The Puritan Errand: God's City on a Hill

On a ship called the Arbella, somewhere in the North Atlantic in the spring of sixteen thirty, a Puritan lawyer named John Winthrop gave a sermon that would echo through American political rhetoric for four centuries. He told his congregation they were building a city upon a hill, and that the eyes of all people would be upon them.

Winthrop was not the first English settler in Massachusetts. He was not even the first Puritan. But when his fleet of eleven ships arrived at Salem in June of sixteen thirty, carrying roughly seven hundred colonists, he inaugurated something new: a systematic attempt to build a godly commonwealth on American soil. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was unlike Plymouth. It was not a ragged band of desperate separatists. It was organized, capitalized, and ambitious.

The Puritans brought with them a vision of society that bound religion and law together. Church membership determined civic standing. The colony's General Court was reformed in sixteen thirty-four to include deputies elected by the towns. Education was mandatory. The printing press arrived in sixteen thirty-eight. Harvard College was founded in sixteen thirty-six, within six years of the colony's founding, to train a literate clergy.

They were, by their own account, a people of covenant. They believed they had made a contract with God, and that failure to keep it would bring divine punishment. It was a powerful and often terrifying worldview, one that shaped Massachusetts law, culture, and politics for two centuries.

The city on a hill was real, imperfect, and enormously consequential. Its founders knew it too.