It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore, keep standing firm and do not be subject to a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1
One nation under God—this was the result of the First Great Awakening. Colonial Americans learned some important spiritual lessons during that time. Through the preachers of the Awakening they heard that God loved everyone. They realized that He wanted every person to come to know Jesus as Savior and Lord—whether they were rich or poor, slave or free, black or white, and no matter which colony they lived in. They also realized that in God’s eyes they were all equal. They were brothers and sisters. They were beginning to understand what it meant to be an American.
God was doing something new. He had never before uprooted a body of Christians and taken them across the ocean to a new land to create a nation based on the Bible. But He did in colonial America. He had never called such a group to create a civil government with constitutions and elected representatives. But He did in colonial America.
In 1775, the colonists finally revolted against Britain. Why did they decide to throw off the yoke of the mother country? Was it God’s will for them to do this? What happens when a ruler starts violating the will of God for his subjects? Actually, in New England they had already been through these kinds of problems with Britain once before—almost a hundred years earlier.
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It was a cold day in January 1684. Increase Mather hurried down the cobblestone street toward Boston’s Old South Meetinghouse. A blustery wind was blowing, and Mather clutched his papers tightly.
A few minutes later, he arrived. Inside, a huge crowd was jammed into the meetinghouse. They had assembled to vote on Boston’s response to a declaration made by King Charles II. Mather walked up to the pulpit and placed his papers on the stand. As he looked out over the large crowd, his mind wandered back to the events which had brought them to this point.
After the founding of Plymouth, English settlers had flocked to the New World. Unlike the French and Spanish, they did not come to seek gold or silver. They came to begin a new life. They built cabins and farms. They established villages and towns. They organized churches and set up schools. And they set up local governments to govern their families.
Mather thought about his grandfathers, John Cotton and Richard Mather. He thought about the hopes and dreams they had shared with him. “God has sent us to America,” they had said, “and He has a plan for us. We are to be like a city set on a hill. We are to shine His Light into a world of darkness.”
Mather thought about England’s policies with her colonies. For more than a century, Parliament had allowed the colonies to run themselves. Yet the English Parliament had the power to rule over the colonies, and the colonists had to obey English law.
Recently, England had started passing some very strict laws in regard to the colonies. In 1651 and 1663, Parliament enacted the Navigation Acts. These allowed the colonies to trade only with England. Colonial merchants could no longer trade directly with the merchants of other countries.
King Charles II then ordered Massachusetts to swear allegiance to the Crown and to let the Episcopal Church set up churches in the colony. And he ordered the colony to change some of its voting requirements.
Massachusetts said no. Charles then demanded the return of their charter. He planned to make them a royal colony. The Bay Colony was in trouble. How could it stand up to the greatest military power on earth?
Increase Mather stood in the pulpit and delivered his message.
“The king has demanded that we give up our charter,” he said. “Doing this will clash with the very reasons our forefathers came to New England! They came for religious freedom. They came for political freedom. King Charles decrees that we give up these freedoms.
“If we resist,” he continued, “we’ll face great suffering. But can we give away our inheritance? Which should we choose—to fall into the hands of man or the hand of God? I say we must choose God!
“To give up our charter would be a sin against God!” he proclaimed. “Who of us would dare to sin against God? We must stand on God’s side at all cost!”
As Mather finished, he saw tears running down people’s faces. When the vote was taken, it was unanimous not to submit. Boston had taken a strong stand against the King of England. Soon other towns in Massachusetts did the same.
Charles II was furious. He determined to send Colonel Percy Kirk and five thousand troops to make Massachusetts obey. Word of “Bloody Kirk’s” coming reached Mather in February of 1685. The minister shut himself in his study to pray for a whole day.
O Lord, we’ve put ourselves in Your merciful hands, he prayed. We’re like Daniel, who wanted to follow You. Then King Darius demanded that everyone pray only to the king. Daniel knew this would mean disobeying You. Daniel could not disobey You, so he disobeyed the king. When Darius sent him to the lion’s den, You saved him. Lord, we need You to save us now, too.
God spoke to Mather’s heart that day and assured him the colony would be safe. Sure enough, two months later, word arrived that Charles II had died. The invasion was cancelled! Colonel Kirk would not be coming. When Mather figured out the day of the King’s death, to his amazement he found that it was the day he had spent in prayer!
The new king of England, James II, did not send Kirk, but he did send Sir Edmund Andros. And Andros sought to put down any resistance to the King in the colonies. First, he ordered that Anglican services be held in the Old South Meetinghouse. (The Anglican Church was the same as the Church of England.) This would force the colonists to worship in the Church of England again. Next, he tried to take away all their charters.
“Hand over your charter!” Andros demanded one night at the meetinghouse in Hartford. “You Connecticut people must bow down to the king!”
The treasured document lay on a table in a room filled with candles. All of a sudden, the candles went out! There was a great commotion.
“Get that document!” Andros ordered. “Don’t let them have it!”
It was too late. When the candles were lit again, the charter was gone. Someone had hidden it in the hollow trunk of an old oak tree. Andros never found it.
In 1689, William and Mary took over the throne of England. Peace returned to the colonies until the French and Indian War began in 1754. England fought against France and their Indian allies. George III became king in 1760 during this war.
When the war was over, England had captured a great deal of France’s territory in the New World. This pleased George III because he wanted to keep the French out of North America and protect England’s interests. But there were problems: The war had been expensive and had left England in debt. King George decided the colonies should pay for the British troops he sent to America to defend them. Since the colonies had no representatives in Parliament, they could not object. Parliament began passing tax laws.
First came the Molasses Act of 1733. This act required a six cent tax on each gallon of molasses that was not purchased from the British West Indies. This act hurt many merchants in the northern colonies. The old hated Navigation Acts had been repealed by the British Parliament, but King George III brought them back. He sent customs officials to collect new taxes. These officials were greedy and kept much of the money for themselves.
The Stamp Act of 1765 required the colonists to pay for British stamps. The stamps were expensive and the colonists had to put them on all printed matter from marriage certificates to newspapers. The colonists protested, and Parliament finally repealed it.
But the tax laws did not end there. In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts. These forced the colonies to pay taxes on glass, paint, paper, lead, and tea. George III was proving to be a selfish, conceited monarch who was no longer just raising money to pay for troops in America. Now he was raising money to pay for England’s adventures around the world!
The mood in America began to turn ugly. Colonists started resisting the taxes and called themselves Patriots. They formed Committees of Correspondence which sent letters throughout the colonies. These letters told everyone what was happening. And these Committees became very important to the resistance effort.
In Boston, Jonathan Mayhew spoke out in favor of resistance. “When our officials rob and ruin us, they’re nothing but pirates. The king is bound by oath to uphold our legal rights. As soon as he sets himself above the law, he becomes a tyrant. He is no longer a king, and his subjects no longer have to obey him.”
A lawyer in New York named William Livingston wrote, “Courage, Americans . . . the land we possess is God’s gift to us. Soon, we will be writing an American Constitution.”
Ministers across the land supported resistance too. Many of these ministers had lived through the Great Awakening. They wanted to help further God’s plan for America. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,” they preached. “When a ruler opposes God’s will, his subjects cannot follow God’s will. We must stand fast. We must not submit to a yoke of slavery.
“We don’t want to rebel. We want peace, and we must work toward peace. But if resistance is the only way, then we must resist.”
In 1770, England withdrew all of the Townshend Acts, except the one on tea. In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act because the colonists had refused to buy British tea. This act helped the British East India Tea Company by permitting the Company to sell tea directly to the colonists without selling it to a colonial company first. It could sell its tea for less than any of the American companies could sell theirs.
The colonists were furious. The Committees of Correspondence dispatched urgent letters. “Don’t let the Company unload its tea,” they said. “Stop them from selling the tea!”
And in Boston, the colonists did just that.
Samuel Adams was the chief organizer among the Patriot leaders in Boston. He planned protest meetings where people promised they would not drink any British tea. He wrote articles for the Boston newspapers protesting British tyranny and arguing for the rights of the colonists. One time he wrote that “the rights of the colonists as Christians were best understood by reading the New Testament.” Adams was a strong Christian and regularly took days of prayer and fasting to beseech God to help the Patriot cause.
When three ships docked at Boston Harbor with cargoes of tea, Adams was ready for them. He had made sure that no Boston men would unload the tea and was hoping that the ships’ captains would then get permission from the governor to sail the ships back to England. The governor kept refusing to give his permission, because British law said that if the taxes had not been paid in twenty days that the governor could order soldiers to take the cargo from the ships and give it to British officials to sell. He thought he could just wait until the twenty days were up, tell the soldiers to take the cargo, and force the colonists to buy the tea.
But Samuel Adams had been praying, and he had a plan.
Adams organized a Patriot meeting at Old South Meetinghouse for the afternoon of the twentieth day, and during the meeting he sent one of the ship captains to ask one last time for the governor’s permission to take the cargo back to England.
December 16 was chilly outside, but twelve-year-old Benjamin sat with his father and about 5,000 other people jammed into the meetinghouse. There were people everywhere, even sitting on the stairs, and with all those warm bodies packed together it was plenty hot in the old church. Benjamin was too young to go with his father to most Patriot meetings, but this time Father had brought him along. He had told him that something important was probably going to happen, and that if it did, he wanted Benjamin to be there so he could remember it forever.
Mr. Adams was speaking. “I tell you that free-born Englishmen are not required to submit to the tyranny of an unjust tax on tea or anything else. We have made our own laws and governed ourselves in this colony for 154 years, and Parliament has no right to cram laws down our throats when we have no representatives in that body!”
Just then, the back door to the meetinghouse swung open. A man Benjamin didn’t recognize walked in, looked at Samuel Adams, and shook his head. That must be the captain, Benjamin thought.
Immediately Mr. Adams cried out: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!”
Benjamin knew that was some kind of signal, because suddenly several dozen men in the back of the church dressed like Mohawk Indians gave a few war whoops and left the church. Then everyone else got up and went out. “Come on, Ben, hurry up!” said his father. “We’re going to the harbor.”
They followed the throng of people down the narrow streets to the waterfront, where three British tea ships owned by the East India Tea Company were tied to Griffins’ Wharf. By now it was dark, and the moon was rising. Its light shone on the water of the harbor. Benjamin could hear dogs barking in the distance.
He noticed dozens of the “Indian” men with feathers in their hair moving toward the wharf. Their disguises aren’t very good, he thought. Anyone can see that they’re just colonists dressed like Indians! He squinted his eyes. I wonder what they’re going to do?
Benjamin watched as groups of these men boarded each of the three tea ships and disappeared down a hatch. In a moment they all came back on deck and began throwing boxes clearly marked TEA over the harbor side of the ships.
“Father, they’re dumping tea into the water!” he exclaimed, with his eyebrows raised high. His father said nothing. No one else was talking either. There was total silence.
The men did not stop until they had dumped the tea from all three ships into the harbor. As people started to leave, Benjamin’s father said to the man next to him, “Well, we’ve turned Boston harbor into a teapot tonight!”
Benjamin knew that what had been done would lead to further trouble.
And it did. As soon as King George III heard about the Tea Party, he demanded that the men who had done it be found and arrested. But no one seemed to know who they were, and if they did know they weren’t telling! The King decided to punish the entire city by closing the port. This meant the colony could not import food or supplies. It was also a warning to the other colonies. “They’ll not get away with this!” the King declared.
By now, the truth was becoming clear. If the King could close the richest port in the colonies, he could close any port. If he could ruin their tea companies, he could ruin all colonial merchants.
The colonists’ anger erupted. Patriots everywhere joined together to help Boston in her hour of need. Towns in North and South Carolina donated barrels of rice. People in Connecticut gave sheep. A Virginian named George Washington promised money. Maryland and Virginia sent aid too. The Boston Tea Party had united the colonists in their cry for freedom.
The Committees of Correspondence warned the colonists, “If England can do this to Boston, she can do this to any of us. George III has become a tyrant. We have no king . . . no king but King Jesus!”
In August 1774, William Prescott of Pepperrell, Massachusetts, posted a letter to Boston, “God has placed you where you must stand the first shock. We are all in the same boat. We must sink or swim together. Our forefathers died that we might be free. Let us all be of one heart. Let us stand fast in the freedom Christ has given us.”
In October 1774, Massachusetts Patriots held a Provisional Congress. Its President, John Hancock, declared: “We must humble ourselves before Almighty God. We must ask Him if we are wrong in some way. We must pray for a peaceful settlement to our differences.”
But the Congress also wrote to the colonists of Massachusetts: “If God does not will peace, then we must resist. It becomes our Christian duty to resist. Continue steadfast, and remember that our dependence is on God. Defend those rights which heaven gave, and no man can take from us!”
It was now early in one of the most important years in American history—1775.
The Southern colonies also had many Patriot leaders. Among them was Patrick Henry of Virginia. Like Samuel Adams, he was also a strong Christian believer. On March 23, Henry addressed the Virginia Revolutionary Convention gathered at St. John’s Church in Richmond. As he began speaking, the delegates sat forward on the edge of their seats, because he was speaking with a passion and power that they had never heard before from anyone.
“There is no longer room for hope. If we wish to be free, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!”
Every eye was riveted upon Henry.
“We are not weak. We shall not fight alone. God presides over the destinies of nations, and He will raise up friends to help us.
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”
Henry stood with head bowed, shoulders hunched like a chained slave.
After a pause, he lifted up his head, and shouted: “Forbid it, Almighty God!”
There was not a sound in the church.
Patrick Henry knelt down and bent toward the floor, as if weighted down by British oppression. After a long moment, he struggled to his feet and spat out the words: “I know not what course others may take, but as for me . . .”
He threw his arms wide open, as if throwing off chains, and thundered, “Give me liberty!”
When the echo of his voice had died away, he let his left hand drop to his side. Then, striking his breast with his right fist, as if driving a dagger into his heart, he cried out, “Or give me death!”