Thirteen The Black Regiment
By the turn of the mid-18th century any hesitation American divines might have had about crossing the boundary between church and state had long since disappeared. Elections became fraught contests between the forces of the established order—often Anglican and Old Light Congregational—against the upsurge of neo-Calvinist, evangelical, New Light disruptors. Barefaced attempts to manipulate the electorate resulted in the passage of laws like Connecticut’s 1756 ordinance against “the artful applications of designing men,” i.e., corruption and bribery. But at a time when even esteemed figures like Yale’s president Thomas Clap were caught scheming to sway elections, such laws had little power to keep religion and politics from becoming more entangled and encumbered.
It wasn’t always so. Up until the mid-18th century, most ministers considered the spiritual and the secular to be too volatile a compound to be mixed. One observer asked “how ridiculous is the sight and sound” of clergymen ignorant of the affairs of state to offer their observations on politics from the pulpit. But when the revival came, such distinctions between the sacred and profane vanished in many places. The arrival of self-styled preachers and exhorters drew even more Americans into battles over religion in civic life, as the poor and working classes became energized in the pews and took their newfound power into the streets.
The militancy of parishioners had not ebbed much in the years after the revival’s peak. A provocative sermon here, or an angry pamphlet there, might be enough to send a restive congregation up in arms. Such feelings became even more combustible when colonial assemblies passed laws that congregants saw as hostile to them, favored one religion over another, or tried to outlaw practices like itinerancy. In response many American Christians demanded liberty to pursue their own sense of faith, and for civil powers to let them practice it without restraint. And when they didn’t get their way, they either protested more vehemently or tried to escape their rulers’ authority.
Many Separatists left the cities and decamped into the frontier, where they could experiment with their beliefs however they pleased. In time many drifted toward New Light evangelism, and still others toward Separatist Baptism. After having broken from Regular Baptism to light the fires of revival in the hinterlands of New England, the Separatist Baptists had, over thirty years, expanded their numbers and worshipped in two-and-a-half times more churches than they had at the beginning of the revival. They conquered the frontier and built meetinghouses and communities led by the figure of the “farmer-preacher” who could till the land and save souls, and didn’t need a divinity degree or any kind of training to do it.
By the 1760s the Separatist Baptists had perfected a system for seeding the countryside with their religion. It started with itinerant preachers, who would go from town to town spreading the gospel and setting up meetings in which they would exhort their listeners to confess their sins and accept God’s grace and be reborn in Christ. From these locations, “mother churches” would form, and once they were established, laymen with a flair for ministry carried the word to new towns and formed “daughter churches.” So the process went until the frontier from New England down into the South erupted in evangelical fervor. Hundreds of Baptist ministers seeded the faith, especially in Virginia, where they battled mobs and hostile authorities to do the Lord’s work as they saw fit. Some were horse-whipped, imprisoned, beaten, urinated upon, almost blown up, and “smoke[d] with brimstone and Indian pepper,” yet still they persisted. In the Carolinas and Georgia they found particular success converting rural folk, even when threatened with assaults and fistfights by local ruffians.
The Baptists’ greatest enemies continued to be the Anglican gentry, who charged them with being “ignorant enthusiasts” ruled by delusion and claimed they presented a monstrous threat to the social order. They also frightened Regular Baptists and mainstream sects with their radical means of worship. In some Separatist Baptist churches, women became “deaconesses” who took leadership positions, while in most others, women prayed and exhorted openly and without censure. Black and Indian preachers, too, served as deacons and exhorters, and sometimes became church elders and shared pulpits with white pastors. This activity helped define the Separatist Baptists as a trailblazing sect—far more than any other in colonial America.
Separatist Baptists reveled in the enthusiasm of their faith, which included everything from extensive feet-washing and laying on of hands to “kisses of charity” to ceremonies that involved, as one observer wrote, “some roaring on the ground, some wringing their hands, some in ecstasies, some praying, some weeping; and others so outrageously cursing and swearing that it was thought they were really possessed of the Devil.” Although such reports were overstated, they nonetheless showed how emotional a Baptist service could be, and how it appealed to rural Christians who had little interest in formal sermonizing or tedious church rituals.
For their efforts they met with the seemingly bottomless scorn and mockery of the higher classes, who still didn’t know what to make of these fervent rustics and perceived them as a threat to their way of life. They did not duel, cockfight, race horses, gamble, drink, dance, or subscribe to any of the other rituals that Southern society esteemed. Instead, they lived simply and prayed constantly and never stopped trying to advance their cause at the expense of their adversaries. It made a difference, too: The Separatist Baptists captured the minds and hearts of many Southerners and started to push the Anglicans into eclipse.
Aided by New Side Presbyterians and New Light Congregationalists—the charter members of the old revival—the radical Baptists demanded the Church of England be disestablished over the colonies. It was a bold move against the Crown, for such colonies owed their existence to royal charters, with the understanding that the Church of England would be favored by law there. But the evangelicals did not yield; they pushed for greater toleration, greater liberty, and greater respect for their faith. In response, royal officials either ignored or suppressed them, or enforced new laws designed to counter their advance. This made the dissenters’ demands for tolerance even more aggressive and unyielding.
The contrast was striking: Whereas in previous years, New Light ministers took pains to excuse their parishioners’ enthusiastic “wildness” or apologize for it, they now exalted in it. Some pastors saw the conflicts with royal officials through the lens of apocalyptic Millenarianism and warned of God’s vengeance upon those who impeded their faith. Others encouraged behavior that critics called insane—crying and screaming, yelling and convulsing, writhing and speaking in tongues, and revealing spectacular visions of heaven and hell.
To prominent dissenters, such enthusiasm became a hallmark of God’s grace; to the new American nationalists, it was a sign of homegrown religion. The rising thirty-year-old lawyer John Adams supported it fully: “I believe it will be found universally true, that no great enterprise for the honor or happiness of mankind was ever achieved without a large mixture of that noble infirmity.” The Puritans, too, had been derided as extremists; yet they had founded a nation in the wilderness and built the fountain from which all current radicalism flowed.
Amid these striking shifts in belief, one figure remained proud, unrestrained and hostile to anyone who opposed him—Andrew Croswell. Several decades had passed since he had torched New England with his spiritual fire, inspiring thousands of New Lights and singing, marching, hollering and stripping down to praise God with every bit of ferocity he had in him. After midcentury, he continued to lead Boston’s Eleventh Church, and to “champion a radical, experiential faith . . . defiantly outside the religious mainstream.” He had few allies in town, and regularly heard “the ministers are all against you,” even from his friends. He stood outside most of the factions of New England religion—the Old Light Calvinists, the New Divinity preachers, and the growing number of liberals. None of them had room for Croswell, a man who praised the love and joy to be found in rebirth in Christ but who spit bile at anyone who challenged him.
For the most part, he was more a relic than a pariah. His condemnations of salvation through works, his attacks on the liberalism of colleges like Harvard, his rearguard defense of the old extremism—it all gave him an antique quality. This was unfortunate, for many of Croswell’s critiques still resonated, or should have to anyone paying attention. He continued to renounce slavery and the trade in human flesh as an abomination. He practiced an open-minded spirituality that encouraged exhortation from women, blacks, and Indians, who remained sidelined and silenced in other Boston churches. He promoted prison reform and attacked the cruelties of the penal system. And he even declaimed against military whippings and other forms of corporal punishment that were so widespread to be seen as unremarkable to everyone else but him.
Until the end of his long life, he would remain a champion for justice and fairness, a proponent of humane laws and honest government, and a proclaimer of the power of a loving God. For these and other reasons, established ministers treated him dismissively when they noticed him at all. Despite his diminished stature, a spark inside kept him aflame. Perhaps it was divine inspiration, perhaps simple human emotion. But whatever it was, it gave him voice to channel his fury and target those who promoted sin and blasphemy as he saw it. One particular minister who vexed him, and became the target of his invective, was Jonathan Mayhew.
The minister of West Church, Jonathan continued to provoke the orthodox by challenging long-held dogma. He had already undercut the notion of original sin and various other Calvinist truisms, and had tied his own theology to the rationalism of Isaac Newton and Enlightenment philosophers John Locke and Samuel Clarke. In the 1750s he angered even more of his adversaries by questioning the truth of the Trinity, and claiming Christ acted as a mediator between humans and God, and was his subordinate instead of his coequal. These heresies offended countless Calvinists—Croswell most of all.
In a piercing rebuttal, the paleo-Calvinist took aim at Jonathan and accused him and other liberals of “daring attempts to confute and ridicule the doctrines once delivered to the saints.” He said, “My heart burned within me, while I read” Jonathan’s recent sermons, for his “horrible talk about the Trinity” was as “wretched nonsense as ever was printed.” Croswell promised to employ “all proper means to destroy his [theology] from under the whole heavens.” But Croswell could no more destroy Jonathan’s ideas than he could get people to accept his own, and in any case Jonathan didn’t even bother to respond to him. Yet strangely enough, aside from theology, the two men shared more in common than either might have cared to admit—namely, politics.
Croswell had been a committed opponent of British authority and Anglican high churchmen ever since he had defended George Whitefield from Alexander Garden’s attacks in 1741. Jonathan had echoed many of the same sentiments in his Discourse on Unlimited Submission, and in his risk-taking sermons that followed it. He had even delivered an election sermon in 1754 to Governor Shirley and the Massachusetts legislature that exceeded Croswell’s polemics for its fiery demands to protect the hard-won freedoms of colonists from the threat of tyranny. He invoked God as the highest power over the “divine right of monarchy [and] . . . the despotic, unlimited power of kings” and the “learned parasites, or other graceless politicians.”
Speaking boldly before royal officials, Jonathan denounced those who claimed “loyalty and slavery mean the same thing. . . . to prepare us for the dutiful reception of an hereditary tyrant.” He did not levy criticism only at British politicians. He also channeled Whitefield in his attacks on Catholic France. If anything, Jonathan’s rhetoric was even more manic than Whitefield’s ever was, in imagining the outcome of a French victory over Britain:
Do I see Christianity banished for Popery! The Bible, for the Mass book! The oracles of truth, for fabulous legends! . . . Do I see all liberty, property, religion, happiness, changed, or rather transubstantiated, into slavery, poverty, superstition, wretchedness! . . . O dishonest! profane! execrable sight! O piercing sound! that entereth into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath! Where in what region! in what world am I! Is this imagination? (its own busy tormentor) or is it something more divine? I will not, I cannot believe ’tis prophetic vision; or that God has so far abandoned us!
The speech proved Jonathan had learned much from his orthodox enemies in fifteen years. He had captured the tones, cadences, and rhetoric of the most ardent revivalists, and now funneled them into attacking that favorite enemy of colonial Protestants: the pope and Catholicism. Jonathan depicted the conflict between Britain and France as an apocalyptic struggle with control of the civilized world at stake. In so doing he imbued his audience with a sense of their own righteousness against adversaries who were Satanic, insidious, and somehow less than human. It was a masterpiece of inflammatory rhetoric, with more than a touch of demagoguery, and it made his name even more famous than it already was. As one historian wrote, Jonathan deployed “an enraged language that patriot ministers would later imitate in fomenting revolution against England.” Along with the Discourse on Unlimited Submission, “these sermons would stand as the apotheosis of revolutionary preaching in New England.”
Jonathan continued to channel the spirit of the revivalists when an earthquake struck New England in 1755. Like the Grand Itinerant, Jonathan blamed the tragedy on the moral failings of the colonists and the sins of the mother country, calling it “a nation where infidelity, irreligion, corruption and venality, and almost every kind of vice, seems to have been increasing all the time!—Will not almighty God, who ‘only is holy,’ sooner or later visit us for things? And will not his soul be avenged on SUCH A NATION AS THIS!” He said only faith in God could stave off destruction, and those who rejected him “are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and IDOLATERS, and whosoever loveth and maketh a LIE.”
These were peculiar words coming from someone who praised natural religion and civic virtue over human depravity and divine punishment. But Jonathan employed these fire-and-brimstone tropes not only because he believed them, but because they managed to increase his appeal to the many Calvinists of America who would otherwise be his foes. While his theology might appall them, his political harangues and jeremiads appealed to them—and forming such alliances would prove to be crucial as the conflicts with Britain only worsened.
As the years passed, Jonathan’s reputation increased with each new blast he directed at the authorities. In his personal life, his conflicts in the public arena had dour consequences for his health—in the 1750s he became stricken with smallpox and survived, then faced painful kidney stones and pleurisy to add to the misery. He grieved the loss of his father and sometimes mentor Experience Mayhew (who died at the age of eighty-five), knowing he could never reconcile his own liberal ideas with his father’s Calvinism. He did find some comfort when he married Elizabeth Clarke, with whom he started a family, but few beyond his family and friends would ever come to know the relaxed, personable side of Jonathan Mayhew. His stern public image proved to be a strength as well as a burden to maintain.
He spoke repeatedly in his sermons against despotic monarchs and lamented the demise of one of the good ones in his Discourse Occasioned by the Death of King George II. He saw the late king as a constitutional monarch, a protector of colonial freedoms despite the nefarious designs of some of his counselors, and he could only hope his son would emerge as a worthy successor. Such hopes proved fleeting when George III took the crown, and let himself be influenced by Tories like the Earl of Bute, who persuaded him that royal power over the colonies must be strengthened with greater taxation and commercial regulation, and dissenters must be brought to heel. Jonathan suspected such policies would lead to disaster, and that recent events “confirm the apprehensions which I have all along had concerning the [king], and make me almost tremble for the consequences.”
In this new, increasingly repressive atmosphere of the 1760s, Jonathan courted more trouble with royal officials. In one episode, he overheard a rumor of Governor Francis Bernard accepting a small bribe from a petitioner and spread the story to a few friends, who spread the rumor to others until it made its way back to the governor. Infuriated, Bernard called the pastor to his residence at Province House and interrogated and insulted him, calling him a liar who “did not understand, but abused British liberty” and represented “the diabolical spirits of slander and defamation.” As a final touch, Bernard demanded satisfaction, which Jonathan thought referred to the law, but may have just as well referred to a duel. In the face of such hostility from the colony’s highest ranking official, Jonathan had no choice but to privately back down and blame a misunderstanding for the allegation. But Bernard’s furious reaction showed that his sermons and rhetoric had a powerful effect—while Jonathan might be a hero to many of his peers, he had also become an enemy to those in control.
Bernard’s sharp rebuttal was not unique. Anglican high churchmen followed the lead of their magistrates and became ever bolder in confronting dissenters like Jonathan and showcasing their power. In Boston, the grand King’s Chapel had opened a few years before to great controversy. In Cambridge, within sight of Harvard College, Anglicans founded Christ Church, which dissenters called a “dagger aimed at the heart of Puritan tradition in America.” They claimed it would act as a garrison for missionaries to convert Congregationalists to Anglicanism, and to pressure other nonconformists to abandon their religion. They assigned much of the blame for these offenses to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Secker, whom they saw as an archenemy for his long-held desire to install a colonial bishop and create an American episcopate.
Jonathan took a special interest in checking the advance of the Anglicans. Not only did he stir up anxieties about the state religion of Britain, but he had been working with Charles Chauncy to establish a rival to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which had plans to spread the gospel into the interior of New England. Jonathan’s family background included a long line of missionaries who operated on the frontier, and now that the frontier was once again pacified after the war with the French, he saw a great opportunity to proselytize to Indians who lived there. Of course, the experience of the late Jonathan Edwards and other missionaries had shown that, once converted, groups like the Mohawk and Stockbridge Indians provided little interest to colonial rulers. They were openly mistreated and abused, their earnest conversions offering little protection from the machinations of corrupt British rulers and local swindlers. Nonetheless, despite its often tragic outcome, the push to convert Native peoples to Christianity became something of an obsession for both Anglicans and Congregationalists, and Jonathan used the controversy to arouse even greater anger against his foes in the Church of England.
East Apthorp made his work easy. The ambitious young cleric was an Anglican missionary and heir to a family fortune who had a knack for offending people with his garish taste and opinions. He lived in a mansion that inspired envy and disgust among Bostonians, and regularly penned tracts for the press “equating New England nonconformity not only with superstition, fanaticism, hypocrisy and persecution” but with Roman Catholicism and Islam. Apthorp upheld the SPG as blameless in its conduct and pure in its motives, and dared to challenge anyone to say otherwise. Jonathan could not resist the opportunity.
In response to Apthorp, he wrote a lengthy tract, Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, claiming the Society used subterfuge to effect its aims, which were not those of conversion, but a conspiracy to deprive Americans of their freedom. He warned that its missionaries had sinister aims, and attacked the “narrow, censorious and bitter spirit that prevails in too many of the Episcopalians among us.” He raised the prospect of bishops installed in America, overseeing forced conversions of dissenters, and recalled how “furious episcopal zealots” had done the same thing in the previous century. The threat was dire, and he asked “the people of New England to stand fast in the liberty wherewith CHRIST hath made them free; and not to return under that yoke of episcopal bondage, which so miserably galled the necks of our forefathers.”
Line by line, Jonathan so eviscerated the hapless East Apthorp that a greater response was called for than one from an immature cleric. Adherents to the Church of England denounced Jonathan’s attacks, one writing “this blind bigot is for setting up an Inquisition against the religion of the nation” just as Oliver Cromwell had done in the 17th century with his “forty-thousand cutthroats.” Still, most of these responses were anonymous, and with Jonathan’s work gaining praise among Congregationalists and Presbyterians of all stripes—and being printed in the newspapers of Britain—the church knew it had to respond with a better defense of its missionary conduct. The task was left to Archbishop Secker.
Secker thought little of Jonathan, and in private referred to him as “a most foul-mouthed bespatterer of our church and our missionaries in print.” He still championed episcopacy, but knew the violent reaction that might ensue if he tried to force Americans to accept it. Privately, many other clerics in Britain saw the struggle as futile, and compared trying to organize Anglicans in the New World as akin to hanging from a “rope of sand; there is no union, no authority among us; we cannot even summon a convention for united counsel and advice.” So Secker proceeded cautiously, and in his anonymous response to Jonathan’s Observations, he promised that if bishops ever came to America, they would act tactfully and respect the native traditions and faiths of the king’s subjects. He granted a number of points in the Observations, and adopted a tolerant tone and support for a wide range of faiths and promised harmonious coexistence between Anglicans and dissenters.
With Secker retreating from the controversy, many observers thought Jonathan had triumphed over his adversaries. His Observations were printed and reprinted in London, his British allies lauded his efforts, and high churchmen compared his work to “the devil’s thunderbolt.” Not only did the minister of West Church provoke a response by the top cleric of Great Britain, according to one writer, he “won for himself a transatlantic reputation as the champion of British Nonconformity, and it is doubtful if Benjamin Franklin had as many readers.” East Apthorp humbly retired to England, and Jonathan received praise from the city’s orthodox ministers who had once treated him as a pariah.
His words unified the warring sects of Protestantism in a way they had not been in a quarter century. These united clergymen now formed a “Black Regiment”—named for the color of their robes—that aimed to further undermine the authority of Anglican clerics and royal officials. Just as the Baptists of the South had been doing recently, the Black Regiment threatened the colonial hierarchy and shifted the battle lines of American religion and politics. No longer was the conflict principally between revivalists and their foes; instead, it was between dissenters and their enemies within Britain’s state religion—and soon after that, within its very government. As John Adams wrote, Jonathan Mayhew’s controversies “spread an universal alarm against the authority of Parliament . . . and if Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes.” Fear of British imperial power became further inflamed the next year, when the legislature passed the Stamp Act.
Parliament’s latest attempt to demonstrate its supremacy over the wayward colonists had followed its Sugar Act of 1764, which levied taxes on molasses and limited the export of some colonial products only to Britain. That act was unpopular, but it did not encourage the same defiance as the Stamp Act. Passed at the beginning of spring 1765, the Act had an implementation date of November 1. As it came closer, elites like Ben Franklin became alarmed at the consequences (and later did something about it, as noted earlier), when public anger swelled and threatened to send the colonies into revolt. By the summer boycotts against British-made products became widespread, merchants of the Middle Colonies and New England vowed not to import British goods, and various groups, from college students to fire companies, singled out particular imported products to boycott—anything from beer to clothing.
The New Lights were especially hostile to the Act, and some threatened violence against those who tried to enforce the law. In mid-August turmoil erupted when a mob of Bostonians hung effigies of the colony’s stamp collector Andrew Oliver and the king’s counselors from an elm tree and proceeded to destroy the local stamp office and set a bonfire outside Oliver’s luxurious home. Though the sheriff and Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to stop the rioters, they broke into Oliver’s house and demolished it, spiriting away bottles from the wine cellar as they ransacked the garden and pulverized the furniture. The stamp collector quit his job soon after.
Many in West Church and throughout Boston awaited Jonathan Mayhew’s verdict on the mayhem, and eleven days later he delivered it. In his bracing sermon, he did not condone the violence, but did use passages from the Bible to tell his congregation that in any nation, people should not be governed contrary to their desires. They should not be abused by their magistrates and should retain their full rights as subjects loyal to a king, or as citizens loyal to a republic. If their rights were abrogated, they became slaves. Of course, Jonathan did not mean the ruinous and inhuman slavery that Andrew Croswell called an abomination to God; he meant the metaphorical kind, applied to free citizens alone.
Jonathan said, “slaves are bound to labor for the pleasure and profit of others; and to subsist merely on what their masters are pleased to allow them.” For colonists to be stripped of their rights by the imperial overlords or distant legislature of another country was nothing more than cruel servitude—“this is really slavery, not civil liberty.” He mentioned the Stamp Act by name and urged his listeners to do all they could to fight “the execution of unrighteous and oppressive laws,” not through brute force of arms, but through concentrated civil action. He added this careful warning because he knew how enflamed his audience could get after listening to his words. But what may have seemed to him like a plea for nonviolent resistance translated into something very different on the streets of Boston.
The following evening, another riot broke out. This time the angry masses broke into the homes of several royal officials and ransacked them and seized their valuables before moving on to the residence of Thomas Hutchinson. The lieutenant governor was inside dining with his family when the mob approached, and he scarcely had time to escape before the rioters smashed inside with axes and obliterated the walls and gardens. They drank the wine, they stole the coin, and they scattered the official papers. They even began pulling apart the brickwork before the structure finally gave way and collapsed under their assault. The damage came to 25,000 pounds sterling.
Many Bostonians blamed the policies of the British government for causing the riot, and claimed that without representation in Parliament, people would resort to violence to achieve their ends. The crowd included numerous artisans and laborers aggrieved not only by the acts of taxation, but by the years of abuse they had endured at the hands of elite bankers and royal officials, who called them a “herd of fools, tools and sycophants.” Hutchinson’s own rhetoric had contributed to their grievances, as had his support for noxious policies dating back to the 1740s. As for Hutchinson himself, he blamed Jonathan Mayhew.
In his official history of Massachusetts Bay, Hutchinson claimed Jonathan’s sermon had a galvanizing effect on some of the rioters, and cited an accused mob member as saying “he was excited to [violence] by this sermon, and that he thought he was doing God service.” Those in the Anglican elite also targeted Jonathan for encouraging defiance, saying he had preached “one of the most seditious sermons ever delivered, advising the people to stand up for their rights to the last drop of their blood.” They painted Jonathan as an anarchist and seditionist and stopped just short of calling his words criminal.
Jonathan felt unjustly accused. Had he not warned his listeners against rash and violent action? Did he not call for civil and peaceful protest against unjust policies? He had no desire to see anarchy bloody the land, or for rightful rulers to be dispatched at the hands of street criminals. Besides, he had written to Hutchinson after the mayhem offering his sympathies, saying, “I had rather lose my hand, than be an encourager of such outrages.” Still, he knew he had elevated his profile to such a degree that one spark of his rhetoric could ignite a firestorm of trouble. And so for once, he had to publicly back down.
He delivered a sermon the following Sunday in which he expressed his love for liberty as well as his apprehensions of violence in protecting it. He warned against “abusing liberty to licentiousness” and condemned those who would sully a noble cause through their own selfish or barbaric ends. Jonathan was earnest in his thoughts and measured it his tone, but his words made little difference. His supporters continued to interpret his homilies as a justification for forceful resistance to the Crown, and his enemies continued to see him as a figure of rebellion against civil authority. The lesson only proved one thing, which revivalists like George Whitefield had learned twenty years before: a man of the cloth could stir people up and drive them toward acts of strength and resolve, but controlling their behavior once unleashed was impossible. They would take his words and act on them however they pleased. And once that man had developed a reputation as a firebrand or demagogue, it would take great effort to convince them otherwise.
Less than a year later Jonathan Mayhew was dead. A stroke felled him in July 1766 and his demise followed a few days after. The tributes came in from prominent clergymen and citizens throughout New England, the liberals praising his daring theology, the Calvinists lauding his commitment to liberty. A line of fifty-seven carriages and coaches led his body to the grave, with Charles Chauncy offering a eulogy that Jonathan might have appreciated: “[I]f his zeal, at any time, betrayed him into too great a severity of expression, it was against the attempts of those who would make slaves either of men’s souls or bodies.” A more unexpected honor came later from Andrew Croswell, who lionized his adversary’s virtue and integrity, and said despite his faults, “he was a shining example for his brethren in the ministry to follow.” But the most important honor came from John Adams.
Himself a prominent opponent of the Stamp Act and Parliament’s other taxation attempts, Adams had followed Jonathan’s career since he was a teen, relishing his attacks on historical tyrants and current officials. He called him “a Whig of the first magnitude, a clergyman equaled by very few of any denomination in piety, virtue, genius, or learning, whose works will maintain his character as long as New England shall be free.” And he wrote, “to draw the character of Mayhew would be to transcribe a dozen Volumes. . . . [he] threw all the weight of his great fame into the scale of his country in 1761, and maintained it there with zeal and ardor.” Adams would later claim that there were five critical figures who drove America toward revolution, and Jonathan Mayhew was the only minister among them.
Another man on that list was Samuel Adams—John’s cousin. Since the Knowles Riot of 1747, he had made his name as a prominent figure in the Boston town meetings and more recently as a legislator in the Massachusetts assembly. He was also active in the Caucus Club, the Masonic Lodge, and the fire companies—all organs of rebellion in the eyes of colonial officials—and penned articles and pamphlets that denounced cruel British policies and instructed his readers how to fight them. For his many efforts of resistance, many in the royal government saw him as nothing less than “the most dangerous man in America.”
This wasn’t entirely true. Though many of his artisan and shipyard worker allies in the Sons of Liberty had rioted in recent months, he was hardly their puppet master, and was careful not to call for outright violence. Rather, he was a masterful exhorter and agitator of the people who worked closely with the Loyal Nine, a group of upper-middle-class merchants who helped arrange many of the protests that shook the city.
Like Jonathan Mayhew, Sam Adams wove spiritual ideas in with the struggle against Britain, writing, “the religion and public liberty of a people are so intimately connected, their interests are interwoven, and cannot exist separately.” Unlike Mayhew, however, he saw the protection of liberty through the eyes of an orthodox Calvinist. He demanded a return to moral virtue and a rejection of wickedness, and praised the rustic simplicity of 17th-century America, when Puritan rectitude held sway and traditional values were protected by force of law. He aimed his message at the commoners of Boston, praising their struggle for liberty against the selfish designs of their betters, and identified himself an enthusiast in religion and politics. Like a revivalist of old, he said, “mankind is governed more by their feelings than by reason” and used this idea to incite his followers against those he claimed oppressed them. Thus, in his methods, Adams was both radical and reactionary, an aggressive herald of the republic to come, and crusader for the values of the antique past.
He was not alone in this feeling. Americans from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs invested the age-old Puritans with a radiant sense of virtue they tried to recapture. Esteeming New England’s distant history, some ministers resurrected the idea that modern dissenters were the heirs of the saints who had built their proud “city on a hill” in America. They claimed the colonists resisted Satan by standing on their holy traditions while the mother country stood awash in corruption and turpitude, which threatened its damnation: “there is no truth, no mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. . . . As they have increased, so have they sinned, therefore God is changing their glory into shame.”
Sam Adams took these ideas and innovated them. While he venerated the past as much as any Calvinist, he also employed modern communications and mass-market rhetoric that preachers like George Whitefield had pioneered. With his ally James Otis, Adams spread information via the press and organized his campaigns against imperial policy through private societies and secret clubs. He did not act heedlessly, however. He knew the patriot clubs had to legitimize their actions with the sanction of church authority. The Black Regiment served this role, until “scarcely a patriot club was without a divine who lent an odor of sanctity to what conservatives believed would otherwise have been rank treason.” One of the staunchest members of this regiment was Charles Chauncy.
Now sixty years old, Chauncy had emerged from the battles of the revival scarred but still standing, a citadel of Whig values—namely the primacy of popular elected representation over the privileges of the Crown and nobility—and opponent of British policy. He knew and worked with many of the men in the patriot clubs, among them Adams and Otis as well as Benjamin Edes, a leader of the Loyal Nine who printed many of his tracts and published the Boston Gazette. Chauncy delivered regular sermons and jeremiads against the laws of Parliament, stating that colonists’ privileges were actually “RIGHTS that had been dearly paid for by a vast expense of blood, treasure and labor, without which this continent must have still remained in a wilderness state.” He challenged even the most ardent New Lights in supporting religious liberty against tyranny, and acquired a reputation as a source of trouble for the Crown, despite being a senior citizen. A notable piece of doggerel mocked him:
That fine preacher, called a teacher
Of Old Brick Church the First,
Regards no grace to men in place,
And is by Tories cursed.
At young and old he’ll rave and scold,
And is in things of state
A zealous Whig than [John] Wilkes more big,
In church a tyrant great.
Curiously, while his anti-British rhetoric grew more aggressive, his theology went in the other direction. He dabbled with heresy in works like The Benevolence of the Deity, in which he stressed the generous spirit of God and diminished such dogma as original sin and the damnation of unbaptized infants. He exalted “the power and wisdom of the infinitely benevolent Creator” whose grace allowed the ultimate salvation of all people after the expiation of their sins. Along with Benevolence, his other major work, The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations, Made Manifest by the Gospel Revelation, wouldn’t be published until 1784—three years before his death—and then only anonymously. But by then many ministers in Boston knew who the author of this controversial tract was, along with Chauncy’s code word for it: “the pudding.”
The pudding was either sweet or bitter depending on one’s taste for Calvinism. For the revivalists it was unpalatable, since Chauncy emphasized human free will and associated sin with sickness and pain, instead of endless damnation. Moreover, his idea of salvation was universal, available to anyone beyond just the Calvinist elect, and required good works as well as faith to achieve it. Ultimately, Chauncy argued that salvation meant reconciling with God, for “all of life and part of life after death is a process of trial and discipline, by which sin is conquered and virtue triumphs in the soul.” Human perfectibility meant loving God and becoming his ally, not running in terror from him and fearing his wrath. Oddly, these straightforward ideas still carried the taint of heresy, and threatened to alienate Chauncy from his New Light colleagues in the struggle against Britain. So he kept them quiet, and only revealed the pudding once the cause of independence was secured. Eventually Chauncy’s Universalism become one of the roots of the religion of New England liberals, taking his and Jonathan Mayhew’s ideas and developing a new, spiritually tolerant movement from them.
In the run-up to the war, however, Chauncy appeared anything but tolerant. After the repeal of the Stamp Act, the minister of First Church kept tempers simmering with public statements against whatever colonial laws issued from the legislature. Parliament soon passed the Quartering Act, which required the billeting of redcoated troops in public buildings, and followed it with the Townsend Acts, which validated its right to control the trade and taxation of the colonies. These measures predictably enflamed anger against the British government, but while Chauncy made sure to criticize these laws, he reserved much of his scorn for the potential installment of an American bishop for the Anglican church.
Like Mayhew, he warned against a sinister plot to bring episcopacy to the New World and said such a measure would threaten the rights of dissenters everywhere. He charged the agents of the church with “an occasion of pride, haughtiness, tampering with princes, and advising and helping forward oppressive tyranny over conscience.” One of his tracts, The Appeal to the Public Answered, sold 400 copies in a week and fed the Boston press’s appetite for controversy, reminding readers of the growing threat to their liberties and calling for resistance to the Church of England and its clerics’ underhanded ways.
The church and state of Britain came under greater fire in the 1770s, as relations with the king’s American subjects reached new lows. In the most notorious event, scuffles between Boston rope makers and the occupying British army led to crowds hurling taunts and snowballs and ice at the troops, who were under orders not to fire on civilians without authorization. When the crowds pressed in, some of the soldiers fired and left five citizens dead. Figures at the highest levels of the British government blamed Sam Adams for the Boston Massacre, calling the crowd members “Sam Adams’s regiments”—though his involvement was hard to prove. To ensure a fair trial for the soldiers involved in the shooting, his cousin John surprisingly acted as counsel for the accused and provided a successful defense in court. Sam Adams, however, tried the soldiers in the Boston Gazette under the name “Vindex,” declaring them guilty of murder regardless of the actual jury’s verdict.
The verdict of Charles Chancy was just as damning. Instead of preaching God’s abundant mercy as he did in his theology, he raised the specter of the Lord’s judgment upon the wicked and demanded convictions for the accused. He announced that “if I was to be one of the jury upon [a soldier’s] trial, I would bring him in guilty, evidence or no evidence.” British critics reacted with shock, and accused the minister of equating “divinity, zeal, rancor and revenge. . . . He was always for calling down fire from heaven to destroy his opposers.”
Chauncy confirmed their fears in the sermon that followed, Trust in God, The Duty of a People in a Day of Trouble, in which he inveighed against “the streaming blood of many slaughtered, and wounded innocents. So shocking a tragedy was never before acted in this part of the world; and GOD forbid it should ever be again!” Like an old-fashioned Calvinist, Chauncy threatened that God “would not suffer the town and land to lie under the defilement of blood! Surely, he would not make himself a partaker in the guilt of murder, by putting a stop to the shedding of their blood, who have murderously spilt the blood of others!”
By 1773 the memory of the Massacre had not been forgotten, even as most of the Townsend Acts (except on tea) had been repealed and Archbishop Secker had died, stifling the push for episcopacy in America. Despite these victories, the radicalism of Charles Chauncy continued unabated. He continued to preach incendiary sermons and worked ever closer with many of the militants in Boston like Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty. They called on Chauncy to “advise, persuade, propagandize, comment on the times, and lend the influence of his position to the cause”—including the creation of the committees of correspondence.
Adams and his allies had created the committees to disseminate information via letters and pamphlets over hundreds of miles, organize resistance to imperial policy, and act as an ad hoc government in some areas. This appealed to an increasing number of Americans who no longer saw themselves as colonists dependent on the will of Parliament; instead they claimed they were citizens in independent states, still loyal to the king but free to rule themselves. British officials like Governor Thomas Hutchinson fiercely resisted such arguments, yet the rebellious Americans had plenty of supporters—including John Adams, who wrote favorably of colonial self-government.
His cousin Sam, however, did not wish to simply argue with the governor. He actively sought to undermine him. First, he publicized a series of letters Ben Franklin had given to him that revealed Hutchinson’s private thoughts on matters of state. Most were innocuous, but Adams excerpted the most controversial parts and had them read before the Massachusetts assembly. This embarrassed the governor, and Adams created more problems for him when he plotted against the new British tea policy. The idea was to thwart the smuggling of illicit, untaxed tea from Holland by offering colonists cheap East India Company tea at reduced duties, thereby encouraging the purchase and taxation of the beverage and breaking their ongoing boycott against it. This plan was meant as a subtle means of raising revenue and gaining a monopoly over American commerce, and many rebels realized it immediately, calling it “parliamentary despotism.” Sam Adams was among them.
Goaded by Adams and other figures in the resistance movement, on December 16, 1773, some sixty or more Bostonians dressed as Indians clambered aboard ships carrying East India Company tea and dumped 342 chests into the water—a loss of 9,000 pounds. Delighted with the vandalism, Adams said the act brought joy to everyone except the British officials it embarrassed. Those officials quickly petitioned Parliament for redress, and within months the legislators delivered it with the Coercive Acts, which Americans called the Intolerable Acts. These measures closed the port of Boston until its residents paid for the cargo loss; they allowed the quartering of royal soldiers throughout British North America; and they stripped Massachusetts of its charter and gave the royal governor the power to appoint local magistrates, instead of the people electing them.
Outrage ensued, as Sam Adams expected. Boston’s committee of correspondence acted quickly to arrange resistance to these measures, calling itself the Solemn League and Covenant after a Puritan alliance formed against Charles I during the English Civil War. Charles Chauncy remarked on how well the committee operated to provide relief for embattled New England communities, as “bountiful donations from one part of the country and another are daily flowing in upon us.” Such donations were needed since he and other committee men called for an economic boycott of British goods “to frustrate the designs of those who would rule [Americans] with a rod of iron, instead of the laws of constitutional government.”
Chauncy didn’t only argue for this rebellious course in his letters; he preached it from the altar at First Church. He had become militant, invested with the desire for revolt, and now fully aligned his mission with that of the Sons of Liberty. Like so may others in the Black Regiment, he stood willing to provide sanction in the house of God for the actions of revolutionaries in the streets.
So much had changed in three decades. In 1743, when he was entering middle age, Chauncy had battled ferociously against enthusiasm and threats to the public order. He had called the New Lights lunatics and wildmen, and argued they posed a peril to civility as well as sanity. The revivalists and their opponents spent years calling each other tools of the devil, unconverted heathens, or enthusiastic madmen, and destroyers of the unity of Protestantism. They issued threats and received them, fired off angry pamphlets and were forced to answer them, and passed laws to secure their own version of the gospel above all others. In the end, the New Lights may have triumphed in numbers, but the Old Lights more than held their own, and the conflict made both sides better combatants. They had warred for many years and kept the edges of their rhetoric sharp and the design of their strategy current. And when they finally found a common enemy that they perceived as a greater threat to their liberties than each other, it was not hard for them to unite.
By 1774 they formed a fearsome, battle-tested front against their British adversaries, who like East Apthorp could not answer their charges, or like Thomas Secker withdrew from the conflict or died before it could be fought out. The American pastors out-preached, out-organized, and outfought their Anglican-Loyalist-British foes; and once these foes realized they had no other options, and that persuasion and incremental legislation had failed, they resorted to armed force.
Events followed rapidly and dramatically. The Continental Congress arranged for the nonimportation and nonconsumption of British goods, with social pressure and the threat of violence hanging over those merchants who continued to trade with the mother country. Loyalists came under threat from angry mobs, and responded with demands for further punitive action against the disloyal masses. George III opted to use military power to bring the colonists into line, and Paul Revere and William Dawes rode to announce the march of the redcoats. War broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, and the Second Continental Congress met the following month. The next year it passed the Declaration of Independence, which severed bonds with Great Britain and renounced the authority of the king.
In August 1776, in an address to his congregation, the now seventy-one-year-old Charles Chauncy offered the most radical sermon of his career. He read not from the Bible, but from the declaration itself, and many of his parishioners heard these passages recited in full for the first time. Abigail Adams sat in a pew and was struck by the power of the words. The minister told his flock how the document offered them the prospect of new “free and independent states” that rejected the dominion of the British Crown; how God had endowed them with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; how the king had oppressed them with tyrannical ministers and unjust policies that trampled upon their rights; and how citizens had the prerogative to abolish their old government and enshrine a new one that honored their principles and protected their freedoms. He said, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
Abigail watched, as Chauncy concluded the reading and “lifted his eyes and hands to heaven,” invoking the protection of the deity for the battles yet to come.
“God bless the United States of America, and let all the people say Amen.” The crowd answered him, “Amen.”