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- " City upon a hill " is a phrase derived from the teaching of salt and light in Jesus ' Sermon on the Mount. [n 1] Originally applied to the city of Boston by early 17th century Puritans, it came to adopt broader use in political rhetoric in United States politics, that of a declaration of American exceptionalism, and referring to America acting as a "beacon of hope" for the world.
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Jun 28, 2010 · The “City upon a Hill” section of the essay called “A Model of Christian Charity” was written in 1630 by the Puritan leader John Winthrop while the first group of Puritan emigrants was still onboard their ship, the Arbella, waiting to disembark and create their first settlement in what would become New England.
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As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college.
Drawing upon Matthew 5:14–15, Winthrop articulated his vision of the prospective Puritan colony in New England as "a city upon a hill": an example to England and the world of a truly godly society.
John Winthrop used the phrase "City upon a Hill" to describe the new settlement, with "the eies of all people" upon them. And with those words, he laid a foundation for a new world. These new settlers certainly represented a new destiny for this land.
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John Winthrop (born January 22 [January 12, Old Style], 1588, Edwardstone, Suffolk, England—died April 5 [March 26], 1649, Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony [U.S.]) first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the chief figure among the Puritan founders of New England.
Winthrop’s father was a newly risen country gentleman whose 500-acre (200-hectare) estate, Groton Manor, had been bought from Henry VIII at the time of the Reformation. Winthrop thus belonged to a class—the gentry—that became the dominant force in English society between 1540 and 1640, and he early assumed the habit of command appropriate to a member of the ruling class in a highly stratified society.
At age 15 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. At age 17 he married the first of his four wives—Mary Forth, daughter of an Essex squire—and the next year the first of his 16 children was born. Like many members of his class, Winthrop studied law, served as justice of the peace, and obtained a government office; from 1627 to 1629 he was an attorney at the Court of Wards and Liveries. For more than 20 years Winthrop was primarily a country squire at Groton, with no discernible interest in overseas colonization.
He was an ardently religious person. From his early teens Winthrop threw himself into scriptural study and prayers, and gradually he trained himself into a full-fledged Puritan, convinced that God had elected him to salvation—or, in Puritan terms, to “sainthood.” His religious experience reinforced his elitist outlook, but it also made him a social activist. Like other prominent Puritans, Winthrop dedicated himself to remaking, as far as possible, the wicked world as he saw it, arguing that “the life which is most exercised with tryalls and temptations is the sweetest, and will prove the safeste.”
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During the late 1620s, Winthrop felt increasingly trapped by the economic slump that reduced his landed income and by Charles I’s belligerent anti-Puritan policy, which cost him his court post in 1629. When, in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company obtained a royal charter to plant a colony in New England, Winthrop joined the company, pledging to sell his English estate and take his family to Massachusetts if the company government and charter were also transferred to America. The other members agreed to these terms and elected him governor (October 20).
As Winthrop sailed west on the Arbella in the spring of 1630, he composed a lay sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in which he pictured the Massachusetts colonists in covenant with God and with each other, divinely ordained to build “a Citty upon a Hill” in New England, with “the eyes of all people” on them:
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If we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world; we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all believers in God; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us, till we are forced out of the new land where we are going.
Some critics have seen Winthrop as a visionary utopian while others have seen him as a social reactionary, but most obviously he was urging his fellow colonists to adopt the combination of group discipline and individual responsibility that gave Massachusetts such immediate and lasting success as a social experiment.
For the remaining 19 years of his life, Winthrop lived in the New England wilderness, a father figure among the colonists. In the annual Massachusetts elections he was chosen governor 12 times between 1631 and 1648, and during the intervening years he sat on the court of assistants or colony council. His American career passed through three distinct phases. On first arrival, in the early 1630s, he did his most creative work, guiding the colonists as they laid out a network of tightly organized towns, each with its church of self-professed saints. Winthrop himself settled at Boston, which quickly became the capital and chief port of Massachusetts. His new farm on the Mystic River was much inferior to his former estate at Groton, but Winthrop never regretted the move, because he was free at last to build a godly commonwealth.
First, we see what “city on a hill” really means: it doesn’t mean perfect, it means visible. They will be under a microscope, unable to hide their failures from all the eyes trained on them. No one wants to live in a city on a hill, because all of your faults and failings are in plain view.
It is one of America’s most powerful founding myths – the pilgrims on an errand into the wilderness to create a new model society– “we shall be like a city upon the hill,” Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor Winthrop was supposed to have said in 1630, “the eyes of the world upon us”.
