The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  In the end, a decade later, in Jefferson’s great Act for Establishing Religious Freedom and the disestablishing legislation that surrounded it, this goal, sought jointly by spokesmen for minority denominationalism and enlightened reform, was attained in the state of Virginia. In Massachusetts and Connecticut the same conclusion was reached with greater difficulty and after a struggle that lasted into the nineteenth century. But there, paradoxically, the pre-Revolutionary opposition to the internal establishment had been even fiercer than in Virginia, and the contagion of Revolutionary thought more virulent.

  The leadership in the fight against the internal establishments in New England in the 1760’s and 1770’s was taken by the Separate Baptists, “the most radical of the despised and illegal Separates.” These doctrinally self-conscious predestinarian evangelists of the eighteenth century, like Jehovah’s Witnesses in the twentieth, were fiercely belligerent, acutely sensitive to slights, and indefatigable in righting every wrong done them; they became, however limited and parochial their intended goals, spearheads in the drive toward a fuller realization of equality. Inheriting in the mid-1760’s the social views of the earlier Strict Congregationalists, reinforced by large increases in membership, and strengthened by a newly perfected group organization and by the leadership of the fantastically energetic proselytizer and pamphleteer Isaac Backus, they threw themselves into the fight for equal rights.29

  Their work was cut out for them. Complacent leaders of the favored church declared that “liberty is the fundamental principle of our establishment” since each congregation was free to organize itself, pick its own minister, and, once it certified itself as a unit of a legitimate dissenting denomination, gain exemption from “ministerial taxes.” How much better off, they said, was true Christianity here than in England. Abroad there was discrimination against dissenters and limitations of speech and inquiry; but at home in New England there was “liberty of conscience, the rights of private judgment and [an acknowledgment of] the absurdity of advancing the kingdom of Christ by penal laws.” Superior human authority was disdained: “We regard neither pope nor prince as head of the church; nor acknowledge that any Parliaments have power to enact articles of doctrine or forms of discipline or modes of worship or terms of church communion.”30

  But popes and parliaments were hardly the point. Everyone conceded that freedom abounded in America, in religious affairs, at this level even in Massachusetts. What was galling to the Baptists and to others who resented having to receive freedoms as favors from those with the right to choose the beneficiaries, was the extent to which the local civil authorities, rejoicing in the advocacy of civil liberty, themselves exercised the very powers they refused to allow others to exercise over them. The toleration they permitted was not freedom or equality; they retained, and used, the power to say what was “regular” enough to be tolerated, and to tie up in humiliating administrative detail what they could not deny in principle. The established church of Massachusetts, Backus wrote, “has declared the Baptists to be irregular, therefore the secular power still force them to support the worship which they conscientiously dissent from.” This is not liberty, but hypocrisy: “many who are filling the nation with the cry of LIBERTY and against oppressors are at the same time themselves violating that dearest of all rights, LIBERTY of CONSCIENCE.” The same persons who protest “year after year against being taxed without their consent and against the scheme of imposing episcopacy upon them … impose cruelly upon their neighbors, and force large sums from them to uphold a worship which they conscientiously dissent from.” Let those who claim liberty for themselves in one sphere grant it to others in another.

  The note was sounded again and again. Suppose episcopacy were established here, Backus argued in one of a series of pamphlets supporting the claims of the Baptists, and suppose the Congregational church were permitted to exist only on sufferance and within an elaborate machinery of certification and approval. What kind of liberty would those presently in power consider this to be? How astonishing, he wrote, “that any of the same men should at the same time show worse treatment to the fellow subjects here than what they complain of from the higher powers!” They protest against taxation without representation; but the representation they are denied is at least possible: “what must it be to deprive them of a right that never can be conveyed to any representative!” They call themselves “Sons of LIBERTY, but they treat me like sons of VIOLENCE.”31

  The establishment was shocked; disbelieving. “Our Baptist brethren,” the libertarian Andrew Eliot wrote Thomas Hollis in 1771, “all at once complain of grievous persecutions in the Massachusetts! These complaints were never heard of till we saw them in the public prints. It was a great surprise when we saw them, as we had not heard that the laws in force were not satisfactory.” He was himself, of course, for full religious freedom: “I do not like anything that looks like an establishment.” But what precisely did the Baptists have to complain about? As soon as a group of them “produce a certificate that they are Baptists, they are excused from all ministerial taxes.” And the arrangement is prejudiced in their favor: “The certificate is to be given by persons of their own denomination, who are hereby made the only judges, and who it is to be supposed (like all others) will be fond of increasing their own party.” The present trouble, he reflected, is probably the result of agitation carried on by a mischievous “young Baptist minister from Pennsylvania” working in collaboration with bishop-loving Anglicans. For if in the past there were

  some particular acts of hardship and injustice … they must have proceeded from some accidental cause. There is nothing in the present complexion of this country that looks like persecution. Both magistrates and ministers are as free from it as they ever were in any age or country. If it were not so, I should detest New England as much as now I love it, and if possible would leave it … I hate every species of persecution, and cannot bear that a people should be accused of it that in my conscience I believe are free from it.32

  But even Eliot could not altogether ignore the force of the argument associating Baptists’ claims with the principles the colonists were advocating in their complaints against Parliament. “I wish,” he admitted, “our fathers had contrived some other way for the maintenance of ministers than by a tax. Thank God we have none in Boston.” The reasonableness of the association was undeniable, and as the Anglo-American controversy deepened in the seventies so too did the frequency and intensity of the arguments that applied the logic of secular liberty to the condition of religion and the churches. In town after town in Massachusetts — Ashfield, Berwick, Bolton, Hadley, Haverhill, Montague — embattled Baptists fortified their pleas for full freedom of religion with language borrowed from the larger controversy. The most famous episode took place in Ashfield, a hamlet of some five hundred souls in the western hills of Massachusetts. The Baptists of that obscure village, claiming they had settled the town in the first place and under the worst of wartime conditions, had refused to pay taxes to support the church of “men of a contrary persuasion” (Congregationalists) who had subsequently invaded the place and outvoted them in the town meeting. As a result their property was confiscated. Their adversaries justified the action on the grounds that the Baptists were not a denomination worthy of toleration at all, but only a group of wild schismatics too “fluctuating and unstable” to remain peaceably within any respectable organization, and forming in their so-called church only “a sink for some of the filth of Christianity in this part of the country.” The “natural rights” the Baptists claim, it was said, threaten anarchy; they would create a situation in which everyone could exempt themselves “from the payment of public taxes if they should happen not to be inclined to pay them.” Like everyone else, they must be bound within their civil obligations and not released “to a state of nature.” The General Court must deal firmly with them, for just as it is the duty of the legislature to protect “all regular religious societies of Protestants,” so too must it cast off tho
se who “cannot, in any tolerable sense, answer the valuable ends of religion to the community.”

  To such charges the Baptists replied in a campaign of indignant protest and petition that did not cease even after the issue had been taken to London and decided in their favor by no less an authority than the King in Council. The Ashfield remonstrants explained to the General Court in detail the “distressed circumstances which we think cries aloud for some pity to be showed upon us.” They pointed out that the local authorities “say they will not favor us because we are of a different opinion in religion from them.” Yet they took encouragement “in this our address, from the consideration of the rights of mankind having been so well defined in the votes of this honorable House, by which we are taught to think ‘that no taxation can be equitable where such restraint is laid upon the taxed as takes from him the liberty of GIVING his own money freely.’”33

  But the heart of the problem, in Ashfield as elsewhere, was the assumption of a justifiable tie between church and state. It was against this that the Ashfield remonstrants particularly directed their case, and it was this that Backus primarily attacked in his comprehensive Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, published in 1773. Notice, he pointed out, the implications of the axiom that “religious liberty is so blended with civil that if one falls it is not to be expected that the other will continue.” The legislature can compel acceptance of its own definition of proper religious practice; and so orthodoxy in effect is decided by majority vote, though God himself said that only a “few find the narrow way, while many go in the broad way.” Yes, some minorities are tolerated in Massachusetts; but some are not, and the procedure of deciding which are and which are not worthy of this privilege gives to a group of civil magistrates — a body which, since each man must speak for himself before God, cannot in the nature of things represent anyone in matters of religion — the power of passing judgment on “the springs of their neighbors’ actions.” You are condemned, he told the Massachusetts magistrates, out of your own mouths, for you say that England cannot in right tax beyond her own domain: “have we not as good right to say you do the same thing, and so that wherein you judge others you condemn yourselves?” Just as “the present contest between Great Britain and America, is not so much about the greatness of the taxes already laid as about submission to their taxing power, so … our greatest difficulty at present concerns the submitting to a taxing power in ecclesiastical affairs.” The two campaigns for liberty are logically and morally one. The success of one is dependent on the other: how can anyone reasonably expect that God “will turn the heart of our earthly sovereign to hear the pleas for liberty of those who will not hear the cries of their fellow subjects under their oppressions?”34

  The point by this time was too obvious to be ignored, and other forceful pamphleteers hammered it home. John Allen, in his florid declamation, The American Alarm, or the Bostonian Plea, for the Rights and Liberties of the People, informed the members of the General Court that they had pleaded “like men — like stewards, like gods, for the natural rights and liberties of the people … And yet will you dare to make or enforce any law to take away by force and power the properties of your brethren not only contrary to their consent but contrary to their own consciences, because they will not worship the golden image which you have set up?” A true son of liberty, he said, seeks to protect “the sacred liberties of the conscience of mankind as well as to plead for and preserve their civil liberties and properties.” You have no more right either by the word of God or by the law of nature to tax the Baptists, or any other minority group, and force them to support a religious worship not their own than you have to tax the angels or allow one man to cut another’s throat.

  You tell your governor that the Parliament of England have no right to tax the Americans … because they are not the representatives of America; and will you dare to tax the Baptists for a religion they deny? Are you gentlemen their representatives before GOD, to answer for their souls and consciences any more than the representatives of England are the representatives of America? … if it be just in the General Court to take away my sacred and spiritual rights and liberties of conscience and my property with it, then it is surely right and just in the British Parliament to take away by power and force my civil rights and property without my consent; this reasoning, gentlemen, I think is plain.35

  Yet still not plain enough; and it was to dramatize what was to many, by 1774, the manifestly logical extension into ecclesiastical affairs of the claims Americans were making in civil matters, that the Baptists undertook their invasion of the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia.36

  It was an extraordinary episode, demonstrating vividly the mutual reinforcement that took place in the Revolution between the struggles for civil and religious liberty. On the evening of October 14, 1774, the Massachusetts delegates were invited to Carpenter’s Hall by a group of Philadelphians to do “a little business.” When they arrived they found themselves faced by “a great number of Quakers seated at the long table with their broad brimmed beavers on their heads” together with a conclave of Baptists and local Philadelphia dignitaries. The assemblage had gathered to confront the Massachusetts delegates with the discrepancy between the way “in which liberty in general is now beheld” and the way the Baptists were treated in Massachusetts. Our colony and her delegates, John Adams, one of the delegates, later recalled, had thus been summoned “before a self-created tribunal, which was neither legal nor constitutional.” The lengthy condemnation of Massachusetts for retaining, inconsistently with her professed desire for civil liberty, an oppressive establishment of religion, was read out by the Reverend James Manning, president of the College of Rhode Island, and it was supported by the Quaker leaders as well as by Backus and other Baptists. The charge concluded with the hope that the Massachusetts delegates would assure the conference, in the name of the liberty they had come to Philadelphia to preserve, that the offensive laws would be repealed and things in Massachusetts placed “as they were in Pennsylvania.”

  The Massachusetts delegates were astonished and acutely embarrassed. Years later Adams reconstructed the main points of the groping speech he extemporized for the occasion. In the first place, he said, we delegates cannot bind our constituents, and so there is no point in our giving assurances of any kind: further, the establishment of religion in Massachusetts is so mild that it can hardly be called an establishment at all; and finally, the people of Massachusetts were as conscientious as those of Pennsylvania: they too were acting in accordance with their consciences, and therefore “the very liberty of conscience” sought by the Baptists demanded, by extension, that the laws in question be retained. It was a shabby performance. To the last point the Quaker leader Isaac Pemberton could only exclaim with disgust “Oh! sir, pray don’t urge liberty of conscience in favor of such laws!” The conference lasted five hours, and it so upset Adams’ equanimity that thirty years later, when he came to write his autobiography, he still felt it necessary to explain the whole thing away by concluding that it had been a plot hatched by that “artful Jesuit” Pemberton in order “to break up the Congress, or at least to withdraw the Quakers and the governing part of Pennsylvania from us.”

  But if such a rationalization was effective in later years, it was not at the time. The Massachusetts delegates returned home to face still another challenge by the Baptists, this one addressed to the Provincial Congress and hurled with even more painful accuracy. A tax of three pence a pound on tea has made a great noise in the world: “but your law of last June laid a tax of the same sum every year upon the Baptists in each parish … All America are alarmed at the tea tax, though, if they please, they can avoid it by not buying the tea; but we have no such liberty.” These taxes we are determined not to pay “not only upon your principle of not being taxed where we are not represented, but also because we dare not render that homage to any earthly power which [we] … are fully convinced belongs only to God.”