Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,762

This is the grave of John Winthrop, Jr., or John Winthrop the Younger as he was known in ye olden days.

Born in 1606 in Groton, Suffolk, England, Winthrop grew up in the radical Protestant world that the Anglicans could not control once it ruled the Catholic Church illegitimate. Hardly anyone could claim a deeper relationship to the rise of Puritanism than the son of John Winthrop, also buried here of course, along with various other Winthrops over the years. The family was well off and Winthrop rose through very good schools, went to college at Trinity in Dublin, and then passed the bar in 1627.

Winthrop was as deeply committed to Puritanism as his father and he was on the Duke of Buckingham’s expedition to provide relief for Protestants in France. He spent the next year traveling in Europe, reaching as far as the Ottoman Empire, before returning to England in 1628. His father went to America in 1630 and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Winthrop following him in 1631. Naturally, he was at his father’s side and played important roles in the new colony over the next many years, often traveling between Boston and London for various reasons, including financial and political. He returned to the colonies in 1635 as the governor of lands that became part of Connecticut and build the fort at Saybrook, named after Lord Saye and Lord Brooke, who were granted the lands. He was back in England in the early 1640s, but returned to found the Saugus Iron Works, today an interesting National Historic Site run by the National Park Service. I hadn’t thought about iron production in colonial America either before visiting there, but hey, that’s pretty important stuff.

Winthrop’s real impact though was much more in Connecticut than Massachusetts. It didn’t take long for the Puritans to seek to push out from their Boston Harbor base. The heretics of course were flushed to Rhode Island, home of all manner of sin and depravity. But real glorious Puritans wanted to expand both north and south along the coast. So skipping around Rhode Island, Puritans went all in on settling in Connecticut. Winthrop was granted a big chunk of land in southeastern Connecticut. He founded the town of New London in 1646 and was granted a monopoly on his grist mill so long as his heirs maintained the mill, one of the first monopolies granted in the New World. He also worked to bring the New Haven Colony into Connecticut. Winthrop was also one of the best doctors in New England (who knows what actual knowledge he had given the state of medicine at the time) and so New Haven invited him to move there in order to be their doctor. He agreed and took the house they offered, not because he cared about the doctoring much, but because he wanted to start an iron works there.

All this led to Winthrop rising in power in Connecticut. He was first elected governor of the colony in 1657. These were one-year terms. He was not elected in 1658, but was reelected in 1659 and was reelected every year until his death. One thing that differed between himself and some of the Massachusetts fanatics is that he would accept Quakers, so when Massachusetts banished them (as well as killing some of them), Connecticut took them.

Winthrop also rejected the concept of witches, at least mostly. Now, this was not easy to do. It’s hard to overstate just how superstitious even learned people were in the 17th century. I don’t teach the first half of the U.S. history survey anymore, but when I did, I taught this book of primary sources on the Salem Witch Trials. I really recommend it, not because I think people here need lessons on this incident per se, but because it’s just super interesting to read the primary source documents of the time. In short, let’s say you have a cow. The cow gets pregnant but then gives birth prematurely and whatever mess of a half-grown fetus comes out. Well, today, you and I would say, ok, miscarriage. It happens. In the seventeenth century? Oh no, my friends. No, it was some supernatural force, probably witches. Who is conspiring with Satan to undermine our fine next generation of cows? It has to be someone! This itself is an actual example from that book, though it’s been some years so it’s probably a bit more detailed than I am remembering off the top of my head. But you can see how, under the right atmosphere, this superstitious world that saw supernatural powers all over the place (and this among Puritans, supposedly the most rational beings rejecting all that crazy Catholicism with its mysticism and smells and bells and virgins and etc that you could find in Europe) could create the kind of panic that led to the Salem Witch Trials. Well, Winthrop was very sure to nip any of that in the bud. At the very least, he didn’t want that kind of panic to challenge his leadership of Connecticut. And as we know about the witch trials, much of the underlying issue was about political leadership, class, and other more structural issues. Incidentally, before Winthrop took over Connecticut had already executed more witches than the rest of Puritan New England and that ended fast when he took over.

A pretty savvy operator, Winthrop moved quick when the Stuart Restoration happened. He immediately traveled to England and got a new royal charter from Charles II. This is what combined his colony with New Haven to create what is today Connecticut. Not sure how he cut out New Haven leadership, but he was a smart political operator. One of the things he did to impress Charles II was to bring a lot of specimens from New England to expose the curious King to the latest scientific advancements and in fact, he was elected to the Royal Society while he was there. Another of his scientific achievements was his claim that Jupiter had a fifth moon. He had brought the first telescope to the English colonies. Edward Emerson Barnard would not confirm this fact until 1892, but Winthrop at least made this claim in the 1660s.

Now, none of this meant life was easy for Winthrop. The problem was the Dutch Navy during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The Dutch kept attacking his ships and he lost a lot of cargoes and a lot of money. He tried to resign in 1667 and again in 1670 in order to focus on his business interests and the colony wouldn’t let him. I guess individuals in Puritan society didn’t have that much autonomy.

Winthrop worked until the end. He died in 1676 in Boston, while at a meeting for the United Colonies of New England. He was buried with his father.

John Winthrop Jr. is buried in King’s Chapel Burying Ground, Boston, Massachusetts. I have absolutely no idea why people put coins on this grave.

If you would like this series to visit other Americans of the colonial era, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. It’s not that easy to get these graves because it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the modern American cemetery developed. But Richard Mather is in Dorchester, Massachusetts and Johann Martin Boltzius is in Rincon, Georgia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.