One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  The Reflector, Livingston and his cofounders declared, “is determined to proceed inawed and alike fearless of the humble scoundrel and the eminent villain. The cause he is engaged in is a glorious cause. ’Tis the cause of truth and liberty: what he intends to oppose is superstition, bigotry, priestcraft, tyranny, servitude, public mismanagement and dishonesty in office. The things he proposes to teach are the nature and the excellence of our constitution, the inestimable value of liberty, the disastrous effects of bigotry, the shame and horror of bondage, the importance of religion unpolluted and unadulterated with superstitious additions and inventions of priests.”

  When it was announced, in 1753, that a new college in the city of New York would be affiliated with and controlled by the Anglican Church, this triumvirate, as they would later be called, raised their voices against it. The colony of New York was already held in the sway of the established Anglican Church. To add a college to the church’s quiver of authority would, the young men feared, create a religious monopoly, a “monster tyranny” that could spread until it threatened liberty of conscience in all the colonies.

  In a clear act of provocation, Livingston attempted to publish a petition against the measure with a printer thought to be a supporter of the Anglican cause, who predictably declined to provide a platform to the opposition. Displaying a propagandist’s talent for creating controversy, Livingston came out swinging. The Independent Reflector published an issue devoted to “The Use, Abuse, and Liberty of the Press,” which took direct aim at the printer and his alleged support for the Church of England at the colony’s expense.

  A printer ought not publish every thing offered him; but what is conducive of General Utility he should not refuse, be the author a Christian, a Jew, a Turk, or Infidel. Such refusal is an immediate abridgement of the freedom of the press. When on the other hand he prostitutes his art by the publication of anything injurious to his country, it is criminal, it is high treason…

  There followed a broadening of Livingston’s offensive until it included not only the printer he accused of being a stooge for the Anglican establishment but the establishment itself—and by extension the monarchy that it represented. “In absolute monarchies a vindication of the natural rights of mankind is treason,” he wrote. Thereafter, he published essay upon essay against the colony’s dominant religious denomination. Titles included: “Primitive Christianity, short and intelligible—Modern Christianity, voluminous and incomprehensible,” and “Absurdity of the Civil Magistrates interfering in Matters of Religion.” As Livingston’s nineteenth-century biographer put it: “The importance attached to this journal at the time may be judged from the violence of the opposition it excited. The editor was defamed in private society, and denounced from the pulpit. The mayor recommended the grand jury to present the work as a libel; the author was charged with profanity, irreligion, and sedition, and his printer, alternately menaced and cajoled by the enemies of the paper, yielded at length to their efforts and refused to continue it.”

  Among the attacks leveled in print against Livingston was a two-hundred-line poem parodying his intellectual pretensions:

  Some think him a Tindal, some think him a Chubb,

  Some think him a Ranter, that spouts from his tub;

  Some think him a Newton, some think him a Locke,

  Some think him a Stone, some think him a Stock—

  But a Stock he at least may thank Nature for giving,

  And if he’s a Stone, I pronounce it a Living.

  The range of opinion concerning Livingston’s propositions can be gleaned from the fact that he is compared not only to the major voices of the Enlightenment—Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, Isaac Newton, John Locke—but also to a stone and a stock animal. He responded to such challenges to his intelligence and religious commitments with an essay entitled “Of Creeds and Systems, together with the Author’s Own Creed,” a scathing rebuttal to critics who had called him an immoral atheist and worse. He never claimed for himself the mantle of atheist, but given the constraints of the time and the wallop the word then delivered, he did something perhaps even more remarkable: He laughed it off, going one better than his opponents by declaring himself fit for a heretic’s pyre. He well knew that among his detractors some saw him as “an Atheist, others as a Deist, and a third sort as a Presbyterian.” But he said, “My creed will show that none have exactly hit it.” To illustrate his point he proposed to his readers to “cheerfully lay before you the articles of my faith.”

  “I believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, without any foreign comments or human explanations but my own: for which I should doubtless be honoured with martyrdom, did I not live in a government which restrains that fiery zeal which would reduce a man’s body to ashes for the illumination of his understanding.… I believe that the word orthodox, is a hard, equivocal, priestly term, that has caused the effusion of more blood than all the Roman Emperors put together.… I believe that to defend the Christian religion is one thing, and to knock a man on the head for being of a different opinion is another thing.… I believe that our faith, like our stomachs, may be overcharged, especially if we are prohibited to chew what we are commanded to swallow.”

  His thirty-nine articles of faith numbered fifty-six less than Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, but they were twice as funny—and no less revolutionary. Both before the War for Independence and after, Loyalists later identified the culprits they deemed most responsible for beginning the rebellion: “the wicked triumvirate of New York” in whose publication “the established Church was abused, Monarchy derided, Episcopacy reprobated, and republicanism held up, as the best existing form of government.” Livingston in particular was hated, for he wrote “with a rancor, a malevolence, and an acrimony, not to be equaled,” earning “the applause of the mob by propagating the doctrine that all authority is derived from the people.”

  Livingston lost this particular battle. The college he had fought to keep nonsectarian—originally called King‘s College, it changed its name to Columbia after the Revolution—remained officially Anglican, but his rhetoric and the attention it received marked an important turning point. The understanding that politics was a manifestation of theology had been replaced by the secular conception that rights need not be given by God to be claimed by women and men. “The right of self defence is not a donation of law but a primitive right prior to all political institution, resulting from the nature of man and inhering in the people till expressly alienated and transferred,” he wrote. “Nor is the defence of our lives and properties in such cases an act of judgment or the object of law; it is a privilege of nature, not an act of jurisdiction.”

  His prescience in these matters was observed by historian John Mulder, who noted that Livingston, “viciously radical in his rhetoric,” had formulated “the outlines of revolutionary ideology more than two decades before the Revolution.” While Livingston was likely not an atheist in the way we currently understand the term, his “atheism” can be understood along these lines. The meaning of the word has changed significantly over time. Atheism, in fact, is more situational than is commonly understood today. In the second century, for example, the followers of the upstart faith known as Christianity were considered atheists because they refused to acknowledge the Roman gods. In Livingston’s day, it was a word that could be used as a bold protest against both worldly and religious authorities that seemed too certain of themselves. Across the centuries, the core of his beliefs cannot be known, but perhaps they matter less than his actions, which showed him to be more open than most to acknowledging the influence of religious ideas far outside those expected of a man in his position. He spoke for both spiritual and political nonconformists when he expressed his refusal to remain silent in the face of resistance from the forces of the dominant belief: “Clamour is at present our best policy,” he said.

  Not through one voice but many, not through harmony but cacophony, Independence would be won by raising a ruckus. Whether inspired by the
genius and manners of the Mohawk, or by daring to make light of the loaded charge of godlessness, Livingston and other religious outliers showed how difference, not uniformity, would set the course the nation would take.

  Cover image from Undzer demokratishe yerushe (Our Democratic Inheritance), a 1954 pamphlet teaching American history to Yiddish-speaking immigrants. By the time of the pamphlet’s publication, the language of Eastern European Jews had been in America for more than two hundred years. (From the collection of the Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, Massachusetts)

  CHAPTER 9

  The Yiddish Code

  1776–1787

  The American Revolution is rarely described as a war of religion, but in many ways that is just what it was. It was not fought in order to establish a Christian nation, as some partisan historians would have us believe. Nonetheless, the role of ministers of various Protestant churches in lending moral weight to the republican cause cannot be denied. Each denomination had something unique to its specific interests at stake in the war’s outcome, yet the general sentiment of clergy who favored separation from England was later expressed by the Baptist preacher John Leland, in words emblazoned upon his famous gift of a twelve-hundred-pound block of cheese to Thomas Jefferson: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

  The power of framing liberty in such blatantly theological terms was not lost on those advocates of Independence with no personal affection for religion or its staunchest adherents. Even notorious freethinkers like Thomas Paine—who once declared, “my mind is my own church”—recognized the potential impact of religious rhetoric and frequently drafted it into service, willfully employing any piety that promised to hasten the coming of the Revolution. Paine was no fan of scripture. Of the Old Testament, he wrote: “with a few phrases excepted,” it “deserves either our abhorrence or our contempt.” Of the New: “Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities?” Still, when called upon to summon the devout to the cause of dissolving the union with England, he could thump the Bible as well as anyone. With his pamphlet Common Sense, he built a scriptural case against monarchy and even borrowed the sermon as a literary form. “A situation, similar to present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now,” he preached. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. The birthday of the new world is at hand.” Indeed, many of his contemporaries credited Paine and George Washington equally with American victory. Derided by Theodore Roosevelt as a “dirty little atheist,” Tom Paine no less than John Leland provided an example of the ways in which religious imagery was central to Independence. Christian stories served as a “disinfectant,” the scholar Mark Noll writes, that made republican ideas religiously palatable.

  It was not only those making radical use of Christian terms who made the Revolution a war of religion, however. Though its flames were often stoked with words fit for the pulpit, as the war dragged on, it could not have been won without the support of a group of people living on the margins of the dominant faith. Those far outside the religious assumptions of any church played a crucial role in the cause, and often paid a higher price than those in the spiritual mainstream.

  By the summer of 1776, the newly declared United States of America were cut off from the rest of the world by a naval blockade. Boasting more than a hundred warships while the six-month-old Continental navy had fewer than ten, the British planned to strangle the rebels’ economy, reliant as it was on trade from Europe and beyond, while pummeling its ports with cannon fire. Anyone in the former colonies who hoped to undermine the Crown’s floating firewall was forced either to hazard a watery grave by charging straight through in small, fast, blockade-running schooners, or to take the more stealthy tack of sending cargo or information across the ocean by way of a zigzagging route through the European-held islands of the West Indies. This, too, had its risks, but they were considered well worth taking when the shipment was important enough.

  One such important shipment left Philadelphia in July of that year, not long after Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and other members of the Continental Congress had hashed out the document that formalized the former colonists’ separation from England. With the ports of New York then bracing for some of the worst fighting of the war, the parcel likely traveled overland to the southern colonies. From there, it made its way to the Dutch island of St. Eustatius, where, a full two months after it had left Philadelphia, it was loaded aboard a vessel bound for Amsterdam.

  St. Eustatius at the time was the free trade zone of the Americas. Every year, thousands of ships from all trading nations made their way in and out of its ports. The Dutch were as yet officially neutral in this domestic dispute between a mother country and one of her colonial children, but they would not be for long. Already Dutch merchants were secretly supplying arms to the Continental army, and so any cargo bound for the Netherlands could not pass through the British blockade without scrutiny. When the ship carrying the parcel from Philadelphia was stopped for inspection somewhere in the Atlantic in the fall of 1776, it was subjected to a searching eye. The Royal Navy impounded all suspicious cargo, including the parcel from Philadelphia.

  The exact circumstances under which the British took possession of this packet of papers is not known, but if one of the Crown’s naval officers opened it, he would have found several items that were cause for alarm.

  The first was a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the original of which had been written in the same month and in the very city where this package had begun its journey. Fewer than two hundred copies had been made that summer, in the print shop of John Dunlap, and so it is tempting to suppose that this intercepted document could have been taken from that first printed batch, making it one of the famous Dunlap Broadsides, of which fewer than two dozen are known to exist today. Just as likely, however, it was simply the front page of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, printed two days after Dunlap’s efforts late on the night of July 4, which made the full text of the Declaration available throughout Philadelphia within the week. In either case, the copy discovered in this suspect parcel was almost certainly the first anyone on board the Royal Navy ship had seen of it. The crew had likely been trawling the waters of the West Indies for the better part of a year; they had undoubtedly performed too many contraband inspections to count. Now suddenly there it was: a slip of paper containing the bothersome ideas at the root of all this trouble.

  Turning to the other documents, the British officer would have seen a bank draft that could be exchanged for cash in Amsterdam. This was not terribly unusual; despite the war, economic ties across the ocean inevitably found a way to endure. Nor was the amount anything to worry about—ten pounds sterling would likely not make much difference to the rebel cause.

  Another item, however, was far more curious. Headed with the place and date of its composition—Philadelphia, July 28, 1776—and inked in the fine quill-lines of the day, the page’s several paragraphs gave it the form of a personal letter. Its script, however, was indecipherable beyond the date at the top of the text. Filled with curls and slashes cutting backwards across the page, it might as well have been written in hieroglyphs or some language of the gods. The only clear thing about it was that it was composed in the same month and in the same city as the Declaration; how could it not be related? Perhaps it could have even been written by the same hand, making it an addendum to treason no matter what it said.

  Taken together with the statement of the colonists’ dissolution of their ties with the king and the bank draft for Dutch funds, the letter was assumed by the British to be some kind of cryptogram, a message of sufficient significance to the colonists’ war effort to warrant transmission in a secret code.

  This was in many ways a logical conclusion to be drawn from the discovery of such an incendiary document along with an unreadable missive. The year before, the Continental Congress had created a Committee of Secret Correspondence, charge
d not only with creating and maintaining alliances overseas but also with finding ever more innovative ways of keeping international messages and other communications out of British hands. The committee resorted to methods ranging from invisible inks to a mathematically complex substitution code that remained unbroken throughout the war. The invention of a new system of writing would not have been outside the committee’s purview.

  All three documents—the Declaration, the bank draft, and the enigmatic letter—were rerouted to England, where sharper minds might find a way to crack the cipher and perhaps foil a cunning revolutionary scheme.

  Three months earlier, a forty-year-old merchant, Jonas Phillips, sat down in his Philadelphia mercantile shop to compose a letter to a relation and commercial associate, Gumpel Samson, in Amsterdam. After writing the date and the name of his recently adopted city in English at the top of the page, he switched languages for the body of the letter, marking it as a communiqué between two men with more important things in common than name or nation, and shielding its meaning from anyone outside the bond they shared. Contrary to the suspicions of the Royal Naval officer who would later confiscate this letter, he did not employ an encoded communication system. Instead, he simply used his first language: Yiddish, the thousand-year-old tongue of Eastern European Jews. Phillips’s letter could have been read easily by hundreds of thousands on the other side of the ocean, as well as by a fair number of the roughly 2,000 Jews then living in the former English colonies.