Our Founders' Warning. Strobe Talbott

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      An Errand in the Wilderness

      America [is] the only country in which the starting point of a great people has been clearly observable.

      —Alexis de Tocqueville

      Most of the first British settlers on the North Atlantic seaboard came to the New World because they were impoverished, persecuted, fleeing from the law, or alienated from family, society, or politics. Although they were subjects of the Crown, they welcomed its distance.

      In 1607 three ships owned by the Virginia Company dropped anchor off the banks of the James River, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. About a hundred passengers, most of whom would never see England again, founded Jamestown, named after the Stuart monarch of the day. They were male and mostly adventurers. Not until the following year did women arrive: a Mistress Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras, followed by a few more a year later, including Temperance Flowerdew, the wife of Captain George Yeardley, who later became governor of the colony. They were a pitiful but vital addition to what would be the first permanent British colony in the Americas. In 1619 the company recruited about 150 Englishwomen to travel to the colony and wed the males. These brave, poor, and desperate volunteers, while compensated for their journey, were unprepared for the hardships at sea and those at their destination. Within a few years, many died from starvation or disease, or in raids by indigenous people.1

      The charge from James I was threefold: Create a settlement on the southern Atlantic coast as a buffer against Spanish conquistadors encroaching on what would be British America; reap the bounty of the land—gold and silver was the hope, but tobacco was the bonanza; and convert to Christianity the descendants of clans who had lived in that hemisphere tens of thousands of years before Europeans sailed into their world.

      The first two goals were, after many setbacks, successful, but the third was a grotesque charade and failure. Few natives joined the Church of England, and many resisted the white man’s incursions. They were experienced warriors whose arrows, spears, and tomahawks might have outmatched the invaders, especially when the tribes captured and bought guns. But they were not armed with European immunities against European diseases. They succumbed quickly up and down the Atlantic seaboard. By some estimates, 90 percent of the coastal indigenous population died from alien microbes.

      Twelve years after the founding of Jamestown, a British privateer, the White Lion, attacked the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship, off the coast of New Spain (now Mexico). The British seized the human cargo, consisting of twenty captives from the Kingdom of Ndongo, a region in what is today Angola. They were sold into bondage to work in the tobacco fields in the Virginia Colony.2

      Two infamies inflicted on people of different color stained the American soul and soil for centuries to come.

      More than a decade later, in 1620, a new wave of settlers set forth for New England. They called themselves Pilgrims, a radical offshoot of Puritanism, which rose out of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. The Pilgrims were passionately and inflexibly pious or, as they said, godly. In their eyes, mainstream Anglicanism had relapsed into worldliness and, worse, into corrupt Catholic practices. Their mission was to establish a place where their “true” religion could flourish, unimpeded by magistrates who served the king and the Church of England, now an ocean away.

      The Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower to establish the Plymouth Colony had made a permanent break from England and had rejected the church that bore its name. After another ten years, mainstream Puritans came to Massachusetts, bent on reforming—that is, purifying—Anglicanism. Both sects were followers of John Calvin, the charismatic, fiercely unbending French reformer whose theology, an offshoot of Martin Luther’s, emphasized God’s sovereignty, teaching his followers that only those elected by Him would find salvation in eternity.3

      The Puritans had maintained an uneasy truce with King James I, but his successor, Charles I, was a threat to their community and religion. As royal intolerance intensified to oppression and persecution, they looked for guidance in the Bible. For many, the Book of Exodus provided an answer. They would put an ocean between themselves and an earthly sovereign. That would allow them to be the masters of their own land and servants of their Lord.

      Unlike the Jewish people in their Egyptian captivity, the Puritans did not think of themselves as turning their backs on an alien land. Rather, they set off to New England to keep the flame of their faith burning until they could return to Old England after it had become purified under a Puritan government. Their sojourn came to be called an “errand into the wilderness.” Their errand was not intended to be forever; when finished, they expected, they would go home.4

      Even though they were increasingly out of favor with King James, the Puritans were well established in English business circles. Under their influence, a commercial venture in Massachusetts Bay was reorganized as a colony. The company’s directors hoodwinked His Britannic Majesty by presenting him a prolix charter that was larded with scrapes and bows to the throne. The numbing verbiage seems to have camouflaged a deliberate omission: there was no mention of where the annual stockholders’ meeting would be held in the future. That sleight of pen permitted the directors to move the seat of governance from London to the colony itself, thereby weakening the control of the Crown.5

      The principal agent of that step toward quasi-independence was John Winthrop, the first leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In that capacity, he was both a holdout of a vanishing system of governance—religious patriarchy—and an experimenter of proto-republicanism.

      He arrived in an eleven-vessel fleet in 1630, leading a flock of more than seven hundred to their new home. The Great Puritan Migration was underway.

      Winthrop’s fame today comes largely from a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity” that he reputedly wrote aboard the Arbella, the flagship of the flotilla. Yet there are no known contemporaneous sources that would fix a date and a place where he might have delivered it, or how it was received, or whether he delivered it at all. For all we know, Winthrop’s message bypassed his seagoing parish and went right into a time capsule, widely unknown for three centuries, until his prophecy became a paean to a strong, righteous example of the world during the Cold War and after. In 1989 Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia, consecrated it as “a kind of Ur-text” of the national narrative.6

      Of the some six thousand words Winthrop composed, a single sentence was elevated to a place in U.S. presidential rhetoric in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”7 John Kennedy made it a bipartisan trope for his successors to invoke America’s moral strength, magnanimity, optimism, championship of liberty, and leadership in the world. Ronald Reagan picked it up, as did Barack Obama.

      Winthrop’s immediate, practical, and somber purpose was to fortify his fellow passengers’ faith that the Lord would protect them in the face of certain and unknown perils. His message was one of pride, responsibility, and liberation. As the Puritans waited for the purification of the Church of England and England itself, Winthrop loosened

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