77 Facts About John Winthrop

John Winthrop was an English Puritan lawyer and slaveowner, and one of the leading figures in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the second major settlement in New England following Plymouth Colony.

John Winthrop was born into a wealthy land-owning and merchant family.

John Winthrop trained in the law and became Lord of the Manor at Groton in Suffolk.

John Winthrop was not involved in founding the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628, but he became involved in 1629 when anti-Puritan King Charles I began a crackdown on Nonconformist religious thought.

John Winthrop was a respected political figure, and his attitude toward governance seems authoritarian to modern sensibilities.

John Winthrop resisted attempts to widen voting and other civil rights beyond a narrow class of religiously approved individuals, opposed attempts to codify a body of laws that the colonial magistrates would be bound by, and opposed unconstrained democracy, calling it "the meanest and worst of all forms of government".

Winthrop's son John was one of the founders of the Connecticut Colony, and Winthrop himself wrote one of the leading historical accounts of the early colonial period.

John Winthrop's birth was recorded in the parish register at Groton.

John Winthrop's father's family had been successful in the textile business, and his father was a lawyer and prosperous landowner with several properties in Suffolk.

When John Winthrop was young, his father became a director at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Winthrop's uncle John immigrated to Ireland, and the Winthrop family took up residence at Groton Manor.

John Winthrop was regularly exposed to religious discussions between his father and clergymen, and thus came to a deep understanding of theology at an early age.

John Winthrop was a close childhood and university friend of William Spring, later a Puritan Member of Parliament with whom he corresponded for the rest of his life.

In 1604, John Winthrop journeyed to Great Stambridge in Essex with a friend.

In 1613, Adam John Winthrop transferred the family holdings in Groton to John Winthrop, who then became Lord of the Manor at Groton.

John Winthrop eventually followed his father in practicing law in London, which would have brought him into contact with the city's business elite.

John Winthrop was appointed to the county commission of the peace, a position that gave him a wider exposure among other lawyers and landowners and a platform to advance what he saw as God's kingdom.

Some of its members were empowered to act as local judges for minor offenses, although John Winthrop was only able to exercise this authority in cases affecting his estate.

The full commission met quarterly, and John Winthrop forged a number of important connections through its activities.

John Winthrop documented his religious life, keeping a journal beginning 1605 in which he described his religious experiences and feelings.

John Winthrop's family was initially opposed to the match on financial grounds; Winthrop countered by appealing to piety as a virtue which more than compensated for his modest income.

Pastor John Winthrop White led a short-lived effort to establish a colony at Cape Ann in 1624, on the Massachusetts coast.

John Winthrop was apparently not involved in any of these early activities, which primarily involved individuals from Lincolnshire; however, he was probably aware of the company's activities and plans by early 1629.

John Winthrop was aware of attempts to colonize other places; his son Henry became involved in efforts to settle Barbados in 1626, which John Winthrop financially supported for a time.

John Winthrop was seen as the most dedicated of the three candidates proposed to replace Cradock, and he won the election.

John Winthrop worked to recruit individuals with special skills that the new colony would require, including pastors to see to the colony's spiritual needs.

John Winthrop used a coat of arms that was reportedly confirmed to his paternal uncle by the College of Arms, London in 1592.

John Winthrop sailed on the Arbella, accompanied by his two young sons Samuel and Stephen.

John Winthrop wrote a sermon entitled A Modell of Christian Charity, which was delivered either before or during the crossing.

John Winthrop set an example to the other colonists by working side by side with servants and laborers in the work of the colony.

John Winthrop built his house in Boston where he had a relatively spacious plot of arable land.

John Winthrop operated her as a trading and packet ship up and down the coast of New England.

However, John Winthrop decided instead to build his home in Boston when asked by its residents to stay there.

John Winthrop acceded on the point of the elections, which were thereafter conducted by secret ballot by the freemen, but he observed that lawmaking would be unwieldy if conducted by the relatively large number of freemen.

John Winthrop graciously invited his fellow magistrates to dinner, as he had done after previous elections.

John Winthrop opposed these moves, and used his power to repeatedly stall and obstruct efforts to enact them.

John Winthrop's opposition was rooted in a strong belief in the common law tradition and the desire, as a magistrate, to have flexibility in deciding cases on their unique circumstances.

John Winthrop pointed out that adoption of written laws "repugnant to the laws of England" was not allowed in the charter, and that some of the laws to be adopted likely opposed English law.

John Winthrop appealed to the general court, which ruled in her favor.

Winthrop became the focus of allegations about the arbitrary rule of the magistrates in 1645, when John was formally charged with interfering with local decisions in a case involving the Hingham militia.

John Winthrop defused the matter by stepping down from the bench to appear before it as a defendant.

John Winthrop successfully defended himself, pointing out that he had not acted alone, and that judges are not usually criminally culpable for errors that they make on the bench.

John Winthrop argued that the dispute in Hingham was serious enough that it required the intervention of the magistrates.

One major issue that John Winthrop was involved in occurred in 1647, when a petition was submitted to the general court concerning the limitation of voting rights to freemen who had been formally admitted to a local church.

John Winthrop wrote an account of his religious awakening and other theological position papers designed to harmonize the opposing views.

John Winthrop vigorously defended this rule against protests, arguing that Massachusetts was within its rights to "refuse to receive such whose dispositions suit not with ours".

John Winthrop was then out of office, and he had a good relationship with Williams.

The magistrates ordered Williams' arrest, but John Winthrop warned him, making possible his flight which resulted in the establishment of Providence Plantations.

John Winthrop described an early meeting with one local chief:.

John Winthrop kept one male and two female Pequots as slaves.

John Winthrop was a member of the committee which drafted the code, but his exact role is not known because records of the committee have not survived.

Manegold writes that John Winthrop was opposed to the Body of Liberties because he favored a common law approach to legislation.

Governor John Winthrop refused to provide official assistance, but allowed la Tour to recruit volunteers from the colony for service.

John Endecott was particularly critical, noting that Winthrop had given the French a chance to see the colonial defenses.

In 1646, John Winthrop was again in the governor's seat when d'Aulnay appeared in Boston and demanded reparations for damage done by the English volunteers.

John Winthrop placated the French governor with the gift of a sedan chair, originally given to him by an English privateer.

John Winthrop owned the Ten Hills Farm, as well as land that became the town of Billerica, Governors Island in Boston Harbor, and Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay.

John Winthrop engaged in the fur trade in partnership with William Pynchon, using the ship Blessing of the Bay.

John Winthrop was the widow of Thomas Coytmore and sister of Thomas and William Rainborowe.

John Winthrop was survived by his wife Martha and five sons.

John Winthrop rarely published and his literary contribution was relatively unappreciated during his time, yet he spent his life continually producing written accounts of historical events and religious manifestations.

John Winthrop wrote and delivered the lay sermon that became A Model of Christian Charity either before the 1630 crossing to North America or while en route.

John Winthrop used the phrase "city upon a hill" to characterize the colonists' endeavour as part of a special pact with God to create a holy community.

John Winthrop's sermon is often characterized as a forerunner to the concept of American exceptionalism.

Furthermore, John Winthrop did not introduce any significant new concepts, but merely repeated what were widely held Puritan beliefs.

John Winthrop kept a journal of his life and experiences, starting with the voyage across the Atlantic and continuing through his time in Massachusetts, originally written in three notebooks.

John Winthrop's account has been acknowledged as the "central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s".

John Winthrop wrote primarily of his private accounts: his journey from England, the arrival of his wife and children to the colony in 1631, and the birth of his son in 1632.

John Winthrop wrote profound insights into the nature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and nearly all important events of the day.

John Winthrop wrote in this journal intermittently between 1607 and 1637 as a sort of confessional, very different in tone and style from the Journal.

Political scientist Matthew Holland argues that John Winthrop "is at once a significant founding father of America's best and worst impulses", with his calls for charity and public participation offset by what Holland views as rigid intolerance, exclusionism, and judgmentalism.

John Winthrop strongly believed that civil liberty was "the proper end and object of authority", meaning that it was the duty of the government to be selfless for the people and promote justice instead of promoting the general welfare.

John Winthrop supported this point of view by his actions, such as when he passed laws requiring the heads of households to make sure that their children and servants received proper education, and for support of teachers from public funds.

John Winthrop's actions were for the unity of the colony because he believed that nothing was more crucial of a colony than working as a single unit that wouldn't be split by any force, such as with the case of Anne Hutchinson.

John Winthrop was a leader respected by many, even Richard Dummer, a principal Hutchinsonian disarmed for his activities, who gave 100 pounds to him.

John Winthrop is a major character in Catharine Sedgwick's 1827 novel Hope Leslie, set in colonial Massachusetts.

John Winthrop is the namesake of squares in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline.