Reacting to Reacting: John Winthrop and William Blackstone in Boston

A street sign reading "Winthrop Lane."

My recent trip to Boston for research brought some updates about your friend and mine, John Winthrop, multi-time governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and head honcho of The Trial of Anne Hutchinson. As you may recall from either your time in the game or my other posts, the game revolves around determining whether or not the controversial Anne Hutchinson should be banished from the colony. John Winthrop heads both the colony and the faction which wishes to expel Hutchinson from its borders. Post-trial, while Anne was expelled and died shortly after, Winthrop led a long and celebrated life: he served a total of nineteen terms as governor despite criticisms and died in 1649. He is rumored to have regretted Hutchinson's banishment on his deathbed (perhaps because problems of keeping the colony religiously homogeneous proved to be both evergreen and bloody-- or perhaps this remorse never happened at all! History can be fun that way).

In any case, there's a lot of Winthrop's footprints around Boston. The top photo shows a sign for Winthrop Lane,one of many places in the state named after Winthrop. Winthrop Lane leads into a very small grassy area called Winthrop Square. Winthrop Square has a statue, but not of Winthrop, and I neglected to take a picture of it because I was so confused by this. For that tale, I'll refer you to this article from the Boston Globe.

The second photo deals with an event which precedes what my students have called "the Anne matter": 

A sign commemorating the 1634 purchase of Boston Common. 

This impressive sign in Boston Common commemorates the purchase of the gathering place under Winthrop's governorship. Blackstone (also spelled Blaxton) was the first European settler in the area which would become Boston, moving there alone in 1625 after arriving with a group of settlers to the south. He had accumulated a mass of land which he called his own, and welcomed the Puritans who arrived five years later, but soon wished to move on-- so, he sold them his pasture and moved to Rhode Island. This will sound very familiar to some of you-- many of Anne Hutchinson's supporters, like William Aspinwall, John Clark, and William Dyer, made similar moves in the wake of her banishment (though none of their pastures became Boston Common). 

This sparked my curiosity about Blackstone and his departure, which sent me down quite the internet rabbit hole. In a quick look, I've found limited and conflicting discussion of just why Blackstone left. Thomas Coffin Amory in 1877 poetically suggested that "The details of what followed are wanting, but in the end Blackstone found it convenient to leave," (7) and that Winthrop's band of Puritans, "Without actually driving [Blackstone] out… made it uncomfortable for him to stay" because he would not join the church (12). Wikipedia cites Louise Lind in saying that he simply "soon tired of their intolerance." The linked text which this comment came is now inoperative, but I tracked it down at the Wayback Machine and found it's an excerpt of a biography of  Blackstone. 

Another educational resource claims that "When the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived in 1630 and found him living on land for which they had a patent, they drove him out and ordered his house burned to the ground." This is a statement borne out by no other evidence, including the source about Blackstone cited within the same page. That source, a family history written by a descendant in the 1970s, suggests:

"It is very difficult to believe that BLACKSTONE sold all of his rights and interest in Shawmut to his full content and satisfaction, as is so stipulated in ODLIN's deposition. Rather, it is quite obvious that life was made very trying for him, and he simply took what he could get after considerable hassling with the powers in control. If the facts were known, he probably refused to sign any kind of release leaving GOVERNOR WINTHROP and his clan in a quandry and which prompted ODLIN's deposition nine years after WILLIAM's death."

Quite the tangled web! I would love to incorporate Blackstone into future playthroughs or discussions of the Anne Hutchinson game in some way. It certainly suggests the stubbornness of Winthrop and the others in his charge-- even a fellow white male Protestant critical of the Anglican church could not escape their pressures.

Delightfully, Blackstone/Blaxton's Wikipedia page bears the following statement:

Amory's text goes further than this. In his discussion of Blackstone's marriage to a Bostonian in 1659 (at the sprightly age of sixty), Amory suggests that "a recently discovered broadside shows that at this period he was accustomed to make occasional visits to Boston, riding on a bull, and the object of his pilgrimages may therefore be surmised" (17). Any Wikipedia editors out there should feel free to update this and garner editorial glory-- the people should know the truth about William Blackstone and his bull! 

Related Links:

Amory's pamphlet on Blackstone is short and just sort of delightful to read-- and free on Google Play. 

A discussion of Boston Common as a longstanding gathering place through the lens of the Commons Movement.