John Winthrop's "Model" of American Affiliation

Recently, scholars have begun to question the Age of Reason's idealization of and dedication to dispassionate reason, and to chart what one collection calls, somewhat infelicitously, the "emotional history of the United States" (Stearns and Lewis). In his investigation of early American affect, Peter Coviello argues that the nation emerges in the rhetoric of its important polemical writers, Jefferson, Paine and Wheatley, not from particular "state dictates" or political theories, but through the strategic evocation of potent emotions of loss and separation that enable a quite disparate and widely separated colonial populace to bond together imaginatively as a unified whole (441–42). This "odd civic intimacy" not only precedes and makes possible the political constitution of the new nation but it establishes the capacity for impassioned response as a prerequisite for virtuous republican citizenship. This requires a reconsideration of the standing of women and people of color, who were traditionally excluded from participation in the public realm because of their perceived link with untrammeled emotion (Coviello 457, 443).

A "seminal" precursor of this emotional collectivity, according to Coviello, is John Winthrop's famous address, "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered in the spring of 1630, probably at Southampton to a band of Protestant dissenters on the eve of their departure to establish a "purified" commonwealth in the new world.¹ What Jefferson "retrieves" from this lay sermon, in Coviello's account, is an early blueprint for American exceptionalism in which affect is central "to the mutuality that defines a civic body" (462). While "exceptionalism" may indeed be a legacy of the visionary Puritan leader, Winthrop does not dwell on the "agonizing affection" Jefferson invokes at the dramatic climax of his initial version of the Declaration of Independence, which Coviello analyzes so adeptly, but on a form of Christian love indissolubly entangled with classical, early Christian, and Renaissance friendship discourses and the legal language of contract to which these give rise.²

In fact, the multivalent exchange Winthrop recommends to his followers, which he extols as "a most equall and sweet kinde of Commerce,"³ more nearly and unwittingly presages the imperial economic vision Tom Paine vividly painted for indecisive colonists in 1776 in his widely circulated pamphlet "Common Sense." In passionate prose, Paine urges separation from England, so that the colonies can free themselves from a heartless "Parent Country" to become a "continental" nation able to "carry our friendship on a larger scale" and to "claim brotherhood with every European Christian," and whose master "plan is commerce" (19–20).

For Paine, and for many an eighteenth-century treaty-writer, "amity" between nations not only indicated the cessation of conflict but was the necessary precursor of America's real purpose: economic development through trade. A close examination of the sources and dynamics of Winthrop's vaunted "charity" reveals the imbrication of friendship as social and spiritual affiliation and commercial relations. It also discloses a strategic slippage characteristic of early Protestant culture between the homo-normative logic of friendship and the heteronormative logic of marriage that produces a curious effect: the oscillation between friendship's "ideal" but masculine egalitarianism and the gendered hierarchy of marriage. What may have been radical in Winthrop's day, as we will see, for later generations ratifies a conservative social agenda in which women are the "equals" of men in neither marriage nor friendship.

Contexts for Winthrop's "Charity"

Winthrop founded his famous plan or "model" for the "City upon a Hill" he envisioned in New England on an understanding of love, in the original Greek agape, which early Church fathers called Christian brotherhood or fellowship. The Vulgate renders this form of affiliation as caritas, while the Geneva and King James Bibles sometimes translate it as "charity." ⁴ What emerges from the scholarly debate over nomenclature is an understanding of Christian agape and caritas that is tangled up in the shifting and diverse meanings of the ancient Greek term philotes and the philia and amicitia of later classical philosophers, not to mention the other prominent human affect the Greeks called eros.⁵ David Konstan argues that Christian writers generally...