Ten Holy Ground
By the end of the 1740s, the reputation of Jonathan Edwards was secure. He had emerged as the revival’s most original thinker and galvanizing spirit, and its greatest herald for the rebirth of Calvinism. Long before George Whitefield ever set foot in America, Edwards had enflamed entire regions with his evangelism. He had written influential justifications for his work, had battled foes like Charles Chauncy in print, and had witnessed some of the hottest spiritual fires of New England. He had even preached one of the most famous sermons in American history, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which would ensure his name throughout posterity long after most other revivalists had been forgotten.
His work was not finished. Even as the energy of the revival began to flag, Edwards wrote his classic volume A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections to defend the power of the emotions to redeem the hearts of sinners, and to correct some of the errors he saw in the recent spiritual movement. One of the most notorious was the way enthusiasts became stirred into a frenzy under delusions of salvation. He knew that extreme passion could be dangerous, and its “effects on the animal spirits are more violent, and the mind more overpowered, and less in its own command.”
Edwards didn’t trust the radicals who unleashed those spirits because he remained an orthodox Puritan at heart. In Religious Affections, he established a rigorous test for deciphering the true signs of God’s grace upon repentant sinners, the clues that would tell whether a conversion was real or illusory. He also questioned those who established “pure” independent churches outside the control of the major faiths, and who confused wild enthusiasm for genuine transformation.
But if Reverend Edwards thought that his latest work could enable him to channel the untamed energies of his followers, he was wrong: He had no more control over what they did than any of the other revivalists had. If anything, his books and sermons had proved to be so influential for the Separatists, they took his message and found their own truth in it.
For example: Edwards told them they could use their feelings and emotions to testify to God’s grace; they took this to mean they could exhort in the streets and proclaim their own visions and revelations. Edwards told them a divinity degree did not guarantee a minister had been redeemed in Christ; they took from this they didn’t need ordained pastors at all and could preach from their own pulpits. Separatists like Isaac Backus even claimed he understood Edwards’s message better than the students at Yale, and he spread this gospel over thousands of miles in places Edwards had never been, in ways Edwards could not have imagined.
Edwards refused to accept these radical notions, because he could not contain them. American religion had become personal, pervasive, and populist, and the radicals had made it so without asking his permission or by following his edicts about proper conversion. Evangelists like Andrew Croswell even attacked Edwards personally, claiming he had been too timid in following the earth-shaking import of his ideas. He painted Edwards as a milquetoast who valued “ecclesiastical tranquility” over the wondrous disorder of being reborn in Christ, and he challenged Edwards to embrace the turmoil instead of running from it. But Edwards had no use for men like Croswell, who embodied everything base and fraudulent he saw in the extremists, who gloried in their own arrogance, and who perverted true faith in God.
Edwards wearied of such battles, and found a dour pessimism creeping in. The revival had not turned out as he had expected, but had become “very sorrowful and dark,” and not only because of the radicals. Declension from faith was apparent everywhere. Countless redeemed souls had returned to revel in their old sins. The energy of the New Birth had waned and those who had first fed the flames had long since given up. In fact, Edwards no longer saw much that was unique in the religious experience of America. In writing to Scottish ministers and revivalists, he discovered a greater growth in piety overseas than at home, and he helped to foster a transatlantic network of faith seekers who knew no bounds of nationhood or background or creed. While the rest of America was becoming ever more Anglophobic, Edwards continued to find new friends across the sea, and warm new avenues to express the message of Christ.
He kept writing works that he hoped would lead his readers away from sin and toward salvation. In 1749 he composed a biography of the late David Brainerd that showed the true path of a Christian soul. Brainerd had gone from fiery young zealot who had been expelled from Yale to a more thoughtful seeker of the Holy Spirit, a man who rejected fanaticism and instead undertook missions to convert the Delaware peoples to Christianity—and learned much about his own faith in so doing. He had died young, but Edwards intended to exhibit Brainerd’s life as an example of how moderation in the pursuit of salvation could be a worthy goal, and radicalism a destructive temptation. The biography of his late friend became his most popular book, acclaimed as another fine volume to add to the shelf of devotional classics, but the praise it earned did not fully satisfy Edwards because it did not reignite the revival. It was yet another example of his readers enjoying his work, taking comfort that they were good Christians, then ignoring everything he had written.
Why had the revival faltered? Why had his message of rebirth and the promise of God’s grace fallen on intentionally deaf ears? Edwards knew the depravity of man played a role. He knew people had succumbed to Satan’s rich temptations. And he began to suspect the gospel of the colonies was not that of Jesus Christ, but the worship of money, power, and hedonism.
In response he denounced the “false scheme of religion” which “gave men both an undue sense of their own importance and an errant definition of the way to wealth.” The message of Christ had been twisted by opportunists into a gospel of material success, in which the most prosperous members of the community lauded themselves as the most holy—because surely God showed his favor by showering his saints with economic benefits. The blasphemy of this idea sickened him.
He began to preach more openly about the wickedness of the burgeoning market economy, and all the ways that colonists’ livelihoods could be destroyed by men of power. Inflation, currency depreciation, uncontrolled market forces all led to the ruin of society and the abuse of the poor, because “greed and selfishness flourished in an unfettered market.” He saw how international trade and commerce could be tantamount to extortion, and how the profit motive could encourage sin and wastefulness. And while a few Enlightenment figures like John Locke provided valuable tools to understand human emotions, he spurned other thinkers from the same movement who trafficked in market theories that justified the accumulation of capital. Such theories emboldened the great men of Massachusetts and Connecticut to justify their shameless pursuit of wealth—and to ignore their duty of ensuring charity and justice for everyone else.
The elites of Northampton did not take kindly to Edwards’ criticism of their economic prerogatives. Many of them openly disavowed the revival and tried to undercut the message of the reverend by depicting him as antiquated and out of touch. Moreover, Edwards had left himself open to charges of hypocrisy: while he pitied those who had been crushed by the market society, he also defended slavery and owned several humans himself.
Although was aware of the miseries of the slave trade and the abuses bondsmen suffered, he could never go as far as to reject it. Instead he put his faith in hopes that it might be abolished, in future “glorious times” well after his own slave-owning life ended. Many of his parishioners in Northampton, however, did not find his logic convincing. As early as 1744, they had demanded an accounting of his expensive taste for slaves as well as “jewelry, chocolate, Boston-made clothing, children’s toys” and other luxuries. Edwards argued with them vehemently, and employed biblical examples to defend himself, but the charge of greed and hypocrisy still resonated as the years passed. And by the end of the decade, it would threaten his career.
The congregation of Reverend Edwards had been paying him handsomely, tripling his salary to 870 pounds by 1748. Yet Edwards continued to fret over the rising inflation in Massachusetts and the challenge of keeping up with the cost of goods and services. He asked for a fixed long-term contract that would rise with inflation, as a symbol of his parishioners’ faith in him and his need to maintain a certain lifestyle. But instead of granting his request, they rejected it. His growing number of doubters aired their apprehension about whether he was truly spending his money on the Lord’s work, or on mere frivolities. This charge shocked Edwards and damaged the relationship between the pastor and his flock. He became further estranged from them when he realized many were tossing worthless old currency into the collection plate, knowing it had no value. Such an act revealed a growing lack of respect for him.
He decided to put a stop to the wayward behavior of his congregants. In his Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God, he proposed new tests to determine the spiritual quality of the members of his church. Not all conversion experiences were valid simply because the sinner felt saved, Edwards argued, and external signs of redemption were critical to determining whether God’s grace had been offered and accepted. Ministers like himself would judge such matters. He determined that “none ought to be admitted as members of the visible church of Christ but visible saints and professing saints.” No backsliding sinners or self-proclaimed prophets or wild-eyed enthusiasts should participate in communion or the sacraments; only those whose lives and souls were spotless, for “visible saints or converts are those who are so in the eye of man.”
Edwards’s church members reacted with outrage to the proposal. Primed by a decade of revivalism, they had no interest in returning to the bad old days when ministers lorded over their parishes and judged the state of people’s souls as worthy or corrupt. Edwards’s plan threatened to restrict membership to a small fraction of people who met with his approval, and to condemn those who didn’t as outcasts.
This did not sit well with his congregation. They didn’t need “skillful guides” to lead them toward the New Birth, because as one critic said, “only God could see into the heart” and no one should step in the way of a deeply personal relationship between the convert and the Creator. And Reverend Edwards was proposing just that.
In 1750 Northampton church members took one of the boldest steps any laypeople had in seizing the power of the pulpit: they fired Jonathan Edwards as their minister. Citing him with betraying the word of God and exploiting his position in the community, they cast the most famous preacher in America out of the church he had led for more than two decades. His renowned sermons, his influential writings, his grand theories—none of it helped save his job. His congregation had no more use for him, and he would have to find a new role in the upturned world of Calvinist America. The creation had long since outgrown its creator.
With the fall of Edwards, the revival had swallowed up its last great evangelist. All the awakeners who had first promoted it to great success—Whitefield, Tennent, Davenport, and himself—had fallen victim to their own pride or foolishness or become victims of the forces they had unleashed. And those who prospered were the unexpected ones: the radicals like Andrew Croswell, who continued batthng for the New Birth long after its original champions had left the fight; the Separatists and the Baptists, who grew most in the aftermath of the revival; women and slaves and Indian preachers, who found a new avenue for their expression; and heretics like Jonathan Mayhew, who had no use for Calvinism but was learning to be his own kind of evangelist.
Reverend Mayhew represented everything in religion that Jonathan Edwards opposed. While both were pastors of the same faith—Congregationalism—the young minister continued to attack the revival without mercy and detailed its compendium of errors in his popular sermons at Boston’s West Church.
In just a few months since his ordination as pastor, Jonathan had been disowned by most of the rest of the clergy in town. In an open rebuke, they denied him admittance to the Boston Association of Ministers and kept him from participating in the Thursday Lecture, one of the town’s religious traditions, in which a given pastor would offer a chosen homily on a pressing topic. Jonathan countered by offering his own lecture series, also on Thursdays, to compete with the sermons of his foes. He drew much bigger crowds, and more controversy, for these speeches, in which he questioned almost everything local preachers had been preaching, and believers had been believing, for the past decade . . . or even much further back.
Enjoying his status as an outcast, Jonathan made no effort to hedge his beliefs or moderate his rhetoric. For example, he took the core Calvinist doctrine of original sin and called it fanciful. His God was not a capricious tyrant; he was “a merciful and faithful creator” who had no interest in making people suffer for the sins of Adam and Eve. “We have sins enough of our own to bewail, without taking those of others upon ourselves.” Moreover, this reasonable God made humans to be reasonable, too—to use their heads, not their emotions, to worship him and to embrace all the splendid faculties of the mind to find true religion, which had nothing to do with “vice, ignorance and superstition.” He said people should not be “dragooned” into becoming orthodox Christians, and that following such absurd ideas was akin to getting knocked in the head—and they are “more readily embraced by a man after his brains are knocked out, than while he continues in his senses, and of a sound mind.” The most extreme example of this lunacy was in the recent revival, in which enthusiasts enjoyed “frequent raptures, and strange transports of mechanical devotion” and went “from one degree of religious frenzy to another, till they run quite divinely mad.”
He took special pleasure in rejecting the tenets of Calvinism that had guided the revival—from predestination and human depravity to the election of the saints—and showed them to be dubious and unbiblical. He exalted instead the “natural religion” that showed “beauty, order, harmony and design” to be hallmarks of God’s creation, and said the natural world reflected the perfection of the ethereal.
The dichotomy between good and evil really came down to a conflict between happiness and misery, and humanity should simply pursue the former at the expense of the latter. The best way to accomplish this was to do good, to be wise, to behave well, and to have faith. As he saw it, “Christianity is principally an institution of life and manners; designed to teach us how to be good men, and to show us the necessity of becoming so.” Ben Franklin couldn’t have said it any better himself.
Jonathan published his controversial ideas in 1749 as Seven Sermons Upon the Following Subjects . . . , which included measuring truth versus falsehood, honoring one’s own judgment on spiritual matters, and loving God and neighbors. In Boston, the publication met with stony indifference from the clergy, but in Britain, the sermons attracted great attention among nonconformists and those who followed more tolerant schools of thought. Since Jonathan had based his sermons on the work of British theologians he had read at Harvard, supporters from across the Atlantic quickly picked up on his references to their own heroes, and he became “the toast of dissenting Britain.”
Jonathan’s British allies were surprised that such works had come from the heart of Calvinist America—that land of widespread evangelism with its legacy of Puritanism. He acknowledged that they had cause to be shocked, and that it was akin to hearing “good things coming out of Nazareth.” Soon after, the University of Aberdeen made Jonathan an honorary doctor of divinity, a rare award for an American, previously bestowed on such worthies as Charles Chauncy, Joseph Sewall, and Jonathan’s former teacher at Harvard, Edward Wigglesworth, who had first steered him away from his father’s brand of Calvinism.
Among the recommendations Jonathan received for the degree was one from Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts. This was no surprise: royal officials often befriended pastors with liberal views, encouraging them to drift over to Anglicanism. From Timothy Cutler to William Hooper, the previous pastor of West Church, antirevivalists had fallen into the arms of the state church. These ministers’ ambition within the colonial hierarchy made such a move logical, and their elitist philosophy seemed to accord better with the ideas of aristocratic clerics than with the “low rabble” of the revivalists. Governor Shirley had witnessed the ordination of Reverend Hooper into the Church of England and no doubt hoped Jonathan would follow his example.
Jonathan knew the British magistrates had high hopes for him. They saw that his congregation—urban and urbane, posh and sophisticated—included just the kind of top-shelf parishioners who could fill the pews at an Anglican church. And they assumed that his battles against the evangelists of the New Birth heralded his first step toward the embrace of His Majesty’s own religion, because if the Anglicans were anything, they were against the revival, and few spoke against it as passionately as Jonathan. However, if they thought the enemy of their enemies was their friend, the Anglican clerics were mistaken. Because in the imperious power of the established church, Jonathan found something he despised even more than the Calvinists. And he let them know it.
Anyone who closely read the Seven Sermons understood this. For Jonathan spoke not only against the orthodoxy of religion; he also excoriated the tyranny of those in power. And to him they were often one in the same. In his work he described a series of “enemies” of liberty that deserved all the scorn he could muster. At the top of the list was the Roman Catholic Church, which he said had allowed the torture and murder of Christians and others during the Inquisition and similar campaigns of terror. He ripped the Church of England, denouncing those “who punish dissenters and nonsubscribers by fines and imprisonments” and other unjust actions. And he cut down the orthodox Calvinists, using the rhetoric described earlier.
The anti-Anglican invective may have been the most unexpected, but to Jonathan the issues went beyond theology; he despised the Anglican elite because they had made their alliance with the British state, and that state had brought corruption and abuse of power to the colonies. He asked, “whose authority then is to be regarded, that of the King, or that of the Monarch of the Universe, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords?” He suggested that earthly kings had no business heading religions—as George II did over the Church of England—and inquired “how any civil magistrate came by any authority at all in religious matters; and who gave him this authority?”
He also claimed that no nation, however powerful it might be, had a right to control people’s free thoughts and religious liberties. Radical revivalists had been making this argument for years, and now it found a central place in the rhetoric of Jonathan Mayhew, one of their committed opponents. But to him it made sense: untrammeled human liberty naturally followed from resistance to tyranny. He made it plain in one sermon, in which he said, “We have not only a right to think for ourselves in matters of religion, but to act for ourselves also. . . . Nor has any man whatever, whether of a civil or sacred character, any authority to control us, unless it be by the gentle methods of argument and persuasion.”
Needless to say, these were dangerous statements to be making during the British government’s campaign to extend its dominion over its territories and keep the colonists under its heel. But Jonathan had already taken a risk in antagonizing his fellow ministers in Boston, and it pained him little to extend the critique to royal authorities as well. Because he knew everything he said was true, and it became more apparent as the miseries of New England only seemed to worsen by the day.
In the fall of 1749 Boston threatened to erupt in riot once more. The issue this time was the retirement of the wartime debt of Massachusetts, which had reached ungodly proportions and created an economic drag in the form of massive inflation and the shrinking value of the currency in relation to the British pound. Under the influence of Governor Shirley, Parliament had designated 183,000 pounds in silver specie to retire the old currency and replace it with legal tender acceptable to the British government. The legislature thought this would be a kindly gesture to reimburse the colony for all its sacrifices at Louisbourg in King George’s War. But instead of placating the colonists, it made them burst into fury.
When the ship carrying the silver arrived in Boston Harbor, people swarmed through the streets, looking to find imperial officials to assault or to engage in other violent acts. The speaker of the General Court, Thomas Hutchinson, became so frightened he fled the town for his country estate, no doubt remembering how the previous spring his house had briefly taken flame while an angry crowd surrounded it, shouting “Let it burn! Let it burn!”
The protestors were angry none of the shipment of British silver would find its way into their pockets. Rumors had circulated of wealthy individuals hoarding depreciated bank notes, hoping for a fat return on their investment, instead of that money going into the hands of the soldiers, their families, or other people who deserved it more. They felt it had been earned with “the blood of the lower classes on the Canadian expeditions” and saw it as yet another bald-faced insult to the pride and heroism of New Englanders. The comments of men like speaker Hutchinson didn’t help either: he proudly took credit for the currency replacement act and its approval by the king, and demanded that the colonials obey it, or else.
His haughty attitude continued a disturbing trend. The British state and its organs like the Board of Trade had been increasingly interfering in colonial affairs, demanding compliance with their edicts and threatening those who resisted them. The people might disapprove, but without organized opposition or a powerful force of arms, they had little chance to overturn even the most unjust decisions of Parliament. Unpopular legislators like Hutchinson who championed widely hated policies might get voted out in local elections—and he was, in 1749—but that did little to stop those policies or bring relief from suffering. And in any case, even if agreeable legislation were enacted in America, it could always be defeated in London. The example of violent convicts being shipped to the New World proved this: despite the efforts of Ben Franklin and countless others to enact laws to forbid the practice or tax it heavily, Parliament rejected those laws and kept shipping criminals across the Atlantic, despite whatever harm they might inflict. Without true autonomy, local government was rendered toothless, and people took their only recourse in the streets.
The signs of increased imperial control became unavoidable, not only in the threats of royal officials, but in the symbols of the Crown’s supremacy itself. The most obvious was King’s Chapel, rising on a plot once home to a Puritan graveyard, and now vying to be one of the most imposing sights in Boston. An anonymous pamphlet claimed “the ashes of the dead were inhumanely disturbed” to create the bulky stone Georgian edifice, and the much-hated Commodore William Knowles—cause of the eponymous riot—had even pledged one hundred pounds toward its construction.
The site of the church was no accident. It had been intended by its founders to remind dissenters of the irresistible power of the state religion. As a later history put it, “the new church arose, to symbolize by the massive walls which made it a cathedral amid the simpler structures around it. . . . dominating the metropolis of New England as with a visible sign of the presence of the English Church and the supremacy of the British Crown.”
In concord with the grand new church came increased calls for submission to Anglicanism. A pamphlet appeared, A Calm and Dispassionate Vindication of the Professors of the Church of England, that celebrated the church’s missionary work and expansion in New England. At the same time, Fast Day celebrations became more adulatory of Charles I, with churchmen describing him in near-saintly terms. A London cleric, Thomas Pickering, in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral, proclaimed the dead king to be “swifter than an eagle—stronger than a lion” but who was nonetheless murdered by “vermin.” Anglican clerics reviled the century-old Parliamentarians who had fought the king’s armies as “a disorderly rabble of enthusiasts scrambling for power in every part of the kingdom” and linked them to the nonconformists of the current era. A missionary in Boston, Thomas Brockwell, claimed the same kind of zealots who had lorded over Britain with such barbarity would likely do so again if they were ever given the chance.
All of this disgusted Jonathan Mayhew. He had already seen the British government acting with disregard for colonial liberties, and now added to that were the push to convert New Englanders to the state church and the fusillade of insults directed at those who refused. On the occasion of Fast Day, he resolved to provide a response. He didn’t consider himself a political philosopher but knew that history and politics would be essential to his message. So he studied everything from John Locke—increasingly a favorite author for dissenters—to John Milton, Benjamin Hoadley, and Cato’s Letters. And he made sure to delve into the circumstances of the English Civil War, that monumental conflict that had destroyed and rebuilt the bonds of church and state, whose shadow still loomed over America in the memory of Puritan revolutionaries and the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.
THE LEGACY OF OLIVER CROMWELL IN AMERICA
In 1645, the English-speaking world balanced on a precipice. Royalist armies under King Charles had been fighting Parliamentarians in the English Civil War for nearly three years, with control of the home country and the colonies of the New World at stake. The power of the monarchy, the establishment of religion, the very nature of the English nation had all come into question, with the answer to be provided by force of arms and a brutal political struggle.
Twenty thousand dissenters from the state church awaited the outcome with special interest. During the previous twenty-five years, these Puritans had come to Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies as the founders of what they planned to be a theocracy in the wilds of America, and as exiles from a hostile English government. But ever since reformers had gained control of Parliament in 1640, many had been returning home.
They had good reason. Economic conditions in New England were bleak and few jobs could be found amid the immigration surge of previous years. Ministers and Harvard graduates made up the bulk of returnees, hoping to complete the revolution in church governance set about by Henry VIII. To do so, they enlisted to fight with Parliamentarians in a conflict they believed was an “apocalyptic sign of a new world ruled by the saints.” Some New Englanders fit in well among the revolutionary “Roundheads”—eight took positions in Parliament and ten held major roles in the New Model Army led by Oliver Cromwell, a legislative backbencher who had emerged as the army’s foremost commander.
After several indecisive battles and stubborn royal resistance, Cromwell’s forces won a decisive victory at Naseby, effectively crushing Charles’s army. Word of the triumph of Parliament arrived in New England like a thunderbolt. Long hoped for and desperately imagined by Puritan exiles, the downfall of the king seemed like a sign of Providence. His most hated advisors had been deposed, others had been executed, and the foundation of the Church of England—its legal establishment and system of episcopacy—stood in ruin along with the monarch’s autocratic power. Four years later, on January 30, 1649, the king himself faced ruin, as Cromwell signed his death warrant and he was executed at his own banqueting house.
Despite the controversy that ensued over the king’s killing, dissenters at home and abroad supported Cromwell. They called him “friend and disciple,” held fast days for him in Massachusetts, and one prominent New England minister, John Cotton, commended him for fighting the Lord’s battles. Another minister from Salem, Hugh Peter, even preached sermons that had encouraged the king’s execution and played a prominent role in seeing it through. For decades afterward, men who returned to New England after fighting in the New Model Army would be hailed for their service and treated as heroes.
Cromwell did all he could to return the affections of New Englanders. Under the advice of Puritan divines, he allowed the persecution of Anglicans in the New World, and when they complained, he ignored their protests. He conquered Ireland, subjugated native Catholics and stripped them of their land and gave it to Protestants. He encouraged the banishment of rebels like Anne Hutchinson from Massachusetts and forbade any formal inquiry into the governance of that colony. He imagined greater power for Puritans over the rest of the New World, approving an expedition to the Caribbean led by Admiral William Penn, later namesake of Pennsylvania, that laid claim to Jamaica. And he allowed open trade with the northeastern colonies by giving them “that extraordinary privilege of having their goods imported into England free from all custom,” potentially a great boon to their economy.
But the Puritan Commonwealth and the later Protectorate—a military dictatorship led by Cromwell—did not last beyond the 1650s. Upon the Lord Protector’s death and the misrule of his son, Puritan control of Parliament ended with defeat at the hands of resurgent royalists. Charles II took the throne and countermanded virtually every major Puritan policy, reestablishing the monarchy and the Church of England, and trying and executing those who had conspired to murder his father, including Hugh Peter, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Most importantly, the new royal government drove some two thousand nonconformist ministers from their offices and harassed and imprisoned scores of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, as well as Quakers and Roman Catholics. His campaign of reestablishing royal dominion became known as the Restoration.
For fear of being arrested or otherwise persecuted, many Puritans returned to the New World, where they attempted to rebuild their broken theocracy. Only now, dissenters and nonconformists were severely hampered by law, and it would take decades before the Crown recognized their right to toleration—and they remained forbidden from public office. Accordingly, praise for Lord Protector Cromwell vanished from official circles, and any prominent Puritan had to carefully denounce his actions when speaking of him at all. But underground, among common people and in hushed tones among the upper classes, Cromwell’s legacy endured as an “avenging savior.”
For those who cared to look, signs of reverence for the military chieftain were not hard to find. Parents in New England named their children “Oliver” in his honor, much more than they did in the South or the Middle Colonies, and librarians in Massachusetts added books to their shelves written by sympathizers of the Puritan Commonwealth. In Boston, Cromwell’s Head Inn forced visitors to bow to a giant sign featuring the Lord Protector’s titular head before they could enter the premises. In that town and others, commoners celebrated Pope’s Day with tarring and feathering the effigies of the pontiff and the devil, dragging them along in violent processions before burning them in a great spectacle. As time passed, the event evolved into “a ritual of detestation of the Stuarts,” with the torch-bearers playing the part of Puritan revolutionaries against the power of an oppressive monarchy.
As the mid-eighteenth century came, the colonists grew bolder. Ministers like John Dickinson openly defended the Puritan Revolution and claimed the Commonwealth had exterminated evil in the realm; and when it collapsed, wickedness had returned in a flood that threatened to drown the nation. Anonymous pamphlets called Charles I an “execrable tyrant” and dissenters said he deserved to lose his head, and in turn, “Christ’s ambassadors were represented by Calvinists in the image of Cromwell.”
Anglican ministers reacted scornfully to such claims. To them Cromwell was anything but divinely inspired. He would always be a cruel and merciless regicide who showed just how devious nonconformists from the state church could be unless they were kept under the heel of a powerful monarchy. But as years passed, their warnings to keep quiet about the Puritan Revolution only encouraged its heirs to speak out more loudly.
The revival brought praise for the Lord Protector from New Light evangelists. Jonathan Edwards, especially, lauded the zeal and resolution he found in the English commander—“And how much were the great things that Oliver Cromwell did, owing to these things!” His hosannas allowed lesser clerics to express their own admiration, which “nearly every pietist in New England had secretly shared since the Great Awakening.” Although many moderate pastors and laypeople still thought of Cromwell as a regressive dictator, to many revivalists, he was just the kind of benevolent strongman the country needed—someone who could summon God’s armies to fight corruption and declension from faith, and who could not be bribed or bargained with, or otherwise bought off. They claimed Cromwell had been as stalwart in religion as he was on the battlefield. For he had accepted or at least tolerated all the sects of the Reformed Christian faith, whether they were theocrats who wanted to remake the government in God’s image, or groups like the Levellers and Diggers who sought to destroy the social hierarchy and rebuild it from the ground up.
As time passed and crisis followed crisis in the colonies, young rebels like James Otis and Samuel Adams raised the name Cromwell as a rallying cry, and inspired others to do the same. On a later tour of the English countryside with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams visited one New Model Army battlefield and was struck with reverence. He asked of the local villagers, “[D]o Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground, much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.”
However, even as New Englanders sought to elevate the Lord Protector’s reputation in history, monarchists demanded ever more promises of loyalty to the Crown and praise for martyred kings, and they threatened colonists with greater subjugation for their loose talk. Some ministers and laypeople cowered in the face of such threats, but those who didn’t could achieve a strange sort of fame—a seditious celebrity that drew the affection of their countrymen, even as it put their lives and careers at great risk.
On January 30, 1750, Jonathan Mayhew delivered the third in a series of sermons based on the verse from Romans 13, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” Anglican prelates had long taken this verse to defend unlimited submission to the monarchy—upholding the Divine Right of Kings, the primacy of the Church of England, and “the people’s duty of passive obedience and nonresistance to tyrants.” These clerics issued their message on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, and their message was rarely answered in kind. But fed up with hearing the same calumny repeated year after year, Jonathan resolved to do just that.
He began by offering his support for George II as a wise and just ruler, for “disobedience to civil rulers in the due exercise of their authority, is not merely a political sin, but an heinous offense against God and religion.” A rightful ruler like the current king had nothing to fear from his colonial subjects, because he had done nothing wrong and was in no way a tyrant. But what of actual tyrants?
He revealed to his parishioners that throughout history, many despots had been banished or killed by their subjects for justifiable reasons. Tarquin faced expulsion from Rome; Julius Caesar faced daggers in the Senate; and, in the Glorious Revolution sixty years before, James II “was made to fly that country which he aimed at enslaving.” Jonathan said that these banishments and executions were justifiable because these men were base and wicked rulers, and that “It is blasphemy to call tyrants and oppressors God’s ministers. They are more properly the messengers of Satan to buffet us.” He continued:
For a nation thus abused to arise unanimously, and to resist their prince, even to the dethroning him, is not criminal; but a reasonable way of vindicating their liberties and just rights; it is making use of the means, and the only means, which God has put into their power, for mutual and self-defense. And it would be highly criminal in them not to make use of this means. It would be stupid tameness, and unaccountable folly, for whole nations to suffer one unreasonable, ambitious and cruel man, to wanton and riot in their misery. And in such a case it would, of the two, be more rational to suppose that they [who] did NOT resist, than that they who did, would receive to themselves damnation.
With this in mind, he set about exorcising the ghost of Charles I.
He called him an agent of oppression, a wretch who had married a French Catholic and threatened to bring the Pope’s legions to England. He said he governed in a “wild and arbitrary manner” that employed “illegal and despotic measures” to bring his subjects under his boot. He gave license to evil counselors and ministers to inflict harm on the populace, using unjust taxation, imprisonment, and “unheard-of barbarities” to do so. Worse, “he supported that more than fiend, archbishop Laud and the clergy of his stamp, in all their church tyranny and hellish cruelties,” thus describing the head of the Church of England as an ogre. All in all, Charles used armed force to intimidate Parliament, ruled without legislative consent for decades, and used the state church to do his dirty work.
Jonathan summoned the fire of radical preachers, who had for years inveighed against the power of oppressive government and demanded liberty from it. He channeled their zeal with his own furious rhetoric, polishing his words into daggers, and held his listeners spellbound.
He asked them, who were the people who finally brought down such a menace to the English nation? They weren’t any mere rebels, but “the LORDS and COMMONS of England.” The people’s own representatives—those legendary Puritans who had dissented from the Church of England and peopled the New World—had forced the end of Charles’s reign, and had earned God’s favor for it. So whatever flaws that Oliver Cromwell may have had, he and his allies “were not, properly speaking, guilty of rebellion; because he, whom they beheaded, was not, properly speaking, their king; but a lawless tyrant.”
He said it was the civic duty of Parliamentarians to rid the nation of a royal scourge! For they had slain a devil, and rescued the nation from drowning in the corruption and dissolution in which the depraved monarch had engulfed them. He was no martyr—and certainly no saint! No, Jonathan announced, he was “a man black with guilt and laden with iniquity . . . and it was the oppression and violence of his reign that brought him to his untimely and violent end at last.”
As a flourish to his oration, Jonathan offered a dramatic threat: “Britons will not be slaves; a warning to all corrupt councilors and ministers, not to go too far in advising to arbitrary, despotic measures. . . . Let us learn to be free, and to be loyal. Let us not profess ourselves vassals to the lawless pleasure of any man on earth. But let us remember, at the same time, government is sacred, and not to be trifled with.”
Jonathan’s sermon, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers, was a bold political declaration, and as brazen a statement as any clergyman had ever made in New England. Though he wasn’t yet thirty years of age, he gave voice to beliefs that had circulated for many decades in quiet tones and qualified comments, but this time using his own blunt, slashing rhetoric. While many in his congregation had heard him hint of such sentiments before, few had imagined he would knit his arguments into such a damning critique of the House of Stuart and the current churchmen who held up Charles I as a role model. And those churchmen were quick to anger once they took notice.
They called the sermon a justification for murder and anarchy, a scandalous and scurrilous tract that lacked decency or merit. They accused Jonathan of sedition, and of encouraging disobedience to the current king or even of being in league with secret Jacobites, or Catholics, or other such enemies. They said his attack on Archbishop Laud was tantamount to attacking the entire Church of England. Jonathan’s longtime nemesis Charles Brockwell even called the sermon a work of treason and urged the Bishop of London to have him arrested and shipped back to Britain to meet his fate.
Luckily for Jonathan, attacking a century-old dead king did not meet the legal definition of treason, and he had taken great pain not to impugn the name of George II in his sermon, but rather praised him effusively. This gave him some protection from his critics, whose attacks were almost all anonymous. Jonathan challenged his foes to put a name to any single criticism so he could answer it, whether in print or in court, but none would.
He faced a greater challenge in defending himself from charges of plagiarism. He had knowingly lifted many of his ideas from the work of British authors like Benjamin Hoadley, who had argued for the protection of liberty in the face of oppression. The nameless critics said Jonathan was a mere mouthpiece for such opinions and that his literary merits were as dubious as his loyalty to the British nation. But Jonathan did not apologize for borrowing such ideas. Rather, he sent Hoadley a copy of the sermon along with a note thanking him for his influence.
Fueled by all the controversy, the sermon had a huge impact: it set off a six-month battle in the press over the idea of citizens rebelling against their government—with Anglicans and Congregationalists on warring sides—and sections of the speech found their way into the papers of the Middle Colonies and the South. Many colonists immediately recognized it as a groundbreaking work: a statement of past and perhaps future resistance against unjust rulers, and a political manifesto that became “the most famous sermon preached in pre-revolutionary America.” To New Englanders it was also a long-awaited salvo in their battles against royal magistrates, after years of political crackdowns, war, impressment, riots, currency chaos, and economic misery that did not seem to end. And for Americans beyond the Northeast it had a powerful meaning too, and one rich with irony.
Namely, Jonathan Mayhew was to evangelists the arch villain of liberal theology, who rejected original sin, predestination, the New Birth, and all the Calvinist principles of the revival that they proudly believed and promoted. But this enemy heretic had also delivered an oration that, in its aggressive tone, its open mockery, and its uncompromising rhetoric, outdid anything their own preachers, including George Whitefield, had ever said against the ruling elite. Jonathan took all the force of the revival, all the anger and passion and piercing accusations, and directed it against British magistrates and the Church of England—the sworn enemy of the New Lights. In so doing he fed the American populist rage and became “a pre-eminent spokesman in the colonies for everything that was new, bold, and radically nonconformist in matters of church and state.”
One young man paying particular attention to the minister and his speech was a fourteen-year-old John Adams. He had attended West Church at various times to watch Reverend Mayhew preach, and even decades later, remained struck by the impact of his words. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson that accompanied a copy of the tract, he wrote that he had pored over the sermon, “till the substance of it was incorporated into my nature and indelibly engraved on my memory.” And he knew others had too, for the sermon “was read by everybody; celebrated by friends, and abused by enemies.” He called it his own “catechism” of revolution.
Thus, at the dawn of the 1750s, the collective attacks of Jonathan Mayhew, along with those of Charles Chauncy, Sam Adams, and legions of Separatist dissenters and frontier Baptist preachers, put at risk the system of governance that had guided British North America since the early 17th century. And the change came both in the hearts and minds of Americans, through their transformation into vehement protestors, subversive preachers, spellbound enthusiasts, and potential revolutionaries. The outcome of the great revival, then, was to make America both more devout and irreverent, fearless and reckless, pious and uncivil. Driven by the religion of Jonathan Edwards and the politics of Jonathan Mayhew—a volatile mix that offered an explosive promise.