It was a puzzle to the British, and even to some extent many modern historians, why the North American colonists were willing to risk so much—their lives, their fortunes, and their “sacred honor”—for the cause of independence, when their grievances seemed so trifling. The Americans, after all, were probably the freest people on the planet: Their taxes were lower than those of Englishmen in the motherland, they were governed in most respects by legislatures of their own choosing, and they enjoyed greater freedom of speech and religion than their compatriots at home. The most famous answer to this puzzle came from the British statesman Edmund Burke in his 1775 Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies. Burke identified four sociocultural characteristics of the American people that made them unusually zealous for liberty, and hence unusually resistant to heavy-handed monarchical rule. The most striking of these was religion.
According to Burke, the colonists’ religion was a “main cause of this free spirit.” By this he did not mean that religion in general, whatever its content, promotes a free spirit. He instead meant that the variant of religion most common in America, and especially the Northern colonies where the Tea Party rebellion broke out, was particularly conducive to resistance to authority. “The people are Protestants,” he pointed out, “and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” He explained that
all Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.1
This may sound strange to modern ears. We are accustomed to keeping religious beliefs separate and distinct from philosophies of government and reluctant to ascribe special importance to any particular religious sect. But Burke was not alone in thinking that there is a profound connection between the two. As Alexis de Tocqueville was to write some 50 years later, “Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.”2 This is partly because of religious teachings about the relations of man to man and partly because of habits formed by church organization.
Religious Establishment and Religious Diversity
In the decades preceding the founding, churches were the principal institutions for the formulation and dissemination of ideas, both oral and written. The leading polemicists on the Loyalist side were almost all Anglican ministers, and many of those supporting the American Revolution were Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or Baptist ministers.
Yes, there were almost 50 newspapers in circulation—most of them weeklies—and historians have long regarded these as the principal forums for spreading revolutionary ideas. But an empirical study of newspaper readership concluded that only about a quarter of the households in Philadelphia in 1773 had access to a newspaper. In most of America, the number of newspaper readers was far lower still. In addition to newspapers, authors frequently shared their ideas through published pamphlets, but these too had a relatively constrained readership.3
By contrast, historians estimate that New England churchgoers—and most New Englanders were churchgoers—would hear 15,000 hours of sermons in a lifetime.4 In addition, traveling evangelists such as George Whitefield and Samuel Davies reached audiences of thousands. Of course, most of these sermons were not political, but many of them were. Moreover, much of the content in newspapers and pamphlets consisted of reprints or reports of sermons.5 Some 80 percent of the published political pamphlets surviving from the 1770s are reprints of sermons. It thus makes a difference whether sermons harped on Romans 13 (“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”) or the fourth chapter of the book of Acts (“Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto [the authorities] more than unto God, judge ye”).6
The state establishment of religion was therefore not merely a matter of individual or communal liberty of conscience. It also had great structural and institutional significance. Government attempted to control religion for much the same reason it attempted to control the press: to inculcate ideas and opinions favorable to the state among the populace. For this reason, we should think of disestablishment as parallel to freedom of the press, preventing the government from dominating the organs of opinion formation.
At a time when most European nations had a single established church and suppressed most forms of dissent, colonial America was one of the most religiously diverse places on the planet. Virginia and the colonies south of it were settled mostly by economic adventurers with the active support of the British Crown. Each of the Southern colonies recognized the established Church of England, with varying degrees of tolerance for dissenters. Virginia was the most rigid colony, jailing Baptists for preaching without a license up until the eve of the Revolution. Georgia was the most tolerant, partly in the interest of attracting settlers. The Northern colonies of New England were a place of refuge for Puritans and Pilgrims. These pious men and women fled to the New World in search of freedom to worship in accordance with conscience—for themselves, at least. Members of other faiths, such as Baptists, Catholics, and Quakers, were not welcome (except in Rhode Island).
The Dutch colony of New Holland (which would later become the British colony of New York) established the Dutch Reformed Church. But New York City also attracted religious dissenters of various stripes from all over Europe. These included members of the Sephardic diaspora, who came to New York after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal by way of Amsterdam and Brazil and who formed the first synagogue in America.7
Three colonies were established as havens for religious minorities. Maryland was granted to the Calvert family, who created the colony as a place where Catholics could live and worship freely. By 1776, Catholics made up 15 percent of the Maryland population, and there was no Catholic church south of Maryland prior to 1796. Although most American Catholics supported the Revolution, future Chief Justice John Jay, a descendant of Huguenots, attempted to exclude Catholics from eligibility for citizenship at the New York state constitutional convention in 1777. He was successfully opposed by future constitutional framer Gouverneur Morris, also a descendant of Huguenots.
William Penn, whose father had been granted ownership of Pennsylvania, was a devout Quaker and made the colony a welcoming place for that often-persecuted religious minority. In doing so, however, he did not favor Quakers but guaranteed religious freedom for all. As a result, Pennsylvania was an unusually religiously diverse state, with large numbers of Anabaptists, German Lutherans, German Reformed (a German variant of Presbyterianism), and Presbyterians. Frederick Muhlenberg, the first Speaker of the US House of Representatives, was a German-speaking Lutheran pastor from Pennsylvania. There was also a significant Jewish population in Philadelphia.
Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who were dissidents from the strict Puritan regime in Boston. From the beginning, Rhode Island had something close to full religious freedom, including for the early Jewish community in Newport.
Religious diversity increased with the First Great Awakening in the middle of the 18th century. This revivalist movement, led by itinerant preachers, was a populist religious outpouring that emphasized personal encounters with the Holy Spirit and accused the more staid and learned clergy of the major denominations of being “hireling priests.”8 A famous sermon from this period by the Presbyterian revivalist Gilbert Tennent warned of “The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry.”9 This did not sit well with ministers in the settled pulpits. The Great Awakening produced splits in the Reformed Protestant churches between Old Lights and New Lights, swelled the ranks of the Baptists, and birthed the Methodist movement. Its effect was radically democratic and disruptive of established institutions. When Burke spoke of “the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion,” he could have been speaking of the Great Awakening.10
Although the Church of England was formally established as the state church in every colony south of Pennsylvania and was semi-established in metropolitan New York, it was far from the dominant or largest religious group. By 1775, Anglican churches served only a ninth of the colonial population. They tended to be concentrated in coastal and tidewater areas and scarce in the hinterlands. In order, the largest American denominations at the time of the Revolution were Congregationalists (the successors to the Puritans), Presbyterians, and Baptists. Congregationalists were concentrated in New England, Presbyterians in the middle colonies, and Baptists were dispersed through all the colonies. There were also significant numbers of Quakers and Lutherans, especially in Pennsylvania. Roman Catholics were perhaps 2 percent of the population, concentrated in Maryland, as noted above. There were enough Jews to constitute a congregation in six cities: Charleston, South Carolina; New York; Newport; Philadelphia; Richmond, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia. With a congregation of 500, the Jewish community in Charleston was by far the largest Jewish community in British North America, though there were no rabbis in the region before 1800.11
History and Ecclesiology
“I do not think,” Burke claimed in his Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, “that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches, from all that looks like absolute government, is so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their history.”12 Certainly, there was ample history to make Protestants wary of governments. Dutch Protestants had suffered violence at the hands of the Spanish in Holland—between 10,000 and 100,000 French Huguenots were killed in a state-sponsored pogrom in 1572—and hundreds of English Protestants were burned at the stake under “Bloody” Queen Mary in the 1550s. However, Catholic monarchs were not alone in fomenting violence against Protestants. English Puritans formed their churches in the teeth of governmental opposition and fled to New England in the 17th century to escape persecution at the hands of the Anglican Stuart monarchy. Puritans who remained in England were jailed and exiled under the Stuarts and fought Charles I in the English Civil War. James II similarly persecuted Scottish Presbyterians in the 1680s when he attempted to force them to accept Crown-appointed bishops.
This history left an indelible mark on the relations between dissenting Protestants and the state. Convinced as they were that their particular form of worship was ordained by God, the fact that it was forbidden by the king and Parliament taught them that the authority of king and Parliament was in opposition to God’s will, making rebellion legitimate.
But it was not only historical experience that shaped American political theology. Equally important were doctrine and church organization. The overwhelming majority of Americans (outside of the unchurched, who were numerous) were Protestants of one denomination or another. The most salient differences among denominations had to do with church organization—or what is called ecclesiology. Most of the denominations (with the possible exception of Anglicans) believed that ecclesiology was dictated by Scripture, though they disagreed about what that biblically ordained form of governance should be. In what follows, I will focus on the four largest colonial denominations: Congregational, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Anglican.
By virtue of its foundation and articles of faith, the Anglican Church was committed to royal authority. Henry VIII established the church when he severed ties with the Pope, making the king the “supreme head of the Church of England.”13 At first, Henry did not intend to alter the church’s doctrine or ritual, but the break with Rome coincided with the Protestant Reformation. After Henry’s death in 1547, the Anglican Church adopted many of the most prominent Protestant ideas, including the doctrine of justification by faith; a new liturgy in the English language; the rejection of clerical celibacy, indulgences, and transubstantiation; and the proclamation of a new set of articles of faith.
Unlike Reformed Protestantism, Anglican ecclesiology is hierarchical and top-down, more similar in structure to Catholicism than to Congregationalism or Presbyterianism. Under the 1559 Act of Supremacy, the monarch is the “supreme governor” of the church. He or she has the authority to appoint the church’s high officials (though now this authority, like all royal prerogatives, must be exercised on the advice of the prime minister) and correct “all manner of errors, heresies, schisms, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities” that might arise in the church.14 No one may be ordained as a minister unless he (or, since 1993, she) swears an oath of allegiance to the monarch as head of both church and state. Before the Revolution, American ministers had to travel to London to take this oath before the bishop of London, who had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the churches in the colonies. In Virginia and some other parts of North America, where there was no bishop to exercise discipline, Anglican ministers were effectively under the thumb of the parish vestry, an elected office typically held by members of the local gentry. George Washington was a vestryman in his Anglican church near Mount Vernon.
Descended from the Puritan Church, the Congregational Church is governed at the local level by the congregation. In its early years, only those who gave evidence of experiencing saving grace could be full members. Eventually all the male members of the congregation could vote and had power to elect the minister of their choice. In theory, this could be a clergyman of any denomination, but in practice this almost always meant a Protestant of Puritan persuasion. The minister was often a man of education and great personal influence. Congregationalists emphasized the importance of a learned ministry—hence the centrality of Harvard and Yale in New England society. But in theory, the minister’s role was solely to preach and lead worship; governance of the church was in the hands of elders elected by the congregation. Each local congregation governed itself, with no higher colonial, state, or national authority.
As fellow Reformed Protestants, Presbyterians resembled Congregationalists in many ways, but their governance was distinctive. Each congregation elected a board of lay members, called ruling elders, who governed the church. This was called the session. The minister, whose formal title was (and still is) teaching elder, was responsible for preaching the gospel, but church discipline was the role of the session. Each session sent lay members, plus clergy, to a regional body called the synod and ultimately to a national general assembly. No single person headed the church, and there were no bishops. The Presbyterian Church was nonetheless connectional, and local congregations could be reprimanded and corrected by appeal to the ascending tiers of judicatories. In effect, the general assembly served the governance function of national bishops or archbishops, but the power flowed up from the congregations rather than down from the top.
The Dutch Reformed Church was virtually identical in structure to the Presbyterian, except that until 1754 its equivalent of the general assembly, the classis, was located in Amsterdam. Descendants of the Huguenots, the Protestants of France who were persecuted after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, easily assimilated into the Anglophone Protestant culture, most often as Anglicans or Presbyterians.
Baptists were yet more individualistic. Membership in congregations was fluid, and anyone could serve as a preacher without need for formal theological training. Many were unpaid laymen. Sometimes even women and African Americans were preachers. Like the Congregationalists—but even more so—each congregation governed itself and chose and ordained its own ministers. The most distinctive feature of Baptist theology was that only believers could be baptized, which meant persons of sufficient age to make a convincing profession of faith. This may seem a trivial difference, but the adherence to believers’ baptism was an affirmation of the ultimate authority of each person over himself or herself. Baptists believe that we are not born into faith or religious society and must instead choose for ourselves. The belief that true religion is a matter only between each person and the Creator made the Baptists the fiercest opponents of established religion and advocates of what they called “soul liberty.”
Why does all this ecclesiology matter? Tocqueville, the most perceptive analyst of American political institutions, wrote that “every religion is to be found in juxtaposition to a political opinion which is connected with it by affinity.”15 Some religions are monarchical, some aristocratic or oligarchic, some republican, and some democratic. Some lend themselves to demagogic tyranny or coercive imposition, and some are disruptive of authority.
Anglicanism, by its structure, accustomed its adherents to monarchical rule. If you believe that in the most important things in life, authority flows from the top down—and if you believe, in particular, that religious authority is vested in a hereditary monarchy—you will tend to believe that political authority is of a similar nature. The colonial American variant of Anglicanism tended more toward oligarchy than monarchy. Because distance across the ocean precluded effective governance by a royally appointed bishop, authority in American parishes tended to devolve toward the local vestry, which was dominated by the landed elite. That, too, had its political effect.
As an early historian of the American Revolution wrote in 1794, “The ministers of New England being mostly congregationalist, are from that circumstance, in a professional way more attached and habituated to the principles of liberty than if they had spiritual superiors to lord it over them.”16 The absence of a hierarchy in religious matters reinforced the idea of an absence of hierarchy in political matters. James I tried to impose bishops on the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland because, in his words, “No bishop, no king.”17 It is likely James was less concerned with church organization as a matter of abstract ecclesiology than because of its implications for civil government. People who formed their own churches, governed their own churches, and elected their own pastors found it natural to form their own governments, govern their own polities, and elect their own leaders.
Political scientist Donald Lutz has observed that the earliest colonists patterned their civic charters and compacts on church charters they had formed in the mother country.18 This is not to say that adherents to hierarchical faiths are unable to be good republican citizens—Tocqueville reported that Catholics in America were “the most republican and the most democratic class in the United States.”19 But it helps to explain why Protestants, especially Reformed Protestants, were inclined toward republican government.
The distinctive feature of Congregationalism as a branch of Reformed Protestantism is its adherence to localized democracy, based on the individual congregation. It is not a coincidence that the characteristic New England civil institution was the town meeting.20 In view of the value Congregationalists placed on a learned clergy, it is perhaps more precise to say that Congregationalism in practice tended toward a localized form of democracy dominated by an educated leadership class, which often coincided with wealth and birth.
Presbyterian governance is similar to Congregationalism in that authority comes from the people, but it has an important difference. Presbyterian congregations are not isolated; they are subject to supervision and control by higher authorities. The congregation elects the session, and the session sends delegates to the synod and ultimately to the general assembly, which is the highest authority. It is a federal system. After receiving an education at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), the leading intellectual center of Presbyterian thought in America, is it any surprise that the otherwise deistic James Madison became the greatest designer and defender of a constitution he dubbed “partly federal, partly national?”21 Founding-era Presbyterianism thus was as republican in its tendency as Congregationalism, but it was disposed toward a federal rather than a localist or nationalist structure.
The Baptist impulse was more libertarian and more anarchic. If a Baptist did not like the way his church was going, he would leave and join another—a marked contrast from religious traditions such as Catholicism, where the faithful often have a lifelong attachment to the church as an institution, whatever they may think of its teachings. Baptists thus tended to be the most antiauthoritarian religious movement in the new republic. Along with their fellow spirits among the New Lights of the First Great Awakening, Baptists were a force for popular democracy more than cautious republicanism.
Political Theology
Then as now, churches generally had a political theology—a doctrine regarding the responsibilities of man to man and the proper organization of society. Reformed Protestants had a series of teachings that, although formulated for reasons other than politics, had profound implications for politics and pointed strongly in the direction of republican government. The Church of England, by contrast, had (and still has) an explicit article of faith affirming the authority of the British monarch over both church and state.
Article 37 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, finalized in 1571, addresses the authority of “Civil Magistrates.” It declares that the king or queen has “the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions,” and goes on to say that the monarchs have the “prerogative . . . that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers.”22 This article of faith makes the British monarchy not just a preferred form of governance but one that is divinely ordained.
The first provision of the 1604 canons of the Church of England, which were carried over into the Anglican colonies, required ministers at least four times a year to deliver sermons teaching that the king “is the highest power under God.” Amusingly, the canons specified that this adjuration was to be delivered “purely and sincerely, without any colour or dissimulation.”23 Because all Anglican ministers had to take an oath of loyalty to the Crown, an American minister who supported the Patriot cause would be in violation of his sacred oath. During the Revolution, half of them resigned their pulpits, out of either conviction or fear of their Patriot parishioners. The most public Tory voices were typically found in places like New York, where they enjoyed the protection of British troops.
The Book of Common Prayer was a particular bone of contention. It prescribed prayers for the king as part of the regular liturgy, asking God “to be [the king’s] defender and keeper, giving him victory over all his enemies.”24 That posed an obvious problem after the Declaration of Independence. The Anglican Church in Philadelphia replaced these words with the more patriotic sentiment “that it may please [God] to endue the Congress of the United States & all others in Authority, legislative, executive, & judicial with grace, wisdom & understanding, to execute Justice and to maintain Truth.”25 In Maryland, one of the states with the highest percentage of Patriots, the church was in confusion, not daring to continue the old prayers but believing itself without authority to change the liturgy. The church turned to the revolutionary state government in 1776, which replaced the words of the prayer with a blessing on the “honorable Congress.”26 Such are the travails of an established church in revolutionary times. At that point, the Anglican Church in Maryland had ceased to receive public financial support but still understood itself as under government control regarding its manner of worship.
All in all, these provisions of church doctrine tied the Church of England to the Loyalist cause. A New Jersey Loyalist minister in 1774 wrote, “The principles of submission and obedience to lawful authority are as inseparable from a sound, genuine member of the Church of England, as any religious principle whatsoever.”27
The foundational text for Reformed Protestant political theology is John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published (in Latin) in 1537. Calvin taught that individuals have a religious duty to obey their rulers up to the limits of Christian conscience—but not further. The flip side is that individuals have a duty to God to disobey political authorities when they command actions in violation of Scripture or forbid actions commanded by Scripture. In his chapter on Christian liberty, Calvin wrote that Christians must “voluntarily obey the will of God”—with an emphasis on “voluntarily.” Calvin believed that righteous acts avail us nothing if they are done under compulsion. It follows that, to obey the will of God, men must be free.28
Calvin’s theological descendants thus understood resistance to arbitrary government—not obedience or submission—to be the religious duty of a Christian. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin emblazoned this belief in their design for the first seal of the United States, which proclaimed “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.”29 Governments that oppress their people and deny their freedom to follow their consciences in obedience to God are acting contrary to the will of God.
In sermon after sermon, revolutionary preachers gave a political twist to this passage from the book of Galatians: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”30 They also interpreted Romans 13 as requiring obedience to civil rulers only when those rulers were using their power for the ends specified in that passage: to reward good and punish evil. Congregationalist minister Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers, which was one of the most widely circulated and influential political sermons of the era, gave the following interpretation of Romans 13:
If it be our duty, for example, to obey our king, merely for this reason, that he rules for the public welfare, (which is the only argument the apostle makes use of) it follows, by a parity of reason, that when he turns tyrant, and makes his subjects his prey to devour and to destroy, instead of his charge to defend and cherish, we are bound to throw off our allegiance to him, and to resist; and that according to the tenor of the apostle’s argument in this passage.31
The biblical passage most often cited in support of obedience to civil rulers was thus turned on its head.
In his chapter on civil goverment, Calvin argued that every regime has lesser magistrates (counsellors, legislators, judges, and nobility), who have the duty to protect the people. When the higher magistrates, including the king, become abusive and tyrannical, these lesser magistrates have the obligation to organize and lead the resistance. As historian John Witte explains,
The power to resist and remove tyrants, however, lay not directly with the people, but with their representatives, the lower magistrates, who were constitutionally called to organize and direct the people in orderly resistance to tyrants—in all out warfare and revolution if needed.32
Thus, when American colonial legislatures remonstrated against British abuses and their delegates met in formal continental congresses to raise armies in defense of American liberties, they were behaving in good Calvinist fashion.
The First Great Awakening further inclined Americans toward resistance to authority. One of the principal themes of the revivalist preaching of the Great Awakening was to undermine the common people’s deference to an educated clergy—and by secular analogy to authorities of all sorts. The Great Awakening was, in essence, a populist uprising. Historians generally agree that the political effect was democratizing, and thus it built hostility to the British establishment.33
Support for Independence
Whether because of history, ecclesiology, or doctrine, denominational differences manifested in clerical attitudes toward the American Revolution. A meticulous study of the views of every Anglican minister in the colonies found that only 27 percent supported the Revolution—with most of the supporters being from Virginia. Of 55 Anglican clergy north of Pennsylvania, only three supported the Revolution. Virtually every important pamphlet published in support of the Loyalist position came from the pen of an Anglican priest.34
By contrast, Reformed Protestant clergy supported the Revolution almost unanimously. Many observers at the time credited (or blamed) Reformed Protestantism for the Revolution. Joseph Galloway, an early supporter of the American cause who later became a Tory and fled the country, wrote that the Revolution was caused by Presbyterians and Congregationalists, whose “principles of religion and polity [were] equally averse to those of the established Church and Government.”35 Another Loyalist blamed the Revolution on the “black Regiment”—referring to the austere black robes worn by Calvinist ministers.36 King George III reportedly called the Revolution a “Presbyterian Rebellion.”37
It is more difficult to get reliable numbers on the political allegiances of the people in the pews. The split between Patriots and Tories ran along regional, ethnic, economic, and religious lines. Historian Paul Johnson, however, reports that Anglicans were “predominantly loyalist, except in Virginia.”38 New York, one of the most heavily Anglican states, was also one of the most Loyalist. There is no reason to doubt that members of the three largest denominations—Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists—followed their clergy in favoring the Patriot cause. Catholics and Jews, both miniscule in numbers, were overwhelmingly supportive of the Revolution; Quakers and Methodists less so. The Dutch and German Reformed and the German Lutherans were divided.
These differences had a major impact on religious freedom in America. The two denominations that held the status of established church in the colonies prior to independence were the Congregationalists in New England (on a localized basis) and the Church of England throughout the South and in parts of New York. In every state where the Church of England was the established church, it was stripped of that status during the Revolution, for the obvious reason that it made no sense to support a church that was committed to the divinely ordained authority of the monarchy. Establishment never returned to those parts of the country. By contrast, the Congregational Church emerged from the Revolution with increased prestige. John Adams commented that “we might as soon expect a change in the solar system, as to expect [that Massachusetts] would give up their establishment.”39 In fact, the establishment of religion survived in Massachusetts for only a couple more generations, being abandoned in 1833.
The Principle of Energy
It is sometimes assumed that the American Revolution was a product of the secular Enlightenment, and thus of a turn away from religion. Burke knew better. Religion was “always a principle of energy,” according to Burke, and it was in “no way worn out or impaired” in North America. Moreover, “The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies” was committed to the principal of resistance to arbitrary authority.40
Sometimes it is the testimony of critics that makes the most persuasive case. David Hume, who abhorred religious fervor, wrote that the Puritans were “actuated by that zeal which belongs to innovators, and by the courage which enthusiasm inspires.” For Hume, “It was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous and habits so ridiculous, that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution.”41 It was even more so in revolutionary America.
