1775 (18 page)

Among the leading Anglican clerics, Maryland’s Jonathan Boucher was especially combative. His 1775 address, delivered from the pulpit of Queen
Anne’s parish church in Annapolis, approached seventeenth-century royalist theory: “Government is not of human but divine origin,” and “it is with the most perfect propriety that the supreme magistrate, whether consisting of one or many, and whether denominated an emperor, a king, an archon, a dictator, a consul, or a senate, is to be regarded as a vice-regent of God…All government, whether lodged in one or many, is, in its nature, absolute and irresistible.”
⁴⁵
Historians trace these ideas to Sir Robert Filmer in his 1680 volume
Patriarcha.
New Jersey Anglican rector Thomas Chandler also praised authority and obedience. In his late 1774 essay “A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans,” he insisted that “the ill consequences of open disrespect to government are so great that no misconduct of the administration can justify or excuse it.”
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Samuel Seabury, rector in Westchester, New York, convened an unusually large protest meeting of Loyalists in nearby White Plains in April 1775. He was later arrested and briefly jailed in Connecticut. In 1777, as a chaplain to His Majesty’s troop—and presumably expecting a British victory—Seabury orated that “in the empire to which we belong, the supreme Authority is vested in the King, the Lords and the Commons of the Realm, conjunctly called Parliament, and to the Laws of the supreme Authority absolute submission and obedience are due, both upon the principles of religion and of good policy.”
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John Adams and others frequently accused Anglicans of propounding the pernicious doctrine of “passive obedience,” and here is Seabury praising “
absolute submission
and obedience” (italics added).

If some high churchmen harked back to seventeenth-century absolutism, Anglican theorists and propagandists had no trouble in tying Congregationalists and Presbyterians to their own seventeenth-century echoes. A leading Boston Congregationalist minister, Jonathan Mayhew, preaching on the one hundredth anniversary of the execution of Charles I, beyond dismissing the doctrine of passive obedience, argued that scripture did not require submission to a bad ruler. On the contrary, disobedience was “a duty, not a crime.” The people themselves were the “proper judges.”
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“The colonial pamphleteers of the 1750s and 1760s,” wrote one scholar, “vigorously revisited the memory of Archbishop William Laud’s strictures against the Puritans in the late 1620s and 1630s,” as well as the abuses of government under Charles I.
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The “ideology of dissent” that grew up in England and the colonies drew heavily on John Milton’s mid-seventeenth-century political rejection of divine right in favor of the counterauthority to depose an unjust king. The excesses of Charles I and James
II showed the interdependence of religious and civil liberties. Others recalled how divine right and nonresistance doctrines had resurfaced in the 1709–1710 controversy over and impeachment of high Tory churchman Henry Sacheverell, stirring them into the 1760s debate. The
Independent Whig
and
Cato’s Letters,
widely read in America and widely credited with helping to shape pre-Revolutionary thinking, identified “the High-Church Jacobite clergy of England” and the “ungainly Brats of Passive Obedience [and] the Divine Right of Kings and Bishops” as the greatest threat to liberty.
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Although this old debate had cooled in Britain by the 1770s, it remained very real in America, where the pot of dissenter versus Anglican politics was once again boiling. And much of the new heat came over the Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act of 1774 and what they suggested about harsh British attitudes.

The Quebec Act and the American Revolution

In 1775 many Americans, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, had a sense of a British conspiracy to deny American liberties.
Chapter 7
will look at how these interpretations emerged.

But one specific is appropriate to pursue here: how colonial distrust and apprehension, including perception of a threat to American religious freedom, was fanned in 1774 by the Coercive Acts and the almost-simultaneous Quebec Act. The latter, in establishing Catholicism in Canada and overriding the westward land promises of colonial charters, became an early Rorschach blot—American colonials could see different, sometimes extreme, implications depending on the particular intentions they read into British actions.

From the British standpoint, the act could be described as one to reassure the French in Quebec that the French Civil Code and the Catholic religion would be respected. There would be a governor and a council, but no provincial assembly and no right to trial by jury. Catholics, who had already welcomed a new bishop, would now be eligible for public office. The boundaries of Quebec would be extended south to the Ohio River in order to include settlements of French
habitants
in Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia.

For His Majesty’s government, that could be interpreted as a sophisticated step, given how Britain had beaten the drums of an anti-Catholic
crusade through most of the 1756–1761 fighting in Europe and North America. However, the 1763 peace treaty had further expanded the British Empire, which already included Mediterranean Catholics in Gibraltar and Minorca, French Catholics in Nova Scotia, Catholic Highlanders in Scotland, and a large Catholic population in Ireland, by adding many more. Quebec held 70,000; Caribbean Grenada, a small increment. Newly British West and East Florida counted 10,000 to 20,000 French, Spanish, and Minorcan Catholics. Conciliation was already a policy in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands—the end of the Stuart threat had muted Catholic insurgency—and British strategists wanted to eliminate a potential French fifth column in Canada should the thirteen colonies set North America ablaze.

Had Quebec been a remote French island in the Indian Ocean, British concessions would hardly have mattered. But in the real world of 1774, the Quebec Act touched four or five raw American colonial nerves. Recognizing Catholicism right next door was a provocation in New England and in New York, where men of Huguenot extraction like John Jay were incensed. Bringing a Catholic bishop to Canada was another piece of dubious symbolism. Concern about rights to a jury trial had refocused in New England after the Coercive Acts tampered with Massachusetts procedures. Britain’s decision not to allow an assembly in Quebec spread jitters far afield in South Carolina, which suspected that British officials would be happy to eliminate the one in Charleston. The Quebec Act’s blunt dismissal of the western territorial claims of Connecticut and Virginia, both charter based, offended beyond persons involved with western lands. Patriots in Connecticut and Rhode Island already feared for their charters—Anglicans in Newport had mounted a serious drive against Rhode Island’s charter in 1764.
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Whereas the four Coercive Acts fanned political and economic distrust of the mother country, the simultaneous Quebec Act also stirred religious concern, another dimension of conspiracy-consciousness. “In the wake of the Quebec Act, especially” said one historian, “the depiction of Great Britain as Antichrist became frequent throughout the colonies.”
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From a survey of printed material during the period, historian Ruth Bloch concluded that “by the 1760s, both the conflicts of the Great Awakening and the Anti-Catholic crusade of the French and Indian War had re-enforced the inclination of American Calvinists to see themselves engaged in a cosmic battle with Satan…The symbolic link forging the connection between Great Britain and the Antichrist was typically the pollution of Roman
Catholicism. In Boston and elsewhere, traditional anti-Catholic Pope Day celebrations became occasions for dramatizing the patriot cause.”
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To one British historian, London’s new twist in grand strategy touched multiple fears: “All land between the Ohio and the Mississippi—subject of furious debate between London and the expansion lobby since 1763—was now incorporated into Quebec. In the eyes of many North Americans, this threatened the encirclement of the thirteen colonies by an absolutist government—a resurrected New France; it restored the pre-1762 threat. If the Act were allowed to stand, the thirteen colonies would be penned into a geopolitical reservation from which they could not escape.”
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As we will see, Patriot thinking was sufficiently conspiracy-minded by 1774 to intertwine these suspicions. That September, as the First Continental Congress met, Arthur Lee, then one of the Massachusetts agents in London, reacted that “every tie of allegiance is broke by the Quebec Act, which is absolutely a dissolution of this government; the compact between the King and the people is done away with.”
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Since the nineteenth century, scholars mindful of modernism and its insistences have been careful to explain that the religious intensity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to a lesser degree the eighteenth, will seem implausible to contemporary readers. This is true, and it helps to explain why interpretations widely accepted 150 years ago—for example, the importance of theologian John Calvin and his doctrine in explaining the wars fought for liberty in England, Scotland, and America—have been consigned to a Victorian rubbish dustbin. Perhaps the history of religion in American war and politics needs a rebalancing.

Our
next chapter
will turn to another side of the Revolution—the extent to which it was a quest for economic self-determination across a spectrum of issues from trade, taxes, manufacturing, and currency to trans-Appalachian settlement. But economics, like religion, is only one explanation of the Revolution among several, and it, too, should not be considered all-determining. In Pennsylvania and New York, both principal cockpits of religious influence on politics, we will see how the economic specialties of merchants—smuggling from the West Indies, say, versus importing British dry goods for resale—also played a powerful role in how such men chose sides in 1775. Yet Philadelphia merchants’ choices were at least as likely to reflect whether they were Anglicans, Quakers, or Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. A balance always has to be struck.

A
mericans in the 1770s, while prosperous relative to most of the world, were also worried. The perceived threat to that well-being was coming not from some foreign foe but from the mother country, through seeming intentions to cut the colonials down to size, both politically and economically.

Although politics and economics frequently intertwined, this chapter focuses on the latter. Indeed, roughly a dozen economic circumstances and resentments played a significant role in 1774–1775 and the run-up to revolution. Telling that story requires this book’s longest chapter, but the dozen elements cannot be neatly disentangled, and they also frame two of the Revolution’s principal regional motivations. In addition, as we will see, a catalogue of the war’s economic interest groups and constituencies—mercantile, maritime, plantation, professional, speculative, and debt-ridden—puts further emphasis on the Revolution’s commercial ingredients.

Full-fledged independence was not a North American colonial ambition in the early 1770s, but support was unmistakably brewing for greater home rule, which included economic self-determination. Through the 1750s, British policy, resting on a basically mercantilist framework, had built a relatively prosperous economy. But by the 1760s, awareness of a population inpouring and rich economic potential encouraged Americans to ask serious new questions about what existing colonial obligations and new signs of imperial harshness meant for future prosperity.

Succinctly put, many New Englanders, Virginians, Carolinians, and others were starting to develop a new, incipiently nationalist “American” outlook. As we will see, analyses of pre-Revolutionary speeches, letters, and newspaper contents document a change in self-perception.

Europeans, too, were attaching more import to British North America. What the Old World called the Seven Years War (1756–1763) had actually begun in 1754 near the forks of the Ohio River, where French and British rivalry converged. By war’s end, as many key battles had been fought in North America as in central Europe, a notable first. To newly attentive Austrians, Prussians, and Russians, Britain’s empire in North America had become a vital, even critical, prop of her global and maritime predominance.