The Wordy Shipmates

Ronald Reagan had a great gift for reducing powerful ideas to shallow platitudes. So perhaps it is no surprise that, like some verbal reverse alchemist turning gold into lead, he could debase the Puritan fear of accountability to a stern deity to a bland notion of modern celebrity. When John Winthrop spoke of a City on a Hill, it was equal parts aspiration and admonition. Yes, he intended the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be an example of godliness to others, but he was also firmly persuaded that if the Colony abandoned the the path of righteousness, that God could make it an example of another sort after the fashion of, say, Sodom and Gomorrah. Reagan, in contrast, basically viewed the "City on a Hill" as a variation of the Magic Kingdom. Reagan's platitudes are just one of many ways in which modern America has watered down and caricatured the Puritans' high minded, if sometimes oppressive, ideals.

None of which is to do justice to the bitingly funny and deeply compassionate narrative of life in early America recounted by Sarah Vowell in the Wordy Shipmates. Vowell has a keen understanding both of how radically different the Puritan outlook was from our modern sensibilities and yet how deeply ingrained Puritan notions of their special place in the world are in modern America, with both comic and disastrous consequences. And in the end, some of the characters Vowell is most fond of are the rebels and misfits - Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams -- who were forced out of the Massachusetts to Rhode Island, where they established a precedent for religious tolerance that has been a significant thread in American history ever since.

Contrary to today's secularists, Roger Williams was not concerned with limiting the state's power in matters of conscience because he was irreligious. Rather, he was, if anything, too religious, so scrupulous about his own salvation that at times he would refuse to pray even in the company of his wife and children less they tarnish the purity of his thoughts. Williams recognized, however, that the tyranny of the state in religious matters corrupts both religion and government. False doctrines can be imposed by force, but more importantly religion comes to serve secular ends.

No account of early New England would be complete without confronting the colonists encounters with the Native Americans. Vowell acknowledges that the early epidemics that wiped out huge numbers of the native population were inevitable once initial contact was made between Indians and Europeans. However, she also observes that the subsequent genocide was not, and she vividly describes the incineration of virtually the entire Pequot tribe - men, women, and children - in one monstrous conflagration as a horrifying precedent for the centuries of massacres to come.

For any person willing to take a lighthearted look at early America, and its underside, the Wordy Shipmates is a volume not to be missed.