1775 (16 page)

More attention is warranted, though, to the mobilizing force of belief in the Anglo-American colonies as a chosen people. For believers, instead of being merely
just,
the war for American independence became vital to God’s plan. Such language particularly engaged the Puritan provinces, imbued with faith in New England’s leadership role. Some of the muskets pointed on April 19, 1775, had a millennial target as well as a worldly one.

William G. McLoughlin, a prominent twentieth-century U.S. religious historian, expanded the nation’s “chosen people” historical mission to include a total of five religious revivals, all of them producing major cultural and political watersheds. “American history,” he said, “is thus best understood as a millenarian movement.”
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This hypothesis, offered in 1978, seems less apt amid the United States’ early-twenty-first-century disillusionments. Nevertheless, the Chosen Nation explanation was a powerful driver in the 1770s. One reason why Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull frequently placed “the united colonies” or “the country’s future” ahead of narrow provincial interests—a boon to both George Washington and Congress—was his religious commitment to America’s global mission.

To Ruth Bloch, a twentieth-century historian convinced of religion’s huge part in the Revolution, New Englanders by the mid-1770s were shifting away from their former preoccupation with the Puritan past to the uplift of a millennial future. Moreover, her research “on the frequency of millennial statements in printed literature suggests that such ideas may well have been as common among Presbyterian and Baptist patriots in middle and Southern regions as they were among New England Congregationalists.”
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Martin Marty, a distinguished American theologian, in 1970 hyperbolized the United States as a “righteous empire.” In the minds of many Protestants, he added, it had taken flight in 1776 as an “evangelical empire.” Culturally, its heritage of mission was English, and Marty reached back to the biblically referenced (Deuteronomy) words of seventeenth-century Massachusetts governor William Bradford, “
May not and ought not the children of these followers rightly say: Our faithers were Englishmen what came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wildernes; but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voyce and looked on their adversitie.
”
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Jonathan Edwards, the colonies’ greatest mid-eighteenth-century theologian, also heaped importance on the role of British North America, anticipating that it would succeed Britain as “the principal nation of the Reformation.”
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The sustenance that this role gave to the Revolution should not be underestimated.

In
Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America,
historian Patricia Bonomi concluded that the last decades of pre-Revolutionary British North America displayed an
increasing
“interpenetration of religion and politics.” She described a rising tempo: “Reflexes generated by the schisms of the Great Awakening and by the colonists’ denominational rivalries made for a contentiousness that pervaded the entire realm of the provincials’ behavior, and eventually the categories in which they framed political and religious issues became almost interchangeable. Indeed, what Clarendon said of England at the time of the Civil War might also be said of the American colonies by the mid-eighteenth century: ‘the ecclesiastical and civil state…[are so] interwoven together, and in truth so incorporated in each other, that like Hippocrates’ twins they cannot but laugh and cry together.’”
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Elevating the tie between politics and religion circa 1775 to an equivalency with riven 1640s England is excessive. Whereas the Stuart Church of England was reestablished in the 1660s after the English Civil War, the mid-1770s overthrow of Anglicanism in the six out of thirteen American
provinces where it had partial or full establishment was never reversed. The American overthrow stuck because a critical change was under way. Colonial Americans were concluding that even a loose interweaving of the ecclesiastical and civil states should be ended. The bolder argument that the American Revolution was, deep down, a religious war in the manner of the English Revolution likewise stretches too far. Too much of the colonists’ motivation in 1774 and 1775 involved a drive for economic and political self-determination conjoined with frustration at being reined in territorially. True, partly related frustrations operated in the 1640s. Some 130 years later, however, nonreligious factors carried greater weight in the motivation of thirteen colonies some 3,000 miles distant from the imperial center, provinces with a history of self-government that were also burgeoning economically and diverging ideologically.

Toward this end, later chapters will amplify some of the continuities between the English Revolution (or English Civil War) of the 1640s and the American Revolution, which also had characteristics of civil war. The role of religion was important in 1775, but less intense than it had been 130 years earlier. My 1999 book
The Cousins’ Wars
traced a thread of persisting concern about the interplay of religion and liberty through all three major English-speaking civil wars, with each displaying elements of millennial belief and fears about conspiracy. Each of these eras saw a growth of radical Protestant sects like the one visible in the 1770s. This was no coincidence.

Within the thirteen colonies, the
overall
kaleidoscope of religious belief or denomination explains better than any other single context how Patriots, neutrals, and Loyalists lined up politically or militarily in 1775. Across the pre-Revolutionary American provinces, in an era when much of the printed material was religious, religion probably remained the most important self-identifier, certainly among churchgoers.

The Politics of Religion, 1775: The Congregational, Presbyterian, and Vestry Anglican Coalition

The outlines of Patriot-faction religion are clear enough. Building on Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and South Carolina, we can easily prepare a “mental map” of the generalized religious constituencies of the Revolution in its opening years. Of the four New England provinces, three had a Congregational Church establishment, while the fourth, Rhode Island, had no establishment but a dominant mix of Baptists and
Congregationalists. Color New England “Congregationalist/Patriot.” For the moment, minor denominations, quibbles, and exceptions can be pushed aside.

The five plantation colonies come next, each with an Anglican Church establishment of sorts. Here a Patriot hue can be used for an area that begins with Maryland’s Chesapeake tobacco counties, then jumps across the Potomac to the tidewater and Piedmont of Virginia, another tobacco culture. Eastern or tidewater North Carolina is a further extension, originally populated by English settlers from Virginia and South Carolina. Tobacco-growing in the north, North Carolina gave way to rice and naval stores in the lower latitudes.

The subtropical extension, in the South Carolina low country, produced the most lucrative crops, rice and indigo. Southernmost Georgia, raw and sparsely populated, repeated this agriculture in a less affluent fashion. This Chesapeake-to-Georgia coastal swath represents the second great Patriotic leadership concentration circa 1775. It hosted a broadly similar religious establishment: relaxed, low-church Anglicanism, vestry-run by local plantation and commercial elites almost as hostile as New Englanders to bishops or to British religious supervision. Here, too, minor quibbles and exceptions can be pushed aside for now. This area should be mentally colored “Vestry Anglican/Patriot.”

The third region of revolution-friendly religion generally follows the foothills of Appalachia from New York’s Hudson highlands south through northern New Jersey, eastern and central Pennsylvania and northern Delaware into Maryland and then down into the southern backcountry, following the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia through western Virginia and the Carolinas. By the 1750s, this area had a distinctive, early-immigration Scotch-Irish overlay. It bristled, almost literally, with a score of Presbyterian churches—Donegal, Octorara, Timber Ridge, Fourth Creek, Thyatira—that became famous in the Indian wars or in the Revolution for fielding fighting men, sometimes right out of Sunday pews and occasionally led by a fighting preacher. In New York and New England, rebel Presbyterians were at loggerheads with minority Anglicans of the high-church Tory variety. However, from Virginia south, the churchgoing Presbyterian Scotch-Irish were allied with the very different vestry Anglican elites who led the Patriot side. It is easier to conceptualize than to neatly map.

Any good mental map must fundamentally differentiate between northern
and southern Anglicans. In Virginia and South Carolina, 60 to 80 percent of the vestry Anglicans took the Patriot side. From New England to New Jersey, where only 5 to 10 percent of the population was Anglican, the latter were more high-church than otherwise, and roughly three quarters became Loyalists or neutrals.
²⁰
These ratios blurred in Pennsylvania and Maryland, but it would be impossible to draw a clear border.

The middle colonies have complicated divisions, more easily imagined than reliably drawn. Presbyterians dominated the Patriot coalition, the ranks of the Scotch-Irish augmented by New England Yankees who migrated to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They usually wound up as Presbyterians, because New England’s established Congregational Church didn’t travel well beyond its home region. In any event, by the 1770s the New England Congregationalists and middle-colony Presbyterians were semiofficial allies. They had not been able to achieve the full-fledged merger advocated and worked for in the 1760s by Congregationalist Ezra Stiles and others, but cooperation was close.

Presbyterian ecumenicalism extended to the theologically kindred evangelical wings of the German Reformed and Dutch Reformed churches. Central New Jersey’s evangelical Dutch Reformed churches, for example, cooperated with neighboring New Light Presbyterian congregations, and Patriot leader William Livingston urged a working alliance against Anglicanism.
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In Pennsylvania and New York, where religious pluralism nurtured rivalry and infighting, political factions developed identifiable denominational characteristics and alliances. Take Philadelphia in the 1760s. Lawyer William Allen, describing 1764 election results to Governor Thomas Penn, recounted church by church: “We had great help from the Lutherans, and Calvinist among the Dutch[;] from the other sects we had great opposition: we had about half of the Church of England and the Presbyterians to a man.” The dynamics were well summarized by historian Alan Tully: “When politicians spoke of the electorate in ideal or didactic terms they might talk about freemen, but when they spoke about mobilizing the electorate, it was in terms of the Quaker, Presbyterians, Baptist, or German church interest…Religion became the main vehicle by which ethnicity gained political representation.”
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By the mid-1770s, Pennsylvania’s evangelical-leaning Presbyterians, German/Dutch Reformed, and Lutheran churchgoers were more or less on
the same side. The opposing conservative or incipient Loyalist bloc, in turn, combined high-church Anglicans with nonevangelical Dutch and Germans, some in churches allied to the Anglicans. It also attracted many Quakers (fearful that their longtime political and religious dominance was eroding). Thomas Barton, a Pennsylvania Anglican rector, bluntly opined that “many of the principal Quakers wish for it [episcopacy, whereby Anglican bishops are sent to America], in hopes it might be a check to the growth of Presbyterianism.”
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Not a few wealthy Quakers, including the Penn family, had already converted to Anglicanism. This reckoning is slightly oversimplified but compatible with the religious coloration of politics in Pennsylvania and New York.
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In New York, too, the importance of religion in politics reflected how many legal controversies and political gambits were connected to denominationalism. The basis of friction was the Ministry Act of 1705, which established the Anglican Church in four counties in and around the city of New York. This status, in turn, led to combative proposals: at one extreme for broader Anglican establishment; at the other, for complete disestablishment. It also led to acrimony over petitions for bishops, to bitterness by other Protestants that local authorities would not charter non-Anglican churches and colleges, to fears about civil liberties, and to indignation by Presbyterians in Westchester County or Baptists in Queens about being taxed to support Anglicanism.
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By the 1770s, New York’s DeLancey faction was Anglican-led, and the rival Livingston group Presbyterian-led. Provincial politics in Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey shared the central tension between Anglicans and Presbyterians.

So to return to our mental map of 1775, the third entry should include an important but imprecise stippling for Presbyterian centers stretching from the Hudson highlands through Pennsylvania to the southern Piedmont and backcountry. Middle-colony Presbyterians by themselves weren’t powerful enough to lead their provinces toward independence in the manner of Yankee Congregationalists and vestry Anglican southern planters. But it was a rare Presbyterian concentration—a Scottish church or a quirky splinter group—that wasn’t strongly on the Patriot side.

Bishops, Vestries, and Anglican Church Establishments

With London so distant, individual church vestries—governing groups of church elders—became essential to maintaining local control of
plantation-colony Anglicanism. In old colonies like Virginia and South Carolina, many became instruments of the local gentry. In a minority of parishes, vestries counted less because the church or its rector was funded from London by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) or was under the thumb of a royal governor or a proprietary family like the Calverts in Maryland. The Patriot bias or incipient Toryism of Anglican congregations often hung on distinctions like these.