City Upon A Hill of Skulls

In Spring 2023, I was part of a research team of students from the Generational African American Students Association and Natives at Harvard College who wrote a report calling on Harvard to dename Winthrop House. The House was named after Massachusetts colonizer Governor John Winthrop and his great-great-grandson, an enslaver and previous president of Harvard, who bore the same name.

As detailed in our report, Governor Winthrop’s crimes are especially abhorrent. A leader of the Puritans, Winthrop used religious fundamentalism to disguise massacres, dispossession, and enslavement as a righteous crusade worthy of honor and God’s favor. Leaving his name on our dorms and our streets signals that these actions are worthy of commemoration.

They are not.

We must look through the eyes of history to understand the true nature of Winthrop’s catastrophic legacy. It is a legacy built on the genocide of the Indigenous population. As a community, we must continue to contextualize and repudiate any attempt to celebrate settler colonialism.

Historian Benjamin Madley gives us four markers for looking at a potential genocide: massacres, annihilationist statements, state-sponsored body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody. All of these markers existed in the Puritan campaign to exterminate the Pequot people led by Governor Winthrop.

In late August 1636, Colonel John Endicott and 90 soldiers were ordered by Winthrop to eliminate the Indigenous population of Block Island. The English attacked and burned a Pequot village on the east bank of the Thames River, triggering a war and the beginning of the tribe’s demise.

One of the most horrific massacres by European settlers occurred at the Pequot Mystic Fort. Captain John Mason, a leader in the attack in May 1637, made the Puritan annihilationist goals clear, announcing to his men, “We must burn them.” Settlers indiscriminately slaughtered and burned alive anywhere between 300 to 700 Pequot people at the Mystic Fort, most of whom were women, children, and elders.

John Winthrop wrote about the massacre as a win worthy of God’s favor: “There was a day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for the victory obtained against the Pequods.” This “victory” characterized what happened at Mystic Fort as simply one battle of a great war. In truth, the rape of Mystic Fort was an act of ethnic cleansing done perversely in the name of faith and conquest.

After the incineration at Mystic Ford, the Puritans made a concerted effort to finish the liquidation of the Pequot people. The Pequot’s remaining food supplies and homes were destroyed, clearing them from their homelands. Head bounties were administered to neighboring tribes to murder survivors of the massacre, threatening the Montauk with the same genocidal fate.

What came with these state-sponsored bounties was the legalization of the institution of slavery. Governor Winthrop assisted in crafting the Body of Liberties, the first legal code in British North America that codified the enslavement of African and Indigenous people into the law. Since the Pequot fell under “captives taken in just wars,” it was legally permissible under the leadership of Governor Winthrop to hold them in the jaws of slavery.

Governor Winthrop was also a participant in this system of human bondage and human trafficking. According to Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery report, Winthrop enslaved at least seven indigenous people and ordered the trafficking of 17 Pequot prisoners of war into slavery in Bermuda. Through Winthrop’s own governance, he was able to enslave and treat people as human cargo for personal profit.

The legacy of Governor Winthrop is worthy of condemnation, contextualization, and acknowledgement, not commemoration. No longer will our community allow Harvard to continue to honor enslavers and architects of settler colonialism. The petition to dename has more than 1,000 signatures, including nearly 50 descendants of John Winthrop. If the administration had respect for the Black and Indigenous students leading this campaign, they will dename Winthrop House.

Indeed, Winthrop and the Puritans helped facilitate the society we occupy today. As Winthrop articulated himself, the expectation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was to be a “city upon a hill.” But a study of history is quick to remind us that this city, riddled with sin and human atrocity, was built on a hill of skulls.

Prince A. Williams ’25, a Crimson Editorial Editor, is a History concentrator in Adams House. His column, “Fight the Power!” runs bi-weekly on Mondays.