Fields of Blood (50 page)

The Puritan establishment believed that God had used the Indians to punish the colonists for their backsliding from godly ways and for the decline in church attendance and were therefore unconcerned about the Indian casualties. But many of the colonists were now less convinced of the morality of all-out warfare. This time a vocal minority spoke out against the war. The
Quakers, who had first arrived in
Boston in 1656 and had themselves been the victims of Puritan intolerance, vigorously condemned the atrocities.
John Easton, governor of
Rhode Island, accused the Puritans of
Plymouth of arrogance and overconfidence in provocatively expanding their settlements and mischievously playing the tribes off against one another.
John Eliot, a missionary to the Indians, argued that this had not been a war of self-defense; the real aggressors were the Plymouth authorities who had fudged evidence and treated the Indians with rough justice. As in
Virginia, flagging piety meant that gradually more rational and naturalistic arguments would replace theological ones in their politics.
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As is often the case, a general decline in religious fervor tends to inspire a revival from some dissatisfied element of society. By the early eighteenth century, worship had become more formal in the colonies and elegant churches transformed the skylines of
New York and Boston. But to the horror of these polite congregations, a frenzied piety had erupted in the rural areas. The
Great Awakening broke out first in
Northampton,
Connecticut, in 1734, when the death of two young people and the powerful preaching of its minister
Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) whipped the town into a devotional fever that spread to Massachusetts and Long Island. During Edwards’s sermons, the congregation screamed, yelled, writhed in the aisles, and crowded around the pulpit, begging him to stop. But Edwards continued inexorably, never looking at the hysterical masses, offering them no comfort, but staring rigidly at the bell rope.
Three hundred people experienced a wrenching conversion, could not tear themselves away from their
Bibles, and forgot to eat. Yet they also experienced, Edwards recalled, a joyous perception of beauty that was quite different from any natural sensation “so that they could not forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration.”
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Others, broken by the fear of God, would sink into an abyss of despair only to soar to an equally extreme elation in the sudden conviction that they were free of sin.

The Great Awakening showed that
religion, instead of being an obstacle to progress and democracy, could be a positive force for modernization. Strangely enough, this seemingly primitive hysteria helped these Puritans to embrace an
egalitarianism that would have shocked Winthrop but was far closer to our present norms. The Awakening appalled the
Harvard faculty, and
Yale, Edwards’s own university, disowned him, but Edwards believed that a different order—nothing less than the
Kingdom of God—was coming painfully to birth in the New World. Edwards was, in fact, presiding over a revolution. The Awakening flourished in the poorer colonies, where people had little hope of earthly fulfillment. While the educated classes were turning to the rational consolations of the European
Enlightenment, Edwards brought the Enlightenment ideal of the pursuit of happiness to his unlettered congregation in a form that they could understand and prepared them for the revolutionary upheavals of 1775.
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At this date, most colonists still believed that democracy was the worst form of government and that some form of social stratification was God’s will. Their Christian horizons were bound by the systemic violence that had been essential to the
agrarian state. In the congregations of New England, only the “saints” who had experienced a born-again conversion were allowed to participate in the
Lord’s Supper. Even though they comprised only a fifth of the English population, they alone had a share in God’s Covenant with the New Israel. Yet not even the saints were allowed to speak in church but had to wait in silent attendance on the minister, and the unregenerate majority had equality before the law but no voice in government.
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Edwards’s grandfather,
Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, had brusquely dismissed the masses as incapable of serious thought: “Let the government be put into their hands and things will be carried by a tumultuous cry … things would quickly be turned upside down.”
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Yet Stoddard had urged his entire congregation, including
the unconverted, to partake of the Lord’s Supper and ordered them, in highly emotional gatherings, to stand up and publicly claim the covenant for themselves.

Jonathan Edwards understood that, despite his autocratic views, his grandfather had in fact given the masses a voice. He now demanded that his congregants speak out in church or be forever lost. Edwards belonged to the New England
aristocracy; he had no interest in political revolution, but he had realized that a preacher could no longer expect his audience to listen submissively to eternal verities that did not speak convincingly to their condition. That might have worked in seventeenth-century England, but a different kind of society was coming into being in America, one that was not in thrall to an established aristocracy. In 1748, at the funeral of his uncle,
Colonel John Stoddard, Edwards delivered a remarkable eulogy that listed the qualities of a great leader. In this New World, a leader must come down to the people’s level.
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He must have a “great knowledge of human nature” and acquaint himself with “the state and circumstances” of the
nation, adapting his ideas to the realities of human and social experience. A leader must get to know his people, be attentive to current events and foresee crises.

Only at the very end did Edwards say that a leader should belong to a “good family,” but that was simply because education was “useful” and would make him more effective. A great man could have nothing to do with self-interested people of a “narrow, private spirit.” Standing before the merchants, businessmen, and land speculators of
Northampton, Edwards uttered a blistering condemnation of men who “shamefully defile their hands to gain a few pounds, and … grind the faces of the poor and screw upon their neighbors, and will take advantage of their authority to line their own pockets.”
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This revolutionary assault on the structural violence of colonial society spread to other towns, and two years later, Edwards was driven from his pulpit and forced to take refuge for a time on the frontier with other misfits, acting as chaplain to the Indians of
Stockbridge. Edwards was well versed in modern thought and had read
Locke and
Newton, but it was his
Christianity that enabled him to bring the modern egalitarian ideal to the common people.

The Great Awakening was America’s first mass movement; it gave many ordinary folk their first experience of participating in a nationwide event that could change the course of history.
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Their ecstatic illumination left many
Americans, who could not easily relate to the secular leanings
of the revolutionary leaders, with the memory of a blissful state that they called “liberty.” The revival had also encouraged them to see their emotional faith as superior to the cerebral piety of the respectable classes. Those who remembered the aristocratic clerics’ disdain of their enthusiasm retained a distrust of institutional authority that prepared them later to take the drastic step of rejecting the king of
England.

In 1775, when the British government tried to tax the colonists to pay for its colonial wars against
France, anger flared into outright rebellion. The leaders experienced the
American Revolution as a secular event, a sober, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power. They were men of the
Enlightenment, inspired by Locke and
Newton, and were also
deists, who differed from orthodox Christians by rejecting the doctrines of revelation and the divinity of Christ. The
Declaration of Independence, drafted by
Thomas Jefferson,
John Adams, and
Benjamin Franklin, and ratified by the Colonial Congress on July 4, 1776, was an Enlightenment document, based on Locke’s theory of self-evident human rights—life, liberty, and property
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—and the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality. These men had no utopian ideas about redistributing wealth or abolishing the class system. For them, this was simply a practical, far-reaching, but sustainable war of independence.

The
Founding Fathers, however, belonged to the gentry, and their ideas were far from typical; most Americans were Calvinists who could not relate to this rationalist ethos. Reluctant initially to break with Britain, not all the colonists joined the struggle, but those that did were motivated as much by the millennial myths of
Christianity as by the
Founders’ ideals. During the revolution, secularist ideology blended creatively with the religious aspirations of the majority in a way that enabled Americans with very divergent beliefs to join forces against the might of England. When ministers spoke of the importance of virtue and responsibility in government, they helped people make sense of
Sam Adams’s fiery denunciations of British tyranny.
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When the Founders spoke of “liberty,” they used a word charged with religious meaning.
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Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards’s grandson and president of
Yale University, predicted that the revolution would usher in “Immanuel’s land”;
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the Connecticut preacher
Ebenezer Baldwin argued that liberty, religion, and learning had been driven out of Europe and moved to America, where
Jesus would establish his kingdom; and Provost
William Smith of Philadelphia maintained that the colonies were God’s “chosen seat of Freedom,
Arts and Heavenly Knowledge.” John Adams saw the English settlement of America as part of God’s plan for the world’s enlightenment,
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and Thomas Paine was convinced that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the days of
Noah.”
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This exaltation, though, was laced with hatred for the enemies of God’s kingdom. After the passing of the
Stamp Act (1765), patriotic songs portrayed its perpetrators—Lords
Bute, Grenville, and
North—as the minions of
Satan, and during political demonstrations their pictures were carried alongside effigies of the devil. When George III granted religious freedom to the French Catholics in the Canadian territory, he was denounced by the American colonists as the ally of Antichrist; and even the presidents of
Harvard and
Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God’s design for the overthrow of Catholicism.
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This virulent sectarian hostility enabled the colonists to separate themselves definitively from the Old World, for which many still felt a strong residual affection; hatred of Catholic “tyranny” would long remain a crucial element in American national identity. The Founders may have been followers of Locke, but “religion” had not yet been banished from the colonies; had it been so, the revolution might not have succeeded.

As soon as independence was declared in July 1776, the colonies began to compose their new constitutions. In
Virginia, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) proposed a formula that would not survive the ratification process: “All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution.”
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This guaranteed freedom
for
religion and freedom
from
it. But we must bear in mind that Jefferson’s conception of “religion” was based on two early modern innovations to which most of his countrymen did not subscribe. First was the reduction of religion to “belief” and “opinion.” As an apostle of Enlightenment empiricism, Jefferson rejected the idea that religious knowledge was acquired by revelation, ritual, or communal experience; it was merely a set of beliefs shared by some. Like all Enlightenment philosophes, Jefferson and
James Madison (1751–1836), the pioneers of religious liberty in America, believed that no idea should be immune from investigation or even outright rejection. Nevertheless, they also insisted on the right of conscience: a man’s personal convictions were his own, not subject to the coercion of government. Obligatory belief, therefore, violated a fundamental human right. “Religious
bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expected prospect,” Madison objected.
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The last fifteen hundred years, he claimed sweepingly, had resulted in “more or less all places” in “pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
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The “myth of religious violence” had clearly taken root in the minds of the Founders. In the new enlightened age, Jefferson declared in his
Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia,
“our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
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The critique of Jefferson and Madison was a healthy corrective to the idolatrous tendency to give man-made ideas divine status. Freedom of thought would become a sacred value in the modern
secular West, an inviolable and nonnegotiable human right. It would advance scientific and technological progress and enable the arts to flourish. But the intellectual freedom proclaimed by the Enlightenment philosophes was a luxury of modernization. In the premodern agrarian state, it had never been possible to permit an entire population to cast tradition aside and freely criticize the established order. Most of the aristocratic Founders, moreover, had no intention of extending this privilege to the common people. They still took it for granted that it was their task, as enlightened statesmen, to lead from above.
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Like most of the
elite, John Adams, second president of the
United States (r. 1796–1800), was suspicious of any policy that might lead to “mob-rule” or the impoverishment of the gentry, though Jefferson’s more radical followers protested this “tyranny” and, like Edwards, demanded that the people’s voices be heard.
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Still, it was not until the
Industrial Revolution shook up the social order that the ideals enshrined by the Founding Fathers could apply broadly to social reality.