston was the rehabilitation of the Puritan colony’s most outspoken dissidents. Roger Williams, whose challenges to the ecclesiastical and political orthodox kept Massachusetts Bay in continuous turmoil throughout the early 1630s, was the most prominent case in point. Seeking first to cut his Salem church off from association with all those whom he did not see as truly Christian, Williams finally gave up hope of finding purity this side of heaven and opened his Rhode Island colony to persons of all sorts of religious opinions. Williams himself never relented in his search for truth, but the idea of a New Israel, a state good enough to police the religious opinions of its people, seemed to him the deeper heresy than doctrinal heterodoxy itself. A “turbulent” spirit Williams’s critics called him at his trial and banishment in 1635. By the early nineteenth century, however, Williams was already beginning to be set off from his Boston prosecutors as a truly heroic figure in early American history: the first and clearest American articulator of the liberty of conscience.21
A later sign of the same tendency was the redemption of Anne Hutchinson, whose religious turbulence Winthrop had found even more dangerous to the colony’s safety and good order. Hutchinson was not a clergyman like the Cambridge-educated Roger Williams. She taught private gatherings of other pious New England women. But when she told the General Court that she knew by an immediate, inner voice which of the ministers and magistrates were truly Christian enough to be honored with obedience and which were not, Winthrop could not contain his outrage. “It overthrows all.” The court banished Hutchinson and disarmed her supporters not only to censor her opinions, as Winthrop and others saw it, but to preserve their very covenant from being rent in pieces by anarchy.
But in time Anne Hutchinson, too, was raised to a status morally higher than Winthrop’s. Charles Francis Adams, whose account of the affair in 1892 was a model of the new, balanced, scientific history, did not warm to Anne Hutchinson’s inner religious certainties. She was “an ambitious woman, with her head full of Deborahs and the like, and with a genius for making trouble,” Adams wrote. But her trial was “no trial at all, but a mockery of justice rather,—a bare-faced inquisitorial proceeding.”22 A generation later, Hutchinson’s elevation to martyrdom in the cause of free speech and women’s status was complete. Funded by the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, a statue of Anne Hutchinson was erected just outside the Massachusetts State House in 1922. “Courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration,” the inscription ran. The city’s only statue of John Winthrop, by contrast, erected in 1880 not far from the State House, had already been shunted into a less conspicuous site to open more room for subway construction.23
To understand the development of “American thought,” the literary historian Vernon Louis Parrington wrote in his canonical history of American ideas and literature in 1927, there was no alternative but to begin with the Puritans. But it was with New England’s dissenters, not its “stewards of theocracy,” that “the promise of the [American] future” was to be found. Given the colony’s leaders’ “patriarchal” social philosophy, their “extreme jealousy of popular power,” and their inability to adjust to new conditions, “New England democracy owes no debt to her godly magistrates.”24 For Parrington, Winthrop stood at the beginnings of American history not as a Founding Father but as a man determined to stave off what America was to become.
Boston’s tercentenary celebration of 1930 pulled Winthrop out from these shrouds of embarrassment. Its organizers gave an extract from “A Model of Christian Charity,” for the first time, a prominent public place. But they did all this only to celebrate a city vastly more secular and more multicultural than Winthrop had ever imagined. Boston of 1930 was in the hands of its new immigrants. Mayor James Curley, who spearheaded the summer’s celebration plans and who presided enthusiastically over its events, was a product of the city’s Irish political machine and its mass politics. Corrupt enough to go to jail for helping two of his constituents to cheat on their civil service exams, he was beloved enough to be elected mayor on four different occasions. The tercentenary celebration over which he presided placed the city’s new immigrants on full display. The organizers’ “racial groups committee” arranged programs by the city’s Greek, Syrian, Polish, Armenian, Finn, Ukrainian, and other populations. A Lithuanian group did some “clever tumbling” as they marched in the grand parade, the Daily Boston Globe reported. The Chinese built a “wonderfully picturesque float” that stopped the show. The music and steps of the African American marching bands riveted the reporters’ eyes. Replicas of the Arbella and Puritan home life were swept along in this spectacle of twentieth-century Boston’s diversity, tolerance, and modernity.25
In the course of celebrating Winthrop as Boston’s founder, the tercentenary’s organizers remade him into a figure that they would have liked far better than the governor of 1630. In Paramino’s bronze relief, Winthrop strides up the hill to shake William Blaxton’s hand, while a pair of Indians give silent blessing to the scene. Paramino’s Winthrop carries no Bible. A young woman helps lead the way. No “steward of theocracy,” this was a generous, open-handed Winthrop, tacitly stripped of his religious convictions, a Winthrop who could have presided comfortably over James Curley’s immigrant city.
Paramino credited the leaders of the Massachusetts Art Commission, all of them from old-stock Puritan families, with suggesting the quoted lines from the Model for the memorial’s street-facing side.26 Though they included Winthrop’s warning of peril “if we deal falsely in this work,” the Model’s extracted words no longer evoked a pious English remnant, anxious to make God’s purposes visible in a strange world and fearful of their ability to do so. It did not signify a people convinced of their divine chosenness. In the context of the city’s grand parade—the Lithuanian American gymnasts, the Syrian American swordsmen, the Irish American organizers, and the orators—the “city upon a hill” phrase meant something much more literal and much closer at hand. Many of the physical hills of Winthrop’s Boston had been cut down and redeposited as fill for urban expansion, but Boston remained in literal fact a city of hills. “City upon a hill” in 1930 was a bid to boost the City of Boston’s fortunes. It was a bid to release New England from its accumulated embarrassments. It was a slogan for a city admiring itself.
The first, small steps toward iconic status for “A Model of Christian Charity” had begun. But for the New England elite’s ambition to be seen as the nation’s Founders to be realized—and for Winthrop’s text to take on still more weight than the Boston tercentennial’s celebrators gave it—it would take other hands and contexts than these.