CORE HUMANITIES 203 SECTION 1002 //DR STEVEN P. //SUBJ: CITY UPON THE HILL
(The Roundabout)--Sailing from England fearing possible action taken against the Calvinist-Puritan group, John Winthrop organized nearly a dozen ships, crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Salem in the summer of 1630. But there wasn't enough room or water there so the band of Puritans eventually settled what is now present day Boston. During the Atlantic crossing, Winthrop gave a high-winded speech on board the Arabella about God, duty and the (soon to be) American way of life in which he alluded to building a city upon a hill that would be the envy of the world. But the city would eventually be built on land taken from the Native Americans who had lived there for at least two centuries.
Pequot-Americans and other indigenous tribes had long been working the land, hunting and fishing and growing crops but all of that would change when, as Tocqueville called them, the "Europeans" arrived. There was a fundamental cultural outlook on life stemming from the strict Puritan code that disallowed other religious viewpoints, one of the principal reasons they left England in the first place. Confronted with the pagan rituals and loose moral codes of the Indians, it is no wonder that soon the Puritans would begin to question why the natives were allowed to keep all the fertile land much in need for plantations and exploitation. The colonists were not directly under any requirement from the homeland to make the New World profitable but were bound to a charter that would at least guarantee some sort of nafta with the King. Where the Indians stood in it became muddled in competition from other British settlers, numerous tribes all of whom could not get along, and the Dutch. The result was ultimately a war, the Pequot War of 1636-38 to be specific. The Pequots, by the way, was already faced with extermination due to that other great killer of Indian nations, smallpox.
Speechmaker John Winthrop, if not a key player in the decision to go to war with the Pequots, certainly didn't climb back up on the pulpit of the Arabella with another lecture on treating everybody equal, with one of his "four things to be propounded," as; " love one another with a pure heart fervently," and " bear one another's burdens." That translated to love one another's land fervently and bear one another's crops and furs. Without going into the details of the outcome of the war, history reports the Pequots were massacred (Mystic River, 1637), women and children included. Those that survived were shipped off to the West Indies to become plantation slaves; except for a few that Winthrop adopted as household servants, in other words, slaves.
Winthrop's city upon the hill was built on expropriated Indian land following the extermination of the tribe that owned it, with the help of turncoat Native-American allies, and became known as Boston, ground zero of the American Revolution.
Supporting Documents:
"A Model of Christian Charity," John Winthrop. https://www.coursehero.com/file/16242329/American-Exceptionalism1/
Sketch of Winthrop on Arabella at Salem--http://gerard-tondu.blogspot.com/2014/11/1630-puritans-found-boston.html
Mystic River Massacre-1637--https://worldhistoryproject.org/1637/5/26/the-mystic-massacre
Image: http://gerard-tondu.blogspot.com/2015/03/1637-pequot-war.html
Indian-Pilgrim Image--https://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/the-narragansetts-and-pequot-indians.htm
Background Notes--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Winthrop
CORE HUMANITIES 203 SECTIO1002// DR STEVEN P. //SUBJ: CITY UPON THE HILL