1775 (39 page)

Within each American colony, moreover, the relations between the different branches of government had evolved contrary to the mother country’s late-eighteenth-century example. George III might no longer be able to veto acts of Parliament, but royal governors sent to America—except Connecticut and Rhode Island, where governors were chosen locally—could and frequently did veto the bills passed by local legislatures. In other ways, though, governors were handicapped. Even if the governor signed a bill and forwarded it to London, the measure could still be vetoed by the Privy Council. By the 1760s, most colonies had developed adversarial relationships that pitted locally elected assemblies against the chief executive appointed by the Crown or the proprietors (as in Pennsylvania and Maryland). Patriot-faction opinion favored the popular and elected branch, which in most colonies was increasing its political and fiscal power.

Some governors were shrewd, agreeable, and popular—men like Thomas Pownall in Massachusetts, James Glenn in South Carolina, and Lord Botetourt and Robert Dinwiddie in Virginia. A larger ratio, however, were hobbled by insufficient stature, questionable judgment, lack of meaningful patronage at their disposal, and complicated instructions from home that limited their room for maneuver and give-and-take. In short, by the 1760s,
the rivalry prevalent in most colonies—popular representatives in assemblies (elected by Whig yeomen and elites) confronting governors appointed by the Crown or ministry—bore an apparent, although superficial, resemblance to the seventeenth-century politics of Puritan and Whig legislators arrayed against Stuart kings. The king-and-Parliament entente within the late-eighteenth-century British system did not operate in the American colonies. Thus, if colonial Whigs of the 1760s harked to yesteryear’s rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny that revisited the combats and name calling of the 1630–1715 period—and clearly many did—that was because provincial tensions recalled those years.

The informal “constitutions” of the individual North American provinces had other distinguishing legacies. New England stood out. “In [seventeenth-century] New England court records, one reads little about felonies and misdemeanors but a great deal concerning sin, evil, wickedness, filthiness, pollutions and the like…[But] this rhetoric is almost entirely absent from the court records of the early Chesapeake colonies.”
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Furthermore, according to one constitutional scholar, eighteenth-century Massachusetts had its own idiosyncratic, locally controlled and interpreted version of the English Common law.
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With its town meetings and town-based government, the Bay Colony of the 1750s enjoyed an unusual judicial and jury system capable of frustrating imperial policy. One linchpin, so-called civil and criminal “traverse juries,” were even allowed to reshape law and not simply interpret evidence.
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Despite Loyalist grumbling, the charters allowing self-government were left untouched in Connecticut and Rhode Island. However, even in the Bay Colony, where the existing charter was suspended in 1774 under the Massachusetts Government Act, elements of Patriot governmental authority persisted at the vital town and county level. This enabled Samuel Adams and his allies to shut down the courts, frighten royal officials into resignation, employ county meetings (never mentioned in the 1774 act) to host the political rallies prohibited at the town level, and control a militia organized town by town. Many juries were still under local control. Simply put, the Massachusetts Government Act, by the beginning of 1775, had failed to reassert British control of Massachusetts government.

As for the “constitutions” of Virginia and the Carolinas, these colonies had swung in the direction of locally elected assemblies gaining control over British-appointed provincial governors. By 1774 or early 1775, Patriot factions were able to seize effective colonywide power. They did this by
blurring the lines between lawful assemblies and the new extralegal committees and conventions that just happened to include many or most of the same elected representatives. When royal governors dissolved or prorogued the assemblies for commitment to Patriot agendas, these dissolved bodies more or less reconvened in a new extralegal form as the General Committee of South Carolina, North Carolina Provincial Congress, or Virginia Convention. And as we saw in
Chapter 1
, once these bodies took the reins of power, helpless royal governors eventually fled to nearby British warships. These accessions were not seamless legal events. Under British law, they were neither seamless nor legal. However, they were effective.

Thus, and to make a long story short, some nine, ten, or twelve months before the official Declaration of Independence, Virginia and the Carolinas had de facto independence in operation under extralegal arrangements that hinted at (and in 1776 or 1777 would orchestrate) new state constitutions. Conceptually, these architects of extralegal governance dragged a broad net, invoking everything from natural rights and natural law to the old common law and the right to resistance, sometimes adding in the Glorious Revolution and sentences from John Locke or the Magna Carta. They were, in effect, doing legal clip-and-paste jobs.

From Maine to Georgia, might ultimately made right, and possession of government provided nine tenths of the lawful origins of the new republic, however much far-off British legalists disagreed. A disparity of legal concepts and relationships had made the War of the Two Constitutions unavoidable.

Calvinism: Liberty’s Fighting Credo?

Barely remembered in the twenty-first century, after being pushed aside during the early twentieth, is the longtime political importance of Calvinism. In the 1500s and 1600s, John Calvin’s faith was the militant, fighting arm of Reformation Era European Protestantism—and in 1775 it became the fighting religion of Whig Revolutionary America.

To a considerable minority of nineteenth-century British and American historians, the earlier spread of political liberty against the forces of Rome, Hapsburg Spain, and Louis XIV marched to Calvinist drums. By these accounts, the rise of Protestant northern and western Europe, to match and then outmatch the power of the Catholic Mediterranean, consummated a 200-year triumph of French theologian Calvin’s heirs on the battlefields and
in the councils of England, Scotland, Ulster, France, Holland, and Germany. The clash in Revolutionary America—at least half Calvinist by denomination, and a promised land for English Puritans, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and French Huguenots, as well as Dutch, German, and Swiss Reformed—marked the last great contest, this time for predominance in North America.

This Calvinist portrait seeps—and sometimes sweeps—through the writings of Victorian-era British historians like Thomas Babington Macaulay and James A. Froude, as well as Americans Edward Bancroft, John Fiske, and John Lothrop Motley. Did these men have a better sense of the religiosity of the eighteenth century than more recent chroniclers? Probably. Were they correct in painting a dour, predestination-minded religious culture as a progressive political force? Probably. This is where twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans balk and find a religious explanation hard to credit.

The old heroes have been crowded off history’s current stage: Holland’s William the Silent and William of Orange, England’s Oliver Cromwell, Scotland’s John Knox and the Lords of the Convention, the French Huguenot Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, and lesser-known Germans and Swiss. The devils of that era were principally Spanish—the Duke of Alba, who executed 18,000 Dutch Calvinists as easily as frontier Texans barbecued beef—and Bourbon French: Louis XIV, who in 1688 revoked the Edict of Nantes, under which French Protestants had been protected.

But modern cultural biases cannot wholly rewrite a prior American reality: that the Calvinist denominations central to these old battles—English Puritans and so-called Independents (Congregationalists), Scottish and Ulster Presbyterians, and members of the Dutch, German, and French Reformed churches—bulked larger in the thirteen colonies of the 1770s than in any major European nation. Some came as religious refugees; more were economic opportunity seekers; many were both. Indeed, America’s Calvinist ratios began increasing in the early eighteenth century as German, Huguenot, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish arrivals displaced the English predominance of seventeenth-century emigration. The religious Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s further increased the Calvinist coloration because so many (but not all) of the Baptists proliferating in the second half of the eighteenth century were Calvinists. The Awakening’s leading evangelist, George Whitefield, was one himself. By rough calculations, at least three fifths of American church attenders in the 1770s would have been
Calvinists, with the remainder being mostly Anglican, Lutheran, or Quaker.

This was not lost on British officials, who, as we have seen, sometimes described the Revolution as a Presbyterian and/or Congregationalist war. Edmund Burke’s pointed analysis a month before Lexington and Concord is also worth revisiting: that “the [American] people are Protestants, and of that kind which is most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” So much so, he added, that religion in “our Northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance.”
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In New England, resistance was principally Calvinist. The
rage militaire
circa 1775 has been described as follows: “When actual fighting began many New England ministers became ‘fighting parsons.’ Ministers exerted their influence to raise volunteers and sometimes marched away with them, as did Joseph Willard of Beverly, where two companies were raised largely through his influence. At Windsor, Vermont, David Avery, on hearing the news of Lexington, preached a farewell sermon, then called the people to arms and marched away with twenty men, recruiting others as they went. The fiery and sharp-tongued John Cleaveland of Ipswich ‘is said to have preached his whole parish into the army and then to have gone himself.’”
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The political implications of Calvinism can be easily stated: that a people’s embrace of
ecclesiastical
republicanism is followed by a strong urge to reshape
government
along the lines of the Reformed and Presbyterian churches.
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As the thirteen colonies grew in the 1750s and 1760s, British strategists feared just this relationship and promoted an Anglican counterreformation. From the Crown’s perspective, Calvinism was still an unduly combative creed.

To Edward Bancroft, writing in the nineteenth century, “the Revolution of 1776, so far as it was affected by religion, was a Presbyterian measure. It was the natural outgrowth of the principles which the Presbyterianism of the Old World planted in her sons, the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, the French Huguenots, the Dutch Calvinists and the Presbyterians of Ulster.”
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John Lothrop Motley, best known for his admiring histories of Holland, asserted that “in England the seeds of liberty, wrapped up in Calvinism and hoarded through many trying years, were at last destined to float over land and sea, and to bear the largest harvest of temperate freedom for the great commonwealths that were still unborn…To Calvinists, more than any other class of men, the political liberties of England, Holland and America are due.”
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“Whatever the cause,” said James Froude, professor of history at Oxford, “the Calvinists were the only fighting Protestants. It was they whose faith gave them courage to stand up for the Reformation, and but for them, the Reformation would have been lost.” To New Englander John Fiske, “it would be hard to overrate the debt which mankind owes to Calvin. The spiritual father of Coligny, of William the Silent, and of Cromwell, must occupy a foremost rank among the champions of modern democracy as one of the longest steps that mankind has ever taken toward personal freedom.”
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Dozens of French, Dutch, German, and even Spanish historians made similar arguments.
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Calvinism is hardly forgotten, though it no longer bears a strong sword. Americans celebrated John Calvin’s five-hundredth birthday in 2009 at a summer conference, and believers have been delivering Calvin memorial addresses in Europe and the United States for centuries. On the other hand, even in the somber Victorian era, scholars (and political leaders) understood that grave, Satan-fearing, free-will-denying, and supposedly morose Calvinism was a difficult credo to credit, praise, or embrace. American theologian Henry Ward Beecher put the doubts aptly: “It has ever been a mystery to the so-called liberals that the Calvinists, with what they have considered their harshly despotic and rigid views and doctrines, should always have been the staunchest and bravest defenders of freedom. The working for liberty of these severe principles in the minds of those that adopted them has been a puzzle.”
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Twenty-first-century opinion is no less reluctant. Yet during Calvinism’s zenith of influence, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, it was easy to see why its theology-cum-ideology won respect: a record that combined opposition to royal tyranny with credit for encouraging just wars, republican principles, self-government, education, and even separation of church and state. Because of its role in seeding representative institutions, New Englander Fiske looked back on Calvinism as “one of the most effective schools that has ever existed for training men in local self-government.”
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The hostility of a king believing in divine right had been voiced centuries earlier by James I: “Presbytery agreeth as well with the monarchy as God with the devil.” At the Revolution’s outbreak, the English writer Horace Walpole remarked more lightly that “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson.”

No other creed had so many of its eighteenth-century churches burned by British troops, especially in New Jersey and in the Carolinas, where they
were regarded as rebel hornets’ nests. Just as Puritans and Presbyterians had interwoven just-war and chosen-nation beliefs into the English Civil War of the 1640s, so they did again in the 1770s, now aided in the middle colonies by Reformed (German and Dutch) clergy.
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