The Puritans sail for America

The Puritans are the Elizabethan Settlement's most persistent critics — English Protestants who believe the Reformation did not go far enough, that the Church of England still carries too much of the Catholic past in its liturgy and governance, that the pure church requires further purification.

Some of them have been meeting in houses and fields, baptizing their children outside the parish system, holding prayer meetings without episcopal license. They have been fined, imprisoned, and in some cases had their ears cut off for it.

A group of Separatists — the most radical wing, who have given up on reforming the Church of England from within — have already gone to Holland. Holland tolerates them but they worry their children are becoming Dutch rather than English, losing the identity they came to preserve.

On September 16, 1620, one hundred and two passengers board the Mayflower in Plymouth. Roughly half are Separatists — the Saints, as they call themselves. The other half are non-Separatist settlers — the Strangers — who are coming for economic opportunity rather than religious conviction.

The crossing takes sixty-six days. Two people die. Two babies are born. One is named Oceanus.

They arrive in November at what will become Plymouth, Massachusetts. Half of them will be dead by spring.

Before they land, the Saints and the Strangers draft a compact in the cabin of the Mayflower — an agreement to govern themselves by just and equal laws for the general good of the colony.

A decade later a separate and larger fleet — the Massachusetts Bay Puritans under John Winthrop, a distinct group from these Mayflower Separatists — will sail for the same coast, and Winthrop will give that venture its enduring image: a city upon a hill.

We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

Winthrop's image has been quoted by American presidents for four centuries, usually as a statement of American exceptionalism. That is not what Winthrop meant.

He meant it as a warning. If we deal falsely with God, he said, we shall be a story and a byword through the world. The eyes of all people are upon us not as spectators of our glory but as witnesses to our faithfulness or unfaithfulness.

The city on a hill is exposed. Everyone can see what you are building and whether you are building it the way you said you would.

The Puritan experiment produced remarkable things and terrible ones — a tradition of literacy and self-governance alongside a tradition of theocratic intolerance that burned witches.

Both are visible from the hill.

The city on a hill is exposed to every eye. That is not a threat — it is the point. The witness is not the announcement but the building itself, visible from a distance, either confirming or contradicting what you said you were.