Mapping As a City on a Hill

In his essay or sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony used the metaphor of a “citty upon a hill.” We currently treat that concept as one of the founding ideas of America. Yet Winthrop’s text was unknown in the eighteenth century.

As Edward O’Reilly describes in this blog post, a Winthrop descendant gave the manuscript to the New-York Historical Society in 1809. The Massachusetts Historical Society published the first transcript in 1838. That essay was reprinted in the American Quarterly Register two years later, but it wasn’t widely promulgated.

In 1867 another Winthrop descendant published Life and Letters of John Winthrop, which modernized the spelling of the phrase as “city on a hill.” After that, the essay started showing up in collections of American literature, on its way to becoming famous.

In the new book As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, Daniel T. Rodgers keeps tracing the phrase over the last century, showing how it became more resonant and its implications changed. Prof. Rodgers is also my Uncle Dan, so I’ve been waiting to see this book.

In Commonwealth Magazine, Carter Wilkie writes of As a City on a Hill:

In the best argued brief of speechwriting forensics yet published, Rodgers reveals how the resuscitation and redefinition of Winthrop’s words was performed before Reagan and JFK, by Perry Miller, the Harvard historian who fathered the field of Puritan studies after watching Boston’s tricentennial celebration in 1930 as a graduate student, and by Daniel Boorstin, the American historian who attended Harvard in the 1930s, when Miller was there.

According to Rodgers, it was Miller who “put the ‘city upon a hill’ phrase at the core of historians’ understanding of Puritanism and put Puritanism, for the first time, at the core of the American story itself.” But it was Boorstin who popularized the myth as a foundational idea in the American mind.

In his 1958 book, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, Boorstin began with, “A City Upon a Hill: The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.” There, Boorstin proclaimed: “John Winthrop, while preaching to his fellow-passengers, struck the keynote of American history… No one writing after the fact, three hundred years later, could better have expressed the American sense of destiny. In describing the Puritan experience we will see how this sense of destiny came into being.”

Again, that “keynote of American history” was completely unknown during the actual founding of the U.S. of A. And the original text didn’t include the word “upon.”

Here’s another review of As a City on a Hill from the Chicago Tribune. And here are podcast discussions with Dan Rodgers at John Fea’s Way of Improvement Leads Home, Princeton’s Politics and Polls, and John J. Miller’s Bookmonger.

While studying the original Winthrop manuscript, Rodgers noticed that the phrase “New England” was in a different, thicker handwriting than the rest. Edward O’Reilly of the New-York Historical Society was determined to figure out the text underneath, and that blog posting I mentioned above shared the result.