if the customs had been efficiently managed, the duties on molasses alone should have amounted to twenty-five thousand pounds a year.2 22 The corruption was enormous and universal, and some of the Governors took their share of the bribery. Now that the colonies had grown rich from the conflict that left England loaded with war debts, it seemed only fair to England that they should assume their share of the burdens, pay their quota of the taxes, and put a stop to illegal trade. Beer 23 notes that Governor Dinwiddie as far back as 1755 had proposed a general tax as a punishment of the colonies for their outrageous failure to support Braddock's expedition. He prophesied that they would be "inflamed if they hear of my making this Proposal, as they are averse to all Taxes." He knew his Virginians. In the same year "writs of assistance" had been invoked to authorize royal officers to break into ships, warehouses and packages to verify their suspicions. This innovation was naturally resisted as a sacrilege. From the start, the mother country had been at odds with her froward children. This, too, was to be expected; for the colonies had been peopled by hardly any but those who would naturally be resentful of direction from home. First, there were the freedom-loving pioneers, who fled from Europe because they felt shackled there. Next, there were the religious and political malcontents, who had either been exiled or had exiled themselves. Finally, there were great numbers who had been carried thither against their wills as kidnapped or indentured servants, convicts, and ne'er-do-wells who had been shipped out of England for England's good. Probably half of the immigrants were servants or slaves. There were half a million negro slaves in America by 1775, and in each of Washington's battalions there was an average of 54 slaves, especially freed for enlisting.24 Add to these an enormous and increasing number of Irish, Scotch-Irish (making up a sixth of the population), 200,000 Germans, Swedes, French, Dutch, Jews and other un-English, anti-English immigrants, and the opposition is complete. In the new world the pioneers had had to learn self-sufficiency or perish. Having learned it they would practice it. As the commerce of America developed, ship-building and seafaring prospered mightily. Rum, molasses, tobacco, offered more wealth than gold mines. Competing manufactures could be easily repressed for a time, but that was because they were of slow growth. The American continent was self-sustaining and its ambitions mounting. The colonies were even issuing paper money for their own convenience. No one can say indisputably just when, how, or why the Revolution began. But since a beginning must be made somewhere, the year 1763 is as convenient a date as any for the start of the Revolution. 22 Adams, Works, X, pp. 246, 348. 23 G. L. Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765, pp. 45, 47. APPENDIX V RELIGIOUS CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION It is well known (perhaps too well and too extravagantly known) that much of the immigration of America was due to flight from religious oppression. The New Englanders hated the Episcopalions next to the Catholics. In 1638 they had spoken of bishops as "Knobs and wens and bunchy popish flesh." 1 The Puritans, believing marriage to be a civil contract, forbade ministers to officiate. The Anglicans wanted to put it altogether in the hands of Episcopalian clergymen. England still has a shadow of Anglican statechurch domination. The shadow was substance then. As early as 1638, Archbishop Laud tried to compel Episcopalianism in America and to send over a bishop backed with force. The Puritan Parliament cut off Laud's head and ended the authority of the bishops. When the King came back the church and the bishops came back with him. From then on there was a constantly recurring effort to force the Anglican church power on America. It was constantly fought off or evaded by the colonists.2 In the infatuation that came upon the British after the victory of 1763, the Anglicans joined with the merchants, whose opinion of the colonists was that of a newspaper writer in England who said: "I have always considered the Colonies as the great farms of the public, and the Colonists as our tenants, whom I wish to have treated kindly whilst they act as such.” 3 This, in the opinion of another letter-writer, was equivalent to saying that they "looked upon the American Colonists as little more than a Set of Slaves, at work for us, in distant Plantations, one Degree only above the Negroes, that, we carry to them." Along with the restrictions on American trade came the project to set up an Episcopal throne. The colonists asked if they must add "ecclesiastical bondage" and "Episcopal palaces" to their burdens. When the merchants and laborers of England squealed with terror at the ruin facing them from the American boycott and begged for the withdrawal of the Stamp Act, five bishops joined the Lords in opposing the repeal. 1 Van Tyne, Causes of the War of Independence, p. 350. 2 The details of this long history are found in A. L. Cross, The Anglican Episcopate and the American Colonies, Harvard Historical Studies, IX, Ch. IV. 8 Hinkhouse, The Preliminaries of the American Revolution as Seen in the English Press, 1763-1775, p. 102. An American contributed to a London newspaper a letter in which he said: "The Sight of Lawn Sleeves here would be more terrible to us than ten thousand Mohawks, or the most savage Indians in this Quarter of the Globe." A pro-American wrote that "when the late Tory ministry had decided upon the humiliation of America, they had thought it would not be decent to exclude the churchmen from a share of despotism over the Americans." 4 There was almost as much opposition in Old England as in New, where John Adams, in the Boston Gazette in 1765, spoke with "utter contempt of all that dark ribaldry of hereditary, indefeasible right,—the Lord's annointed,— and the divine, miraculous, original of government, with which priesthood had enveloped the Feudal monarch in clouds and mysteries, and from whence they had deduced the most mischievous of all doctrines, that of passive obedience, and non-resistance." This was called Treason in Virginia, but in New England it was only good stiff talk. When the Boston "Massacre" took place, the Rev. John Lothrop preached about "Innocent Blood Crying to God from the Streets of Boston," referring to the dead rioters; and Doctor Chauncey protested against sparing the lives of the soldiers and declared that if Governor Hutchinson pardoned them he would "make himself a partaker in the guilt of their murder, by putting a stop to the shedding of blood of those who have murderously spilt the blood of others." They were great encouragers of blood letting, those preachers of the Prince of Peace! The Presbyterians and the Congregationalists carried their religious doctrines over into the political field and furthered Locke's fashionable theory that government was a civil compact and the people had a right to choose their own rulers and limit their power. This doctrine proclaimed from the pulpits reached multitudes who could not or did not read the few papers and the many pamphlets. Patrick Henry was brought up on the sermons of Rev. Samuel Davies, who preached that the British Constitution was "but the voluntary compact of sovereign and subject." 5 But the Anglicans taught that disobedience to the Lord's anointed was rebellion, and incurred eternal damnation. In a book that Boucher wrote later on the causes of the Revolution, he traced the divine right of governments straight from Adam, insisted that the duty of obedience to the worst government was an ordinance of God, and said that he could not find "the word liberty, as meaning civil liberty, in all the Scriptures." He urged that Kings and princes, "so far from deriving their authority from any supposed consent or suffrage of men . . . receive it from God, the source and original of all power." & John Wesley, who abhorred the whole spirit of the American rebels, called independency "this evil disease," and preached that Satan hoped by “adding to all those other vices, the spirit of independency, to have overturned the 4 Hinkhouse, op. cit., pp. 132, 134. 5 Van Tyne, op. cit., pp. 359, 362, 356. 6 Jonathan Boucher, View of the American Revolution, pp. 511, 525. 7 whole work of God, as well as the British Government in North America." Patrick Henry had had both his eyes and his eloquent lips opened by the knowledge of the insatiable greed of the Anglican clergy when they refused to accept their salaries in tobacco at the commutation price established by the Assembly. Since the established church at home palmed off on America its poorest clergymen, the Americans palmed off on the clergymen their poorest tobacco. Washington himself speaks of "the common transfer Tobo. a large proportion of which we pay towards the support of a Minister in York County," and of Mr. Valentine's poorest quality of tobacco as "worse than that which he himself has applied to the payment of the Minister's Salery." 8 But when the parsons appealed to England, Patrick Henry had leapt from obscurity to fame in so scathing an attack on the mercenary churchmen that the jury, partially composed of Presbyterians, had awarded the rector one penny. "The Anglican clergy, in appealing to the power of the king against the colonial will, had awakened an embittered sentiment," says Eckenrode. "They were unfortunate, too, in invoking royal assistance at the time when the controversy over taxation was rising into importance, and they consequently incurred a double measure of odium. It was in these years, when the civil and ecclesiastical powers were opposed, that dissent flourished all through the colony and began to be formidable." The Anglican church had never made good its authority in the northern colonies, but in the southern it held such power that American clergymen could only be ordained by sailing 6,000 miles. One of the reasons offered for sending a bishop to America was in order to save all that trouble. Originally the Anglicans had imposed upon Virginia laws bluer than New England's best indigo, such laws, for instance, as the death penalty for staying away from church, a whipping for failure to be catechised, death to deny the divinity of Christ. The laws were modified or ignored, and Thomas Jefferson was enabled to be a vestryman, a Burgess and a governor, though, if there had been shown that high reverence for the law which is so often demanded, “he would have been deprived of the custody of his children, publicly whipped every day until he acknowledged the Trinity, and imprisoned until he asked forgiveness of the church." 10 It was just because the clergy in America were so lax in enforcing doctrines and suppressing dissenters that the fervent members demanded the presence of a bishop in America. Dr. Samuel Johnson was one of the most ardent agitators for such an Episcopate that it might put down "faction and delusion." But then he loathed Americans so violently that even Boswell defended them from his ferocity. 7 John Wesley, Sermons (Emory Ed.), I, pp. 505, 504. 8 MS. in Library of Congress, George Washington Papers, XVII, P. 48. 9 Eckenrode, The Separation of Church and State in Virginia (Va. State Library, 1910), p. 26. 10 W. E. Curtis, The True Thomas Jefferson, p. 308. As usual there were rich men who subscribed funds or left bequests for the church's benefit, and thousands of pounds were thus provided to push the bishops overseas.1 11 A war of pamphlets, sermons, letters to the papers, and coffee-house argument followed. In Parker's New York Gazette, March 14, and April 18, 1768, one who signed himself "Timothy Tickle" snapped what he called a "Whip for the American Whig": "Depend upon it, when the apostolical monarchs are come over, and well established in their American dominions, you, and such as you, will be chastised with scorpions. . . . Then, O dreadful! The torrent of episcopal vengeance! Then all who will not be so senseless as to adore the mitre and surplice, and dedicate both their consciences and their purses to his episcopal Majesty, may lay their account with-with what? with something I will not yet particularly name, but what one may easily discover, by turning over a Church history or two. This may be the fate of many, unless indulgent heaven interpose, by not suffering the right reverend and holy tyrants to plunge their spiritual swords in the souls of their fellow creatures; "Let my lords the bishops be once landed and fortified in their palaces, guarded by their dependents, and supported by their courts, and instead of this coaxing and trimming we shall soon hear the thunder of excommunication uttered with all the confidence and pride of security. The soft bleatings of the lamb will be changed into the terrible howling of the wolf; and every poor parson whose head never felt the weight of a bishop's hand will soon know the power of his pastoral staff, and the arm of the magistrate into the bargain." The "Centinel" cried: "Every attempt upon American liberty has always been accompanied with endeavours to settle bishops among us." 12 That very Dr. Myles Cooper, president of King's College in New York, to whom Washington entrusted Jacky Custis, and whom he invited to visit him at Mount Vernon, came down to Virginia in 1771 to secure "the cooperation of their brethren in that region in procuring an American Episcopate." 13 But when a small convention of Virginia clergymen asked for a bishop, four ministers protested that "the establishment . . . would tend greatly to... infuse Jealousies and Fears into the Minds of the Protestant Dissenters, and . . . to endanger the very Existence of the British Empire in America." Thereupon the House of Burgesses on July 12, 1771, unanimously passed a resolution thanking the four clergymen for their "wise and well-timed Opposition . . . to the pernicious Project.” Washington was not present, for, according to his Diaries, he did not reach Williamsburg till the 15th, but he would probably have voted with the rest. One cannot imagine him voting alone for an English bishop to rule the awakening American soul. In 1769 the Burgesses had appointed a standing committee on religion.14 11 A. L. Cross, op. cit., p. 111. 12 A. L. Cross, op. cit., pp. 197, 205. 13 A. L. Cross, op. cit., pp. 231-5. 14 J. M. Leake, The Virginia Committee System and the American Revolution, p. 53 n. |