America's Prophet

by Bruce Feiler

  Christ Church was always something of a twin of Independence Hall. The two were built within months of each other, in the same formal Georgian style. When its own bell tower was completed in 1754, Christ Church was the tallest building in the colonies, a distinction it held until 1810, the longest any structure has enjoyed that honor in American history. The front door was lorded over by a three-foot-high relief of Charles II, with garlands and a toga in the manner of Julius Caesar, yet George Whitefield was invited to preach here. Christ Church was a royal building but open to change. And with bells, it superseded its crosstown twin: The State House had one; the church had eight.

  “The reason this church was the largest building in the colonies was to send a message,” explained Tim Safford, the nineteenth rector. With his WASPy good looks and staunch commitment to social justice, he could be the poster preacher for the contemporary Anglican Church. He is also a voracious student of the Revolution. “And the king was the ruler of the church. What happened in the State House was fine, but not until it happened in the church did independence hit home. That’s why Jacob Duché was such a hero.”

  Jacob Duché was the rector of the most important church in America at a time when the most important Americans sat in his pews every Sunday. His father had been a mayor of Philadelphia, and the Duchés were descended from Huguenots, antiestablishment French Protestants. “He’s steeped in the intense cauldron of Philadelphia,” Safford said, “where blacksmith is living next to banker, banker next to seamstress, and they all meet in Christ Church. Only in Philadelphia could Betsy Ross sit next to the president of the United States in church, even though she could afford only a cheap pew.”

  Stained-glass window at Philadelphia’s Christ Church depicting the Reverend Jacob Duché’s reading of Psalm 35 at the first Continental Congress, Carpenter’s Hall, 1774. (Courtesy of Christ Church, Philadelphia; photograph by Will Brown)

  That diversity threatened many of the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia on September 6, 1774, for the first Continental Congress. The meeting was held at Carpenter’s Hall, around the corner from the State House. A lawyer from Boston motioned that the assembly open with a prayer, but delegates from New York and Charleston objected. The members were simply too divided by religious sentiments, with Episcopalians, Quakers, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians among them. Samuel Adams suggested they invite Duché, who he had heard was a “Friend to his Country.” The next morning Duché, dressed in clerical garb and white wig, read that day’s appointed psalm from the Book of Common Prayer, the thirty-fifth. “Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.”

  “I never saw a greater Effect upon an Audience,” John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail. “It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that Morning.” But then Duché did something even more extraordinary. He deviated from the prescribed Anglican readings and, in homage to the revivalist spirit of the time, offered what Adams called “an extemporary Prayer, which filled the Bosom of every Man present. I must confess I never heard a better Prayer or one so well pronounced…. It has had an excellent Effect upon every Body here.”

  “This was the ultimate Great Awakening moment,” Tim Safford said. “Many of the delegates just fell to their knees and began to cry. The antiauthoritarian spirit of the Awakening had suddenly been transported into the command center of the Revolution.”

  But Duché’s revolutionary fervor reached its climax, along with that of the rest of the city, on July 4, 1776. That Thursday afternoon, after the Congress had approved the Declaration of Independence but before the text had been printed, signed, or read aloud, Jacob Duché strode to Christ Church and convened a special meeting of the vestry. The members unanimously agreed that Duché could strike out all homages to the king from the Book of Common Prayer. The minutes of that meeting are stored in this basement room and were the first book Safford pulled from the shelves to show me: “Whereas the honourable Congress have resolved to declare the American Colonies to be free and independent States, in consequence of which it will be proper to omit those petitions in liturgy wherein the King of Great Britain is prayed for as inconsistent with the said declaration.”

  Safford then reached to the uppermost bookcase and pulled out a particularly clean cardboard box, tied with a ribbon. He laid it on the table, opened it, and removed a maroon leather book, about sixteen inches tall and ten inches wide. Considering its age and the poor conditions in the room, the book was in remarkably good condition. He opened to the title page. The Book of Common Prayer, and administration of the Sacraments and other rites and ceremonies of the Church according to the use of the Church of England. It was printed by Mark Baskett in 1716. “I get goose bumps every time I hold it,” Safford said. “This was the physical manifestation of the king. And to Duché, the king was God.”

  Safford slowly turned the pages of the mammoth book and pointed out the half dozen passages where Duché had crossed out references to the Crown and replaced them with tributes to the new country. Duché scratched through words that asked God to bless “thy servant George, our most gracious king and governor,” and wrote in by hand, “the Congress of these United States.” He excised parts of a prayer beseeching God on behalf of “this kingdom in general, so especially for the high court of Parliament under our most religious and gracious King,” and inked in “these United States in General, so especially for the delegates in Congress.” He drew a line through entreaties for the “prosperity and advancement of our Sovereign and his kingdoms,” and inserted the “honour and welfare of thy people.” In half a lifetime of reading American history, I had never seen an artifact that more vividly captured the epic transformation that day represented. And this gesture would not have taken months to sink in. Worshipers at the most powerful church in the land would have heard it that Sunday, July 7, the day before the Declaration of Independence was read aloud for the first time. Christ Church rang the true bell of liberty.

  “I think this book represents Christ Church’s way of blessing what happened over at the State House,” Safford said. “The Congress has gone and done this. What could be more helpful than to have Christ Church say, ‘We agree.’ Almost every other church was loyalist or refused to participate in the Declaration. And speaking as a priest, I can say that it was Duché who had to live with the consequences of what he did.”

  “So what was he thinking at that moment?”

  “I think he’s probably scared to death. I think he’s excited. I think he’s worried he might be hanged. I think he believes he’s doing God’s work.” Safford lifted his head as if toward some invisible authority and clenched his hands as if to build up courage himself. He wasn’t really speaking to me now. “And I’ve always thought this was the real Mosaic moment of the Revolution. Duché must have felt like Moses, going before the pharaoh. How could you do anything but quake? Every molecule in your being had trained you to believe that the king was the king because God had put him there. Duché was denying everything in his heart. And the only way you can do that is if you believe that God has called you to do it.”

  Safford turned back to look at me. “And I’m sure his agony is the agony of all Moseses in American history. He had all the anguish that Dr. King had in 1968. He had all the doubt that Abraham Lincoln had. He had all the concerns of George Washington. Is this the right thing?”

  Duché’s torment only increased in the next year as the American cause suffered a series of debilitating blows. Finally, in September 1777, when the British conquered Philadelphia, one of their first acts was to arrest Jacob Duché. A night in jail shook the preacher, as did Washington’s bloody defeat the following week at nearby Germantown. On October 8, Duché wrote Washington an eight-page private letter begging him to call off the war. “He is saying, ‘George, I know you. Put an end to this before it becomes a travesty,’” Safford said. “‘The British are going to destroy you and slaughter these young men. Congress is leading you astray.�
��” But Washington found the letter a “ridiculous, illiberal performance” and released it to Congress. Duché, the hero of 1776, was finished, forced to seek exile in England. Years later he returned to Philadelphia a broken and forgotten man, buried in an unmarked grave.

  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.”

  [God] was not conducting them from a land of liberty, peace, and tranquility, into a state of bondage, persecution and distress; but on the contrary, had wrought out a very glorious deliverance for them…and was now, by his kind providence, leading them to the good land of Canaan, which he gave them by promise.

  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 b
usiness 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)

  Moses [in the Dress of High Priest] standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by [the] Command of the Deity.

  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.