BRITISH IMPERIAL WARS were also American colonial wars, with local origins, local grudges, local ways of warfare, and local consequences. They were European great power wars but in the colonies remained quintessentially North American in character. Nothing better reflected the local character of imperial wars than the names the colonists gave them. From 1689 to 1763, Britain fought a series of wars, often global in scale and reach, against varying combinations of French-led alliances. Conflicts of European origin and byzantine European causes had European names—except in colonial British America, where they were known for the reigning British monarch. Thus the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–1697) was familiar to British colonists as King William’s War; the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713) as Queen Anne’s War; and the North American phase of the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–1748) as King George’s War. Names such as these reflected another ambivalence among the colonists: proud as they were of being royal subjects of a mighty empire, they also at times resented the mother country’s imperial pretensions and impositions. And as the eighteenth century aged, colonial sensibilities matured. Though the colonists continued to fight as Britons, for Britain, and for the promotion of British liberties, they increasingly came to believe that Britain’s interests were not always the same as their own. Naming wars for their rulers was the colonists’ way of paying monarchical tribute, but it was also a way of reminding themselves that the costs of war had been forced upon them. Yet the battles they fought for William, Anne, and George were not the colonists’ only wars. If the great imperial wars had a North American component, the colonists ensured that their own interests—especially their insatiable appetite for land—were addressed. And they sometimes even sparked their own wars, with Indian and European rivals, on the contested margins of their domain.1
Though religion did not always determine animosity at the great power level—the English fought three wars against their Protestant brethren the Dutch, which resulted in the elimination of Dutch influence from North America and the renaming of New Netherland to New York, and France and Spain continued to be fierce imperial rivals, especially in North America, despite their shared Catholicism—all of colonial America’s wars had an important religious coloring. Thus while their causes were often distant and secular, the colonists’ wars were in large part shaped by faith. For example, though the fact that British North America’s great rival was New France was not determined by religion, the battles the colonists fought were driven by anti-Catholic fear and an intense Protestant patriotism. And though England occasionally allied with Spain against France, as it did during King William’s War, this did nothing to dilute the colonists’ hatred of the Spanish they faced in the disputed borderlands of the southern territories. Overall, the series of wars with the French and Indians, beginning with King William’s War in 1689 and culminating in the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763 (to the colonists, the French and Indian War), sanctified colonial America’s mission of promoting Protestant liberty.
Protestantism stood at the very heart of what it meant to be British. But religion was central to the colonial American view of the world in other ways besides Protestant exceptionalism and anti-Catholicism. Most important was a series of intense religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening, which gripped the colonies in the midst of imperial warfare. Religion was also at the heart of the first sustained antiwar movement in American history, as Quakers and other peace churches opposed warfare and territorial expansion on grounds of Christian pacifism.
Unsurprisingly, then, in the colonies imperial wars were as much contests over the “correct” or “true” definition of nonnegotiable values such as liberty and identity as they were about territorial expansion. In such an ideologically heated climate, fighting often assumed an intensity that mirrored that of earlier Indian conflicts. In all the imperial wars, the churches rallied people to the cause; chaplains accompanied the troops into battle, steeled their nerve, and urged them forward; and colonial soldiers uncharacteristically ransacked Catholic churches and smashed Catholic icons. These would be wars to purify the soul of humanity. They would be wars of permanent reformation.2
FEARS OF CATHOLICISM resonated so powerfully because a threat to British America’s very identity—political and religious—seemed to accompany the physical threat of the French army and navy. Protestants alleged that Catholicism’s earthly powers were tightly centralized, inherently autocratic, expansionist, and aggressive. Yet there was little here that was new. Indeed, with the colonies increasingly prosperous and populous, the era’s virulent anti-Catholicism should have become irrelevant, a curious echo of insecurity from a fading Puritan past.
What gave it potency and brought it to life was a series of events that seemed to corroborate anti-Catholic theories and ideas. Beginning in the 1680s, Louis XIV of France, whose extreme centralization of state power was unusually worrying even by the standards of Europe’s monarchs, sought to bring both the European and colonial worlds under French influence. This bid for dominance was alarming enough, but in 1685 Louis infuriated and frightened Protestants everywhere by revoking the Edict of Nantes, a century-old law that had protected the rights of French Protestants by guaranteeing religious freedom. The termination of the edict led to a severe repression of a Protestant sect called the Huguenots. These French Calvinists, whose persecution made them heroes to Protestants everywhere, became refugees seeking shelter from Catholic persecution. They found it in the great Protestant capitals of Europe, such as London and Amsterdam, but also in the American colonies, especially in Massachusetts, New York, and Carolina, where the locals admired what the historian Jon Butler has aptly called the Huguenots’ “piety of suffering”: faith, courage, and steadfast resistance to Catholic tyranny. During an official day of fasting for the Huguenots, Increase Mather proclaimed that France’s “great Persecution” was an ominous “token” of Protestant “destruction,” while his precocious son, Cotton, warned that the fate of the Huguenots in France could easily portend the fate of Protestants everywhere—especially in the American colonies.3
Almost simultaneously, England and its American colonies were convulsed from within by their own Catholic bids for power, both real and imagined. In England, James II ascended the throne on the death of his brother, Charles II, in 1685. The problem was that James was a Catholic who wanted to restore the official power, prerogatives, and prestige of English Catholicism. During the English Civil War, James spent his exile in France, admiring in equal measure the Catholic faith and absolutist rule of Louis XIV. By the time he became king, England had already been gripped by sporadic bouts of anti-Catholic paranoia, including the fantastically bizarre—and entirely fictional—Popish Plot of 1678, in which Jesuits and their allies were said to have conspired to murder Charles II and restore Catholicism as the official religion.4
Just as Louis XIV had radically centralized monarchical authority in France, James moved to consolidate his own power at home. And just as Louis had torn up the tolerant edict that had protected the Huguenots, James declared null and void the colonial charters that had ensured local governance and political autonomy since the founding of the first colonies eight decades before. In their place, he created the Dominion of New England, a supercolony cobbled together through the forced union of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York. Worse still, this vast territory, nearly twice the size of England itself, came under the rule of a single powerful royal appointee, Governor Sir Edmund Andros. Determined to bring the colonists to heel, Andros prohibited much of the political culture, such as local town meetings, that New Englanders held so dear. Despite Andros’s support for the Church of England, the colonists conflated his rule, and the Dominion of New England, with a Catholic plot emanating from London. In justifying their right to rebel, the people of Boston recalled the Popish Plot and claimed that the “bloody Devotees of Rome had in their Design and Prospect no less than the extinction of the Protestant Religion.” Andros, they charged, was actually “a branch of the Plot to bring us low” and was setting up New England and New York to be “attaqu’d by the French,” who of course would then treat “the English with worse than Turkish Cruelties.”5
True or not, the ambitions of James and his colonial agents triggered revolutionary upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic. The mother country led the way with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 by ousting an English Catholic, James, and allowing a Dutch Protestant, William, to mount a cross-channel invasion virtually unopposed. Here, faith was powerful enough to trump nation because it promised to deliver what politics could not: freedom. As one historian has put it, instead of the “poverty and slavery” of Catholicism, William gave the English “the priceless gifts of true religion, liberty, and prosperity.” Increase Mather had said something similar in his sermon upon the death of William in 1702. When “God made him our King,” Mather eulogized, “he was the great Instrument delivering us from popery and Slavery.”6
Inspired by the Glorious Revolution, the colonies followed suit with their own rebellions the following year. In Boston, where according to a bystander the people “did this day rise as one man,” Andros was ignominiously bundled up, imprisoned, and put on a boat back to England. In Maryland, long governed as a Catholic haven in America, Protestants—actually the majority—ousted their Catholic governors. And in New York, where many of the ruling elite were Catholic but the bulk of the population was Reformed or Anglican Protestant, Jacob Leisler—a fiery, ultraorthodox Calvinist who had recently helped resettle French Huguenots in the colony—mobilized widespread resentment of Catholics in New York and shaped it into an uprising that swept out the “Popish affected” authorities in the name of those “who would defend and Establish the true Religion.”7
KING WILLIAM’S WAR, a ragged, pointless affair, pitted the English and the Iroquois against the French and their own Indian allies, the Abenakis of present-day Maine. While brutal, the fighting was intermittent: long periods of uneasy calm would suddenly be punctuated by bursts of spectacular violence. Though they both scored notable victories, neither side acquitted itself particularly well. The French captured the colony of Newfoundland, constantly besieged the Maine coast, and destroyed the towns of Albany and Schenectady in New York and Salmon Falls in New Hampshire. For their part, the English successfully captured Port Royal, the main French base in Acadia (now Nova Scotia), and launched assaults on the main French towns of Montreal and Quebec. While the French fought their battles with regular troops sent from France, London left the colonies to fend—and fund—for themselves. The war was so damaging to the finances of Massachusetts that the colony became the first in North America to issue paper money, bills of credit that would be reimbursed after the imposition of higher taxes could make up for the shortfall.8
For the American colonists, King William’s War was first and foremost a struggle to resist the domination of Catholic New France. They accused the French not only of territorial ambition but also religious persecution. Giving the ancient anti-Semitic “Christ-killer” myth a New World twist, French Jesuit missionaries taught their aboriginal converts that the Virgin Mary was French and that Jesus had been crucified by the English. French troops paid special attention to symbols of religious authority, desecrating a Dutch Protestant church in their sack of Schenectady; assassinating the Protestant minister of York, Maine, on his own doorstep; and justifying their attack on another Maine town—which included the butchering of nearly a hundred noncombatants, children among them, as they tried to surrender—as a legitimate response to the Glorious Revolution. The French could not even be trusted to be French: Cotton Mather, for one, was disgusted that the attack on Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, was led by a profane, mongrel army of “half Indianized French and … half Frenchified Indians.” This was a terrible English nightmare come to life. But perhaps most startlingly, English soldiers and other men taken captive were brought north to Montreal, where Catholic nuns purchased them as indentured servants and prospective converts. Thus riled at these deliberate erasures of gendered norms and religious identity, colonial American soldiers purged their ranks of suspected Catholics and lashed out at symbols of French Catholicism. When they came upon the Roman Catholic church in Port Royal, for example, they embarked on the kind of iconoclastic spree not seen in England since the Civil War.9
These passions spun even more out of control and led to the war’s greatest tragedy. Even in the context of the times, the Salem witch trials of 1692 were an irrational, unjustified bout of social paranoia that resulted in the executions of twenty-one innocent people. Decades of sporadic but grisly fighting with Indians had induced something of a collective psychosis among New Englanders. The outbreak of King William’s War, which brought the scalping, torturing, and killing of entire villages, merely heightened these internal tensions. As the historian David Lovejoy has observed, by the early 1690s “it was time for some kind of reckoning between New Englanders and their God.” And unfortunately for the eccentrics of Salem, mostly women, the reckoning took the form of a ferocious witch-hunt. Witch-hunters pointed to the supposed partnership of witches with French Catholics and Indian devil-worshipers—not coincidentally, many of the accusers had been traumatized residents of villages destroyed by Indian attacks during King Philip’s and King William’s wars before they had moved to the relative safety of Salem.10
By 1697, with England and France and their respective allies exhausted in Europe, fighting in the desultory North American theater had ground to a halt. The resultant Treaty of Ryswick restored everything in North America—all territorial gains and losses—to their prewar status. England had prevailed from a European standpoint, but the terms of its victory—official French recognition of William III’s reign and the checking of Louis XIV’s bid for hegemony—were hardly adequate compensation for eight years of war.
Still, New Englanders took solace in the fact that their godly errand had been tested and confirmed. Ever eager to control the image of America, Cotton Mather used the horrific ordeal of Hannah Dustin to confirm English virtue and French and Indian blasphemies—and thus to sanctify an emerging national identity based on the twin pillars of Protestantism and liberty. Hannah Dustin had been captured by a raiding party of Abenakis in one of the war’s final acts, a 1697 raid on Haverhill, Massachusetts. While the rest of her family managed to flee to safety, Dustin and the midwife to her newborn baby were seized and taken 150 miles into the New England woods. Worried that the newborn’s cries would alert English rescue parties to their presence, the Abenakis—Catholic converts, no less—killed it on the spot by bashing its head against a tree. Dustin exacted her revenge one night at camp by stealing an Indian hatchet and killing—and scalping—ten of the twelve members of her host Abenaki family in their sleep. When she finally made it back to Massachusetts, the government not only paid her a bounty of £5 per scalp, it celebrated her as a true colonial heroine. Relying, by Mather’s account, on “the singular providence of God” and “nothing but fervent prayers to make their lives comfortable or tolerable,” and enduring the Abenakis’ religious taunting of her Puritan faith, Dustin’s escape was interpreted as a deliverance straight from God. In their attempts to desecrate Hannah Dustin’s virtue, the French Catholic Abenakis—whom Mather described variously as “raging dragons,” “idolaters,” and “savages”—had only confirmed it. Despite all its problems, God still smiled down upon the chosen people of New England.11
BRITAIN AND ITS American colonies had only a few years of respite before war with France, this time allied with Spain, broke out again. While the causes of Queen Anne’s War in Europe and North America were different, British aims were identical: preventing French dominance and ensuring British commercial expansion by preserving a balance of power. Waged between 1702 and 1713, Queen Anne’s War would prove to be even more frustrating, inconclusive, and unproductive than King William’s War. In a recurring pattern that would escalate and eventually spark a rebellion in 1775, London for the most part took its American colonies for granted. Only slowly did the priorities of British foreign policy become imperial as well as European—and even then, American objectives were often sacrificed in the name of European ambitions.12
Queen Anne’s War expanded the geographical scale of imperial warfare, engulfing New England and Canada in the north and Florida and Carolina in the south. Religion was not a cause but a condition that shaped the war’s contours and meaning; faith did not provide the spark that set war alight but the wood that fueled its burning. Foremost among the advocates for a robust colonial defense was the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, who feared another round of God’s tests at the hands of the heretical Catholic Antichrist. Through their actions, the French fanned the hysteria. They used Indian allies, of course, but more galling to Puritan sensibilities in New England was their high proportion of Catholic converts: to take one example, a combined force attacking Haverhill, Massachusetts, had three times as many Catholic Indians as Frenchmen. After the fall of Port Royal in 1710, Jesuit missionaries encouraged their Indian converts to live under British rule but sabotage it from within. And male British captives were once again humiliatingly paraded in the markets of Montreal, often purchased by nunneries and other Catholic holy orders. New Englanders railed at such apostasy and hoped this war, finally, would bring an end to the Catholic threat in New France. “There are terrible troubles and calamities hastening upon the World,” Samuel Clough declared in his wartime almanac, “which may be a means to bring on those Happy Times promised to the people of God, and to the Destruction of their Enemies.” The war with France, he believed, would “make way for the downfall of Popery.”13
Combatants in the south waged an especially intense holy war. Carolinian forces wreaked “horrifying carnage,” in the words of one historian, in targeting Franciscan missions in Spanish Florida. After having his eyes and tongue cut out and his ears cut off, one priest was burned alive while tied to the foot of a cross. Against such ferocity, many Indians fled their mission villages and defected to the marauding invaders from the British colony. Some tried to save themselves by renouncing Catholic baptism, the only Christianity they knew and a marker of their fealty to the Spanish, by crying, “Go away water! I am no Christian!” Though a Franciscan missionary presence would cling desperately to the Floridian swamps, Spanish Catholicism had nearly been wiped out.14
But as in King Philip’s and King William’s wars, to British sensibilities it was the Indians who committed the worst atrocities, particularly in their custom of carrying away captives, for ransom, slavery, or—worse still—assimilation. In Hannah Dustin’s ordeal, the Puritans had found a tale of courage and redemption. But in Queen Anne’s War, a 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, undermined basic notions of good and evil, right and wrong. A redemption of sorts would come, but it would be spoiled by a maddening ambiguity. As the historian John Demos notes, the most important thing about Deerfield was that it resulted in an “unredeemed captive”—one who did not wish to return, who freely chose barbarism over civilization.15
Long a site of Indian attacks—it had been the scene of vicious fighting in King Philip’s War—the village of Deerfield was strategically located as the northernmost English settlement in the Connecticut River Valley. Close to the present-day border between Massachusetts and Vermont, in the early eighteenth century it sat alongside an unmarked frontier, perennially contested by English and French, Iroquois and Abenaki. As the home of the venerable Reverend John Williams, a noted divine in his own right but also related by marriage to the Mather clan, it was also one of the more famous of the Puritan villages. As such, Deerfield symbolized a blend of Protestant piety and territorial expansionism that represented to the French and Indians a particularly obnoxious English challenge—and a particularly enticing target. If their ultimate goal was to push the English back from the frontier, perhaps one day even off the continent itself, Deerfield was an excellent place to start. For these reasons, Reverend Williams had joined Reverend Stoddard in prodding the colonial authorities in Boston to strengthen the defenses of the Connecticut River Valley settlements.16
With these goals in mind, a war party of fifty French troops and two hundred Abenakis—most of them Catholic converts—crept into Deerfield on a cold, clear night toward the end of February 1704. Using the towering snowbanks that had imprudently been allowed to gather alongside the village’s fortified walls, a smaller party of French and Indian raiders climbed into Deerfield and opened the main gate to let the rest inside. The night watchman had fallen asleep and did not awake until the gate had been opened. The villagers had little chance against such a perfect surprise attack, and the invaders had little trouble in utterly destroying Deerfield. Fifty-three villagers died; another 111 were force-marched into the wilderness, destined for sale in Montreal or a new life among the Indians. Either way, they faced the pressures of conversion from Jesuit priests. Among the captives were several members of the Williams family, including the Reverend John, his wife, and those children not already killed in the raid. Mrs. Williams died shortly afterward.17
After Massachusetts paid a ransom, the Reverend Williams returned from his Indian captivity in November 1706, nearly three years after being seized. As Mary Rowlandson had done following her captivity during King Philip’s War, Williams wrote a captivity narrative—colonial America’s singular contribution to the genres of Western literature—about his ordeal. As would be expected from a Puritan divine, Williams’s account was heavily informed by Calvinist notions of piety, grace, suffering, and ultimate redemption. It was also predictably infused with fear and loathing for the French and Indians, who had not only destroyed his home, his church, and his village, but who had also, in the isolated wilderness, tried to steal his faith. Even worse than the Indians, who could not really be expected to know any better, was the power behind them: Catholic Quebec. The French represented the worst sort of threat to the New England soul—autocratic, superstitious, corrupt, venal—and intended to conquer Protestant, English America. Williams’s account of his family’s ordeal, entitled The Redeemed Captive, sounded the alarm.18
Though Williams and dozens of other Deerfielders were freed, one of the captives chose to remain: Reverend Williams’s daughter, Eunice. For her, life was no longer Puritan, or even English: she had assimilated fully to Abenaki ways, would take an Abenaki husband, and bear Abenaki children. She would even renounce her godly ways and embrace instead the Catholic faith. She was the “unredeemed captive,” a living embodiment of Cotton Mather’s nightmare of assimilation and miscegenation. If little Eunice Williams, who from both her parents was made of the very flesh and blood of New England Puritanism, could lose her way, what did that say of the Puritan errand into the wilderness? Of its ability to resist Indian paganism? Or of its strength against Catholic heresy and tyranny? Such agonizing questions bedeviled the New England mind and elicited a redoubled resolve. After his release, Reverend Williams delivered a sermon to the Massachusetts General Assembly exhorting the politicians to mount a new offensive against the French. Little would actually come of Queen Anne’s War, but not for a want of effort among the Protestant British colonists.19
WHILE THE TREATY of Utrecht brought the War of the Spanish Succession and its colonial theater to an end in 1713, true peace eluded the people of North America. In fact, over the next fifteen years the British colonists would fight several wars with the French, Spanish, and their Indian allies, wars that were fueled by religious fear, difference, and grievance. While religious strife was waning in Europe, the continuation of sectarian violence in North America reflected its more pervasive and permissive colonial condition.
War continued to set the southern hinterland alight, with British Protestants fighting Catholic Spanish and their pagan Indian allies, the Yamasees. War continued in the north, too, with the usual sites playing host to the usual contests. French and Abenakis fought the British from western Massachusetts to the coast of Maine. Among British colonists, the war was known by two different names, both for the regional villain and alleged instigator of the war: in the west, colonists called it Grey Lock’s War, named for an enemy Indian chief; in the east, where much more fighting occurred, it was known as Father Rale’s War, after a Jesuit missionary who lived among the Abenakis and stirred them to resist British encroachments.20
There was some truth to this. Rale was a true believer “steeped,” a sympathetic historian notes, “equally in French nationalism, personal piety, and deep interest in the spiritual foundations of apostolic work.” So steeped was Rale in his role as apostle to the Indians that he assimilated to Abenaki life—to the British colonists, an unthinkable act of cultural treason. “We must indeed conform to their manners and customs,” Rale once wrote, “so as to deserve their confidence and win them to Christ.” Fears of Indians partnering the French to wipe out the British rushed back to the surface of colonial America’s fervid imagination. Sporadic Indian raids culminated in several major attacks through the summer of 1723 to the following spring; one celebrated incident saw the Reverend Joseph Willard, a product of Yale, killed in an ambush near Rutland, in central Massachusetts. Further west, Grey Lock led a series of bloody raids against the towns of the Connecticut River Valley. Besieged on two fronts, Massachusetts decided once and for all to rid itself of the Catholic threat in its midst. In the west, the colonists built a series of fortifications to keep Grey Lock and his warriors at bay. In the east, a group of over two hundred militiamen sailed up the Atlantic coast to the Abenaki village of Norridgewock, in Maine. Easily overcoming its meager defenses, the New Englanders cleared the village, set upon the Catholic church and destroyed its altar and icons, and then killed and scalped Father Rale himself. In this, as on most occasions, Cotton Mather had the last word: “The Barbarous and Perfidious Indians in our Eastern Country, being Moved by the Instigation of the Devil and Father Rallee; have begun Hostilities upon us. They did it, when the French Hopes of a Fatal Revolution on the British Empire, deceived them. And it was not long before the Hairy Scalp of that Head in the House of the Wicked, paid for what Hand he had in the Rebellion, into which he Infuriated his Proselytes.”21
WARS WOULD UNFOLD, and as they did the colonists would interpret their meaning largely through a lens crafted by two remarkable Protestant ministers who together brought about a series of intercolonial revivals in the 1730s and ’40s that historians have since called the Great Awakening. The era’s key religious figures, the intellectual theologian Jonathan Edwards and the emotional evangelist George Whitefield, were both revivalists and anti-Catholic activists. Their anti-Catholicism led them to champion the cause of what the historian Thomas Kidd calls “the Protestant interest,” an international endeavor, with global connections and worldwide implications, to advance the cause of Protestantism. The Great Awakening, their awesome religious mass movement that would have tremendous political and social consequences, was part of this campaign to advance the cause of the Protestant interest.22
Edwards, a descendant of a venerable Puritan family in the Connecticut River Valley who could trace their roots to the Winthrop, Mather, and Hooker families, was a complex man and an unlikely pioneer of evangelical revivalism. Although emotive, he was not a “noisy” preacher, a contemporary noted, but “grave, sentimental, searching, and pungent.” He was a strict Calvinist who sought to reinvest the ritualistic doctrine of predestination with meaning. He was also a staunch defender of hierarchy, tradition, and experience—a most unlikely disposition for a revivalist whose followers imbibed, quite understandably, a more informal, individualistic, and accessible faith. Above all, he was an intellectual, a serious theologian who also based his biblical exegeses upon the rigorous scientific logic of Isaac Newton and John Locke. Yet he also prioritized emotion, especially the importance of the conversion experience—what we would today refer to as being “born again”—although he still held fast to the traditional Puritan beliefs in the elect and a covenant of grace. He had his own conversion experience as a student at Yale, recalling that “there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being.” He emphasized morality and piety in equal measure. He warned of eternal damnation for those who rejected God’s law on earth but stressed that salvation was possible for all. Edwards, then, spoke to the heart as well as the head. And in him, American religion had its first great innovator of evangelicalism.23
From childhood, Edwards learned other core values that he would maintain for the rest of his life. As a Calvinist and English Protestant, he learned that the world played host to a struggle between God’s chosen people and their enemies, Catholics and pagans. The Vatican, he believed, was nothing more than a base for the Antichrist. Though he was a great proponent of missions to convert the Indians to Christianity and believed that individually they were as capable of receiving God’s grace as anyone else, he also distrusted the political intentions of Indian tribes. The wars that would devastate the colonial frontier on which Edwards was raised—especially the Indian raid on Deerfield that tore apart his extended family—impressed upon him the fragility and resilience of Protestant colonial society and the untrustworthiness of Indians. And with a father who had served as a chaplain to troops in Queen Anne’s War and an uncle who was a career military officer and commander of New England’s frontier defenses in King George’s War, he also learned the value of patriotism, military preparedness, and the importance of armed strength. For Edwards, everything, war included, was part of God’s plan; politicians and the military were but servants to God’s will. “ ’Tis God, and he only, that determines the event of war and gives the victory,” Edwards later preached during King George’s War. On another occasion, he proclaimed that the “affair of war is one of the most important of all the affairs of the universe: the state of the world of mankind principally depends on it.” As his biographer George Marsden puts it, Edwards believed that “Christ used human military forces as (sometimes unwitting) agents of his justice.”24
Whitefield could not have been more different. Though their theology was similar, Edwards and Whitefield differed remarkably in preaching style and tone. Unlike Edwards—indeed, unlike most other ministers—Whitefield spoke without notes. And unlike Edwards, Whitefield’s delivery was very emotional, even melodramatic. He would often weep during his sermons, and just as often he would move his audience to weep with him. He would adopt a tone of voice that suited the moment, and even do dramatic impressions of Satan and Jesus. While Edwards was most comfortable behind a pulpit and in front of a church congregation, Whitefield preferred to speak to thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—in the open air. He was, in other words, not just a preacher, but an actor; not necessarily insincere, but a showman whose theatrics were as much a part of God’s message as the words themselves. While the intense Edwards produced emotion from logical argumentation, Whitefield used ostentatious displays of emotion, making him an equally important pioneer of American evangelicalism.25
Whitefield was also a believer in the international Protestant interest. He had, in fact, little choice: as an Englishman who launched several wildly popular tours of the American colonies, Whitefield was the Protestant interest. Perhaps even more than Edwards, Whitefield was motivated by a defensive mentality that saw Roman Catholicism as the root of all evil. Whereas Catholicism was authoritarian, Protestantism was decentralized, libertarian, run mostly by the people themselves, and thus the source of Britain’s unique political and religious freedom. “I hope I shall always think it my bounded duty,” Whitefield declared in one sermon, “to exhort my hearers to exert themselves against the first approaches of Popish tyranny and arbitrary power.”26
Edwards and Whitefield’s preaching touched off the Great Awakening. Usually led by emotional preachers loudly, extravagantly, and theatrically proclaiming that everyone was a sinner at heart and that only Jesus could save one’s soul from the torments of eternal damnation, religious revivals often grew out of one particular church to spread across a region and gather souls into the denomination leading the revival. People whose faith had lapsed, or who had never had any to begin with, were brought into the church with enthusiastic joy. They had, truly for the first time in their lives, been brought to Christ. Such awakenings, as revivals were often called, were nothing new on the American religious landscape, and had with some regularity consumed the colonies, especially parts of New England, since the middle of the seventeenth century. But the Great Awakening represented something different altogether. If revivals themselves were nothing new, a series of overlapping, concurrent revivals, across the colonies from New England to Georgia, was. Newer still was the unprecedented interdependence of the revivals—no longer parochial affairs that affected the life of part of a single colony, the revivals of the Great Awakening were coordinated using the emerging phenomenon of the religious celebrity and the innovative use of printed media. Rather than a spontaneous surge of widespread piety, the Great Awakening was crafted, nurtured—“invented,” in the words of one historian—into the first intercolonial mass movement. All this was novel, and it helped create a newly emerging colonial identity—“American” for lack of a better word, though the colonists still very much thought of themselves as British subjects—and sense of colonial solidarity. Moreover, the Great Awakening was not simply a colonial affair: it was transatlantic, international, and bound the Protestant interest closer together than ever before.27
Yet politically, from the 1740s on the Great Awakening would also have a tremendously divisive effect. Its main theological innovation was to spread the notion of individual salvation to a wide audience. Established churches shook to their very foundations at such an individualistic—some would say democratic—spirituality, for it threatened to put them out of touch with churchgoing people. The doctrinal divisions within denominations between New Lights and Old Lights—or New Sides and Old Sides to Presbyterians—pitted radicals who supported the awakenings and their mass rallies promoting a doctrine of easily accessible faith, against conservatives who cherished the stately traditions of the established church. Edwards, with his deference to traditional conduct and elite authority, was thus a most unlikely revivalist. Official, government-supported churches, such as the Anglicans of Virginia or the Congregationalists of Connecticut, were especially critical of the Great Awakening’s disruptive revivalism because it sapped the stately, established churches of their power as well as their congregants, and more informal denominations, such as the Baptists, benefited at their expense.
For the time being, the implications of the new egalitarianism were as fleeting as they were unsettling. Revivalism undermined traditional sources of social authority even as the broad scope of the awakenings kindled a new social and cultural solidarity across colonial lines. But British society—including colonial British society—was still tremendously deferential to hierarchy and rank, and colonists still looked for guidance and example to the mother country first before they did to one another. Still, the Great Awakening built upon a newly emerging American version of a much older English worldview: hostile to external sources of concentrated power, fiercely protective of individual liberties, grounded in an exceptionalist belief that nowhere else did such freedoms exist, and driven by an unbending, crusading sense of righteous morality. Though relatively diffuse for now, these aspects of the American worldview would bond tightly together through two major wars: for empire in the 1750s and for independence in the 1770s.
THE GREAT AWAKENING coincided with another, equally familiar, mass movement: war. Conflict among the European powers erupted yet again, yet again it embroiled the North American colonies, and yet again it quickly assumed a faith-based crusading zeal to purge the colonies of spiritual corruption and contamination. Known to the American colonists as King George’s War, the conflict pitted Britain and its colonies against Spain in 1739, then also against France in 1744; it did not end until 1748.28
In this renewed battle with Roman Catholic tyranny—the first time authorities in London referred to the colonists collectively as “Americans”—the southern colonists had a particular grievance. Franciscan missions in Florida were sheltering Yamasee Indians—converts to Catholicism, no less—and encouraging African slaves in South Carolina to flee south to St. Augustine, into the arms of Spanish protection. The slaves of course needed little additional encouragement beyond freedom. But many had come from parts of West Africa that had already been converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, and in St. Augustine they could pray freely in a Catholic church. As galling as this irony was to the British Protestant self-image as the defender of liberty, it paled in comparison to the raids that freed slaves and Spanish troops had jointly carried out against South Carolina throughout the 1730s. Yet worse was still to come. Almost exactly as war with Spain was declared in the fall of 1739, British North America’s first major slave uprising erupted in South Carolina. The Stono Rebellion—named for its location along the Stono River south of Charleston—threatened South Carolina’s political stability and social fabric. Though the rebellion was swiftly repressed, the South Carolinians suspected it would not be the last attempt by an unholy alliance of Spanish and black Catholics to upend British colonial life. Given that many of the rebellious slaves were African Catholics who had been converted by the Portuguese, the colonists fears were not entirely unreasonable. South Carolina’s Anglican hierarchy moved to contain the religious security threat from within by converting Catholic slaves to Protestantism. Yet the irony of their slaves embracing Catholicism as a religion of liberation seems to have escaped South Carolina’s planters.29
In 1744, North American imperial politics took on a familiar look with the outbreak of another war between New France and New England. And again, for the American colonists it was in large part a religious war. The clergy had always used religion to propel popular enthusiasm for war, either by sanctifying the righteousness of the British cause or demonizing the motives of papist and pagan enemies, but rarely had it been as coordinated on such a wide scale. Broadly symbolic but relatively anodyne measures, such as public fast days, suited a wide spectrum of people, from the passionately devout to the agnostic deists. Others took a harder line, believing that French ambitions heralded the apocalypse because they were merely the tools of the Antichrist in its bid for world domination. This hard line transcended intra-Protestant divisions in the colonies. New Lights and Old Lights in Connecticut, for example, could agree on attacking French Catholics even when they failed to find any common ground on tenets of their shared Protestant faith. Characteristically, Edwards promoted this more rigorous worldview. Church and colony, faith and nation, he believed, would best march forward together. The advance of religion would come through politics, and few political causes were as glorious as an advance on a Catholic stronghold like New France. Mobilization for victory in King George’s War, Edwards hoped, might even sustain the Great Awakening’s waning revivalist fervor. Surely it meant something that Whitefield returned to the colonies, for the first time in several years, just as war was breaking out.30
Edwards’s grand vision of war and revival as complementary struggles dovetailed perfectly with that of the colonial leadership. Many of the strategists in charge of the war were themselves deeply pious, and their religious backgrounds strongly influenced the way they prepared for war. The Puritan grandee John Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards’s uncle and patron, had survived the 1704 raid on Deerfield and was now in charge of New England’s defenses. In keeping with the political views of his father, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, Colonel John Stoddard advised a combined policy of strong defensive fortifications along the French and Indian frontiers to the north and west and strong offensive operations against New France. Stoddard hoped and planned, though in vain, that colonial forces could capture Montreal. Like many New Englanders, he did not trust the French—frustrating negotiations with Jesuit priests and Quebec’s colonial officials over the fate of the unredeemed Eunice Williams had ensured his mistrust. Nor did he entirely trust the Indians, even those who were allied to the British. Others, such as Sir William Pepperrell, another evangelical admirer of Edwards and Whitefield, and Roger Wolcott, a militia commander and orthodox Puritan, led the colonial charge against the mighty French fortress of Louisbourg.31
Pepperrell, in fact, consulted closely with Whitefield about the expedition, a remarkable fact that reflects its amateurish implausibility and godly pretensions. And Whitefield did even more. In February 1745, he surveyed a crowd of over 3,500 amateur militiamen from Massachusetts and Connecticut gathered alongside the docks of Boston Harbor. The soldiers waited to board ships that would take them north to Louisbourg; Whitefield’s dockside sermon would bless their dangerous mission. Finding the Protestant militiamen “stirred up to God” and eager to fight the French papists, Whitefield did not disappoint. Drawing on the biblical tale of David and Goliath, he promised his listeners that like David they would prevail against the odds if they remained true to their faith. He then exhorted them with a prayer to God to “give us Cape Briton. Lord prepare us either for Victory or defeat. But if it be thy will grant it may be a Garrison for Protestants and thy dear Children who will worship thee in spirit and in truth!” Whitefield finished with a blessing of the expedition’s flag and the pronouncement of its official motto: “No need to fear with Christ as our leader.” The expedition, wrote one historian, had assumed “the air of a crusade.”32
Apparently God did favor the American colonists. Despite tackling the most formidable military installation in North America that contained the battle-hardened troops of the most potent military power on earth, the Americans stunned the world—including their own government in London—by taking Louisbourg after a relatively brief siege in the spring of 1745. The British colonies erupted in joyful celebration, and a rare unanimity brought New Lights and Old Lights together. Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian revivalist from New Jersey, exclaimed that the victory at Louisbourg preserved “our civil and religious liberties” from an enemy “who unweariedly labours to rob us of our civil and religious Liberties, and brings us into the most wretched vassalage to arbitrary Power and Church Tyranny.” Thomas Prince, a New England revivalist, preached that the colonists fought not merely for land and glory, but for a political and religious ideal that resisted “the absolute, hereditary, and unalienable Right of Kings,” against “Papists” who would “rule arbitrarily, illegally, tyrannically, and cruelly.” But the reflected glory of Protestantism’s great military victory did not belong to any one faction. Charles Chauncy, the minister at Boston’s First Church and a major Old Light opponent of the Great Awakening, celebrated the colonists’ triumph over the French “Antichrist” and the Catholic “Man of Sin, that Son of Perdition.” Only Louisbourg, it seemed, could heal America’s religious wounds.33
“God gave [Louisbourg] into our hands,” Edwards wrote. Victory was “a dispensation of providence, the most remarkable in its kind, that has been in many ages, and a great evidence of God’s being one that hears prayer.” But the war continued, and so more than two years later, in December 1747, another architect of the colonial war, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, also found himself relying on the grace of God. Although they possessed starkly different religious beliefs, the evangelical Whitefield of the Great Awakening and the rational scientist Franklin of the Enlightenment were friends and collaborators. Franklin’s key business was publishing, and few authors on either side of the Atlantic could sell as many pamphlets as Whitefield. Perhaps this was why Franklin, who feared the Spanish and especially the French but who faced considerable opposition to the war from Pennsylvania’s ruling class of pacifist Quakers, turned to religion to stimulate voluntary militia recruitment. Drawing on his upbringing in Puritan Boston, where such events were regular, Franklin proposed Pennsylvania’s first ever official day of thanksgiving to support the war. “Calling in the Aid of Religion,” Franklin later wrote in the pages of his Autobiography, “I propos’d … the Proclaiming a Fast, to promote Reformation, and implore the Blessing of Heaven on our Undertaking.” He also worked closely with another evangelical revivalist, the Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, to drum up support for a militia among Pennsylvania’s large population of Scotch-Irish. To appease the Quakers, Franklin called for conscientious objectors to be protected by law. By combining such faith-based initiatives with appeals to the colonists’ more secular interests, Franklin built more than enough popular support for a militia, which eventually had more than ten thousand men under arms—no small feat for a distant, provincial outpost of the British Empire.34
The North American theater came to a close in 1748 in an unequivocal British victory. Edwards, Whitefield, and Franklin had prevailed. Yet when Britain and France made peace in 1748 and drew King George’s War to a close, British negotiators thought it better to placate the infuriated French and return Louisbourg at the bargaining table in exchange for the French returning their capture of Madras, an important port in India. While the relinquishing of Louisbourg was unpopular in Britain, Americans were completely dumbfounded. Had they not proved their worth? Had they not sacrificed, in lives and money—both in relatively short supply—for the imperial cause? Edwards, of course, could fall back on a Calvinist providentialism that could explain everything by fitting it into the infinitely wise, mysterious, and unknowable plans of the Almighty. But most others were not as sanguine. Though it was still far too early for the American colonists to think of themselves as a nation apart from Great Britain, it was becoming increasingly clear that their interests were not always the same as the mother country’s. Among the Americans, new doubts arose over the willingness of kings and queens—the very monarchs in whose names the colonists fought and died in three imperial wars since 1689—to safeguard their sacred rights and freedoms. If they still fought to safeguard Protestant liberty in the world, they now began adding republicanism to the mix.35
EVEN AT THE TIME, people sensed that the boom-bust cycle of Anglo-French warfare that had begun in 1689 would continue to grow until it had consumed Europe’s New World colonies. Before, the British competed with the French for land and resources; by the outbreak of the last and grandest of these wars, in 1754, many feared that the competition was for survival itself. The population and prosperity of the British colonies continued to expand rapidly. Logically enough, this economic and demographic boom drove a new wave of territorial expansionism into the fertile valleys beyond the Appalachian mountains that up to this point had served as the colonies’ natural western border. But the French population and economy grew, too, albeit at a smaller rate and with a lower overall result, and with them grew French ambitions for the same land in the Ohio Valley coveted by British colonists. Both peoples felt they must expand or expire; neither could live in harmony under the threat of domination by the other.
These strategic maneuverings triggered the Seven Years’ War, a titanic struggle for imperial supremacy that spilled over into new sites of contest, such as West Africa and the Philippines, in addition to the more traditional theaters of Europe and the Caribbean. Alternately dubbed “the great war for empire” and the “first world war,” the British colonists in North America simply called it the French and Indian War, as if to say that the scope of previous colonial wars, which had also pitted them against varying combinations of French and Indians, paled in comparison to the events of 1754–1763. American colonists and British redcoats fought an unholy alliance of French, Indian, and Spanish enemies across the continent and beyond, from Quebec in the north to Havana in the south. Like previous European great power wars, the Seven Years’ War had a North American theater that was separate from, yet also connected to, other theaters, particularly in Europe and the Caribbean. And like other imperial wars, the fighting actually began in the American colonies as British, French, and Indians vied for control of strategically and economically valuable land. The only main difference was that the contest had shifted westward. Though fighting would again envelop New England, New York, and Nova Scotia, the fulcrum of war would now be found in the Ohio River Valley.36
The Seven Years’ War stimulated colonial religion, reviving passions of the Great Awakening that had subsided for a decade or more. The war also politicized the population, especially the most religious people in society, the clergy, who now found themselves pressed into service of the state. Women, also among the most faithfully pious of people, similarly became politicized and actively supportive of the war as colonial religion itself mobilized. The effect was symbiotic, as religious colonists rallied with near unanimity in support of the British cause. Even the pacifistic Moravians of Pennsylvania built armed forts and garrisoned them with men prepared to fight. In 1755, when Pennsylvania’s Quaker-dominated assembly proved unwilling to prosecute the conflict growing on its western frontier, its people, led by Benjamin Franklin, summarily replaced it and prepared for war anyway. (Nonetheless, on behalf of the Quakers Franklin also pushed through tougher legal guarantees for religious conscientious objectors. Franklin not only recognized that compelling Quakers to fight was politically unwise in Pennsylvania, he also believed that “due Regard might be had to scrupulous and tender Consciences.”)37
Quakers aside, the colonists fervently believed that the cause they supported could not be more necessary or more glorious. The rivalry, at least to the American colonists, between British Protestant liberty and French Catholic tyranny had never subsided. Peaceful periods in between their monarchs’ earlier colonial wars had only brought pause and respite, not a permanent end to hostilities. “The prejudice of their religion,” warned the Reverend Isaac Stiles of New Haven, made the French “mortally to hate us, and seek our overthrow.” Similar fears pervaded Protestant communities from New England to New York and south to Virginia. New France already extended across the vast stretches of land north of the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes (what are now the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec), and with its port of New Orleans the French also controlled the strategically and economically vital mouth of the Mississippi River. Should the two territories ever link up—as they would if the French gained control of the Ohio Valley and adjacent lands—the British colonies would be encircled, unable to expand, and vulnerable to French advances. The Reverend Aaron Burr Sr.—founder of Princeton University and father of a future vice president—painted a grim picture of the colonists’ possible fate: “Our Sea-port Towns sack’d, and land in Ashes!—Our Country ravaged! our Houses plunder’d! Our Wives and Daughters delivered to the Lusts and Fury of a lawless Soldiery!—Our helpless Babes dashed against the Stones!”38
Naturally, such hysteria both produced and reflected an intensified resurgence of anti-Catholicism that couched the war not as a contest between the competing land claims of two European empires but as a moral struggle between the darkness of Catholic tyranny and the virtuous light of Protestant liberty. As the visionaries and prophets of the Protestant interest, the colonial clergy played an inordinately important role in mobilizing and maintaining popular support for the colonial cause. And the people responded, filling churches to capacity and widely observing fast days of thanksgiving. Because Protestantism was widely regarded as the original source of political liberty and economic prosperity, it could provide an ideological glue to bind together disparate colonies with different interests. “Should we succeed,” declared William Hobby in 1758, “then our Liberty, Property, Life & Religion are continued.” But should they falter, “farewell Liberty: Now to be exchanged for slavery! Farewell Property! Nothing hence to be called our own. Farewell Religion; the Sun sets upon the Sanctuary; which is left dark and desolate!”39
If they remained faithful, the preachers generally proclaimed, the American colonists could expect protection from God’s providence. They should resist but not hate their French and Indian enemies, said Joseph Parsons, a minister from Bradford, Massachusetts, because their enemies were but God’s way of testing his chosen people. Such a classically Calvinist theme—adversity as a godly test that his people must simply endure—enabled the colonists to persevere through the war’s difficult initial years with their self-confidence still intact. Clergy also used lessons from the Bible to frighten their listeners into line. Using the biblical example of the city of Nineveh, which God destroyed in the Book of Jonah for the sinful, unrepentant pride of its people, the Reverend Joseph Lathrop of West Springfield foresaw destruction and ruin for the people of New England if they did not recognize their inherent sinfulness and utter helplessness in the face of God’s power. But if they renewed their true Christian—that is, Protestant—faith, Nineveh’s fate would befall the French, not the British, and the godly would emerge stronger than ever. When British soldiers and the colonial militia stumbled, as they did early on in the war, it was simply God’s way of punishing his people for their sins and warning them to repent. “God hath awfully rebuked us,” Jonathan Edwards noted quietly on hearing word of a defeat. The New Light Gilbert Tennent preached a similar message in Pennsylvania. But it was also a warning that, when heeded, would ensure future glory and victory.40
Future glory and victory that would be Christ’s as well as his people’s—little wonder that many colonists interpreted the war and its outcome in millennial terms. With an almost biblical rhythm, the cycle of wars between French Catholics and British Protestants seemed to be reaching its conclusion in this, an imperial war to end all wars. The final, climactic battle with the Antichrist—coinciding, amazingly enough, with a rare New England earthquake—could only portend the end of days. At the time, most colonists believed to some degree in postmillennialism, which took the Book of Revelation to mean that it was up to people on earth to prepare the way for Christ’s triumphal return and his thousand-year reign of peace. Slaying the Antichrist, embodied by the French, would be an important step. So too would ensuring the survival and spread of Protestant liberty that would follow the conquest of the French. Edwards could be so confident in the face of military disaster precisely because of his postmillennial beliefs.41
George Whitefield also supported the war. From his home in England, Whitefield worked with the government to build support for the war among all Britons, but especially the American colonists. To Whitefield, such efforts on behalf of the British cause and the Protestant interest came naturally. In a bestselling 1756 sermon, he charged that the French intended to invade and occupy the colonies so they could impose their autocratic political and religious system devised by Rome. “O America,” he lamented, “how near dost thou lie upon my heart! GOD preserve it from popish tyranny and arbitrary power!” Whitefield urged colonists of all religious persuasions to support the war effort. The arguments of pacifists, in particular, had no moral standing because France had initiated the conflict under the most spurious and dishonorable circumstances in order to dominate the colonies’ western edge and, eventually, the colonies themselves. Those pacifists, such as the Quakers, who still refused to support a necessary and eminently just war would suffer the “curse of Meroz,” a biblical tale (Judges 5:23) of cowardly villagers whom God punished for their refusal to fight in defense of Israel. The curse had long been a staple of colonial Calvinism, a favorite scare tactic of Puritan divines such as Thomas Hooker and more recently a rhetorical device used by Jonathan Edwards to attack the Old Lights during the Great Awakening. Colonial clergy followed Whitefield’s lead and the “curse of Meroz” became a common way to marginalize the war’s dissenters.42
Millennialism and anti-Catholicism were nothing new in American theology, but republicanism was. Building on the disquiet following King George’s War, for the first time since the English Civil War a century earlier the colonists began contemplating life without a king. At least, they began to equate, albeit abstractly, the arbitrary tyrannical rule of Catholicism with that of monarchs in general. Whitefield, a monarchist, may not have meant to include British kings in his charges against “arbitrary power,” but in theory it could certainly apply—after all, few political orders are as arbitrary as those vesting concentrated monarchical power in the hands of a single individual who derives his authority solely through hereditary rule. So when the colonists rallied to fight arbitrary power in the name of individual liberty—not coincidentally, the same rallying call of the Great Awakening—it was only the immediate crisis that averted their gaze from London. And as the historian Mark Noll points out, the new mood was not merely found among the usual suspects of the Calvinist New England clergy. Christian republicanism could now be detected throughout the colonies, including in the habitually Anglican—and thus instinctively monarchical—confines of Virginia. Indeed, what was so powerful about these beliefs was their conflation of religious and political millennialism: final victory over the French and Indians would usher forth a new, uniquely free era of civil and religious liberty.43
As chaplains, now more widespread and integrated into the armed forces than at any other time in colonial history, the clergy also accompanied the militias into the field. Regular soldiers imported directly from Britain were less moved by the motivating power of faith, with the colonial militia clergy often outnumbering chaplains to the redcoats by a ratio of fourteen to one. Drawing upon the widely disseminated doctrines of Calvinism, chaplains could base everything on God’s design—and upon it, they could steel resolve, explain away defeat, and foresee glory in a way no others could. The vast majority of colonial militia members were not trained, professional soldiers, but irregular reservists who fought only upon the outbreak of war. Thus while they were there as counselors and confidants, their most important function was to deliver stirring sermons to rally the frightened, often wavering citizen soldiers of the militia into battle. War was evil, the Reverend James Beebe of Woodbridge, Connecticut, preached to a group of soldiers before battle, but against the “outrages of the barbarians and the cruel laws of violence,” it was at times “necessary in a Christian state and allowable by the laws of Christianity.” War was hell, Beebe warned, and would consume the fainthearted and irresolute who did not put their complete trust in God: “And you my brethren may be called to look upon your enemies in the face. When their glittering armor and burnished shields may even dazzle your eyes. You may see the battle set in array and be called upon to face your enemies front to front.” In the midst of such carnage, only “the truly spiritual soldier will be able to bear up under all the hardships … with an unbroken and steady mind.”44
In addition to rallying troops to battle, religion could also provide justification for outrageous acts of war that we would now call ethnic cleansing. In the case of the Acadians, a French Catholic people living in the British colony of Nova Scotia, perceptions of threat collided with religious prejudice and fear to produce draconian war measures. Nova Scotia had been a French colony, Acadia, until its conquest by the British in Queen Anne’s War. But while the British had little trouble conquering Acadia, it had immense difficulties in both subjugating the Acadians and persuading Britons to settle there. British authorities presented an ultimatum to the Acadians—pledge allegiance to the British king or be exiled from your homes and land—several times between 1713 and 1754, but to no avail: the Acadians would not relent and the British did not have the stomach to enact a policy of forced migration. But the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War changed the dynamic of the Acadians’ situation, and in the process hardened British attitudes. Already hostile to Roman Catholics, the British came to fear the special role Catholicism played in Acadian life despite the fact that few Catholic priests remained in Nova Scotia to provide for the spiritual needs of its French people. From this, the unusually cohesive Acadian people came to be seen as a security threat, a fifth column that would ally with the local Mi’kmaq Indians who were already implacably hostile to British claims to the land. In the years shortly before the war, the British had begun a policy of settling “foreign Protestants,” initially in the village of Lunenburg, as a way to gain social and cultural control of the colony. The American colonists began agitating for sterner measures—pamphleteers in Boston shrilly warned that tolerating the presence of an Acadian enemy within would enable French papists to stab British Protestants in the back—which coincided with a new resolve of the authorities in Halifax. In 1755, the year of several British defeats, the Acadians were presented with another ultimatum. This time, those who refused were packed on British ships and forcibly moved to other parts of the British Empire.45
The expulsion of the Acadians in the years following 1755 perfectly captures the diverging fates of North American Catholicism and Protestantism that resulted from the Seven Years’ War. For this conflict, more than any, was a battle to determine the religious complexion—and with it the political and economic character—of an entire continent. In 1762, Spain intervened on the side of the French. British forces seized the opportunity to attack their new Spanish enemy, weak and indecisive, and quickly mounted an expedition against Havana, the important Cuban port. Their ranks were swelled with thousands of enthusiastic volunteers from traditionally anti-Catholic New England, long accustomed to fighting papists and Indians on behalf of the British crown. Spanish belligerency also brought Florida into the war, where British victory brought an effective end to Floridian Catholicism until its Cuban renewal in the twentieth century.46
Naturally, the war had a more positive effect on colonial Protestantism by acting as a spur to social cohesion and religious endeavor. Frontier Indian missions in New England, New York, and elsewhere that had floundered at the onset of war, forgotten by all but their most dedicated participants, rejuvenated in the wake of the Protestant triumph. Piety among the colonists also revived. The Great Awakening’s exhaustingly intense revivalism, impossible to sustain beyond a few years, was reawakened in service to the war effort, and became more broadly popular as it became more avowedly political and nationalistic. In responding to the unrelenting ideological demands of the war, the colonial clergy enhanced, entwined, and then entrenched the meaning of colonial identity, Protestant exceptionalism, and millennial expectation more than even the Great Awakening itself ever did. The war also spread the boundaries of colonial religion by merging its interests—especially frontier defense—with those of the state.47
After a wobbly start, the war resulted in a complete British, Protestant victory. In succeeding years, important French and Spanish imperial cities fell into British hands: Louisbourg (again) in 1758, Quebec in 1759, Montreal in 1760, Havana and Manila in 1762. Neither Paris nor Madrid could afford to suffer any further losses like these, and in 1763 they sued for peace. The settlement ended the imperial French influence in North America, which to many American colonists seemed to herald the end of the French presence itself despite the thousands of Québécois now living under British rule.
The French defeated once and for all, their Indian allies humbled and prone to British domination, the Spanish humiliated on the southern fringes of Britain’s North American empire—no wonder colonists from Maine to Georgia looked upon victory in the Seven Years’ War as the greatest event of their lifetimes, the dawn of an era of permanent peace and prosperity. And as usual, the clergy rose with a rare ecumenical unity to provide spiritual meaning for the imperial grandeur. Having emerged from a “State of War,” Izrahiah Wetmore, a Congregational minister from Stratford, Connecticut, thanked “Providence” and “the great God of his infinite Goodness and Mercy” for rewarding the godly for their fidelity during a time of testing. But to others, victory meant something more: everywhere they looked, people of God pointed to the very earthly progress that seemed to follow victory. The Seven Years’ War had won the American colonists a permanent freedom in all aspects of life, a freedom whose component parts were now indivisible and indissoluble. “Methinks I see Towns enlarged, Settlements increased, and this howling Wilderness become a fruitful Field, which the Lord hath blessed,” preached Congregational minister Eli Forbes as early as 1760; “and to complete the Scene, I see Churches rise out of the Superstitions of Roman Bigotry.” No less fulsome was Virginia’s James Horrocks, an Anglican minister, who rejoiced in the “Blessing now given us,” the “Security of Our Civil Liberty, a Happiness we justly glory in … Oh Liberty! Thou art the Author of every good and perfect Gift, the inexhaustible Fountain, from whence all Blessings flow.”48
Thus finished the twin processes of imperial warfare and religious revivalism that transformed British colonial America between 1689 and 1763. The colonies had grown and matured, their numbers and prosperity expanding at astonishing rates. But their sensibilities matured in a strangely paradoxical way, becoming more assertive, autonomous, even on occasion advocating outright independence—more “American,” the clergy pointedly noted on occasion—yet also still proudly British. The paradox is best explained by the uncomfortable fact that the kind of British exceptionalism of which the colonists were so proud was not necessarily any longer the same British identity in which the people of the mother country believed. The most important, mutually reinforcing components to colonial identity were robust notions of political freedom and the Protestant religion, forged together through a series of imperial wars that had starkly different meanings for the American colonists than they did for Britons. Crucially, colonial religion expanded and flourished alongside these developments, providing a distinctively pious tenor to an emerging American worldview.49