American Enterprise Institute

Religion and the American Revolution

The American Revolutions of 1776 Notes

  1. Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018).
  2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 69.
  3. Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.18600200/.
  4. Jefferson to Weightman.
  5. This discussion of equality adopts the presentation I set forth in Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (University of Chicago Press, 2022), 43–45. My interpretation in both this chapter and my book follows that of Harry V. Jaffa. See, for example, Harry V. Jaffa, “Thomas Aquinas Meets Thomas Jefferson,” Interpretation 33, no. 2 (2006): 179.
  6. The natural equality of all human beings is why, in his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson included in his indictment against the king that “he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
  7. Jefferson to Weightman.
  8. Mark David Hall, “James Wilson: Presbyterian, Anglican, Thomist, or Deist? Does It Matter?,” in The Founders on God and Government, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach et al. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 187–88, https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=hist_fac.
  9. Mark David Hall, “Notes and Documents: James Wilson’s Law Lectures,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 128, no. 1 (2004): 63, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20093679.
  10. James Wilson, “Of Man, as a Member of Society,” in Collected Works of James Wilson, eds. Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall (Liberty Fund, 2007), 1:636–37.
  11. Wilson, “Of Man, as a Member of Society,” 1:638.
  12. Wilson, “Of the Law of Nature,” in Collected Works of James Wilson, eds. Hall and Hall, 1:501.
  13. Wilson, “Of Man, as a Member of Society.”
  14. Wilson, “Of Man, as a Member of Society,” 1:639.
  15. For a more in-depth discussion of this point, see Muñoz, Religious Liberty and the American Founding, 59–66.
  16. I speak here not of the natural authority of parents over children but of adult individuals vis-à-vis one another. What constitutes consent and this possibility of tacit consent are vexing questions that I bypass here.
  17. Alexander Hamilton, “The Farmer Refuted,” in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (Columbia University Press, 1961–79), https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch3s5.html.
  18. Hamilton, “The Farmer Refuted.” The same rationale is employed in Papers of James Madison, “James Madison: Essay on Sovereignty, December 1835,” Founders Online, December 1835, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/99-02-02-3188.
  19. Romans 13:1–8; and Acts 5:27–29.
  20. In this light, one might consider the following statement in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 413. The most profound and vast geniuses of Rome and Greece were never able to arrive at the idea, so general but at the same time so simple, of the similarity of men and of the equal right to freedom that each one of them bears from birth; and they did their utmost to prove that slavery was natural and that it would always exist. Even more, everything indicates that even those of the ancients who were slaves before becoming free, several of whom have left us beautiful writings, themselves viewed servitude in the same light. All of the great writers of antiquity were part of the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy established without dispute before their eyes; their minds, after expanding in several directions, were therefore found limited in this one, and it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.
  21. Federalist, no. 51 (James Madison).
  22. Wilson freed the single slave he owned in 1793. See Mark David Hall, The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson, 1742–1798 (University of Missouri Press, 1997), 30.
  23. On this point, consider Wilson, “Of Man, as a Member of Society.”
  24. Papers of James Madison, “For the National Gazette, 27 March 1792,” Founders Online, March 27, 1792, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-14-02-0238.
  25. Hamilton, “The Farmer Refuted.”
  26. In this light consider the following passage from Founders’ Constitution, “The Essex Result,” University of Chicago Press, April 29, 1778, https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch4s8.html: “All men are born equally free. The rights they possess at their births are equal, and of the same kind. Some of those rights are alienable, and may be parted with for an equivalent. Others are unalienable and inherent, and of that importance, that no equivalent can be received in exchange. Sometimes we shall mention the surrendering of a power to controul our natural rights, which perhaps is speaking with more precision, than when we use the expression of parting with natural rights—but the same thing is intended.” The right to revolution is perhaps the clearest example of an inalienable natural right. The people’s right to revolution could never be secured by the government or through the government; the very idea is nonsensical. By its nature, the right to revolution is a non-alienated right.
  27. See Muñoz, Religious Liberty and the American Founding, 74–82.
  28. James Madison, “Presidential Proclamation, July 23, 1813,” in The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, ed. J. C. A. Stagg et al. (University of Virginia Press, 2008), 6:458–59.
  29. See Article 5 in Papers of James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, [ca. 20 June] 1785,” Founders Online, June 20, 1785, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163.
  30. James Madison to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, Founders’ Constitution, https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions66.html.
  31. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 283–85.
  32. Matthew 22:21.
  33. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Annual Message,” speech, Washington, DC, December 1, 1862, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/202180.