These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Between 1630 and 1640, the years during which King Charles ruled without Parliament, a generation of ocean voyagers, some twenty thousand dissenters, fled England and settled in New England. One of these people was John Winthrop, a stern and uncompromising man with a Vandyke beard and a collar of starched ruffles, who decided to join a new expedition to found a colony in Massachusetts Bay. Unlike Bradford’s pilgrims, who wanted to separate from the Church of England, Winthrop was one of a band of dissenters known as Puritans—because they wanted to purify the Church of England—who lost their positions in court after the dissolution of Parliament. In 1630, Winthrop, who would become the first governor of Massachusetts, wrote an address called “A Model of Christian Charity” to his fellow settlers. The Mayflower compact had described the union of Plymouth’s settlers into a body politic, but Winthrop described the union of his people in the body of Christ, held together by the ligaments of love.