Early Massachusetts
A Puritan Commonwealth on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean was the ideal that Governor Winthrop and his seventeenth-century colleagues had in mind, writes Richard C. Simmons.
On May 15th, 1629, John Winthrop, soon to be the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay, wrote to his wife about his fears for England’s future and of the afflictions he thought God would bring upon his native land. Then, anticipating his optimistic leadership of the Puritan migration to the New World, he wrote:
‘...be of good comfort, if the Lord seeth it will be good for us, he will provide a shelter and a hiding place for us and others, as a Zoar for Lott, Sarapthah for his prophet; if not yet he will not forsake us.’
This easy familiarity with the Scriptures and assumption of his correspondent’s similar knowledge of them, as well as Winthrop’s application of Biblical precedents to a contemporary situation, were characteristic of the Puritan.
When New England became the ‘shelter and hiding place’, as Winthrop had foretold, the Massachusetts Puritans drew a whole series of parallels between their position in the American wilderness and the flight of the Jews to Canaan and, in their new home, attempted to recreate some of the salient features of the Jewish state.
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