1775 (15 page)

By the 1770s, Scots were also unpopular among English Whigs and in the plantation colonies dominated by Americans of English descent. Scots were thought to be pushy, too dominant in the Chesapeake tobacco trade, too politically influential in Virginia and the Carolinas, and too well positioned in London and the empire. Thomas Jefferson openly attacked them
in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence—his disdainful reference to “Scotch mercenaries”—although colleagues removed the slight.
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The simultaneous prominence of Scots on the American side—generals like Hugh Mercer, William Alexander, Lachlan McIntosh, and Arthur St. Clair—kept broader criticism subdued.

As for religion per se, many if not most Americans saw its hand in the run-up to war. Congregational and Presbyterian ministers and theology were thought to incite rebellion, while Anglican clerics and teachings were seen as instilling loyalty and subservience to authority. So we must return to the conundrum: Was
ethnicity
and its politics the key, or was
religion
the more influential yardstick of who took which side?

The ever-growing ranks of German colonists offer a litmus. The Eighth Virginia Continental Regiment, enlisted from the rolling, rich farm country of the Shenandoah Valley, was German-speaking, as were dozens of rebel battalions and companies from Pennsylvania. Such troops were usually best kept together under equally fluent officers and sergeants. Raising German units was an established practice. South Carolina, in fact, had preceded Pennsylvania by fielding a German-speaking regiment during the French and Indian War, raised to defend the Saxe-Gotha frontier settlements from marauding Cherokee. In 1775, although Charleston formed a company, the German Fusiliers, no large-scale recruitment was possible among the Lutheran Germans of the Saxe-Gotha district. They were heavily Loyalist, partly because of the oath to King George II taken by the original immigrants in the 1730s and 1740s. Breaking it, men feared, might cost them their land.

Affection for the Crown among eighteenth-century German colonials had logical enough roots. The first two Hanoverian kings, German born, took an active interest in attracting Protestant Germans to British North America, often settling them in frontier districts exposed to French or French-Indian raids. In New York’s Mohawk Valley, the local Palatine Germans, descendants of early-eighteenth-century Protestant refugees from a Rhineland devastated by French invasions, no longer felt indebted to Britain for their transatlantic passages. New respect, however, had grown for the family and heirs of Sir William Johnson (1715–1774), the Mohawk Valley’s great man and chief landowner. After marrying a Palatine, Johnson had favored her people. Ethnicity counted. In 1775 and 1776, many Palatines fled to Canada with Johnson’s Loyalist son and nephew.

Besides Lutherans and Reformed Church members, Pennsylvania was
home to tens of thousands of sectarian or “Peace” Germans—Amish, Mennonites, Dunkers, Moravians, et al. They had been recruited by William Penn and Quaker leaders, pleased to welcome other war-weary refugees. Like the Quakers, the Peace Germans were content with the Crown and Pennsylvania’s Quaker-orchestrated Charter of 1702. When the Revolution came, most tried to be neutral. The Moravians turned buildings into hospitals for the American wounded, at considerable cost to their own health. Religion clearly guided their wartime actions.

Even where ethnicity seemed to predominate, an underlying religious context usually applied. The German immigrants invited or attracted to British North America between 1715 and 1775 were almost all Protestants because religious cousinship underpinned mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-German relationships. The Lutheran House of Hanover assumed the British throne in 1715 because of religion, not ethnicity. Under the Succession Act, the Electress Sophia of Hanover was the closest heir who met the all-important criterion: Protestantism. Even after Sophia’s son became King George I of Britain, he also remained Elector of Hanover, a substantial north German Protestant principality. High-church Anglicans in England and Scotland—the tenth of the population who retained leanings to the exiled Catholic Stuarts—grumbled constantly. Most were outraged at the British Crown being passed to Hanoverian Lutherans who remained preoccupied by continental politics, German marriages, German religious networks, and costly subsidies to German princely allies.

These Hanoverian biases included planting Protestant Germans in British North America, first as desirable settlers but second as frontier defenders against the soldiers and Indian allies of Catholic France. From Waldoboro in Maine, settled in 1748 by Germans from Brunswick and Saxony, to Ebenezer in the Georgia pinewoods, tens of thousands were brought over, especially during the 1730s and 1740s. Most unhesitatingly swore loyalty to George I or George II, and by 1775 these well-remembered oaths often remained persuasive. The leading Lutheran patriarch in Pennsylvania, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, a 1742 emigrant, considered himself doubly bound because he hailed from Hanover, the king’s own ancestral homeland and also an early center of sixteenth-century Lutheranism. Until 1776, Muhlenberg insisted on including King George III in his prayers.
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Here ethnicity and Lutheranism blended.

What justifies this detail is the ballooning pre-Revolutionary importance of German settlement. The German inhabitants of British North
America were concentrated in the pivotal middle provinces—Pennsylvania (33 percent German), New Jersey (10 to 15 percent), Maryland (10 to 20 percent), and New York (10 to 15 percent).
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The Piedmont and valley sections of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina likewise held German-speaking concentrations, as did Georgia. The sects or Peace Germans were a small minority, except in Pennsylvania where two thirds of them lived. Overall, “Church Germans”—mostly Lutherans and adherents of the German Reformed Church—outnumbered the pacifist sects by roughly four to one.

Pennsylvania’s Church Germans favored the Patriot side, as did those in Virginia. When North Carolina Patriots needed help winning over local Germans, Pennsylvania Lutheran and Reformed ministers obliged with pastoral letters of support. But the Germans in North Carolina’s Piedmont remained divided, as were those in New York, New Jersey, and Maryland.

This is a long, but hopefully effective, way of concluding that the principal wartime yardsticks and decision-making factors for Germans, as for most other colonials, reflected more religion than ethnicity. The latter was frequently interwoven but secondary. Take the Eighth Virginia Continental Regiment, authorized in late 1775. Its first colonel was John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, American-born son of Pennsylvania’s cross-pressured Lutheran patriarch. Ordained by Lutherans and Anglicans alike in 1772, the younger Muhlenberg had gone to Woodstock in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to minister to a bilingual Lutheran church, but quickly found himself in politics. In January 1775, the 29-year-old clergyman was elected chairman of his county Committee of Correspondence and Safety. By year’s end, he was helping with the Continental regiment to be raised among local Germans, and on January 12, 1776, he received its colonelcy.
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Nine days later the young minister made a well-remembered military debut. After preaching his Sunday sermon—and here accounts vary—Pastor Muhlenberg threw off his gown, stood in the pulpit in his blue and buff colonel’s regimentals, and supposedly said, “There is a time to pray and a time to fight—this is a time to fight,” He then proceeded to enroll large numbers of his congregation.
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Late-eighteenth-century America, these actions tell us, was still a culture in which clergymen not only proclaimed just wars but sometimes led their parishioners to battle. Pastor Muhlenberg would have led them more as Lutherans than as ethnic Germans, but the line was not easy to draw.

As for the Scots, the Irish, and the Scotch-Irish in British North America,
if counted together they would have been more numerous in 1775 than Germans. Both Germans and Scotch-Irish concentrated in the broad interior corridor that ran south from New York to the Carolinas, where their loyalties were pivotal. But just who was Scottish, who was Irish, and who was Scotch-Irish (the largest group) was hard to define and enumerate. Even the first U.S. Census in 1790 stumbled over Celtic breakdowns. And Scotch-Irish political and religious divisions were especially complex and convoluted.

Where religious detail is available, these are the better explicators of Revolutionary loyalty. Unfortunately, the schisms and factions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish Presbyterian church history, together with the inroads during the 1760s and 1770s of keening, emotional, and often illiterate Baptist preachers, can overwhelm even the most committed scholar. In Scottish church history, “Secession” churches pile on other aberrations; nonjurors sneer at established “churchmen.” This book will offer details only where absolutely necessary.

In terms of political importance, though, let us recall the premise set forth in
Chapter 2
: that “the Irish,” the Scotch-Irish, and the Presbyterian Church, variously, were the mainstays of the 1775–1776 revolution in all five middle colonies. Anglican and Quaker distaste for them, in turn, helped spur a countermobilization. Were complete population details—town by town, congregation by congregation, offshoot by offshoot, presbytery by presbytery—somehow available for the full kaleidoscope of denominations, sects, and new faiths in the Irish and Scotch-Irish concentrations running south from Pennsylvania to Georgia, that would be revealing. Such information would probably deal with some now-unanswerable questions. Additional religious explanations would emerge for otherwise-insoluble demographic and cultural blurs on a moving frontier.

Despite this interpretive haze along the Appalachian foothills, we can fairly say, based on the patterns of political faction, that religion—though only a collateral
cause
of the Revolution—played a major role in guiding its political alignments and loyalties. This was especially true in 1775, and it is most clearly seen in the trio of provinces that met a set of three criteria: (1) no colonywide church establishment; (2) a drumbeat of church-related issues during the 1765–1775 period; and (3) a vocal antagonism between republican-leaning Presbyterians on one side and Anglicans, Quakers, or both on the other. The middle provinces of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware fit best, but the model also makes some sense in Maryland.

However, this middle-colony framework does
not
apply in the very different circumstances of New England, especially the three provinces with dominant Congregational church establishments—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. In 1774–1775, the Congregationalists quickly overwhelmed the small, often high-church Anglican minorities. Religious politics got sorted out, in part by Anglicans fleeing. Thereafter it was less important.

Nor does the middle-colony model work in Virginia and the Carolinas. Here a controlling elite of plantation-based low-church Anglicans—men who disliked bishops and managed their churches through individual vestries—managed the early stages of the Revolution. Opposition to this leadership was greatest in backcountry regions only recently settled (with mixed Celtic, English, and German populations) and full of itinerant preachers and evangelical enthusiasts. A separate opposition, on ethnic and economic grounds, came from Scottish-born royal officials, merchants, and recent Highland emigrants who were enthusiastic participants in Britain’s global empire.

Overall, New England and the plantation South were the centers of 1774–1775 patriotism, and we shall return later to the tricky aspects of their provinces’ internal alignments.

The Religious Background of the Revolution

Edmund Burke, the late-eighteenth-century British statesman with a great gift for illuminating the American condition, pointed out to an inattentive Parliament in early 1775 the central part that religion played: a “fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth.” Much of this, Burke said, flowed from their heavy settlement by Protestant refugees and dissenters. “Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired…The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is most adverse to all implicit submission of mind or opinion. [Worship in] our Northern colonies is a refinement on the principal of resistance.”
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Made up of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Reformed Church adherents, Quakers, and Baptists, religious dissenters as the English categorized them in 1775 numbered almost two thirds of America’s churched population. In England, dissenters were only 7 percent. This was a sharp decline from the higher ratios that had roiled England during the
Civil War of the 1640s, and emigration to North America accounted for some of the falloff. The New World’s many denominations and doctrines included a Calvinist majority (Congregational, Presbyterian, Reformed, and some Baptist groups) in perhaps half of the provinces, further fleshing out Burke’s portrait. Calvinism epitomized resistance.

Scholars who cite religion as a prominent cause or even precondition of the American Revolution often emphasize the Great Awakening—the evangelical and democratic wave, inspired by revivalists like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, that swept much of British North America between the 1720s and the 1750s. Succinctly put, the Awakening’s insistence that
individuals
must experience rebirth and achieve a direct, personal, and emotional relationship to God served to elevate the role of ordinary folk and weaken the European principle of divine delegation of authority through a state church or anointed king. This change, in turn, implied broader religious disestablishment, not just of state churches but of the need for priests, bishops, or other learned interpreters or intermediaries.

A third aspect, specific to the New World, proclaimed a millennial belief that God was giving up on a corrupted Europe so that a United Colonies of America would become the new Chosen Nation. The broad support that the Great Awakening provided for the political insurgencies of 1774–1775 has been widely discussed, so this discussion will confine itself to citations.
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