City on a Hill by Abram C. Van Engen

Author:Abram C. Van Engen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300252316
Publisher: Yale University Press

Figure 17: Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary bronze plaquette, silver finish, obverse, featuring a portrait of John Winthrop, with a copy of the colony’s charter and a symbolic book at the bottom corners. The plaquette is 2.5 × 3.25 inches, and a larger (10 × 12) plaque was also made. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Insofar as the 1930 festivities celebrated a founding text, moreover, that text was never A Model of Christian Charity. In fact, through all the state’s anniversary gatherings—in the “2083 events in 253 communities throughout the Commonwealth, attended by 11,041,625 people” and costing $1.5 million, all put together to commemorate the state of Massachusetts (not the city of Boston)—no mention of Winthrop’s “city on a hill” sermon ever appears.33 It was the three hundredth anniversary of that sermon’s first delivery, and no one cared. Instead, commemorators focused on the colony’s charter. When a replica of the Arbella sailed into Salem on June 12, 1930, it carried on board a copy of “the Charter, the original of which formed a part of the earlier Arbella’s precious cargo.” When a scholar decided to commemorate the Puritans by republishing several of their documents, he gave a great deal of space to reprinting and explaining “the charter of Massachusetts Bay”—and no space at all to Winthrop’s sermon. When an artist designed a medallion to be sold at the celebrations, he put Winthrop’s portrait on the front and surrounded him with a representative “book” and, predictably, the charter of Massachusetts Bay (figures 17 and 18).34 Insofar as any text of origin mattered in 1930, it was not A Model of Christian Charity.

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