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Edmund S. MorganThe Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Survival”
In spring of 1630, a thousand new colonists arrived in America after two months’ weary sailing over the Atlantic. The thick forests and hills that greeted them seemed foreboding, and the poor state of the early settlement in Salem redoubled their fears. Many earlier colonists languished in rough hovels, tormented by hunger and hints of scurvy. Indigenous Americans, the French, and Spanish all posed military threats. The new colonists had relatively few supplies due to the constraints of shipping and the inability of many poorer settlers to afford both passage and provisions.
Winthrop immediately spang into action. He organized the settlers, putting them to work clearing land and planting crops. He dispatched a ship, the Lyon, to England with instructions to John Junior to buy and dispatch more food. He negotiated friendly relations with the neighboring Indigenous peoples and managed to trade for food with them. Most importantly, he realized the defects of Salem as a settlement location and explored the coast looking for other sites with richer farmland and good harbors. He decided on the Boston Bay area, moving most of the settlers there. He established the colony’s headquarters at Charlestown first, but then shifted to Boston to secure a better water supply.
While Winthrop brimmed over with energy and enthusiasm in his work and letters home to Margaret, the colonists struggled that first year. Winthrop’s son Henry drowned within a few days of arriving. The harsh winter killed others. Starvation and scurvy threatened the rest until the Lyon returned in February with its cargo of food, including lemon juice to fight the vitamin deficiency that caused scurvy. 200 died and another 200 fled back to England with tales of the deadly American wilderness. Investors and supporters in England gave up the colony as a lost cause and refused to forward any money to it.
Nevertheless, after that first winter, the colony was never again in danger of extinction. The colonists planted their crops as soon as the weather broke, and did well in the new rich farmlands. Winthrop established a farm of 600 acres along the Mystic River. He also had the foresight to bring shipwrights so the colony could begin harvesting furs and fish to trade back to England for needed manufactured goods.
The biggest economic boost, however, came from the 15,000 to 20,000 immigrants who decided to risk the new land in the next few years—including Winthrop’s long-awaited Margaret. They brought manufacturers with them and traded with the old settlers for fresh food. The economic boom did cause inflation, which the authorities tried to fix with government-controlled prices. They failed, but their efforts may have reduced the amount of inflation.
Chapter 6 Summary: “A Special Commission”
Winthrop and the other Puritans conceived of their new community as entering a covenant with God who would bless them if they kept it, allowing them to become an example of goodness to the nations. To fail, however, as the rulers of England had, would invite calamity. Their code of morals was not ultimately that different from most ethics, but the Puritan community took more seriously than most the need to sacrifice selfish motives and vigorously punish all sin before it could endanger the community. Mothers and fathers supervised both children and servants. The unmarried had to live with a family. All community members gathered in church and guarded the morality of the rest.
The problem with strictly policing morality lay in where to draw the line between sin and mere temptation. While Puritans considered drunkenness a sin, alcohol was not itself sinful. At one point they forbade alcohol sales to Indigenous Americans and another time they outlawed toasts, but in both cases revoked those laws as unjustly depriving people of the right to enjoy God’s good gifts in moderation.
Winthrop maintained a healthy sense of moderation in what could be realistically expected of his subjects, but he had to face down many overzealous colonists (especially separatists) who lacked his discernment. In doing so, he needed to avoid alienating them or making them martyrs. Moreover, their inflated spiritual pride and disdain for the Church of England might invite royal intervention. Winthrop’s internal struggles with balancing heavenly and earthly desires and his deliberations on separatism had prepared him to help Massachusetts navigate these same debates writ large.
Puritans wished to do away with bishops, but had two competing visions of what should replace them. Presbyterians wanted to organize churches into groups called “presbyteries,” which in turn would be overseen by synods. They also wanted to continue the traditional practice of admitting to full membership all willing Christians who did not live in public sin. Congregationalists—the preference of most in Massachusetts—believed church communities need not answer to any higher authority and that only the predestined elect should be full members (although everyone ought still to attend services). Contrary to mainstream Protestant theology, they believed that the identity of saints could be discerned in this life. Separatists tended to be Congregationalists, but many Congregationalists still wanted to be part of the Church of England.
The formal process of church membership, in which some settlers judged the saintliness and damnation of others, must have been destabilizing. Furthermore, no central body existed to impose a shared theology, which led to the danger of schism. In practice, however, few complaints are recorded and rational debates about belief usually took place in a civilized fashion. When goodwill and rational argument failed, ministers could meet in informal synods. Winthrop believed that, if those failed, the state had the power to step in and prevent schism.
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Due Form of Government”
In England, men did not yet enjoy the universal right to vote and the same was true of New England. According to the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, authority over the company and colony rested with its official members (“freemen”)—only a dozen men plus Winthrop. They had to meet regularly in a General Court and Court of Assistants and elect officers: A governor, a deputy governor, and assistants. They had complete autonomy to rule the colony, provided they did nothing contrary to the laws of England. The two most influential company men after Winthrop were John Endecott (a former soldier) and Thomas Dudley (the deputy governor). Neither ambitious, prickly man had Winthrop’s moderation. Their sense of ruling by God’s providence reinforced their authority.
Nevertheless, these leaders did not succumb to the temptation to rule as a tiny oligarchy. Instead, they transformed the company charter into the constitution for a commonwealth beginning with a meeting on October 19th, 1630. Practically all adult, church-going males who were not servants became freemen. They could vote in annual elections for the assistants, who formed a legislature. The assistants then elected the governor. Men who lacked the right to vote in England now had it in the colony. Ministers were informally expected to guide the decisions of their congregations to choose truly godly men without seeking office themselves.
Winthrop’s motives are unknown. There is no record of popular demands for it. Some historians suggest that the death of old freemen threatened the ability to have a quorum, but the remaining assistants could have appointed a handful of people instead of the whole colony. The more convincing explanation is the ideology of a covenant. The people had entered a covenant (or sacred agreement) with God like ancient Israel when they joined the colony, but they needed a second covenant to found a legitimate government for it. This decision makes sense in light of the religious requirement and the emphasis that the assistants and governor had to enforce God’s law as they saw fit, rather than emphasizing the agency of the people to make laws. In this way, Winthrop’s ideals are not quite identical to democracy, but overlap.
The early government mostly handled mundane matters, but also made sure God’s commandments were enforced. Suspicion of adultery could lead to fines or the removal of an offending servant from a household, even without proof. Winthrop addressed divisions over doctrine mainly through debate and persuasion. Some older settlers left rather than submitting to the new Puritan rule, but others stayed.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
The Puritan Dilemma is part of a series of biographies of key figures in American history that aims to be accessible to the general educated reader rather than a narrow scholarly audience. In accordance with that goal, Morgan avoids engaging in explicit debate with other historians or giving a detailed analysis of the primary sources on which he draws.
There are a few major instances where his professional interpretation of Winthrop’s career differs from that of the majority of historians during his time. Some of those instances, such as how he stresses the moderation and rational coherence of Winthrop’s version of the Puritan worldview, are an argument made gradually and repeatedly throughout the book. This emphasis is part of his theme of Rehabilitating the Puritans. Morgan does not explicitly mark that kind of argument as controversial, though a reader might deduce that Morgan would not have repeatedly insisted on this understanding of Winthrop if everyone agreed on it. In shorter key episodes, however, Morgan does quickly flag opposing interpretations and offers quick summaries as to why he rejects them.
Chapter 7 is an example of Morgan more explicitly challenging other historians who see a more authoritarian Winthrop. There is no good primary source record that explains the revolutionary decision of the Massachusetts Bay company to remake its governing charter, giving freeman status and voting rights to all church members in the colony. This gap in the evidence leaves room for historians to speculate based upon their reconstruction of the personalities involved.
Morgan doesn’t name any opposing historian. Instead, he offers other interpretations as anonymous possibilities to be considered and rejected. He writes of Winthrop and the other officers, “Possibly they gave way to popular demand, but there is no evidence any such demand existed. Possibly they felt a need to keep their own ranks filled […] [but] they could still have filled vacancies with a few hand-picked men as the need arose” (92). These are two apparently reasonable explanations as to why an authoritarian-minded Winthrop would have felt obligated to open the franchise in the colony and dilute the original leaders’ authority. For each, Morgan offers a summary rebuttal. In a scholarly article, the debate on interpreting Winthrop’s decision could take pages of analysis. For the more general audience of this book, Morgan states the key points in a couple of paragraphs.
Though arguing that Winthrop voluntarily expanded the right to vote, Morgan is careful not to impose modern values on him or to offer an uncritical, glowing portrait of a hero. His interpretation of Winthrop is firmly grounded in the evidence and a serious consideration of the 17th-century Puritan worldview. Aspects of that worldview may look like authoritarianism, such as the belief that magistrates received authority from God rather than voters. Similarly, Puritans believed that the government ought to outlaw a broader range of immoral behavior than contemporary states do. Other aspects might appear democratic or liberal, such as the independence of churches, the lack of ministers in the state, and the need for the people as a whole to enter into a covenant agreement to create the government for their new colony.
Morgan is aware that using these modern categories makes Winthrop hard to understand. Morgan briefly skims through some of these debates, including whether Winthrop should be seen as democratic for extending voting rights to male church members, but not women or those not granted membership in a congregation. Giving more people voting rights is democratic; not granting all capable adults these rights is a failure of democracy. Neither fact, though, captures Winthrop’s intentions.
Winthrop wanted a godly, righteously ruled community that drew on English common law tradition. From that perspective, he desired a government system in which the righteous male elect (that is, church members) agreed to the Puritan experiment in godly society, discerning who best could shepherd them. He also believed that these shepherds or magistrates, once chosen, had to answer to God for their decisions. The people chose these magistrates precisely because they trusted the selected leaders to be the best men in the colony. They would know God’s will and act more wisely than the average person.
By the same reasoning, to have those leaders constantly checked or questioned by people less wise or holy than themselves would be patently absurd, and would interfere with their mission to guide the governed to become better people under God. In this way, Morgan reconciles the apparent contradiction of authoritarianism and democracy in Winthrop: He was a Puritan trying to follow God, with the people united under wise and holy leaders.
