The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

directly. They are, however, required to take an oath that they will be “obedient” to the governor and assistants. They also pledge to rat out their neighbors by alerting the governor and assistants “of any sedition, violence, treachery, or other hurt or evil which I shall know, hear, or vehemently suspect to be plotted or intended against the said commonwealth, or the said government established.”
    The vow of obedience and that thing about vehement suspicions doesn’t exactly make the democratic idealist in me want to hum the trombone part from “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Still, got to start somewhere. So it’s worth celebrating, a little, that within two years of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s arrival on these shores, a hundred white male religious fanatics get to pick their own dictator in a show of hands. Winthrop will be that dictator on and off until he dies.
    Winthrop and the other assistants get their authoritari anism from the same place they derive all their other beliefs—the Bible. Winthrop railed, “If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy, first we should have no warrant in Scripture for it for there was no such government in Israel.” He continues, calling democracy “the meanest and worst of all forms of government . . . a manifest breach of the Fifth Commandment.”
    The Fifth Commandment is honor your father and mother. To these people, “father and mother” are not merely biological parents. Martin Luther wrote the best explanation of how the Fifth Commandment extends beyond the nuclear family and into public life:
    In this commandment belongs a further statement regarding all kinds of obedience to persons in authority who have to command and govern. For all authority flows and is propagated from the authority of parents. . . . They are all called fathers in the Scriptures, as those who in their government perform the functions of a father, and should have a paternal heart toward their subordinates.
    That explanation goes a long way toward explaining Winthrop’s seemingly schizophrenic behavior. By setting limits on dissent, Winthrop’s government is facing a question asked of and by every government. But according to the Puritans’ interpretation of the Fifth Commandment, a governor is also a patriarch. This requires tough love, but love nonetheless. How the Fifth Commandment informs Winthrop’s conduct is best explained in the person of Philip Ratcliffe, he of the sliced-off ears.
    Recall that Winthrop was one of the magistrates who convicted Ratcliffe of “scandalous invectives against our churches and government.” Which is to say Ratcliffe broke the Fifth Commandment twice over by failing to honor both his church fathers and his legislative/judicial fathers of the General Court. His punishment, besides the ear lopping and a whipping, is banishment.
    Earlier, I mentioned in passing that throughout his tenure as governor, the townspeople accused Winthrop of leniency. The example I gave was the Bostonians’ disgust that Winthrop allowed a couple of men who had been banished to loiter in Boston. Winthrop’s reasoning was that “being in the winter, they must otherwise have perished” if they were forced to hike into the icy wilderness right away.
    Well, Ratcliffe was one of those men Winthrop refused to kick out into the cold. And I think it’s because Winthrop takes the Fifth Commandment seriously. He sees himself as a father and the other colonists as his children. Is this condescending? Absolutely. Does it explain his contradictory words and deeds, the disconnect between the ideal of the colonists being “members of the same body” and chopping off a loudmouth’s ears? I think it does. A father sometimes plays the doting dad who buys his son a Popsicle, or he can be the furious punisher of the phrase “wait until your father gets home.” By banishing Ratcliffe, Winthrop was disowning him; by letting Ratcliffe stay in Boston until the weather