The Wordy Shipmates

“The most important reason I am concentrating on Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire.” 

Vowell sets the tone for her interpretation of history. While American popular culture typically invokes its imagined Puritan roots in a positive light, referencing religious freedom and trailblazing, Vowell says that the modern US is “haunted” by Puritan self-aggrandizement. The drive to set an example succeeded, but the example they set was not one of communal harmony: It was one of conquest and control in the form of patriarchal, paternalistic colonialism with religious, political, and social dimensions.  

“Winthrop’s friends in the Massachusetts Bay Company were shrewd talent scouts who saw something in Winthrop, some potential greatness, and recruited him to emigrate and become their CEO. Winthrop sees the faith of his peers as a revelation of God’s calling. It is, to him, a promotion. And not just an upgrade in social status. The governorship is an opportunity to better serve God.”

This passage highlights the interconnectedness of faith, capitalism, and government in English Protestant society. Winthrop is a trained religious professional, but occupies the profession of governor in a colony established by a company charter. While faith centrally fuels Winthrop’s (and other powerful men’s) ambitions, he garners material wealth and influence from his promotions. To the modern reader, conflicts of interest abound within this shared framework of humility, charity, and superficial aristocracy. Rigid social hierarchies and intimately connected spheres of religion, government, and economy, however, were natural in the Puritan worldview.

“Winthrop’s sermon, as a supposed early model for the idea of America, became a blank screen onto which Americans in general and Reagan in particular projected their own ideas about the country we ended up with.” 

Vowell routinely traces elements of the Puritan legacy through American politics and society. Many politicians have invoked Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” speech, but Vowell pays particular attention to Ronald Reagan because his conservative political coalition included the religious Right and won decisive victories in the 1980s. Reagan’s image of an exceptional American standard worthy of emulation was very much at odds with reality: Rates of unemployment and homelessness were high, wages were low, and the Cold War raged on. Vowell condemns Reagan for his failure to help suffering Americans, particularly people of color, but she recognizes the power of his Winthrop-minded political rhetoric, admitting that she herself wants to believe in the triumph and essential goodness of her country.

“The thing that appeals to me about Winthrop’s ‘Christian Charity’ and Cotton’s ‘God’s Promise to His Plantation’ from this end of history is that at least the arrogant ballyhoo that New England is special and chosen by God is tempered by the self-loathing Puritans’ sense of reckoning. That same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. The humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That’s what subsequent generations lost.”

Vowell oscillates between admiring and admonishing the historical actors she focuses on. Her opinions about politicians and social leaders in modern history are less ambivalent. While Puritans held staunch beliefs about their own lowliness and sinfulness, extolling self-reflection and improvement, Puritan colonists committed what we consider war crimes. Meanwhile, American politicians condone or endorse war crimes like the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, while lacking the impulse for self-reflection or self-doubt. 

“The Massachusetts Bay Colony becomes, under this Charter, a sort of republic—the most severely limited, totalitarian, closed-minded, vindictive, hard-ass republic possible. But the democratic impulse is a mutating virus that adapts and changes, quickens and grows; it is contagious, and the Charter is one important sneeze.” 

Vowell is measured in her celebration of the seeds of democracy visible in the 17th century. A move towards representative self-government through regularly scheduled elections via loopholes in the Royal Charter represented a significant departure from the colony’s roots in monarchical England. At the same time, governing structures were entirely controlled by a privileged class of white men and most members of society (including all women) could not participate in the quasi-electoral process by which designated church members elected assistants who elected the governor.

“That first winter, living in a town where goats and people die, one of them by rotting ‘from the feet upwards,’ Winthrop’s sermon about how the colonists would build some fancy city on a hill must have seemed, in retrospect, a tad laughable.” 

The colonists suffered in New England. In their first winter, they lacked the skills necessary to survive in the harsh climate with few resources. Vowell illustrates the disconnect between earthly concerns (like access to water) and religious ambitions (like mission work and worship). To the colonists, these were not competing interests, but they took place in very different mental and physical spheres—one pragmatic, and the other abstract. Devoting attention to their practical suffering imbibes the narrative with tangible detail so the book goes beyond an intellectual history of Puritan theology and social theory. 

“There’s no agreeing to disagree in Massachusetts Bay. There is only agreeing to agree. Winthrop’s perpetual task is consensus-building.” 

When Roger Williams challenged Boston magistrates on mattes of worship and governance, Winthrop and his fellows in power responded by putting him on trial and demanding he recant. Williams’s refusal to do so eventually led to his banishment. The colonists left England because of their religious dissent, but they did not establish room for religious dissent among their own ranks. 

“Remember this is almost a century and a half before the Boston Tea Party, before Lexington and Concord, before the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown burns down that tavern built on the site of Winthrop’s first American house. John Winthrop is no Son of Liberty. He’s a Puritan father of communal control.” 

When King Charles of England attempted to recall the Charter in 1634, a move that would end the colony, Winthrop failed to deliver the patent—an act of resistance through nonviolent noncompliance. Vowell compares their defiance of the king to later colonists’ mobilization for all-out political revolution and independence. 

“Williams’s greatness lies in his refusal to keep his head down in a society that prizes nothing more than harmony and groupthink. He cares more about truth than popularity or respect or personal safety. And while his pursuit of truth leads him to some eccentric, if not laughable, applications of the Ten Commandments, his quest also leads him to some equally eccentric beliefs about racial equality, self-determination, and religious liberty that good people now hold dear.” 

Vowell values Williams for his moral convictions: his acknowledgment of Indigenous land claims and the right to dissent and worship freely. Williams called into question the very nature of the Royal Charter because it assumed ownership of North American land without taking into account that sovereign people already lived there. Transferring ownership should have required Native consent and a formal transaction. Williams was a steadfast believer in his own faith and likened other religions to devil worship, but he did not think a court should have the right to punish members of society who did not adhere to the same religious prescriptions as the community leaders. 

“Winthrop and Williams personify not just the conflict between orthodox Massachusetts and what would become madcap Rhode Island, the freewheeling colony Williams is about to found. They personify what would become the fundamental conflict of American life—between public and private, between the body politic and the individual, between we the people and each person’s pursuit of happiness.” 

Vowell roots major enduring conflicts in American ideology in the early history of British settlement in New England. Winthrop and Williams’s theologies and political speak to large abstract questions about an individual’s proper role in society and the proper place of religion in government (or vice versa). 

“One side effect of Williams’s admiration for the natives is that they make Englishmen, including the Boston variety, look bad.” 

Williams wrote a dictionary of Algonquian words and phrases (the language group including the one spoken by his Narragansett acquaintances). His choices and commentary describe the Narragansett as a helpful, intelligent, resourceful group of people who saved his life and showed him kindness, and who enjoy a lower crime rate and commit fewer sinful acts against each other than their English counterparts. 

“Honestly, the idea that all human beings are corrupt vessels of evil is oppressive enough when one is born into that way of thinking. I was exposed, from infancy on, to so much wretch-like-me, original-sin talk that I spent my entire childhood believing I was as depraved as Charles Mansion when in reality I might have been the best-behaved nine-year-old of the twentieth century. But how jarring it must have been to be an adult Narragansett and this strange white man shows up out of the blue and shatters his lifelong peace of mind with what the stranger calls the ‘good news’ that the native is in fact a wicked, worthless evildoer and so was his mother.” 

Religious conversion was a stated goal of the New England colonial endeavor, but the colonists in Massachusetts Bay did very little proselytizing. Roger Williams tried to act as a missionary among the Narragansett, but they typically rejected his theology. Narragansett religion and cosmology had some basic overlap with Protestantism—like the existence of a higher power and its preeminence in human life—but the imagined relationships between the Earth and the cosmos were very different and often incompatible. 

“The English are diabolical. The Narragansett and the Mohegan are willing accomplices. The Pequot commit distasteful acts of violence and are clueless as to just how vindictive the English can be when provoked. Which is to say that there’s no one to root for.” 

This passage is Vowell’s summation of the Pequot War. She refrains from glorifying warfare or delivering an overly simplistic formulation of good and evil, instead acknowledging the brutality and chaos that typically characterizes war. Ultimately, she condemns the English for orchestrating and executing a massacre, but she acknowledges that the string of conflicts that led up to that violence was the result of multifaceted power struggles, some of which existed long before the English founded New England. 

“The Pequot, the Narragansett, and the Mohegan are sovereign nations with a long history of resentment that predates European contact.”

This is an incredibly important point. The simple binary of Native versus White does not accurately depict the period’s power struggles and alliances—instead this reductive view unproductively overlooks the diversity of Native groups across the North American continent. Complex systems of trade, kinship, and conflict existed well before Europeans arrived. Pan-Indianism (a racial identity that united Native people to resist colonialism and assert diverse Indigenous traditions) emerged over time, only coming to fruition in the 20th century. No such identity characterized the early colonial era.

“Within a year of Massachusetts kicking him out, Massachusetts was using Williams as its Indian ambassador, negotiator, and spy.” 

Roger Williams maintained contact with Massachusetts Bay after the court there banished him. John Winthrop had aided Williams’s escape to Narragansett territory where he founded Providence; Williams in turn was an intermediary between Whites and Indigenous during the Pequot War. This service in exile highlights the trust and importance English men placed in one another. When Anne Hutchinson is later banished, Winthrop revels in her discontent and misfortune. 

“To modern readers, the Pequot War is an unpleasant turf war in which the English battle a specific New England tribe. To the English, they are fighting the devil himself and his earthly representatives.”

This passage highlights English racism towards non-Europeans. Because Native nations in Europe’s imagined New World did not share language, customs, or religion to any European peoples (specifically Christians), the Puritans regarded them as devil worshipers that should be eliminated. This driving ideology justified the use of military tactics that they would never use against Whites.

“The years 1636-1637 are busy and difficult: Boston banishes Roger Williams, prepares to go to war against the king of England, hoes go to war with the Pequot, watches Connecticut draw away some of its best citizens, and deals with Anne Hutchinson, a female blabbermouth who is so difficult and so defiant that the General Court will long for the good old days of bickering with the comparatively easygoing Williams.” 

This recap orients the reader before the final main historical example in the book (the trial and banishment of Anne Hutchinson). Though the book has generally progressed chronologically through the 1630s, Vowell reminds the reader that these cataclysmic events actually happened simultaneously. Readers can better understand the stress and hardship among the colonists when they bear in mind the overlapping timeline of events that Vowell relates one-by-one. 

“For Underhill, biblical justification is enough of an air freshener to erase the smell of burning human flesh. But the Narragansett and Mohegan, whom Underhill calls ‘our Indians,’ were shaken by the viciousness of the English and the horror of the carnage. Especially the Narragansett.” 

Though the Mohegan and Narragansett allied with the English against their historical rivals the Pequot, the traditional methods of warfare and reciprocal captivity they employed differed greatly from the massacre that the English engineered at Mystic. The English, led by John Underhill, saw their triumph as the will of the Christian god. In response to witnessing and partaking in English cruelty, the Narragansett changed course. However, the Mohegan sachem Uncas remained loyal to the English, committing further acts of violence on their behalf to ensure Mohegan survival.  

“When the film shows the Pequot clashing with Connecticut settlers, Owen whispers, ‘I don’t get it. Why are they fighting? They eat together on Thanksgiving.’”

Vowell and her nephew, nine-year-old Owen, view a movie about the Pequot War at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. Owen’s remarks highlight the erasure effect that myths about early America create. When schools or non-Native American families teach the Thanksgiving myth that colonists and their Native neighbors got along and celebrated the harvest, but fail to inform school children about the dozens of massacres colonists committed against Native people, they perpetuate myths of Euro-American innocence and deny Native suffering. Owen is upset and interested in the correction that his aunt provides when she tells him about colonial warfare. 

“After the Pequot War, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi took the exact opposite course of action from Uncas, with disastrous results. Horrified by the Mystic Massacre, Miantonomi could only conclude that the English were hellbent on native annihilation. So he set out to build a coalition of tribes to fight back, just as Tecumseh would at the turn of the nineteenth century.” 

In discussing the aftermath of the Pequot War, Vowell highlights Native survival and resistance. Many future Native leaders would share Miantonomi’s understanding of European genocidal aims and mobilize to resist. These efforts achieved various degrees of success. On the other hand, Uncas helped the English by assassinating Miantonomi at their request. These types of assassinations—and massacres like the one at Mystic—remained regular occurrences by British and American troops as settlers moved westward across the continent through the 19th century. 

“Behind every bad law, a deep fear.” 

In Boston in 1637, “reactionary immigrant legislation” (218) targeted would-be dissenters by allowing colonial magistrates to deny certain people entry to their community. In this case, Anne Hutchinson’s example threatened to expand the power of women in preaching and the power of the individual in Christian religious hierarchies. The general sentiment, however, extends beyond the immediate circumstances. Fear of changes to the status quo routinely shapes legislation. Those in power resist what less fortunate people might regard as progress because the narrow field of opportunities for influence and professional promotion might widen. 

“I wish I didn’t understand why Hutchinson risks damning herself to exile and excommunication just for the thrill of shooting off her mouth and making other people listen up. But this here book is evidence that I have this confrontational, chatty bent myself. I got my first radio job when I was eighteen years old and I’ve been yakking on air or in print ever since. Hutchinson is about to have her life—and her poor family’s—turned upside down just so she can indulge in the sort of smart-alecky diatribe for which I’ve gotten pain for the last twenty years.” 

The Boston Court was on the brink of exonerating Anne Hutchinson when she spoke at length about her blasphemous theology that undermined magistrate and clergy authority. Vowell identifies with Anne Hutchinson for their shared desire to be heard, even if their ideas might offend the audience. Hutchinson, as a Puritan woman, was under severe societal restrictions, relegated to certain types of gendered labor, and forbidden from partaking in formal religious leadership—a field for which she obviously had a passion. Hutchinson’s rejection of the Court’s and her rejection of Puritan gender norms resulted in her banishment to Rhode Island. 

“When Winthrop first mentioned the tiny, ragged settlement of Boston in his journal in 1630, it was to record that a goat had died. Back then, every goat seemed to count. When he died in 1649, even if Boston had yet to become that city upon a hill he’d dreamed of, it was a city nonetheless. Today, from his grave, near John Cotton’s, in the King’s Chapel Burying Ground, you can look across noisy Tremont Street at a bland, concrete office building, a perfect stereotype of capitalist efficiency.”

Modern Americans imagine Puritans as defined by religious freedom and principled hard work. In this passage, Vowell instead links Puritans to capitalism, a system that birthed an international slave trade and deadly working conditions for generations of lower-class laborers.