American Enterprise Institute

Religion and the American Revolution

Divine Sanction and the American Case for Revolution Notes

  1. Dwight D. Eisenhower, statement to Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force, 1944, US National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/general-eisenhowers-order-of-the-day.
  2. The literature on the Bible and the Revolution is extensive and of exceptionally high quality. See, for example, James P. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Daniel L. Dreisbach, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers (Oxford University Press, 2017).
  3. All references to the speech come from “Patrick Henry—Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/patrick.asp. The original text of “Liberty or Death” did not survive. What we do have is a re-creation of the speech by William Wirt from 1816, based on interviews with people who were there. Scholars debate the reliability of Wirt’s re-creation, but I regard Wirt’s text as reliable enough as an approximation of what Henry said. See Thomas S. Kidd, Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots (Basic Books, 2011), 98; and Charles L. Cohen, “The ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech: A Note on Religion and Revolutionary Rhetoric,” William and Mary Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1981): 702–4.
  4. Kidd, Patrick Henry, 30; Cohen, “The ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech,” 712; and Jon Kukla, Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 23.
  5. Samuel Davies, Religion and Patriotism the Constituents of a Good Soldier. A Sermon Preached to Captain Overton’s Independent Company of Volunteers, Raised in Hanover County, Virginia, August 17, 1755 (pub. by author, 1756), 17–18.
  6. Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford University Press, 2002), 92.
  7. Thomas S. Kidd, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2017), 5–6.
  8. Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (1701), 45.
  9. James Parker to Charles Stewart, April 6, 1775, quoted in Robert Douthat Meade, Patrick Henry: Practical Revolutionary (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1969), 42–43.
  10. Patrick Henry to Elizabeth Aylett, August 20, 1796, Virginia Historical Society.
  11. Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014), 16–17; and Vaughn Scribner, Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society (New York University Press, 2019), 167.
  12. Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Hill & Wang, 2005), 21–25.
  13. Thomas P. Slaughter, ed., Common Sense and Related Writings (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 82.
  14. Nathan R. Perl-Rosenthal, “The ‘Divine Right of Republics’: Hebraic Republicanism and the Debate over Kingless Government in Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 3 (July 2009): 536, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40467522. The English writer Algernon Sidney also employed a Hebraic republican argument against monarchy in Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, 2nd ed. (J. Darby, 1704).
  15. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (John Field, 1644), 189; and Dreisbach, Reading the Bible, 123–27.
  16. Elizabeth Tuttle, “Biblical Reference in the Political Pamphlets of the Levellers and Milton, 1638–1654,” in Milton and Republicanism, eds. David Armitage et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 78; John Milton, The Works of John Milton (W. Innys, 1753), 1:659; and John Milton, A Defence of the People of England (n.p., 1695), 24. A Defence was originally published in Latin in 1651.
  17. John Adams to Benjamin Rush, April 12, 1809, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-5339.
  18. John Adams, diary, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-03-02-0016-0028; and J. C. D. Clark, Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (Clarendon Press, 2018), 161–62.
  19. Peter Whitney, American Independence Vindicated. A Sermon Delivered September 12, 1776. At a Lecture Appointed for Publishing the Declaration of Independence Passed July 4, 1776 (E. Draper, 1777), 43; and Perl-Rosenthal, “The ‘Divine Right of Republics,’” 553.
  20. George Mason, “Virginia Declaration of Rights,” US National Archives, America’s Founding Documents, June 12, 1776, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/virginia-declaration-of-rights.
  21. Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0021; and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5212.
  22. Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, 14; and Thomas S. Kidd, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale University Press, 2022), 51–52.
  23. Allen Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy and Theology (University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 38–40; and Levin, The Great Debate, 92–97.
  24. “Philomathes,” Essex Journal, September 6, 1776, https://newspaperarchive.com/essex-journal-and-new-hampshire-packet-sep-06-1776-p-7/; and James Macpherson, The Rights of Great Britain Asserted Against the Claims of America, 2nd ed. (Gale ECCO, print editions, 2018), 80.
  25. Thomas S. Kidd and Barry Hankins, Baptists in America: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015), 44–45.
  26. Isaac Backus, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty (John Boyle, 1773), 52.
  27. Kidd and Hankins, Baptists in America, 49–50.
  28. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016), 12–13.
  29. Ruth Bogin, ed., “‘Liberty Further Extended’: A 1776 Antislavery Manuscript by Lemuel Haynes,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1983): 94, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1919529.
  30. Bogin, ed., “Liberty Further Extended,” 95; and George Mason University, Center for History and New Media, History Matters, “‘Natural and Inalienable Right to Freedom’: Slaves’ Petition for Freedom to the Massachusetts Legislature, 1777,” https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6237/.
  31. Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (Government Printing Office, 1909), 13:343.