Episode Details

By 1631 the city on the hill was no longer dying. Margaret Winthrop arrived in Boston harbor that November on the Lyon, sixteen months after John had left her on an English dock — without the daughter she had carried across the Atlantic, stepping ashore into a colony her husband had built in her absence. Within two years immigration was a flood. Within five, the Bay had courts, a college, a charter to defend, and a problem its sermons had not anticipated. Winthrop had preached a covenant of mutual love. The colony he governed was building something else: a franchise narrowed to the twenty percent who could stand before a congregation and prove themselves visibly saved, an admonition system that could make a man's life unlivable without ever touching the law, and — when the Crown finally came for the charter — a floating gun battery in Massachusetts harbor, pointed at English warships. This is the episode where the city on the hill discovers what kind of city it actually is.