America's Prophet (7 page)

How quickly a Moses can fall.

I asked Tim Safford if he thought Duché failed the leadership moment.

“I don’t. I’m his successor, and I think the life of a pastor is trying to hold very distant poles in some sort of tension with each other. Loyalty to the Crown, loyalty to the freedom movement of Washington. Granted, in that moment, he’s more like the Israelites complaining in the desert. It’s a greater Moses moment for Washington. But like a lot of preachers, Duché never gives up hope that justice can be served without killing people. He inspires me.”

BACK UPSTAIRS WE
settled in the stark white sanctuary with the worn stone floor. I wanted to press Safford on why he thought the Moses narrative was so prevalent during the Revolution. Duché was hardly the only person to invoke the biblical hero. If anything, the Exodus became the lingua franca of the casus belli.

As early as 1760, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, stressed that God “is now giving this land to us who in virtue of the ancient covenant are the Seed of Abraham.” He urged all Americans to read the story of their past in Deuteronomy 26:6–9. “The Lord freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and
awesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” In 1765, John Adams wrote that he always considered the settlement of America “the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”

The themes these orators drew from the Exodus were similar to the ones the Puritans and Great Awakening preachers had emphasized: Freedom is a God-given right; God promises liberation to the oppressed; God freed the Israelites from Egypt, and he can free the colonists. But the new generation of Exodus-lovers went further, insisting that the Bible expressly rejects the British form of government, the divine right of kings, and endorses the kinds of freedom the patriots were proposing. In 1775, Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard, said Americans should adopt the form of government that God handed down to Moses on Sinai. “The Jewish government,” he wrote, “was a perfect republic.”

Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
and Samuel Sherwood’s
The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness,
both published in 1776, invoked the Moses story to make similar attacks on the English political system. Paine was the antireligious zealot who continually cited religious examples. He hated Scripture but quoted it relentlessly, showing the enduring power of the Bible even for deists. In
Common Sense
he cites Gideon, Samuel, and David, to show how the Bible argues against kingship. And he calls King George III a pharaoh. “No man was a warmer wisher for reconciliation than myself, before the fatal nineteenth of April 1775, but the moment the event of that day was made known, I rejected the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England for ever.”

Sherwood, a Connecticut pastor, calls on the same biblical passages that John Cotton quotes on the
Arbella
to argue that America’s
revolutionary leaders are finally fulfilling the promise of the Puritans. He quotes God’s message to the Israelites in the Sinai: “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself.”

By contrast, these two popular treatises never quote Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, or Bacon, the pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers.

The pace of Mosaic references seemed to escalate as independence drew closer. On May 17, 1776, the Reverend George Duffield, speaking to a Philadelphia audience that included John Adams, also compared George III to Egypt’s pharaoh. The Reverend Jonathan Mayhew, preaching a week later in Boston, declared monarchy “unbiblical” and said: “If any miserable people” in Europe seek refuge from their slavery, “O let them find one in America.” The Reverend Samuel West, addressing the Massachusetts legislature a few days later, praised Jethro’s advice to Moses that he lead Israel by appointing a council of leaders. The seeds of promise first hinted at by Columbus in 1492 and planted by William Bradford in 1620 finally appeared to be reaching full flower in 1776. Like Moses, the country was prepared to stand up to the most powerful force in the world and declare, “Let my people go.”

“I think what’s important about all this language,” Safford said, “is that these leaders were using the Bible to convince themselves they were free. They’re not that biblically pure; often they’re not that religious. But they’re using these stories to build the case that they’re
justified in standing up to the Crown. You’re individuals, they’re saying to the colonists. You’re children of God. You’re no longer subject to the king.”

“So you don’t think this reliance on the Exodus is unusual, or over-the-top?”

“The founders were otherworldly to a great degree,” he said, “but generally they were hugely influenced by rationalism and pragmatism. For them, this whole notion of deliverance was a practical matter. They weren’t looking for the freedom of Christ in the next world, they were looking for the freedom of Moses in this world.”

“So they wanted the story to be true.”

“It certainly seems that way. John Adams sailed multiple times to Europe. Benjamin Franklin did the same. They were willing to risk everything because they believed in something. And what they believed is that you should sacrifice your own fat and happiness for something far greater than yourselves. That is an Old Testament narrative. You risk. You don’t look back, or you’ll end up a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife.”

“Do you believe,” I said, “that Bradford could have gotten on that ship, or Duché could have crossed out the name of that king—”

He cut me off. “The only reason they could have done that is because they had a narrative larger than their own lives. A narrative of God delivers me through the Red Sea. A narrative that if you’re lost in exile, you can remain holy. A narrative of life is stronger than death, love is more powerful than hate. If you do not have a narrative larger than the world gives you, you’re just going to get sucked up by the world.

“Whether or not the Bible is true,” he continued, “is insignificant, compared to
Are you going to live by the narrative you find there?
The Pilgrims, George Whitefield, even Benjamin Franklin I would say,
trusted the narrative. They believed God would deliver them. They never sank into the pure limitations of rationalism, that the world was only what they could perceive. They always seem to be fueled by a reality they couldn’t see. And because of them, that narrative became America’s narrative.”

PHILADELPHI’S HISTORIC DISTRICT
has grown since I first visited in high school and now covers one square mile around Independence Hall. There’s a sign marking the spot where the first edition of
Common Sense
was printed. The house where Jefferson wrote the Declaration has been rebuilt. Franklin’s home has been memorialized by a two-story “Ghost House” consisting of an empty gray frame in the shape of a town house. A major excavation was under way on the mall of the house where Washington and John Adams lived as president. Found by accident when the Liberty Bell was relocated, the house contains quarters where Washington housed slaves, even though this was illegal in Philadelphia. An archaeologist pointed out the circular bay of the parlor, where the presidents met visitors, and which is believed to have inspired the Oval Office in the White House.

Three of these men were involved in another little-known chapter of American independence, one that more than any other shows the intimate connection between Moses and the young nation.

The next-to-last order of business of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, was to form a committee to design a new seal for the United States. Pendant seals were widely used in the eighteenth century, and the new Congress must have craved one desperately to form a committee just minutes after they had adopted the Declaration. As further proof of the seal’s importance, the committee
consisted of three members, “Dr. Franklin, Mr. J. Adams, and Mr. Jefferson.” No records of their deliberations remain, but correspondence indicates that each member submitted a proposal to the others. Franklin’s proposal reads as follows (the words in brackets appear on his original description but were struck out):

John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson’s proposal for the Great Seal of the United States, as drawn by Benson J. Lossing for
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
July 1856.
(Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

Franklin also included a motto: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

An intriguing feature of Franklin’s suggestion is that he doesn’t focus on the moment of triumph for the Israelites, when they cross through the Red Sea on dry ground. Instead, he homes in on the moment of defeat for the pharaoh, when the waters come crashing down on him. But that moment does not actually appear in the Bible. The pivotal scene in which the Israelites escape Egypt begins in Exodus 13. God, fearing that the Israelites will lose the stomach for their escape if they encounter resistance, leads them away from the obvious route, along the Mediterranean, where the main trading route of the region passed. He leads them instead on what the Bible calls the “roundabout” way, via the Sea of Reeds.

The pharaoh, meanwhile, having recently approved the Israelites’ departure, suddenly changes his mind and decides to pursue them with the full vigor of his armed forces. Fearing certain death, the Israelites panic, and God responds by shifting the pillar of cloud from in front of them to behind him. “Then Moses held out his arm over the sea and the Lord drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and turned the sea into dry ground. The waters were split.” Israel’s moment of birth bears striking similarities to the opening sentence in Genesis in which a strong wind also sweeps over an expanse of seas and land emerges from a watery chaos.

But what happens next is more confusing. The Egyptians come plunging into the sea after the Israelites, including “all of the pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and horsemen.” But God locks the wheels of their chariots so that they can’t move. “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Hold out your arm over the sea, that the waters may come back upon the Egyptians and upon their chariots and upon their horsemen.’” The sea returns to its normal state and “Pharaoh’s entire army that had followed after them into the sea; not one of them remained.”
But the Bible offers not a word about what happens to the pharaoh. Did he lead his army into the sea, or let them proceed alone?

Jewish commentators have suggested various interpretations over the years. Some say the pharaoh was spared so he could repent to God; others suggest he was tortured underwater; still more propose that he was sent to the portal of hell so he could mock other kings when they arrived. Franklin’s design seems to suggest a slightly different interpretation: The tyrant, sword in hand, goes down fighting, while Moses, the obedient rebel, is bathed in God’s embrace.

Jefferson, meanwhile, proposed another scene from the Exodus story. The Israelites, having passed through the waters, are marching across the desert. As Adams describes it: “Mr. Jefferson proposed, The children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night.” Jefferson also suggested an image for the back of the seal, the semilegendary Saxon rulers Hengist and Horsa, “whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” Adams proposed Hercules as depicted in an allegorical painting from the time but dismissed his own idea as “too complicated” and “not original.”

Clearly close to a compromise, the committee sought out Pierre Eugène du Simitière, an expert in heraldry who had designed the seals of Delaware and Virginia. In keeping with the needs of wax pendant seals, which were hung from ribbons and thus double-faced, the final version had two sides. One side was an original shield divided into six quarters for the countries that had populated the United States, surrounded by the initials of the thirteen states, flanked by the goddesses of liberty and peace. Above the crest is the eye of Providence in a pyramid, and below is the slogan
E PLURIBUS UNUM
, meaning “Out of many, one,” which had been taken from a magazine company that used the phrase to advertise a year-end com
pendium of four issues. The other side (for which no depiction remains) was Jefferson’s edited version of Franklin’s proposal: