We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.
Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality.
So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. Others focus more on the arrival of Europeans. Amerigo Vespucci gets mentioned. The coming of Columbus. Jamestown, Captain Smith, Pocahontas. So many possible answers, so many different times and places to begin.
And always, in the midst of these responses, one answer rises among the rest: Pilgrim Landing, Plymouth Rock, and the Puritans. The question of American origins, of course, has no real answer. In that sense, historical origin stories function primarily as present-day descriptions. Each answer defines what a person means by America. It is a long story, a tale teeming with diversity. Answers that emphasize the Revolutionary era, meanwhile, define America much more narrowly.
Such responses focus on one particular nation coming into being at one particular time. Even here, however, the distinctions can be quite telling. No doubt, most people see these answers as related, but the specific responses embed much different accounts of what makes America America after all.
When respondents point to Jamestown, meanwhile, a new element enters the picture. Jamestown is the first permanent English settlement in what would later become the United States. Jamestown outweighs and overshadows all other potential nationalities, ethnicities, races, immigrants, and colonial experiments, along with all their consequences and contributions.
Few people, for example, remember that the Spanish established St. Augustine in Florida in , more than four decades before the English came to Virginia. The French also came earlier than the English, beginning explorations in the sixteenth century and establishing Quebec in , then pushing into what is now the Midwest and down the Mississippi.
President Ronald Reagan delivering his farewell address in January To understand Winthrop and the Puritans accurately requires familiarity with the Bible, the fundamental guide for Puritan life in the 17 th century.
The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world. And Reagan missed the irony of holding up the Puritans as beacons of freedom in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony of the s was anything but free. It was an exclusive theocracy of like-minded souls, where free-thinking nonconformists were considered existential threats to the entire fragile undertaking, punishable by banishment. Winthrop would be rolling over in his grave to know that a cheerleader for free-market individualism had so thoroughly warped his Calvinist sense of self-denial, self-doubt, and self-criticism.
Written by Ted Sorensen, its themes were Puritan themes — obligation and responsibility — announcing,. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good. John Winthrop , who helped found the Massachusetts Bay colony, was the first person to apply the phrase to America.
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