Asher K. Sisneros
Dr. Gary North
American Literature
October 4, 2024
John Cotton, John Winthrop, and Mary Rowlandson lived in America during the beginning of the English colonization. They were all Puritans who shared a common mission and calling, and they had a vision for what the Puritan experiment in the wilderness would look like. Today, the West is blessed with the opportunity to read their writings and get inside the minds of each of them to understand their motivations. They tell a fascinating tale, providing insight into their views on the Puritan experiment in the wilderness.
As Governor John Winthrop prepared to lead the Massachusetts Bay Colony across the Atlantic Ocean to their new home in North America, Pastor John Cotton delivered a fiery sermon, titled God’s Promise to His Plantation (1630). The underlying point of his sermon was that the Puritans, by moving to the New World, were leaving the battles behind in England. They were crossing the Atlantic to avoid conflict with the King of England. Under the rule of King Charles and Archbishop William Laud, Puritan-Anglican relations soured and eventually precipitated into a civil war. Sensing such tensions rising, Cotton blessed the expedition as a peaceful means of attaining religious liberty without violently rebelling against the King. Although the colony was legally under the religious rule of the King, the Atlantic Ocean made his intervention impossible. So from a functional perspective, the Puritans had complete autonomy, and Cotton recognized this.
In Winthrop’s address A Model on Christian Charity (1630), he called on the colonists to exercise love and compassion on each other, lending a helping hand when their neighbor was in distress. Their expedition would only be successful through Christian charity, and it was incumbent on them to exercise it. Nobody knew what they would face. As far as he was concerned, the wilderness of America may as well have been a new planet altogether. Their mission was to build a new society, what he called a “city on a hill,” but Winthrop believed the success of their new society was dependent on Christian cooperation under crisis.
Mary Rowlandson gives the greatest insight into the conditions of the American wilderness. She lived as an English prisoner of war during King Philip’s War. It was one of the earliest major conflicts between the English and the Native Americans, and it resulted in tremendous casualties. Approximately eight percent of all English males and forty percent of the Indian population were killed during the conflict. Rowlandson was captured during one of the Indian sieges. Many of her friends and family were killed in the attack, and her daughter was shot, dying a few days later. After eleven weeks in captivity, watching atrocities from the Indians, she was ransomed to the English for twenty pounds. She writes about the ordeal in her book, Captivity and Restoration (1682). Although she saw God’s providence in everything that happened, she also held the Indians morally accountable for their cruelty. In her book, Rowlandson describes the state of America as a competition between two cultures: Native brutality and Christian morality.
In conclusion, the writings of Cotton, Winthrop, and Rowlandson help modern Americans understand their view on the Puritan experiment. To Cotton, it was an attempt to peacefully exercise religious liberty; to Winthrop, it was the building of a new society; and to Rowlandson, it was a battle between cultures.
Asher Sisneros 