A Puritan Reconsidered

Francis J. Bremer.John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xviii + 478 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $39.95.

Referring to Livy in his Discorsi, Machiavelli wrote: "Amongst all praiseworthy men those are most praised who are heads of states and orderers of religions. Next after them are those who have founded republics or kingdoms." Such would seem a fitting epitaph for the life and career of Massachusetts Bay colony's longtime governor John Winthrop, a man who manifestly fulfilled all of Machiavelli's criteria for praiseworthiness as state-builder, political leader, and "orderer" of religion during his long career as the principal lay figure of early New England. Yet in the subtitle of Francis Bremer's new, definitive biography of Winthrop, the Bay Colony leader is described as "America's Forgotten Founding Father." With presidents and preachers alike regularly invoking Winthrop's magisterial lay sermon, "Model of Christian Charity"—a brilliant discussion of which is included in the book's "Interlude"—such might seem an unduly pessimistic assessment. But there is no doubt that the "Puritan" New England that Winthrop labored so strenuously to build and defend is in a current state of scholarly eclipse that has affected Winthrop's reputation as well. The irony of course is that the journal that Winthrop began when the Arbella was anchored at the Cowes on 29 March 1630 is our principal source for the history of early New England and one of the most compelling documents we have for early America generally. After dominating American religious and political history from the 1930s through the 1950s and social and economic history in the 1960s and 1970s, seventeenth-century New England has for the most part passed out of scholarly fashion. (At an international conference in 1999 on "The Worlds of John Winthrop" organized at Bremer's own Millersville University, one participant whimsically advised "the last Puritan historian to turn off the light.") Such things tend to run in cycles and (uniquely document-rich) colonial New England doubtless will have another day in the sun. Indeed, the publication of this biography, along with Michael Winship's arresting Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace 137in Massachusetts, 1636-1641, perhaps suggest that a change is at hand.

Despite early invocations of Stephen Greenblatt's renaissance "self-fashioning," Bremer's is a traditional narrative biography by an author who makes few attempts to hide his admiration for his subject. This is an admiration most readers will end up sharing. John Winthrop led a highly eventful life and will always emerge as an exemplary figure for those who continue to admire the saints. As with its much-assigned predecessor, Edmund Morgan's Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, Bremer's biography occasionally reads like a lawyer's brief, defending Winthrop from the various list of Laudians, enthusiasts, and precisionists who opposed his definition of the New England Way. But the care and astonishing thoroughness that characterize the book make it persuasive even when dealing with some of the knottiest issues in the historiography of New England.

Bremer's greatest achievement, and it is here that his work most contrasts with the Morgan biography, is in his treatment of the English background. It was in England that Winthrop's overarching vision of becoming a godly magistrate was shaped, largely through his service on the Suffolk commission of the peace and immersion in the Reformed-dominated culture of the Stour Valley (or, more negatively, in London's corruption-plagued Court of Wards). As the author points out, Winthrop was a fully fledged man of forty-two when he migrated to the New World and the pre-migration shaping of his character and values should not be "merely sketched or entirely ignored" (p. xv). This oversight Bremer has now remedied, although some may wish for a less detailed treatment of Winthrop's ancestors, with Chapter 1 opening in October 1498. Some of this background material is almost comic, such...