In 1630, a fleet of eleven ships set sail for Massachusetts Bay, led by John Winthrop. The sermon he famously delivered on the voyage is best known today for likening the Puritan enterprise to a city upon a hill, subject to the scrutiny of the world. But while that phrase is often invoked, the core message of the sermon has largely been lost. “Wee must be knit together, in this worke, as one man,” Winthrop told the colonists, or else all would witness their failure. For Winthrop, as for many other Puritans, being “as one man” was more than a figure of speech. If communities were corporate bodies, they reasoned, then they should obey the same principles as actual, non-metaphorical bodies. Galenic medicine taught that a human body needed to be properly proportioned, its humors held in balance. Communities, it followed, likewise required careful tending. “There is noe body but consists of partes and that which knitts these partes together, giues the body its perfection,” Winthrop explained. Love had knit Christ and his church into one body, and now it would knit the colonists together in their new project.
Here was an answer to the critics who took the Puritans leaving their proper place as a confession of error and inadequacy. They were not fleeing England but choosing to depart, because England had grown disordered and distempered. In their new colony, they could produce a properly balanced body politic, to serve as a model for restoring England’s health. Migrating across the Atlantic did not mean abandoning their responsibilities like impecunious vagrants; in Winthrop’s telling, migration was a fulfillment of their duty as Christians, an act of love and caring. They were not a mob, after all, but a cohesive congregation. Leaving their established homes behind and moving someplace new was not just a respectable behavior but a desirable one. Mobility was good. Or, at least, this particular act of mobility.
Winthrop intended to justify his own departure from England—and the broader Great Migration of Puritans to Massachusetts Bay that brought twenty thousand people across the ocean between 1620 and 1640—as an exceptional circumstance. He had no desire to license people to pick up and leave whenever they pleased; the whole point of the migration was to create a healthy, cohesive body and to preserve its integrity. He imagined a new England, just as sedentary and stable as the old. But revolutionary ideas have a habit of twisting back upon their authors in ways they least expect. Just a few years later, when the prominent minister Thomas Hooker requested permission to relocate with his congregation from Massachusetts to what would become Connecticut, Winthrop was distinctly unamused. “They ought not to departe from vs,” he complained, “be-inge knitt to vs in one bodye.” Here was the same objection raised against Winthrop leaving England, now employed by Winthrop to object to Hooker leaving Massachusetts.