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Afterword John Winthrop, Jr., died on April 5, 1676, in Boston, where, despite failing health, he had been helping frame the colonial response to the continuing devastation of King Philip’s War. The preceding month had brought fierce Indian attacks to seven New England towns; colonial prospects for winning the war were in doubt. Nevertheless, the anxious and beleaguered colonists paused to ceremonially mourn the passing of a leader they had come to revere as much for knowledge and compassion as for service. “The Blaze of Towns was up like Torches light, To guide him to his Grave,” eulogized the Boston poet Benjamin Tompson. Forty-four years previously, Winthrop had been welcomed to Boston with the sound of artillery company musket volleys as he came ashore from the English ship Lyon. On Monday, April 10, Winthrop was carried to the sound of drums, horns, and minute gun salutes from the same artillery company to the “old Burying place.” There, he was laid to rest in the tomb of his father. In the wake of his passing, contemporaries who summed up Winthrop’s contributions to New England consistently noted three things: the depth and usefulness of his alchemical knowledge; his commitment to tolerance, especially in religious matters; and his political acumen. Each of these traits was deeply intertwined with the alchemical culture that had been a central feature of his own life and that had, through Winthrop and his associates, put a lasting imprint on New England’s emerging culture. 1. In March Indians had attacked Groton, Longmeadow, Northampton, Marlboro, and Rehoboth , Massachusetts, as well as destroyed Simsbury, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island. [Benjamin Tompson], New-Englands Tears for Her Present Miseries: or, A Late and True Relation of the Calamities . . . (London, 1676), 7; J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, II (Hartford, Conn., 1852), 432–433, 452–453; Samuel A. Green, ed., Diary by Increase Mather, March, 167–December, 1676 (Cambridge, 1900), 27–28; Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston, 1930), 287; M. Halsey Thomas, ed., The Diaryof Samuel Sewall, 167–17 (New York, 1973), I, 15. 2. Benjamin Tompson, the Boston poet who eulogized Winthrop twice—in a poetic account of King Philip’s War and an elegiac broadside—praised Winthrop as a charitable alchemical physician , an incomparable mineralogist, a leader of “Meekness and Justice” committed to “modest Afterword · 0 As a Christian alchemist in Puritan New England, John Winthrop, Jr., was a stellar man of his times, though not a man for all times. He embodied the notion of a fully integrated life, one in which a scientific spirit, social spirit, medical spirit, political spirit, and religious belief were complementary and symbiotic. He also embodied a set of ideals and aspirations that resulted from the unique confluence of confessional conflict and scientific discovery particular to the early modern period. He and many of his contemporaries believed that religion and science were deeply intertwined, that through the successful pursuit of divinely inspired alchemical discovery the world could be improved and the ultimate goal of Christian endeavor—the return of Christ to rule the earth—accelerated. These ideals and aspirations, and the theories of scientific discovery they produced, did not survive the centuries following Winthrop’s death any better than Puritanism. Important aspects of the alchemical culture Winthrop helped bring to New England, however, did. These became foundational threads in the complex tapestry of New England ’s culture, and, like Puritanism, their influence still resonates. Yankee convictions about the importance of knowledge and discovery as tools for social improvement, the idea that technology can solve most of society’s problems , and the notion still prevalent in many circles that America has a duty to lead the world in scientific discovery echo in secular and nationalist form the more prayerful and ecumenical aspirations that ascended with the smoke from Winthrop’s alchemical furnaces. Despite the stresses of war that preoccupied his final days, Winthrop could, at the conclusion of his life, look back upon much with satisfaction. His medical service to his generation had made him a beloved and revered patriarch. Moreover, through his support and example, a younger generation of healers—men such as James Noyes, Gershom Bulkeley, Thomas Palmer, and his own son Wait Winthrop—were continuing to provide New Englanders greatly appreciated alchemical medical services. A plan had also been advanced to build an alchemical laboratory at Harvard College, and the number of people studying the spagyric arts in New...

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