Analysis Of John Winthrop’s Reasons For The Plantation In New England

The text “Reasons for the Plantation in New England” was found among the papers of Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop dated 1629. In the treatise, Governor Winthrop contrived the nine main arguments to be considered as motivation and justification for the English Puritan undertakers of the intended plantation in New England. Subsequent objections and answers in the text are insights from “various interested worthies of the day.” This document was widely distributed (within the English community of interpreters) and an influential piece of propaganda in furtherance of the proposed settlement of Massachusetts Bay which utilized godly calls to action and mundane physical improvement/cultivation arguments. This source adds to the knowledge in Patricia Seed’s book on the various ways European colonizers enacted their possession of the New World.

The treatise is a clear expression of John Winthrop's legal, political, and religious views on planting/cultivating New England, and is significant in revealing the motivations and justifications of the English colonists. The English, like every other European colonizer, presupposed their specific cultural constructions of possession would be understood by the indigenous peoples and other European powers. The English constructs depended upon a local system of understanding Genesis, the fixity of agricultural settlements in England, and common legal understanding of how property rights in land were created and expressed (through enclosure acts like fencing). In Winthrop’s fourth argument he uses Genesis 1:28 to purport the whole earth is the Lord's garden, and he has given it to mankind so they may multiply, replenish, and subdue the earth. In response to the first objection on taking possession of indigenous lands, the English pro-colonizing justification is that the natives in New England who do not enclose, improve, or settle their land for habitation have nothing but a natural right to the land. These arguments can only be appreciated by a community of interpreters who share these common conceptions of taking possession.

As this primary source shows, the mundane way in which English colonizers traditionally believed they could enact authority over land was unique to England (in that it relied heavily on visible physical actions) but no more or less valid than the other methods of possession shown by the Spanish or French. Seed explains, “..clarity depends not on the action, but the community of interpreters.” The intended audience, in this case, was the prominent people of England deciding whether to make the journey to the New World. The Winthrop document shows yet another example of European powers using religious interpretations to validate their colonizing authority. Every colonizing country and therefore their respective colonizers believed what they were doing was objectively clear and valid as expressed in this text by Governor John Winthrop. The readings and themes throughout this course show that these acts of possession were very subjective and not cross-culturally clear.