by Sarah Vowell
Here is the important difference between Massachusetts Bay and Narragansett Bay. Quakers such as Mary Dyer are hanged in Boston Common. In Rhode Island, there is bickering, but there is no banishing. There are mean-spirited spiritual debates, but no forced and freezing hikes of exile.
In 1675, Metacom, aka King Philip (the son of Williams’s old Wampanoag friend Massasoit) assembled an army of allied native warriors, attacking English settlements across New England. In 1676, some of Philip’s Narragansett allies burned down Providence. One English resident of the town believed the Word of God would protect him from the native invaders, who nevertheless “ripped him open, and put his Bible in his belly,” according to one contemporary account. Williams’s house went up in smoke, along with his lifelong sympathy for his Narragansett neighbors. After Philip’s death—his head was displayed on a pike in Plymouth for the next twenty years—Williams was one of the colonial officials at the end of the war who approved the sale of vanquished Indians into slavery, primarily in Bermuda, where their descendants still reside.
Though Williams complained of being “old and weak and bruised” with “lameness on both my feet,” he lived to see Providence rebuilt. He is well remembered there, having died in 1683 at the age of eighty. What was left of his remains was reburied in 1939 in a park on Prospect Terrace in which a colossal statue of Williams stares out across his city, giving him a view of the statue Independent Man on top of the Rhode Island State Capitol, where the Royal Charter of 1663 is, incidentally, housed.
One morning, I sat on a bench near the Williams statue eating breakfast, and from the open window of a passing car I heard rapper Eminem on the radio, asking, “May I have your attention, please?” as Williams must have asked so many times, trying to get the men and women of New England to hear what he had to say.
So Providence is an appropriate place to ponder Williams, but the best spot in Rhode Island to commune with his legacy is in the Touro Synagogue, in Newport. This fine colonial temple with its arches and columns is the oldest synagogue in the United States. The building was dedicated in 1763. But the congregation dates back to 1658, when fifteen Jewish families sailed from the West Indies because they had heard of Roger Williams and his colony’s commitment to freedom of worship.
In 1790, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson come to Newport, stumping for the Bill of Rights. (Rhode Island is the last state to ratify the Constitution precisely because its citizens hold out for a bill of rights so they can retain the freedom of religion they have enjoyed since the days of Roger Williams.) Moses Seixas, a member of the Touro Synagogue, wrote Washington a letter asking about his administration’s policy toward Jews. Washington’s response, addressed “to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island,” reassures Seixas and his brethren that the American government goes beyond mere tolerance:
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.
One hundred and seventy years after the first president wrote those words pledging freedom of religion in the United States, the thirty-fifth president was elected. John Winthrop would have been delighted that the new president came from a Boston family. That is, until Winthrop learned that that Boston family was Catholic.
In a kind of microbial comeuppance, the Protestant bastion Winthrop was able to build in the 1630s because a plague had wiped out its original Indian inhabitants by 1620 would become the Catholic capital of America after an infectious mold destroyed the Irish potato crop in the 1840s, flinging the refugees of the resulting famine, among them the ancestors of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, to Boston in droves, bringing their “popery” with them.
On January 9, 1961, eleven days before his inauguration, President-elect Kennedy gives a speech at the State House on Boston’s Beacon Hill to a Joint Convention of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. His opening remarks, including the fact that his grandparents were born there and the hope that his grandchildren will be, too, seem sentimental on the page. But in the sound recording of that event, the tone of his voice is solemn, nearly fu nereal. He claims it is not a farewell address, but that is how it sounds. He calls himself a “son of Massachusetts,” and here that does not come off as boosterism. To be a son of Massachusetts is to carry the cumbersome weight of history, though Kennedy is proud to bear that burden.
“For no man about to enter high office in this country can ever be unmindful of the contributions which this state has made to our national greatness,” he tells them. “Its leaders have shaped our destiny long before the great republic was born. For what Pericles said of the Athenians has long been true of this commonwealth: ‘We do not imitate—for we are a model to others.’ ”
For a man who always looks so crisp and modern on film, that last opinion could not be more antique. Nowadays, I cannot imagine that an American president from Massachusetts would ever be allowed to stand up in his home state and evoke Pericles in order to put forth the notion that the rest of the country should look up to the place nicknamed “Taxachusetts,” the place where men are allowed to marry other men. Nowadays, I cannot imagine an American from Massachusetts could get elected president period, much less a Harvard grad prone to elitist quotations from ancient Greece.
Kennedy goes on to say,
The enduring qualities of Massachusetts—the common threads woven by the Pilgrim and the Puritan, the fisherman and the farmer, the Yankee and the immigrant—will not be and could not be forgotten in this nation’s executive mansion.
“Allow me to illustrate,” he says. He talks about how he’s spent the last couple of months planning for his presidency. As he makes ready, one man has been on his mind.
“I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier,” Kennedy says.
Then he boils down the two phrases from “A Model of Christian Charity” that mean the most to him: “We must always consider, [Winthrop] said, that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
I fall for those words every time I hear them, even though they’re dangerous, even though they’re arrogant, even though they’re rude.
“Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us,” Kennedy points out. He does not mention that the whole world is staring in America’s direction because we have a lot of giant scary bombs, but I am guessing that is partly what he meant. He says that he hopes that all branches of government, from the top on down, are mindful of “their great responsibilities.” Responsibilities that include trying not to use the giant scary bombs.
“For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arbella in 1630,” he continues. “We are committing ourselves to tasks of state-craft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was by terror without and disorder within.”
He then paraphrases the same verse from the Gospel of Luke that John Cotton evoked in 1630 in his farewell sermon to the passengers on the Arbella. “For of those to whom much is given, much is required.” He says that history will judge him and everyone else on four things—courage, judgment, integrity, and dedication, “the historic qualities of the Bay Colony and the Bay State,” Kennedy adds.
He does not sound entirely steady. “I ask for your help and your prayers, as I embark on this new and solemn journey,” he pleads. At this grave moment, he is not a man merely talking about the Arbella. He is on the dock in Southampton, ready to board the Arbel
la, along with the people before him. The mood is ominous and the fear is real. But this is a new beginning and he is not alone.
MOST USEFUL PRIMARY SOURCES
The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, edited by Perry Miller, seven volumes (Russell & Russell, 1964; based on the Narragansett Club edition of 1867).
The Correspondence of Roger Williams, edited by Glenn W. LaFantasie, two volumes (Rhode Island Historical Society/ Brown University Press, 1988).
John Cotton, “God’s Promise to His Plantation” included in The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, edited by Alan Heimert (Harvard University Press, 1985).
The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, edited by Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Harvard University Press, 1996).
John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War, included in Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology, edited by David D. Hall (Princeton University Press, 2004).
The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, edited by Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (Dover, 2001; originally published by Harper & Row, 1963). Includes, among many others, William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, Edward Johnson’s Wonder-working Providence, John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity,” Thomas Hooker’s “A True Night of Sin,” Anne Bradstreet’s poems, and Thomas Shephard, Jr.’s, letter to his son.
Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (Applewood Books, 1997; reprint of the fifth edition published by the Rhode Island and Providence Plantations Tercentenary Committee, 1936; originally published in London, 1643). A Key is included in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, but this edition, issued by this heroic publisher, is especially handy and beautiful.
The Winthrop Papers, volumes 3, 4, and 5, edited by Allyn Bailey Forbes (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943-47).
William Wood, New England’s Prospect (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994; originally published in London, 1634).
John Underhill, Newes from America (University of Nebraska, 2007; originally published, 1638).
NOTE ON LANGUAGE
I have capitalized “God” throughout for two reasons—because the Protestants’ deity is a character Himself, and as a way of constantly reminding the reader how present and powerful and terrifying this character was in the Puritans’ lives. I have also slightly modernized some seventeenth-century spellings. There wasn’t any uniform English spelling at the time, anyway. So when quoting letters and sermons, I have, for example, changed “humili tie” to “humility” and purged the superfluous “k” from the end of “Mystick” and the extra “l” from “modell” to make the text more uniform and easier on the reader. I have also gone with the spelling “Pequot” for that tribe, even though Winthrop and others called them “Pequod” (which is of course the spelling Herman Melville went with when naming Ahab’s ship after them in Moby-Dick).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the ten years he’s been my editor and friend, Geoffrey Kloske has never let me down. The words “I’m so lucky” and “breathing down my neck” spring to mind.
Special thanks to: Amy Vowell and Owen Brooker for once again traveling with me to places they would prefer to avoid; David Levinthal for his cover photograph; Marcel Dzama for his illustration; Steven “the Colonel” Barclay and Sara Bixler at Steven Barclay Agency; Jaime Wolf for lawyering; Laura Perciasepe, Mih-Ho Cha, and copy editor Ed Cohen at Riverhead; Nick Hornby for his Englishness and kindness, though not necessarily in that order; David Shipley at the New York Times for editing an essay I cannibalized herein; Ira Glass for editing a This American Life essay I pilfered here as well, and for his many years of friendship, partnership, and editorial stewardship—all the best ships, really; my generous theological pen pal Reza Aslan; and always and particularly Bennett Miller for being Bennett Miller.
Also helpful and/or encouraging: J. J. Abrams; Brad Bird; Eric Bogosian; Michael Comeau and Jennifer Fauxsmith at the Massachusetts Archives; Patrick Daughters; Jeremy Dibbell and Elaine Grublin at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Shelley Dick; Dave Eggers; Michael and Jamie Giacchino; Eric Gilliland; Jake Gyllenhaal; Daniel Handler; John Hodgman; Spike Jonze; Ben Karlin; Catherine Keener; Nick Laird; Lisa Leingang; Greil and Jenny Marcus; Tom McCarthy; Clyde, Dermot, Ellen, Kieran, and Michael Mulroney for their hospitality on Cape Cod; Jim Nelson; John Oliver; John Petrizzo; Christopher Quinn; David Rakoff; David Rosenthal; Rodney Rothman; David Sedaris; John-Mario Sevilla; Jonathan Marc Sherman; Zadie Smith; the Family Sontheimer; Pat and Janie Vowell for parenting; Gina Way; Wendy Weil; and Stu Zicherman.
This book is dedicated to Scott Seeley, Ted Thompson, and Joan Kim, the founding staff of 826NYC in Brooklyn. They share a reverence for words and the ideal of community with the Massachusetts Bay Colony (but not the banishing or the burning people alive). Thanks to them, the city on the hill might be Park Slope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH VOWELL is the author of Assassination Vacation, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Take the Cannoli, and Radio On. She is a contributing editor for public radio’s This American Life. She lives in New York City.
