As demonstrated by her
2005 historical travelogue Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell has a gift
for approaching the dusty corners of Americana with a pop-cultural sensibility
that treats her long-dead subjects with the same mix of scrutiny and admiration
that most Americans lavish on modern celebrities. While that book's focus on presidential
assassination and political conspiracy gave Vowell a sexy jumping-off point, the
topic of her new The Wordy Shipmates is downright dour in comparison. So it speaks to
Vowell's talents as a researcher and storyteller that she's able to lend her exploration
of the Biblically motivated dealings of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans a
similar air of intrigue.
The Wordy Shipmates attempts to suss out the
foundations of this country's modern Christian preoccupations. Early in the
book, Vowell traces the lineage of American exceptionalism from its origins in
John Winthrop's sermon "A Model Of Christian Charity," in which Winthrop hopes
that the newly formed Massachusetts Bay colony will be "a city upon a hill."
That notion was famously co-opted by Ronald Reagan, and still ripples through our
nation's rhetoric, no matter how far we've strayed from the original sentiment.
But while the moral ancestry of modern government deserves scrutiny, Vowell
frequently abandons that throughline in favor of a more episodic examination of
Puritan discord. The various inter- and intra-colony squabbles that plagued the
early settlements prove just as compelling, challenging the notion that the
Puritans were a single-minded group of zealots.
Vowell is so adept at
breaking down the highfalutin language of the various books, letters, and
pamphlets in which her subjects conducted their feuds that the impertinence and
eventual banishment of colony rabble-rouser Roger Williams (who went on to
found Rhode Island) reads as more dramatic than the colonies' bloody war with
the Pequot nation. It isn't the most thorough or linear historical record:
Winthrop, Williams, and John Cotton's writings provide the majority of the
source material, and secondary players like Anne Hutchinson and Henry Vane
appear and disappear abruptly. But Vowell's insights into her subjects'
meanings and motivations, combined with reflection and personal
anecdotes—such as relating Winthrop's ideal of communal suffering and
comfort to buying toothpaste for 9/11 relief workers, or an episode of The
Brady Bunch
coloring her early perceptions of the Puritans—humanize and contextualize
the famously uptight settlers, reconsidering what it means for America to be
called a "Puritan nation."