John Winthrop

(1588 - 1649)

As a teenager John Winthrop devoted himself to religious studies and became a Puritan. When Charles I’s anti-Puritan policy cost Winthrop his post with the Court of Wards and Liveries in 1629, he sailed to New England; during the journey he wrote that the colonists were divinely ordained to build “a city upon a hill.” Winthrop served as governor of Massachusetts and helped write the first legal sanctioning of slavery in North America, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties. In a 1645 speech, he called the liberty of men “incompatible and inconsistent with authority.”