winthrop — Blog — conservative curious

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” ~John Winthrop, 1630

There is always one clear moment when a war begins. But the first shot fired in a war is never really the moment a war begins; more accurately it is the moment when peace definitively dies.

The first “official” shot of the war that would become the War of American Independence was fired in New England in April of 1775. Ironically, and rather appropriately, the shooting began before there was any formal declaration of independence and long before there was any real plan. Historians see the 1760s as the lead-up to war. The war began with pamphlets, taxes, speeches, smugglers. Violence begat violence, grudges grew as feisty and independent minded colonists pushed back against a colonial bureaucracy imposed by distant England.

But the roots of the uniquely American willingness to rebel without a plan, to believe wholeheartedly in both individual liberty and individual responsibility, did not emerge solely out of the 18th century era of reason, but instead was shaped by the enduring memory of the bullheaded, devout and fiercely religious world of the 17th century Puritans. Quite frankly, it was easy for a group of people to contemplate the impossible —rebellion against a monarch— if they already believed their only true legitimate judge in this world, or the next, was God.

The America of the 1760s was a far cry from the America John Winthrop knew in the 1630s. It was, comparatively, far more cosmopolitan. It was wealthier. It was more violent. More prone to conflict —both internally and externally. But it was also, simultaneously, more staid and more easy going. Puritans of John Winthrop’s generation did not really seem to believe in a forgiving God, and they certainly rarely forgave themselves, but by the 18th century even the fiercely devout Congregationalists of Massachusetts had begun to contemplate the world in a more forgiving light. (Often a forgiving candle-light… the 18th century had brought luxury to the American born grandchildren of Puritans who had never even given themselves the luxury of forgiveness. But, despite the changes wrought by a century of industrious work, despite prosperity, luxury and the creeping impact of deism, Americans of the 18th century had somehow never lost John Winthrop’s belief that their ultimate —and only meaningful— judge was not of this earth.)

Despite the growing wealth of the colonies, the 1760s were years of turmoil in the 13 Colonies. Eighteenth century colonial Americans were scattered across a geographic area that dwarfed most of Western Europe. Most of Pennsylvania was still the “frontier” when Benjamin Franklin set up his first printing press. Even late in the 1760s Boston, New York and Philadelphia had the raw potential of young cities.

The economic potential of this new era was not lost on the American born children and grandchildren of the first colonists. But the men and women of 18th century colonial North America were driven by much more than a desire for money.

Colonials of the 18th century did not have a common religion. (The defining characteristic of the Protestants was that they were schismatic in the extreme.) They did not have a common ethnic identity, a common language or even a common legal status. The “English” colonials of the coast may have been English speaking, but they were not all ethnically English. Instead they were a disparate group of English, Scots, Welsh, Scots-Irish and Irishmen. New York —originally New Amsterdam— was still, in its bones, more Dutch and Mohawk than it was English. Pennsylvania was a hotbed of religious dissidents from every possible Western European ethnic background —Philadelphia had become even odder by becoming the city that young strivers from Boston wanted to move to in order to escape the more rigid world of Boston. New England was less strictly Puritan than it had been half a century before, but it was still inhabited by people who had the radical courage to put more faith in God than Government.

Bostonians may have fallen far from the Puritanism of the 1630s, but they still believed that their city had the potential to be what John Winthrop called a “city on a hill” —a state of mind and an ideal rather than merely a city.

The Southern Colonials were more likely to be Anglican than their northern neighbors. Economically they were also more likely to be tied to Europe than a Northern farmer. The cash crops of the South —tobacco, indigo, sugar and rice— fetched big money in Europe. The great planters of the South lived like brutal miniature potentates in their own right. (The small planters, the freedmen and the men who owned no slaves, lived much less luxurious lives… but also often lives marked by a bloody contempt for any outside authority and a savage willingness to fight.)

The Colonials had, superficially, very little in common with each other. The separate colonies were separate colonies. Massachusetts was not Virginia. Even Maryland was not Virginia. Legal codes varied from colony to colony. Religious practices differed too. The colonies were, legally, separate entities.

However, although the Colonials of the 1760s were so very different from each other, it was their differences from the “mother country” of Britain that would help to unite them. Much as Colonial North America had almost accidentally developed a free press in the 18th century, the colonials of the 17th century had almost accidentally developed a sense of personal freedom tempered by a social responsibility that was almost unknown in Europe.

Diversity of religion in Europe had led to brutal wars, political upheaval and bloody riots. By contrast, in the 13 Colonies, extreme religious diversity seemed to primarily encourage the devout to look within themselves, recommit to their own faith and, perhaps, learn to define their faith better. (Yes, there would be minor acts of religiously motivated violence in what would become the United States. But, by the standards of contemporary Europe, religious violence in the colonies would be minor, erratic, and not really part of a cohesive story.)

The great irony of the 1760s is that a group of people who had learned to fight primarily with words about religion —when in Europe religious dissent fractured society and led to some actual wars— would stumble almost inevitably into a shooting war over a political principle that very few people in Europe seemed to understand.

The American Revolution shocked western Europe. (Its impact would have been profound if it had not quickly been overshadowed in Europe by the far bloodier French Revolution.)

Even in the golden era of monarchs, the great leaders of Europe faced political turmoil in the 18th century. Sometimes it was a simple matter of succession. In Britain the battle between the House of Stuart and the House of Hanover was anything but simple. However, rebellion did not become revolution in early 18th century Europe. Prior to the 1760s there was no European model for an ideological and political revolt on the American model.

In the tumultuous 1760s Americans stumbled towards war without a model. Americans knew what war was… individual Americans had served Britain in the 7 Years War or endured the nameless bloody conflicts of life on the Frontier. But none of those wars had truly been ideological. Not for the people on the ground anyway.

The American Revolution would be different. The people on the ground —the people who fought, who did without, who marched through the snowy winter, who endured— cared deeply about their reasons for fighting and were willing to make real sacrifices, not symbolic sacrifices.

In the end the rebels would become revolutionaries because they endured. They endured the Winter at Valley Forge, they endured a winter march from Philadelphia to Trenton (for volunteers perhaps more brutal than the more famous and much longer unsupported marches of the war —it was a brutally cold December). The Swamp Fox, George Washington, General Von Steuben, Ethan Allen and Lafayette were genuine military heroes. Each a genius in his own way. But the genius of the rebellion, the success of the revolution, the existence of the United States, is not rooted in the blood of battle. The battle of ideology was already won before the shots were fired.

Americans had already begun to believe that they had a different path, a different destiny. That in the end we answer to a God in heaven and not a King on Earth. (Or, worse yet, a bureaucrat appointed by a King.)

The revolution would not have succeeded without the bloody sacrifice of a long war, but the revolution would have died as a mere rebellion without the ideological revolution that had already reshaped the shared American mind before the first shot was fired.

Americans had already taken the first steps towards ideological independence over a century before the war for independence began.