What happened next is hazy. The two Spanish accounts—the relación of Friar Marcos and that of Castañeda written many years later—both indicate that Zemmouri attempted to find refuge among the Zuni people in what is now New Mexico. “They lodged him in a little hut they had outside their village, and the older men and the governors heard his story and took steps to find out the reason he had come to that country,” Castañeda writes.
For three days they made inquiries about him and held council. The account which the negro gave them of two white men who were following him, sent by a great lord, who knew about the things in the sky, and how these were coming to instruct them in divine matters, made them think that he must be a spy or a guide from some nations who wished to come and conquer them, because it seemed to them unreasonable to say that the people were white in the country from which he came and that he was sent by them, being black.
In both accounts, the Zuni kill Zemmouri, throwing his sacred gourd rattle to the ground as if in rejection of his newly attained spiritual status. Yet stories gathered from the people whom he hoped to join appear to have different implications. One describes not his execution but the continuation of his career as a healer. During subsequent Spanish forays into North America, men still searching for the elusive Seven Cities of Cibola found instead tales of “a black man with a beard, wearing things that sounded, rattles, bells, and plumes, on his feet and arms—the regular outfit of a southwestern medicine man”—and also, it so happens, that of a North African marabout. Another story recounts an event that was ambiguously remembered as either his expulsion or his forced return to the spirit world. It was said that the wise men of the village in which he sought refuge took him to the edge of their pueblo at night and then “gave him a powerful kick, which sped him through the air to the south whence he came.” Still another story suggests that among the Zuni he found neither death nor exile but apotheosis. His image has been linked to one of the many divine spirits of the kachina religion of the Pueblo people, of which the Zuni were a part. In legends from native mythology enacted in elaborate dance ceremonies, the figure possibly inspired by Zemmouri, a kachina called Chakwaina, is depicted with black skin and carrying a sacred rattle—an indication, perhaps, that his career as a god lasted longer than the time he had spent as a slave. According to at least one tale from the oral tradition of the Pueblo, he “lived on among the Zunis for many years, finally dying an old deity.” The life of a god can be difficult, however. Legends of Chakwaina also suggest that his followers so feared that he would leave them that they cut off his feet to keep him in their village. When he could no longer move among those needing healing, they “placed him flat on his back and worshipped him as a god.” In all these stories, no matter his ultimate fate, it seems likely Zemmouri’s days ended as he had lived, with him attempting yet another transformation in an ongoing struggle for survival.
Whether he is remembered as a victim, a god, or some combination of both, the significance of Mustafa Zemmouri’s adventure does not end with him. His use of the spiritual resources accumulated during his travels to subvert the plans of the priests and soldiers who hoped to control him prefigured the efforts of the most significant resistance fighter the Spanish would encounter as they colonized the Southwest. Beginning in 1680 not far from where Zemmouri met his mysterious end, the Pueblo religious leader Popé led a guerrilla campaign against Christian attempts to eradicate native beliefs. While it cannot be known if Popé was directly inspired by tales of the dark-skinned stranger who had tricked the friars pursuing him, his campaign included the crafting of dark masks, like those depicting Chakwaina, for a revival of suppressed kachina dances. He also encouraged the Pueblo who had been converted to wash off their baptisms by scrubbing themselves with yucca root in the Rio Grande. The means as well as the ends of his insurrection have led some historians to call Popé’s rebellion a “holy war.” Like Zemmouri, he transformed the symbols of an alien religion in his fight against those who had forced it upon him.
Even in his own time, though he was singular in many ways, Mustafa Zemmouri was not unique. For evidence of this we need only look at the expedition that sought to follow the trail he had blazed to the mythical Cities of Cibola. A multitude of perhaps a thousand men like him—born in Africa, converted in Spain, carrying the versatility of those caught between cultures with them into unknown lands—followed in his footsteps.
In February 1540, a great army gathered at Compostela, west of Mexico City, on the Pacific coast of New Spain. As George Parker Winship, the translator of Castañeda’s chronicle of the expedition, explains, “The general in command, Francisco Vazquez Coronado rode at the head of some two hundred and fifty horsemen, and seventy Spanish foot soldiers armed with crossbows and harquebuses. Besides these there were three hundred or more native allies, and upward of a thousand negro and Indian servants…”
In the end this army did not find the Seven Cities—because, of course, they did not exist. But it did set the course, for better or worse, of all that would follow. The same account of Coronado’s journey goes on to take an unexpectedly philosophical turn:
I always notice, and it is a fact, that for the most part when we have something valuable in our hands, and deal with it without hindrance, we do not value or prize it as highly as if we understood how much we would miss it after we had lost it… but after we have lost it and miss the advantages of it, we have a great pain in the heart, and we are all the time imagining and trying to find ways and means by which to get it back again. It seems to me that this has happened to all or most of those who went on the expedition in search of the Seven Cities.… Granted they did not find the riches of which they had been told, but they found a place in which to search for them and the beginning of a good country to settle in, so as to go farther from there.
This was true not only of the conquistadors but of the army they had brought with them. We may never know if any of that thousand-strong force did as Mustafa Zemmouri had done—devised a way to escape to the relative freedom of this vast land over the confinement and slavery of the world from which they had come. But nonetheless we know that they stood there for a time, making their lives forever a part of the story of the nation that would be built atop their footprints. Unlike Cabeza de Vaca, Pedro de Castañeda, or Father Marcos, none of those men who had so much in common with the slave of Azemmour left a relación. They recorded no words of their own that might tell us, nearly five hundred years later, what they experienced in the New World or hoped the future might hold. And so the best we can do is to imagine them there on the route trod by Coronado: in Texas, in New Mexico, perhaps as far north as Kansas and Nebraska, an army of men born as Muslims, marching through the middle of America as if toward Mecca, nearly a century before other religious travelers dreamed of making a New Jerusalem of their city on a hill.
Anne Hutchinson Preaching in Her House in Boston, 1637. Lithograph by Howard Pyle, published in Harper’s Magazine, 1901.
CHAPTER 3
Strange Opinions in the City on a Hill
1630–1660
Roughly one hundred years after the doomed ships of the Narváez Expedition crashed into the figurative rocks of the New World and sank beneath its depths, long after the four survivors had died and the tales of their adventure had been surpassed by others in the mounting saga of conquest and colonization, another man sent to govern a land he had never seen stood in the salty air and warned his people that they risked a similar fate. The shipwreck they faced, however, was not to be nautical but divine. Even after they reached their destination, the danger of being capsized and swallowed by the waves of competing religious ideas would be all around them.
“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity,” Governor John Winthrop told the prospective settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, “is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.” Invoking the biblical prophet best known for swords beaten int
o ploughshares, the recently chosen leader of North America’s newest colony seemed to offer an alternative to the bloody exploits of the Spanish territories to the south. Unafflicted by the fever for finding lost cities, they would build one of their own, a godly community in the supposedly godless wilderness.
The threat of a spiritual shipwreck was a lesser-known note in Winthrop’s famous “city upon a hill” sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered aboard the Arabella as it approached Massachusetts. The potential disaster described by the governor was not as dramatic as the one suffered by those stranded on the Island of Misfortune a century before. Yet in Winthrop’s estimation, its consequences would be no less bleak. As he addressed the future New Englanders, he could imagine no fate worse than that which would befall them if they broke the covenant they had made with each other and with God. To speak even metaphorically of a vessel’s destruction during a three-week ocean passage undoubtedly would have seemed a disquietingly odd choice for a man supposedly invested in keeping morale high, but the true “shipwreck,” Winthrop said, would come only if they used their journey across the Atlantic in pursuit of “carnal intentions” and “seeking great things.” To do so would mean ruin in the only sense that mattered to these pious folk. “The Lord will surely break out in wrath against us,” he said, “and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.”
The idea of the covenant was a central theme in the religious and social organization of the group of reform-minded Christians we have come to know as the Puritans, who in the wake of the English Reformation—that turbulent time in which the Anglican Church broke, reaffiliated, and then split irrevocably with Rome—sought to purify English religious life of lingering Catholic influence. Used in the broadest sense, the label Puritan in the American context applies to both the separatists of William Bradford’s Plymouth Colony, who had arrived on the Mayflower ten years before, and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, who believed no less that the existing English church was corrupt, but hoped it could be transformed without formal schism. The Puritans were a people who viewed the particulars of affiliation as matters of life and death. According to their covenantal theology, the relationship between God and humanity was based upon a series of promises and obligations, contracts made in scripture that continued to outline the responsibility of Christians to uphold divine law. This responsibility was not limited to religious practice but had bearing on all aspects of life, including economics and governance.
The covenant that led Winthrop’s band of Puritans out of England in 1630 was no less spiritually preoccupied than the protocols that had directed Spanish exploration during the previous century had been, but the terms of each put them in stark contrast. While the Spanish, guided by their Requerimiento, focused on the New World as a place full of heathen souls to be converted, conquered, or both, the English were more inward-looking. They were aware, of course, that the Massachusett and Wampanoag tribes, their new neighbors, might provide opportunities for spreading the Gospel, but they were more invested in the question of what this “errand in the wilderness,” as the Puritan experiment is often called, would mean for their own community of faith. Moreover, while the Spanish had sought to discover hidden glories, the English would attempt to build utopia from scratch. The covenant through which this would be accomplished was twofold, involving human duties to God as well as the duty of members of society often at odds with one another, the rich and the poor particularly, to work toward the common good.
“For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man,” Winthrop preached. “We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”
A layman and a lawyer, Winthrop had no formal training in ministry, yet his sermon has come to be regarded by many as the starting point of a distinctly American religious literature, providing a singular metaphor for considering the divine favor allegedly enjoyed by the nation that arose from the English colonies. The primary reason for this is a brief use of a scriptural image to describe the kind of society the colonists would attempt to establish after safely crossing the sea. One sentence in particular is far more often recalled than Winthrop’s warnings against spiritual shipwreck, though the latter may be closer to the point of the sermon as a whole. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,” he preached, “so that if we shall 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 through the world.”
Nearly four hundred years since these words were spoken, Winthrop’s notion of a city upon a hill occupies a hallowed place in our national self-understanding. The seemingly self-evident prophecy of its message has not only become the current creed of our civil religion but continues to influence commonly held assumptions about even the earliest moments in our prehistory. If we assume “the eyes of all people” are on the United States now, then Winthrop’s suggestion that his community should consider themselves the pinnacle of civilization do indeed seem prescient. Having found their way into the religiously-infused rhetoric of both political parties, his words are often offered as evidence equally for American exceptionalism and the supposed Christian roots of the Republic.
This is not, however, the way Winthrop himself used his most famous phrase; nor is it the way it was considered throughout most of American history. Though it has become part of the creation myth of a nation, the idea of the city upon a hill has, like any myth, been interpreted in different ways by different people depending upon the needs of the time.
As anyone in his primary audience would have known, Winthrop used the phrase in reference to a New Testament parable. It is taken from one of the most famous passages of scripture, the Sermon on the Mount, in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew. In the biblical text, Jesus exhorts his followers to be exemplars from whom others might learn how to live. “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden,” he tells them. “Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”
There are multiple meanings at play here. The first, and certainly the one that has been most often applied to Winthrop’s allusion, is that it is the responsibility of those who would consider themselves sources of light or moral instruction to set themselves apart from the crowd so that others may see them clearly enough to learn from them. The second meaning, which is also present in Winthrop’s sermon but less often noted, is that a city on a hill, because it is a place set apart, is necessarily conspicuous. While this means that its residents’ good works will be known far and wide, it also ensures that their mistakes will be instantly evident even to those beyond the city walls. To acknowledge that one hopes to build a city upon a hill is to be aware that though one may aspire to greatness, there is an equal if not greater chance that one will achieve infamy instead. As Jesus applies the phrase to his disciples, “city upon a hill” implies at once a compliment (they are “the light of the world”), a challenge (he calls on them to “let your light shine”), and a warning (they should never forget that, for good or for ill, they “cannot be hidden”).
The ambiguity within Winthrop’s reference is further complicated by the question of what it would have meant to his immediate audience, those joining him in the adventure of establishing a religiously oriented city so far from the lands that had both birthed and challenged their faith. Fo
r a fuller sense of what they hoped to accomplish, and why, it is worth looking briefly at an earlier set of writings usually ascribed to Winthrop’s pen. “Arguments for the Plantation of New England,” published the year before the Arabella’s departure, describes in greater detail than “A Model for Christian Charity” what the Puritans bound for Massachusetts intended. In lawyerly prose that suggests his prior career as a member of his father’s London legal practice, Winthrop proposes nine theses in favor of further English settlement in North America, despite the recent failure of similar expeditions. He then moves through a series of objections and answers, making his case for a community that would provide at once a defensive safe haven for those within in it and a counteroffensive against the forces that would do them harm.
The most important points of Winthrop’s nine “Arguments” were these: first, that a Puritan colony would establish “a bulwark against the kingdom of Anti-Christ” and the efforts of “Jesuits”—in other words, the Roman Catholic Church, which controlled the southern regions of the new land through the Spanish and, through the French, seemed poised to do the same in the north. Second, the rest of Europe was in such a bad state that “God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many whom he means to save out of the general calamity.” Though it is often forgotten in favor of the narrative of the Puritan search for religious liberty, a fervent apocalypticism can be found just beneath the surface of the decision to brave the ocean and the wilderness on the other side. Finally, Winthrop said, “this land grows weary of her inhabitants.” Life in England had become so corrupt and difficult, in the Puritan estimation, that one could no longer live there honestly and survive. The theme joining all Winthrop’s Arguments was the threat from a complex of outside forces, both religious and economic. Winthrop and his people risked the spiritual “shipwreck” of crossing the ocean because not to do so seemed even more hazardous to their souls.
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