“We shall be as a city upon a hill,” Puritan leader John Winthrop told his fellow voyagers aboard the Arbella in 1630 as they were preparing to land on the Massachusetts shore. Winthrop and the other Puritan saints believed that the civilized, or European, world was holding its collective breath to see whether their godly venture would succeed. What is noteworthy is that Winthrop did not concoct his prediction out of nothing. Europeans had for years persuaded themselves that the Americas truly might be a special, if not utopian, place. Although experience altered that exotic perception of the New World, the conviction that the land across the Atlantic Ocean was a promising locale for exploration and development never really disappeared.

Winthrop's words would later come to be seen, particularly during the twentieth century, as a declaration of exceptionalism that set England's American colonies apart from the old European world. As historian Jack P. Greene observes, “The concept of American exceptionalism with its positive connotations was present at the very creation of America.” In America, there would be freedom from the culture of corruption and from tyranny endemic to the English political system and religious establishment.