Newburyport, Massachusetts, September 1775. On the eve of mounting the American Revolution’s first major offensive, a thousand soldiers from the newly formed Continental Army marched into Newburyport. The New England seaside town would be the launching point for their audacious attack against the city of Quebec. More than 350 miles of rugged terrain lay between them and their target, and so before departing the soldiers requested a special church service to bless their endeavor and ask for the assistance of God’s providence. With the townsfolk cheering along a packed parade route, the soldiers made their way to Newburyport’s First Presbyterian Church. Everyone, townsfolk and soldiers together, filed into the church and filled it to capacity. Without notes, Reverend Samuel Spring, the army chaplain, preached from a passage in Exodus (33:15): “If thy spirit go not with us, carry us not up hence.” The choice of text was fitting: few of those present did not believe that the Lord marched alongside the amateur colonial soldiers. The Book of Exodus was also appropriate, for the soldiers knew that by conquering Quebec they would lead thousands of people out from under the dual tyranny of the Catholic Church and the British Parliament. More important, by defeating the mighty British in such an important battle, the Americans would help bring about their own deliverance from imperial rule. One listener that day thrilled to Spring’s sermon on “the marvelous and daring expedition on which they were about to set forth.” Another who would never forget the occasion was the expedition commander, Colonel Benedict Arnold.1
Reverend Spring found the experience thrilling as well, though for a different reason: “I preached over the grave of Whitefield.” Buried beneath the stone tiles of the church floor, beneath the altar itself, lay the tomb of George Whitefield. Five years before, in September 1770, he had died suddenly of an early morning asthma attack while staying in Newburyport. The minister of First Presbyterian, Jonathan Parsons, refused to relinquish Whitefield’s body and instead had him buried in a special tomb in the church crypt. Knowing this, after his sermon Chaplain Spring asked if he could visit the tomb to pay homage to Whitefield; several soldiers joined him. They prised open the crypt and stared at Whitefield’s remains. His flesh had decomposed, but his clothes had not. The soldiers carefully removed Whitefield’s collar and wristbands and tore off small pieces for each of them, so that they may have “a precious relic” for the arduous journey and difficult battle that awaited them.2
By 1783, eight years later, the American colonists had defeated Great Britain and won their independence. Joyful celebrations erupted throughout the new nation of the United States, including in Newburyport. From the same pulpit in the same church, Reverend John Murray channeled the spirit of George Whitefield to consecrate the victory. “Joy dances in every eye,” Murray proclaimed. “Pleasure beams in every countenance; and every bosom beats high with the emotions peculiarly fitted to hail the auspicious day that declares the clouds of horror fled, to return no more for ever.”3 Whitefield’s posthumous influence on the course of revolution had come full circle.
Whitefield was in high demand, and not merely for his comforting theology of a new birth that was available to anyone who would accept Christ into their heart. During his career, Whitefield had also, in the words of one historian, “preached politics.” Until his death, he had been strongly supportive of American independence. On the many issues that had split the American colonists from the British government, Whitefield sided with the colonists. Fearing the baroque excesses and political power of the Church of England, his own denomination, throughout the 1760s he had opposed the installation of an Anglican bishop in America. In 1764, he was among the first to warn the colonists of the hated Stamp Tax. “My heart bleeds for America,” he lamented to a private gathering of New Hampshire clergymen. “O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against both your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost.” Two years later, Whitefield accompanied his good friend Benjamin Franklin to the House of Parliament, where Franklin was arguing the colonies’ case against the Stamp Act. It said much about Whitefield’s reputation—and Franklin’s—that the famed evangelist was there not only to persuade British politicians, but to shield Franklin from the criticism of American colonists. Having spent his career warning about the dangers posed by Catholicism’s concentrated, arbitrary power, Whitefield found himself applying the same libertarian logic to his own church and his own country.4
Revolutions fundamentally alter the political climate of regions and continents as well as individual nations, and revolutionary states often seek to export their utopian ideas to foreign countries still living under oppression. Thus while normally thought of as an internal affair, the American Revolution also marks one of the most important episodes in the history of American foreign relations. Indeed, given their colonial status and experience with imperial and Indian wars, the revolutionaries themselves made little distinction between what was foreign and what was domestic. Though the Revolution determined the political independence of the United States, it also created new or cemented existing ideas about the wider world regarding liberty, slavery, expansion, exceptionalism, and how the United States should apply its newly won independent power abroad.5
And of course the Revolution immediately created the need for an independent American foreign policy. Even before the creation of the United States, American diplomats negotiated possible peace terms with the British throughout the war, and they used these negotiations as a ruse to pressure other European powers to weaken Great Britain by supporting the Patriot cause. Without these foreign allies—notably France, but also Spain—the Americans would likely never have defeated Great Britain in the first place. Conducting international negotiations and managing alliances during and after the Revolutionary War, while also maintaining national autonomy, established an enduring tradition of U.S. diplomacy. George Washington may have codified this tradition in his famous 1796 Farewell Address, but it had been already flourishing for twenty years.6
As the life and death of Whitefield illustrate, the role of religion was instrumental in the unfolding of America’s revolution and worldview alike. As with Whitefield, American religion in general helped initiate, sustain, and celebrate revolutionary fervor. Colonial religion and politics changed alongside one another in profound ways—what the historian Rhys Isaac aptly calls “the double revolution in religious and political thought and feeling”—that would attitudinally shape not only a new American nation and its political character, but that nation’s relationship with the rest of the world.7
Religion, deeply allied to the cause of independence, made the outbreak of revolution more likely, helped steer its course, influenced its outcome, and contributed to shaping the peace. In the decades before the outbreak of revolution, developments in American religion helped nurture new ways of thinking about established authority and its relationship to individual liberty. In particular, the Great Awakening’s radical individualist ethos of personal salvation helped sanctify the political ideas—particularly regarding monarchy, concentrated power, and republican liberty—that provided the fuel to power the revolutionary engine. The Great Awakening was in many ways itself revolutionary, an inherently subversive phenomenon that undermined traditional patterns of established hierarchy. There was no straight line from Awakening to Revolution, but the revivals did create a new context that enabled a revolution for individual liberties against established authority to flourish. Revivals empowered colonists, especially among the lower classes, to challenge establishments that unjustly or arbitrarily stood between the people and the free expression of their religious identity. For the first time in their lives, colonists could seize control over their own religious choices—and often they did so emphatically, even violently, in a manner that was highly destabilizing to the traditional boundaries of society and politics. Given that religion, especially Christianity, is inherently a matter of individual conscience, it was natural that this development would have political ramifications. That it happened on a mass scale in several colonies, and not just New England, made the Awakening even more politically consequential. “It seems evident,” the historian Gordon S. Wood sensibly concludes, “that in one way or another the Great Awakening helped prepare American society and culture for the Revolution, but of course not in any direct, deliberate, or intentional manner.”8
This included religious culture and habits that had long ceased to express any specifically sacred meaning. In New England, what the historian Edmund S. Morgan calls “the Puritan Ethic” of championing austerity, modesty, and frugality as the sources of virtue became translated from ideas that were once deeply spiritual but, by the 1760s, could stand on their own, largely independent of religious belief. Other Puritan practices were easily transferable to politics. The Calvinist belief in original sin, to take one example, led many colonists to doubt that a single individual could be incorruptible enough to avoid the luxuries of power and rule justly and effectively. To take another, the Revolutionary spirit broadened the Puritan errand into the wilderness into a more generic “American” sacred mission to spread the blessings of liberty. Channeling the ghost of John Winthrop, during the war John Adams boasted to General Nathanael Greene that “America is the City, set upon a Hill.” Or consider the covenant, God’s pact with his chosen people, that also formed the basis of Puritan government in the form of a covenant, or contract, between ruler and ruled. God, almost by definition, could never violate his end of the bargain with the godly, but his chosen people had to work strenuously to live a pious, God-fearing life in order to uphold theirs; yet civil rulers could fail, and often did, and thus could be removed from office, as Winthrop discovered when he was temporarily stripped of the Massachusetts governorship in 1634. Similar to, and certainly compatible with, John Locke’s liberal theory of government as a contract between the government and the people that can be broken if one side fails to uphold its terms of the contract, in 1775 New Englanders believed their king had violated the terms of their covenant.9
At the same time religious ideas became secularized, politics became sacralized. Political discourse in the Revolutionary era assumed a moralistic tenor, a tone of absolute good battling absolute evil for the souls of the colonists. The language of liberty, in other words, owed much to the rhetorical rhythms and sacred ideas of the church. Consider the stirring oratory of Patrick Henry, who converted many to the cause of independence by modeling his rhetoric upon the revival sermon and plagiarizing his words from the Bible. Begun by the Puritans and evangelized by the Great Awakening, this organic process of exchange between the sacred and the secular produced an emotionally, morally, and ideologically powerful case for American independence. It was probably the Patriots’ greatest weapon.10
Yet it was not only the secularization of religion and the sacralization of politics that influenced the cause for independence: methods mattered too. Rhetoric and forms of mass communication pioneered by the media-savvy innovators of revivalism made it possible for Patriot leaders to disseminate a message of insubordination to a wide spectrum of colonists. The Awakeners’ means of transmitting their own revolutionary rhetoric—especially through large, informal, spontaneous, open-air sermons and the rapid publication and distribution of pamphlets and newsletters—invented networks of communication that later enabled Patriot leaders to win the battle for colonial hearts and minds. Publishing skills developed in the seventeenth century by highly literate New England Puritans and later perfected on a mass scale by revivalists during the Great Awakening were especially notable—by 1776, Patriot clergy in New England were publishing at a rate four times greater than secular pamphleteers.11
In ideas, values, and modes of communication, then, the Patriots used religion to shape their Revolutionary moment and achieve independence. In the process, they discovered a new national identity at the same time they created a new national polity—and in both, faith played an influential role. In turn, they helped to give shape to what would soon become a distinctly American foreign policy.