This final, extreme conclusion had been argued most forcefully, however, not in New England and not by such humble people as the Congregational Separates, but in New York, by a group of sophisticated lawyers in the course of a campaign against the privileges of the Church of England which in 1752 and 1753 they had carried on in the pages of the Independent Reflector. The immediate issue had been the founding, with the financial support of the provincial government, of an Anglican college in New York; but to William Livingston and the other opposition pamphleteers the controversy spilled over into the general question of the establishment of religion. Before the battle was over, Livingston and his collaborators had brought into question the right of any one religious group to claim for itself exclusive privileges of public support, and had advanced for the first time in American history the conception that public institutions, because they were “public,” should be if not secular at least nondenominational.18
All of these episodes form an important background to the attack on establishments of religion that developed in the Revolutionary years. Yet episodes they remained: uncoordinated, for the most part short-lived, and differing in underlying assumptions. Their conclusions were felt to be deviations from what was normal and proper, not advances toward it. They lacked the legitimacy that flows from broad popular approbation, from long familiarity, or from complete and irrefutable logic; they did not spread beyond the situation of their origins, and they quickly faded from prominence. The open hostility of the Virginia evangelicals to the established church — an hostility so little grounded in doctrine that its professors had not known what to call themselves when asked to state “their creed and name” (“Lutherans,” they decided when one of them happened to remember favorably Luther’s Commentary on Galatians)19 — their deliberate opposition to the Church of England had dissolved quickly with the arrival in Virginia in 1748 of Samuel Davies, an astute politician as well as preacher, who channeled their fervor into a decorous Presbyterianism well within the boundaries of official dissent. In New England the intensity of Separatist agitations and claims had eased by the 1760’s, and the groups themselves were beginning to disappear, either by absorption into the major denominations or as a result of the disintegrating effect of successive splinterings. And in New York, once the government had succeeded in silencing the Reflector, the group and the ideas that had sustained it fell victim to the unruly politics of the province and lost their identity in the tumbling chaos of factional disputes.
These were scattered, uncoordinated, and deviant episodes, fading in the permissive atmosphere of the colonies. But then in the decades of the sixties and seventies they were recalled with new relevance. Acquiring in the context of Revolutionary thought a higher justification, a breadth, generality, and intensity they had not had before, they merged into the broad movement, mingling sectarianism and secular reform, that would result, ultimately, in the disestablishment of religion in the states and in the United States of America.
Anti-establishment sentiment and constitutional arguments against Parliamentary power were intimately mingled from the very earliest pre-Revolutionary years; but the relationship at the start was in a significant way the obverse of what it would become. Two powerful explosions, one in Virginia and one in Massachusetts, overlapping in time and in doctrine with the first major constitutional disputes, brought the issue of church-state relations vividly to public attention.
In Virginia the Two-Penny Act of 1759 ignited the colonists’ smoldering anticlericalism. The clergy’s protest against what they claimed was an illegal devaluation of their salaries succeeded not only in forcing the disallowance of the act in England but in eliciting from the Bishop of London a letter denouncing the people of Virginia for disrespect to the Church of England, laxness in dealing with dissenters, and a desire “to lessen the influence of the crown and the maintenance of the clergy.” In their slashing defense of the Assembly and its act, Richard Bland and Landon Carter turned in fury not only against the leader of the clerical “cabal,” the Reverend John Camm, but against the clergy in general and against the Bishop of London as well. Whose fault is it, Bland demanded to know, if, as the Bishop charged, the clergy in Virginia were not accorded the respect due the ministers of an established church? The respect they receive is the respect they earn, for they “stand upon the same level with other men, and are not superior to them, as I know of, in station or learning.” Obviously an established church was of great importance in any state, and the clergy should be held in high esteem; but there would be limits to that even if none of the clergy were a disgrace to their calling, as in fact so many in Virginia were; for “the preservation of the community is to be preferred even to them.”
The issue could not be contained. If the Anglican clergy were under attack, Camm wrote, echoing the Bishop of London, so too was the prerogative of the crown, and if that were reduced “to a mere shadow, to something that has no weight … we should only hereby sap one of the strongest batteries erected for the defense of liberty and property.” Bland did not deny that “the royal prerogative is, without doubt, of great weight and power in a dependent and subordinate government,” but the overriding consideration must be the good of the people: “salus populi est suprema lex … every consideration must give place to it” — even royal instructions when they conflict with it, a fact that is surely “evident to reason” and a “clear and fundamental … rule in the English constitution.”
But the last, and most famous, word in this controversy was neither Bland’s nor Camm’s. It belonged to a rising young lawyer, Patrick Henry, who, in one of the Parsons’ Cause cases, defended a parish sued by its rector for wages lost through the Two-Penny Act. That act, Henry said in the hour-long harangue to the jury that made his reputation and became one of the most renowned, as it was one of the most extravagant, statements of the early Revolutionary years — that act had been passed for the good of the people; the King who disallowed it “from being the father of his people degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all rights to his subjects’ obedience.” As for the ministers of the Church of England, they had been described by their lawyer as benevolent and full of holy zeal; but they were in fact the opposite: rapacious harpies who would, “were their powers equal to their will, snatch from the hearth of their honest parishioner his last hoecake, from the widow and her orphan children their last milch cow! the last bed, nay, the last blanket from the lying-in woman!” In opposing the Two-Penny Act they had acted with characteristic disregard for the public good and thus violated the principle upon which established churches must rest: “the only use of an established church and clergy in society is to enforce obedience to civil sanctions, and … when a clergy cease to answer these ends, the community have no further need of their ministry, and may justly strip them of their appointments.” For their behavior in the present case “instead of useful members of the state, they ought to be considered as enemies of the community, and … very justly deserved to be punished with signal severity.”20
In Massachusetts the attack on the evil of an over-all establishment of religion was a response of the efforts of the Church of England to extend its influence into the heartland of American dissent.21 In 1759 the Church had established in Cambridge, on the very doorstep of Harvard College, a mission of its Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Assignment to this Anglican outpost would have been dangerous even for the wisest and most diplomatic of missionaries; but the person appointed to the position, East Apthorp, was inexperienced, contentious, and supercilious. Inevitably he blundered. He blundered in building for himself a house “more in the fashion of a bishop’s palace than that of a simple missionary,” and he blundered, also, in the way in which he replied — indeed, in replying at all — to a series of newspaper articles ridiculing the efforts the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had been making to rescue the “natives, Africans, and heathens” of Massachusetts from the “barbarism” of their nonconformity. The burden of his argument —
that the original charter of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had not confined its mandate “to the conversion of heathens” but had empowered it to maintain episcopal ministers “among the English subjects in … the most populous and settled parts of the continent” — was both weak, and, to the majority of New Englanders, obnoxious. And its offensiveness was magnified by a number of incidental touches: Apthorp’s insistent identification of Christian orthodoxy with episcopacy; his equating of New England nonconformity not only with superstition, fanaticism, hypocrisy, and persecution but with “popery or Mohammedanism” as well; and the arrogance of his assertion that the Society was “above censure” and “incapable of wrong motives in the application of its liberality.” Above all else, however, Apthorp’s pamphlet played into the profound fears felt by non-Anglicans everywhere in the colonies, and especially in New England, that an American episcopate was about to be established. It was to this deep-lying anxiety, acutely inflamed in 1763 by the known, and even more by the suspected, maneuvers of the Archbishop of Canterbury, that Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of Boston’s West Church and long famous for his advanced views in both politics and theology, addressed himself in his pamphlet attacks on Apthorp and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.22
In the course of his overwhelming reply, Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society, Mayhew argued that by “orthodox” the founders of the Society had meant not only Anglicans but all Protestants,23 and that it had not been intended that the Society’s funds would go to support episcopal clergymen in places “where a competent provision was already made for a clergy of the congregational or presbyterian persuasion.” The sending of missionaries to places like Cambridge was a violation of the Society’s charter, and it resulted only in “setting altar against altar” in the hope that one day nonconformists in New England would submit to the establishment of the Church of England. Such a prospect was frightening to Mayhew. The essential character of the Church of England was only too well known, he wrote: a mode of worship completely alien “from the simplicity of the Gospel and the apostolic times”; an “enormous hierarchy [that ascended] by various gradations from the dirt to the skies”; and a leadership that, historically, included those “mitred, lordly SUCCESSORS of the fishermen of Galilee” who had driven the colonists’ ancestors from “the fair cities, villages, and delightful fields of Britain” into the “arms of savages and barbarians” as punishment for their nonconformity. If the Church of England were ever established in New England, he warned, religious oaths would be demanded as they were in England “and all of us [would] be taxed for the support of bishops and their underlings.” Such an over-all establishment could only be created by act of Parliament or by fiat of the crown; but neither Parliament nor crown had the right to extend the ecclesiastical laws of England to America, or, indeed, to reach in any other way into the internal affairs of the colonies.
It was this association of religious with secular life in the colonies that in the end dominated the controversy. The point, implicit throughout, was made explicit by Mayhew himself:
if bishops were speedily to be sent to America, it seems not wholly improbable, from what we hear of the unusual tenor of some late Parliamentary acts and bills for raising money on the poor colonies without their consent, that provisions might be made for the support of these bishops, if not of all the Church clergy also, in the same way.
John Adams, among contemporaries, passed the final verdict on the affair. The Mayhew-Apthorp controversy, he recollected fifty-four years later,
spread an universal alarm against the authority of Parliament. It excited a general and just apprehension that bishops, and dioceses, and churches, and priests, and tithes, were to be imposed on us by Parliament. It was known that neither King, nor ministry, nor archbishops could appoint bishops in America without an Act of Parliament; and if Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes, and prohibit all other churches, as conventicles and schism shops.24
These two famous episodes — the Two-Penny Act and the Parsons’ Cause in Virginia, and the Mayhew-Apthorp controversy in Massachusetts — dramatized popular resentments against real or potential religious establishments and brought together the issues of civil and ecclesiastical oppression just at the time when the first constitutional arguments against the extension of Parliament’s power in America were being worked out. But the local leaders in both these cases soon discovered that their arguments were two-edged swords, and that they themselves were at least as vulnerable as their opponents. For much of what they had alleged against the home authorities was soon used against them with even greater force by dissenters in their own midst who stood to them as they had stood to Camm, to Apthorp, and to the establishment behind them, and who, arguing against the privileges of the locally dominant churches, found in the vocabulary Bland and Mayhew were using in their constitutional claims against England a powerful reinforcement.
The burden of this internal opposition was borne by the radical sectarians: New Light Presbyterians, Separate Baptists, and Strict Congregationalists; with the result that the most advanced pre-Revolutionary arguments for disestablishment — arguments that would eventually bear fruit in all the governments of the new nation — were unstable compounds of narrow denominationalism and broad libertarianism. In Virginia a new influx of radical dissenters overturned the ecclesiastical stability of the 1750’s. Waves of Separate Baptists, violently hostile to coercion in any form, uninhibited New Light Presbyterians, and finally, after 1770, Methodists, all clamoring for full freedom of religion, put almost insupportable pressures on the hitherto benign establishment. To deal with these increasingly belligerent claims, the Burgesses appointed in 1769 a Committee for Religion, and instructed it to draw up a new, comprehensive act of toleration. It was a powerful committee that included among other leading liberal politicians Camm’s old enemy Richard Bland, who in these years confided to a friend that though he considered himself “a sincere son of the established church” he nevertheless embraced “her doctrines without approving of her hierarchy, which I know to be a relic of the papal encroachments upon the common law,” and argued that the creation of an American episcopate would produce “greater convulsions than anything that has ever, as yet, happened in this part of the globe.” Yet the bill the committee submitted in 1772 reflected more concern for guaranteeing social stability in a situation of increasing religious controversy than for easing the intensity of anti-establishment feeling. It proposed to write into law new limitations on the freedom of local nonconformists to worship as they pleased. Dissenters would be required to meet only during daylight hours, in licensed meetinghouses with unlocked doors; baptizing and even preaching to slaves was to be prohibited, and dissenters suspected of disloyalty could be forced to take the test oath and to swear to the articles of the Church of England.25
A storm of protest followed the publication of the bill. Petitions were received from nonconformists throughout the colony demanding for themselves “and other Protestant dissenting ministers liberty to preach in all places and at all seasons without restraint.” The language of these protests at first remained pragmatic, premised on the continuation of a religious establishment in Virginia and aimed at warding off specific disabilities. But gradually these demands were extended and their bearing on the political claims of the colonies made clear. The Presbyterians of Hanover County led the effective opposition, claiming full freedom of “preaching or teaching at any time or place in this colony,” and pointing out that such freedom “in civil affairs … has long been so friendly to the cause of liberty.” “The interest of American liberty,” they concluded, is “certainly most deeply concerned in the matter.” Similar, more belligerent, claims were made by the Baptists, and it became clear that the passage of the proposed bill, fortifying the establishment in Virginia, would create the same convulsion in that one colony that Bland had feared for all the colo
nies.26
The bill was dropped, and in the confusion of 1774 and 1775 the issue was momentarily lost sight of. But as Independence approached and the need to draft plans for a new state government became urgent, the discussion was revived. Petitions and protests flooded the Assembly, and in the atmosphere of impending revolution they acquired a powerful new appeal. They appeared now not as deviant claims against what was proper and normal but as legitimate and persuasive proposals, appropriately part of a general effort to realize more fully, and universalize, the natural tendencies of colonial life.27 The unstable union of sectarian particularism and political idealism was consummated. The famous clause of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, passed in June of 1776, stating that religion “can be directed only by reason and conviction” and that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience,” was written, in its crucial phrases, by James Madison, confessedly influenced by the claims of the Presbyterians and the “persecuted Baptists” as well as by enlightenment ideals. A delegation of dissenters from three counties pointed out that now that the government was to be “new-modeled,” considerations of justice, of good policy, and of the need for unity in the military struggle for “our liberty, our ALL,” urged the granting of “equal privilege” — in religion as in civil affairs — to all: it would be a “great injustice” if one denomination were to be established among people “worshiping the same God, and all struggling in the same common cause.” In Prince Edward County, dissenters rejoiced that the Bill of Rights had delivered them “from a long night of ecclesiastical bondage,” and they requested the House “to raise religious as well as civil liberty to the zenith of glory, and … that without delay all church establishments might be pulled down, and every tax upon conscience and private judgment abolished.” Others declared “that their hopes have been raised and confirmed by the declarations of this House with regard to equal liberty,” and prayed that “the burden of an ecclesiastical establishment … as well as every other yoke may be broken, and that the oppressed may go free.” Still others condemned establishments as “inconsistent with the spirit of taxation which supposes those on whom impositions are laid to be benefited thereby.” And finally, Hanover County’s Presbyterians, professing themselves to be “governed by the same sentiments which have inspired the United States of America,” pointed out that now that the “yoke of tyranny” had been cast off and government was about to be reconstituted on “equitable and liberal foundations,” the House should keep in mind “that every argument for civil liberty gains additional strength when applied to liberty in the concerns of religion.” Asking for “no ecclesiastical establishments” in their own behalf, they stated their absolute opposition to permitting any other group to enjoy “exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges … to the common reproach and injury of every other denomination.” The only just, reasonable, and effective solution was to abolish “all partial and invidious distinctions” at once and for all time.28
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 32