The Journal of John Winthrop

"John Winthrop keeps a journal from the time that he journeys over in 1629/1630. It’s one of the most complete and detailed records that we have of those first decades of the plantation, this separate colony. He’s an extremely keen-eyed observer, which is characteristic of Puritans as a highly literate and self-scrutinising people. In their theology the more smug you are about your own salvation, the less likely you are to be one of God’s elect. Puritans are forever searching themselves for portents of their own destiny, which tends to make many of them very good observers; Winthrop is one of those. He’s also in a position of civil leadership for much of the period of his journal. The Journal of John Winthrop is as interesting for the things that he doesn’t want us to think about as for the things that he does. We do see some of his ideas about order and propriety and righteousness in the organisation of the city, but we also see the city’s ties to markets around the English Atlantic, including to slave markets. It’s from Winthrop that we learn about the first enslaved people who come to New England from the Caribbean. We see a tremendous amount about relationships with indigenous communities. Much of this material, through our twenty-first century eyes, reflects quite poorly on the Puritan project. Much of what we know about early tensions over radical Protestantism—the things that put the lie to the myth of seeking religious toleration—come from Winthrop. He talks about the need to winnow out the people whose beliefs are purer than the Puritans. There’s a natural drama to what he shows readers about planting a colony on the seventeenth century equivalent of the moon. The day-to-day wear-and-tear of it. His journal gives a terrific sense of the fabric of the city, of how fragile the enterprise often was, its internal contradictions, its lofty goals and its more prosaic daily realities. He’s a poignant documenter of his moment. It’s obligatory to state what Winthrop himself did so much efface: Boston is built on the land of Wampanoag peoples, which was expropriated by the English. As soon as the English plantation that becomes Boston establishes itself in the 1630s, it is a pretty strongly English place until the first big wave of Irish, German Palatinate and some French Huguenot immigration in the second decade of the eighteenth century. The other different thing that distinguishes Boston from New York or Philadelphia and also the reason that its demographic profile is ethnically stable, is that as Winthrop said, “the eyes of all the world were upon them” until the English Civil War of 1642, at which point a lot of reformed Protestants want to stay and fight it out in England in the Civil War, and then in the Commonwealth period. So, it’s not a place of huge in-migration until the second quarter of the eighteenth century. It grew mostly by natural increase for a much longer time than polyglot New York or parts of the colonies that had more direct relationships with the transatlantic slave trade. Although Boston has a foundational and enduring relationship with slavery, for the most part it is not a direct debarkation point for transatlantic shipping; its relationship with slavery is much more mediated by the Caribbean colonies. There are people of African descent here from the end of the 1630s. But you wouldn’t have heard large varieties of African languages on the streets of Boston as you would have, say, in Charleston."