The Winthrop Covenant

In a powerful chronicle, spanning three centuries of the Winthrop family in New England and New York, Louis Auchincloss portrays the rise and fall of the Puritan ethic. Through a richly diverse gallery of men and women, both real and fictional, he illuminates the personal and social conflicts that the Puritan sense of mission has generated—under changing guises—in American life.
The Winthrop heritage begins in the stern confines of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—Governor John Winthrop's covenant with God versus Anne Hutchinson's compulsion to martyrdom. The burden of conscience falls in varying ways to the Governor's descendants. To his grandson, a judge in the Salem witch trials, it means dying in torment. To Rebecca Bayard, wife of a Hudson Valley patroon, it becomes an obsessive sense of duty leading to ironic consequences. It persuades an American diplomat, negotiating in Paris with the canny Talleyrand, to reject the easy gain of private power.
...