Wordy Shipmates

I just finished another of my men's book club selections: Sarah Vowell's Wordy Shipmates, a somewhat irreverent and characteristically sarcastic exploration of our Puritan founders. Despite the sometimes flippant asides, Vowell's history is well grounded and accurate. Having spent some years in graduate school reading Perry Miller's classic works (some of Vowell's sources) and researching seventeenth-century English Puritans and the related religious strife and civil war, background to my study of John Donne and John Milton, I was already fairly well acquainted with many Puritan beliefs and the attendant level of intolerance. These were the folks who not only established their own little theocracy in America, but also chose to follow the rather unyielding Oliver Cromwell, who killed the king and replaced monarchy with a tyranny so offensive that the British soon welcomed the return of the king's son and have been more or less willing monarchists ever since.

But while Vowell gives Cromwell and the English civil war a passing glance, her real interest is the complicated history of the American Puritans, and not the old Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation, but the ones who came after and set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony: John Winthrop, John Cotton, Anne Hutchinson, and (my hero) Roger Williams, who must have been one of the most exasperating men who ever lived. He and Hutchinson provide proof, if any were needed, that some ideas, particularly religious ideas, followed to their logical conclusions can make other humans, and especially Puritans, decide to run you out of town, or worse. And apparently it was worse in Hutchinson's case. According to Vowell, Winthrop and the other Puritan worthies had to resort to founding Harvard College to make sure the men would never again be embarrassed by some smart alecky woman.

I hope it isn't giving too much away to suggest that the real hero of the book, if that's the right term, is John Winthrop, the frequent governor and leader of the Bay Colony, whose journals provide the major source for Vowell's stories. Winthrop's public stances and private agonies provide the complicated and sometimes contradictory philosophical background to some of the more disturbing moments in early American history. It's essential to understand that these Puritans were Calvinists who believed so firmly in divine providence that they assumed everyone was born either saved or damned, and still they were driven to banish and even execute those among them who questioned the colony's religious status quo. Winthrop subscribed to his own brand of limited Christian charity, but woe be unto those who didn't take his generously offered guidance and advice. These good Christians, for example, professed to love the Indians, but happily celebrated with days of thanksgiving after burning them alive, including women and children, in their villages.

Roger Williams, who had his own peculiar notion of God's will, apparently could get along with no one for long, and so eventually was banished and had to set up his own colony among the Indians in Rhode Island. He was a big believer in the separation of the state from religion, but he nevertheless reserved the right to harangue anyone whose religious views differed from his own. He supposed it was his duty to set them on the right path, but he didn't banish them or put them in jail, and so his colony became a haven for all the dissenters who were tossed out of the Bay Colony or were not welcome elsewhere.

Vowell's attitude is skeptical and somewhat sarcastic throughout, but she also acknowledges that the Puritans were nothing if not devout. They knew their Bible and they believed in divine providence. Winthrop's celebrated image of their colony and America as an exemplary city on a hill continues to influence our own national mythology on all sides of the political spectrum. But Vowell points out that the vision has been a dangerous illusion that has fostered some of the worst as well as the best of our actions, and continues to haunt our national identity. Just as the Puritans believed they were chosen by God, so Americans remain quick to assert similar claims to exemplary status. Lately, we seem more inclined to follow after John Winthrop's delusions regarding American exceptionalism than Roger Williams's more hard won belief in the importance of tolerance, especially for those with whom we most strongly disagree.

Finally, Vowell's story of our Puritan origins made me realize once again that our national mythology is founded on some very selective readings of our history. Vowell points out that the behavior of the Puritan colonists toward the Pequots and other original inhabitants was all too predictive of our intentions and later actions as a nation. Americans have been blessed in many ways but have also sometimes squandered those blessings and behaved badly towards our neighbors and those who stood in the way of our national ambitions. Perhaps there is, after all, a Biblical lesson in our American origins. Perhaps with our vision fixed on that city on the hill, we have overlooked the fact of our original sin. What sort of divine providence can there be for a nation founded on the displacement of our land's original inhabitants and the slavery of so many of its earliest immigrants? Is it right to celebrate that history, or better to ignore it? But can we ignore it?