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Home , Caleb Fleming, Charles Chauncy, Edward Holyoke, English Dissenters, Experience Mayhew, Graeme Knowles

“IF WE CLASH, WE BREAK”:

RELIGION, REPUBLICANISM, AND MEMORIES OF STUART TYRANNY AT THE

INCEPTION OF THE (1760-1766)

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Tanner Ogle

May, 2020 “IF WE CLASH, WE BREAK”:

RELIGION, REPUBLICANISM, AND MEMORIES OF STUART TYRANNY AT THE

INCEPTION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1760-1766)

Tanner Ogle

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

Advisor Dean of Buchtel College of Arts & Sciences Dr. Gina Martino Dr. Linda Subich

Co-Advisor Acting Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Michael Graham Dr. Marnie Saunders

Department Chair Date Dr. Martin Wainwright TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION: MONUMENT TO MEMORY 1

II. THE ’ WARS: THE ORIGINS OF THE CONTROVERSY OF THE (1760-1763) 13

Victory’s Terror: The Background of the Bishop Controversy 17

Civil Corruptions: The Writs of Assistance Trials and the Indian Affair 22

The Congregational Missionary Society 25

The Commencement of the Pamphlet War 31

Conclusion 38

III. “SHIP MONEY” AND MEMORIES OF TYRANNY: THE SUGAR ACT AND PEACEFUL RESISTANCE (1763-1765) 39

Memories of Resistance 41

“Ship Money” 52

The Bishop Controversy Rages 59

Conclusion 64

IV. “NO KING BUT KING ”: THE STAMP ACT AND VIOLENT RESISTANCE (1765-1766) 66

The Stamp Act & The Bishop Controversy 68

Violent Resistance 82

Repeal 93

Conclusion 103

V. CONCLUSION 105

BIBLIOGRAPHY 111 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: MONUMENT TO MEMORY

“Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty)” ~Motto of the Commonwealth of Coined by Algernon Sidney 16591

Amidst the noise of patriotic crowds in New City, shortly after the Declaration of

Independence was publicly read by on July 9, 1776, an equestrian statue of

King George III was toppled. Women allegedly gathered the metal from the statue, which they later fashioned into 42,000 rounds of ammunition to be thrown back at the empire they had resisted ideologically for over a decade.2 In an even greater moment of irony, when the British arrived they allegedly decapitated and mutilated the statue of former Prime Minister William

Pitt—the first man to have a statue in the British Colonies.3 Before independence, before these statues were mutilated, the imperial relationship with the American colonies had experienced fourteen years of growing tension. The fate of these statues demonstrates the civil nature of the

American Revolution—it was not merely an American conflict; it was ideologically English to its core.

The commissioning of the Pitt statues, the first statues of a person in the British North

American Colonies, shows both the significance of the Stamp Act (1765) and transatlantic

1 included this phrase in his defense of the British soldiers who participated in the “ Massacre.” Thomas Hollis of , had the phrase inserted in the woodcut in Sidney’s Discourses that he sent to the colonies in 1751, and in ’s Letters Concerning Toleration (1765) that he sent to James Otis. James Otis was on the committee to design the in 1775 when they settled on this motto. W.H. Bond, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn A Whig and His Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 120-122. 2 Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 23: The King’s statue was not called for by the common people like Pitt’s, but was the result of in the provincial assembly. In fact, Lieutenant Governor Colden wrote to Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State for the colonies, stating that the unveiling of King George III’s statue demonstrated their loyalty. However, Pitt’s statue was installed on Wall Street in a common area and the king was put on the Bowling Green in a more aristocratic location. Sally Webster, The Nation’s First Monument and the Origins of the American Memorial Tradition (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2015), 55-56, 68-69, 79. 3 D.E. Huger Smith, “Wilton’s Statue Of Pitt,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine. vol. 15, no. 1 (Jan, 1914), 37. 1 admiration for Pitt’s involvement with its repeal. During the Stamp Act, tensions had risen to a breaking point and physical violence replaced peaceful resistance throughout the colonies, but especially in Massachusetts where there was already turmoil over local politics and fears of a potential Anglican bishop in the early 1760s. The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, in large part from the transatlantic efforts of Real Whigs. Real Whigs or ‘Commonwealthmen’ were republicans who adhered to the principles of the Whig party at the (1689), which profoundly changed the British and established the imperial government that continued to exist in America until 1776. Since the seventeenth-century they had continuously advocated for reform, and were advocates of peaceful resistance for fear of damaging their cherished British constitution which allowed them a comparatively republican government to other European nations. In fact, one of the few to ever get elected to Parliament was William Pitt, the “Great Commoner.”4 People on both sides rejoiced because they were afraid that the conflict would result in a bloody civil war. In March of that year, a well-connected, private figure,

Thomas Hollis Esq called for elated Britons to rejoice and to construct statues of William Pitt.5

Eventually, three were commissioned: one for Dublin, Ireland, one for New York City, New

York, and another for Charleston, South Carolina which Hollis helped commission.6 Nearly three years later, Hollis viewed the colossal classical statue of Pitt before it was shipped to

4 Reference was to his influence and importance in the House of Commons. Real Whigs were a minority within the Whig political party who ardently adhered to Whig ideology, which originated in the seventeenth century, not simply claiming the title for political purposes since Whigs were the dominant political party for much of the first half of the eighteenth century. As Caroline Robbins has shown, Real Whigs or Commonwealthmen, were rarely in Parliament. She characterizes their ideology as supporting a separation of power in government, expanding to include more or all males, strongly adhering to freedom of thought and conscience, and as an extension being contentious toward the church and state establishment, promoted expansive education, and feared a concentration of wealth. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 1-18. 5 Thomas Hollis Diary 18 March 1766, MS Eng 1768, W.H. Bond Papers, Houghton Library, , Cambridge, Massachusetts. 6 Bond, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn, 81. 2 Charleston.7 The statue stood tall, facing the east towards King and Parliament with a plaque that seemed to read as a warning from the seventeenth-century, a quote from John Locke’s Second

Treatise on Government (1689)—“Where Law Ends Tyranny Begins.”8

The inscription on the statue’s pedestal read:

In grateful memory of his services to his country in general and to America in particular the commons house of assembly of South Carolina unanimously voted the statue of the Hon. William Pitt, Esq. who gloriously exerted himself by defending the freedom of Americans the true sons of by promoting a repeal of the stamp-act in the year 1766 time will sooner destroy this mark of their esteem than erase from their minds their just sense of his patriotic virtue.9

Though colonists speculated at an enduring memory, it was easier for them to remember than foresee. After the American Revolution, Pitt’s significance would experience the same fate as the memory of the seventeenth-century—both were forgotten. However, unlike Pitt who by 1776 was being erased from American memory because of his proclamations against American independence, the pantheon of seventeenth-century political paragons such as Algernon Sidney,

Henry Neville, James Harrington, , John Locke, and was supplanted by American patriots like John and Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin

Franklin, and James Otis. Many of these men were not arguing for something novel, but for the protection of long-held traditions of Real Whig philosophy that they claimed the constitution of the British Empire was founded on—philosophy that valued civil and religious liberty. Just as

Massachusetts adopted its motto from the seventeenth-century, traces of the

(1642-1651), the Restoration (1660), and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89) still dot the

American landscape. Relics of seventeenth-century England are particularly prevalent in the

7 Thomas Hollis Diary 4 March 1769, W.H. Bond Papers. 8 For the statue facing east see Smith, “Wilton’s Statue Of Pitt,” 37-38. 9 Smith, “Wilton’s Statue Of Pitt,” 26. 3 original thirteen states, but today they are no longer known as English, they have been adopted as

American.

Despite the importance of the remembered seventeenth-century to the ideology of eighteenth-century Real Whig throughout the British Empire, historians have frequently failed to explore the origin of the imperial crisis through a lens of memory.

Unfortunately this has often resulted in scholarship that underestimates the centrality of religion and the influence of religious networks in the first period of the American Revolution (1760-

1765).10 In fact, the predominant trend in the most recent scholarship on the Bishop Controversy has been to undermine the civil significance of it. Jeremy Gregory directly refuted Bridenbaugh,

Bell, and Clark by claiming that religion was not a major trigger of revolt for the American

Revolution. Instead of extending hatred of the to the British state, he argued that the Church of England became despised because of its connection to the British government.

Gregory also showed that the middle colonies did not have tolerant pluralism, which caused the northern and southern colonies to assert the necessity of establishment. He challenged the Bishop

Controversy and religious prominence as a cause of revolution by claiming that the Church of

England was not an invading outside force in the colonies. British historian Peter Walker also challenged the Neo-Whig focus on religion and the Bishop Controversy. Like other American

10 Both John Adams and date the American Revolution back to 1761. Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre (New York: , 1962), xx: Peter Oliver, Origin and Progress Of The American Rebellion, ed. Douglass Adair & John A Schultz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 27: Patrick Eyres has noted that the war of words (1760-1775) preceded the American War of Independence (1775-1783). Patrick Eyres, “Thomas Hollis (1720-1774): an introduction.” New Arcadian Journal 55/56 (2003): 7: According to Bernard Bailyn the primary goal of the American revolution, which transformed American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order, but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution, and establishment and principle of the existing conditions of liberty. Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992), 19. While this is not a perfect definition of the American Revolution, the preservation of political liberty was a major piece of it. A more complete definition would include the preservation of religious liberty as well, since colonists often saw them as symbiotic. 4 and British historians, he argued that the Bishop Controversy was related to Catholic Canada and that the conquest of Quebec unsettled the balance of power leading to the Bishop Controversy.

However, he maintained that the Bishop Controversy was eclipsed by issues of taxation, and that it was not the product of a contest between colonial liberty and imperial authority, but tensions between competing forms of religious establishment. Katherine Carté Engel also asserted that politics affected religion, and religion did not have a prominent role in instigating the American

Revolution. She even added that the Bishop Controversy destroyed transatlantic dissenting networks because British Dissenters disagreed with their American brethren. In addition, she also argued for a change in the type of that attempted to help colonists, with a shift to more radical figures in the later 1760s and early 1770s. This change in historiography says more about contemporary attitudes towards religion than those in the past. A long line of historians has attributed civil significance to the Bishop Controversy: Bernard Knollenberg, Carl

Bridenbaugh, Charles Akers, Bernard Bailyn, Harry Stout, Jonathan Clark, Robert Ingram,

James Bell, Thomas Kidd, Chris Beneke, and most recently J.P. Mullins. However, Kidd’s of Liberty and Mullins’s Father of Liberty are the only two publications since 2010 that attribute civil significance to the Bishop Controversy.11

While it is easy to examine civil and religious liberties separately by claiming that the

Bishop Controversy was confined to denominational squabbles and religion was eclipsed by taxation, Real Whig Dissenters did not view imperial actions through a modern secular lens.

11 Jeremy Gregory, “Refashioning Puritan : The Church of England in British North America, c. 1680- c. 1770,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, vol. 20 (2010): 91-92, 109: Jeremy Gregory, ““Establishment” and “Dissent” in British North America,” in British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Stephen Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 155-156, 164-165: Peter Walker, “The Bishop Controversy, the Imperial Crisis, and Religious Radicalism in New England, 1763-74,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 3 (September 2017): 307, 308, 318, 331: Katherine Carté Engel, “Revisiting the Bishop Controversy,” in American Revolution Reborn, ed. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 134-135, 147: Katherine Carté Engel, “Connecting Protestants in Britain’s Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Empire” in The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1 (January, 2018): 68-70. 5 Instead, this thesis contends that by ‘seeing things their way,’ memory and religion emerge as issues of the utmost importance in debates over liberty and tyranny.12 Real Whig Dissenters believed that religious and civil liberty were symbiotic, that a bishop could assist the goals of the imperial government and the new taxes could support the Church of England.13 Indeed, because ideological battles over religion preceded those over taxation, taxation appeared to be part of the process of obtaining an American Anglican episcopate. To Real Whig Dissenters, events of the seventeenth-century seemed to be playing out once more, as the Anglican Church attempted to increase its influence, the monarchy approved taxes that seemed unconstitutional. Not only was memory of the seventeenth-century the lens through which Real Whig Dissenters viewed the unfolding imperial crisis, but they also employed these memories of civil and religious tyranny to peacefully combat perceived encroachments upon their own rights. For these Real Whigs, controversies over religion and religious liberties were inextricable from those over economic and political liberties as contributing factors to the imperial crisis that began in the 1760s.14

12 This contextualist approach tries to understand authorial intention behind publications by avoiding both materialist and idealist reductionism. Seeing Things Their Way Intellectual History and the Return Of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 13 Although both Bailyn and Bridenbaugh, recognized the confluence of civil and religious tyranny in discourse and noted the continuation of ideology from the seventeenth-century, which are both valuable contributions, neither explained that the reason religious motives were viewed politically was largely because of memories of the English Civil War. Bailyn noted a pamphlet genre dedicated to the English Civil War, but by emphasizing the early- eighteenth-century literature he eclipsed the most important source of memory. This thesis seeks to add to their arguments by examining in greater detail, how enduring memory of the English Civil War influenced actions during the imperial crisis. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, x-xii, xv, 34, 53, 80, 96-7, 198: Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, xii- xiv. 14 The historiographical argument for the importance of religion as a cause of the American Revolution is grounded on decades of scholarship. In Mitre and Sceptre historian Carl Bridenbaugh argued that it was impossible to understand the eighteenth century if historians unconsciously omit or consciously ignore its religious theme just because of their own secular milieus. Instead, Bridenbaugh proposed that the era of enlightenment was more an age of faith than an age of reason. He also argued that the most enduring issue of public opinion between 1689 and 1776 was religion. Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, xvii: Similarly, Bailyn’s seminal work, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution argued that a sincere fear of conspiracies against liberty was exhibited throughout the eighteenth century. He further maintained that ideology was deep rooted and there was no break between a placid pre-revolutionary period and the turmoil of the 1760s and 1770s. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, xiii, xv: British religious differences were so ingrained in the British Empire that historian Jonathan Clark went as far as to argue that the American Revolution was the last war of religion in the West. Clark even argued for a less significant role of millennial expectations and showed how purity of religion provided the grounds for a right of resistance. J.C.D. 6 Historians who fail to recognize religion as one of the fundamental factors that led to the

American Revolution often try to separate what many eighteenth-century British subjects saw as sacred and conjoined—civil and religious liberty.15 From 1760-1766 a transatlantic network of

Real Whig Dissenters brought together by religious familiarity and unified through a shared memory of the English Civil War, resisted both the church and state of the British Empire to defend their rights. It was the arguments of these men and women that set the tone for the

American Revolution a decade later.

The first period of the American Revolution should be seen through the repeal of three initiatives: a dissenting missionary society in New England, the Stamp Act, and the repeal of

Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 274-275, 305: Harry Stout has argued that historians have overlooked the “symbiotic” relationship between religion and war in American history. Harry Stout, The New England Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2: In 2003 Patrick Eyres argued that politics and religion were synonymous to the Whig Protestant Englishman. Patrick Eyres, “The Invisible Pantheon: The plan of Thomas Hollis as Inscribed at Stowe and in Dorset.” New Arcadian Journal 55/56 (2003): 63, 84: Between 2004 and 2008 historians Robert Ingram and James Bell focused heavily on the problems within the British Empire with the entanglement of church and state. Ingram argued that though church and state were united in theory, in practice they often worked against each other. Robert Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century (Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2007), ix: Bell asserted that the American Revolution changed the Anglican Church’s relationship with the state, and became more separated. James B. Bell, A War of Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xvi: British historian Linda Colley maintained that religion unified a diverse British Empire with a Protestant identity defined by struggles against Roman Catholic principalities. Linda Colley, Britons Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Press, 2009), 6: American historian Thomas Kidd also contended for an important religious platform in the conflict. In addition to arguing for a united front amongst evangelicals, deists, and rationalists in opposition to perceived religious tyranny, Kidd claimed that, “Without 's resources for criticizing political power and rousing popular sentiment, the patriots would never have commanded the allegiance of so many Americans.” Thomas Kidd, God of Liberty a Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 54, 95. 15 Recent scholarship concerning the American Revolution has also focused on the resurrection of a royalist America whose leaders disliked Whig ideology. Within this vein of scholarship religion is often neglected, if not discredited, as a cause of colonial discontent. Historians Eric Nelson and Brendan McConville have both argued for the restoration of a royalist provincial America, while Owen Stanwood has argued that the struggle against ‘popery’ lost its urgency in eighteenth-century America. Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 2006), 138: Eric Nelson, Royalist Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 2, 5: Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 115: Steven Green and Eric Nelson also argued that Whig ideology and were opposed to each other. Steven Green, Inventing a Christian America the Myth of the Religious Founding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 109-110: Nelson, Royalist Revolution, 5: Both the royalist revision and a decline in religiosity ignore the group of Real Whig Dissenters that included people like Thomas Hollis, Catharine Macaulay, John Adams, James Otis Jr., and . The dissenting connections present within the eighteenth century Atlantic not only emphasized republican ideals to obtain civil liberty based on a memory of seventeenth-century oppression, but this network of individuals were heavily involved in stopping infractions on religious liberty as well. 7 Archbishop Secker’s initiative to obtain a colonial episcopate—all of which had civil and religious implications. Both Anglicans and Dissenters throughout the empire took the constitutional establishment of religion seriously because the empire was changing. In 1763, the

British Empire doubled the size of its American possessions when it acquired French Catholic

Canada. While the Anglican Church maintained hegemony in England and in the southern colonies, the northern colonies in America maintained a heterogeneous mixture of dissenting

Protestant .16 Subjects throughout the British Empire looked west and envisioned an expanding empire based on Protestantism. This led various religious groups to vie for power over who would exercise hegemony and who would convert Native Americans. Unfortunately, the religious historians who have examined this period of history have failed to completely recognize the importance of the religious state in America by focusing only on Dissenters or

Anglicans, or by focusing only on America or Great Britain. Only through a transatlantic, interdenominational lens, can the religious significance of imperial actions be fully appreciated.

Dissenters believed that if the Anglican Church was established in New England—the part of its western empire where Anglicans were weakest—over time, they would progressively lose their religious freedom. Dissenters were not alone in their fears, Anglicans also feared that they would lose their beachhead in New England and that non-conformity would spread in America.17 This brought about a religious controversy over missionizing efforts that enraged Dissenters in New

England on an imperial scale because they were denied not by provincial government, but by the king’s privy council which included Anglicans. Not only did Anglicans prevent a dissenting missionary society, they renewed their efforts to obtain an American episcopate.

16 Since, the was established only in New England and most of the British Empire maintained an Anglican establishment, will be used to refer to non-Anglican Protestants. 17 Fear is a more adequate word to define eighteenth-century feelings about security, than the word conspiratorial since conspiracies are often associated with misplaced fears. 8 While the Stamp Act was an important disturbance in imperial relations, it would have been far less significant had the Bishop Controversy not preceded it.18 The Stamp Act appeared to many Real Whig Dissenters as another attack in a century old religious cold war over an

American bishop, a war in which imperial officials maintained a delicate balance.19 Contrary to recent historiographical trends that have minimized the intertwining of civil and religious liberties and claimed that the Bishop Controversy splintered Dissenters, the Bishop Controversy that began in the early 1760s instead rallied Dissenters and Real Whigs around British memory.

Throughout the empire religious memory provided fuel for the flames of resistance that every act of taxation continued to fan. Without comprehension of the English Civil War it is difficult to understand how a religious matter could maintain the weight it did. Those who led the fight to resist a colonial episcopate were part of a network that maintained an ideological majority in

New England, but were a dying minority in Great Britain. This network associated the aggression of the Anglican Church to obtain a bishop in the light of seventeenth-century religious conformity that sparked the Bishops’ Wars with . In Great Britain the network included several dissenting historians, some of which were clergy, who reminded Dissenters of the contemporary threats to liberty by publishing new histories of the English Civil War between

1748 and 1783. When Parliament implemented the first act of taxation in the colonies, the Sugar

Act (1764), Real Whig Dissenters pejoratively named it “Ship Money” based on an arbitrary tax from the English Civil War period. Though nearly all historians who have written about the

18 Bernhard Knollenberg pointed out that while the Stamp Act was important to starting the colonial uprising, other measures had brought the colonists to the brink of rebellion before it from 1759-1764. Bernhard Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution 1759-1766, ed. Bernard W. Sheehan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), xxi: Bridenbaugh mentioned that colonial emotions were stimulated for over a half century and only recently raised to the fever point. Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, 259. 19 Bernard Bailyn recognized that the Bishop Controversy in 1763 eclipsed a century of growing anxiety that plans were being made secretly to establish an American episcopate. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 96, 98. 9 Bishop Controversy have marginalized or neglected the Sugar Act it is key for understanding the symbiotic importance of religion and memory to the American Revolution.

When the Stamp Act finally passed, colonial patience and peaceful resistance gave way to violent resistance. Real Whig Dissenters viewed the acts of taxation as part of the Bishop

Controversy that was already raising tensions. Multiple government officials, especially Stamp

Officers, experienced one of the only means of political power the colonists had—violence.20

Some colonists were content with ritualistic displays of violence, but many Stamp Officers experienced damage to their property and themselves. This display of physical resistance bothered leaders of the Bishop Controversy on both sides and unbeknownst to either, the main leaders of each side decided to enter detente. While historians have largely failed to note it, even the led a campaign in the for the Stamp Act’s repeal because an American bishop was unattainable as long as the colonies were enflamed.21

Since the Bishop Controversy influenced resistance and Parliamentary voting, the Stamp

Act cannot be adequately understood without acknowledging its religious significance. It was only after repeal of the act that the aging Archbishop Secker realized that he would not live to see a colonial prelate. Instead of looking at the Bishop Controversy from the perspective of the

Stamp Act, the Stamp Act, which only lasted two years, should be viewed in the context of a longer Bishop Controversy—a century old religious cold war ongoing intermittently since the first half of the seventeenth-century. As long as the English Civil War was fresh in their minds,

20 Political power was not limited to those who were enfranchised. Colonists could express political influence through petitions, riots, rough music (public displays of violence or shaming), publications, and soliciting members of Parliament through colonial agents. 21 William Lowe, “Archbishop Secker, the Bench of Bishops, and the Repeal of The Stamp Act.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, vol. 46, no. 4 (December, 1977): 429-442. 10 Real Whigs would continue to guard their rights and interpret events in the context of the seventeenth-century.

Many historians have briefly mentioned memory, or noted a reference to the Glorious

Revolution, but the memory of the English Civil War Era (1630s-1660) and its influence on the perceptions of the eighteenth century have not been adequately examined. Historian Charles

Akers asserted that the Puritan tradition in America had carefully preserved the developed saga of the flight of the Puritan fathers from the England of tyrannical King Charles I and Archbishop

William Laud. Briefly mentioning memory, historian Edmund Morgan asserted that the colonists followed the example of their English ancestors by challenging Parliament’s right to tax them.

Historian Harry Stout concurred and argued that history was utilized by Protestants to show acts of providence. Historian Bernard Bailyn observed that an entire pamphlet genre was devoted to the English Civil War and united other genres covering antiquity, the Enlightenment, common law, and New England Puritanism. Bailyn was right to argue that the English Civil War unified various ideologies, but by emphasizing early eighteenth century literature he marginalized the most consequential memory of the eighteenth century. McConville devoted a chapter to memory, but not the English Civil War. He mentioned that struggles forged a long-lasting memory that

“grabbed at the eighteenth-century empire’s very soul.” Gregory also used memory to show that

Anglicans feared the enthusiasm of revival due to a memory of enthusiasm in the , but neglected the English Civil War. Thomas Kidd also briefly mentioned the memory of resistance in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, but without depth. According to

Clark this time was pertinent to the memory of various religious sects because they maintained a memory of persecution before and during the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the

Restoration. Ingram and Mullins are the only historians to actually devote significant space to

11 how memory led to interpretations of the present. Ingram even implied that memory of the

English Civil War existed on both sides of the controversy, but his examination was mostly confined to Anglicans and fairly short. Mullins included memories of the English Civil War, but they were mostly limited to Mayhew’s Unlimited Submission or the “Indian Affair” in 1761-62.

Seventeenth century British historian Christopher Hill profoundly summed up the importance of the English Civil War on colonial America in, The World Turned Upside Down. Therein, he revealed how memory even lasted throughout the American Revolutionary War and showed that a broadside ballad of 1646 “The World Is Turned Upside Down” was allegedly played when

Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1781.22

Memory of the English Civil War defined how many Americans throughout the colonies, but especially in Boston, conceptualized imperial actions and granted them precedent to follow.

It defined the constitutional rights of British subjects and provided a shared identity for Real

Whig Dissenters throughout the Atlantic, most of whom met only in their correspondence. This shared social consciousness imbued religion with civil significance, and led to memory-based interpretations of fiscal policy. It reminded Real Whig Dissenters that the liberties they enjoyed were hard won. If the constitution and their rights were not defended, they could be lost, if not immediately—progressively. Throughout the imperial crisis memories of religious persecution and civil tyranny colonized the provincial imagination and lighted the path to resistance.

22 Charles W Akers, Called Unto Liberty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 166: Edmund and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis Prologue to Revolution, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 34: Stout, New England Soul, 33: Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 34: McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 92: Gregory, “Refashioning Puritan New England,” 102: Kidd, God of Liberty, 80: Clark, Language of Liberty, 57-58: Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, 256: Ingram’s examination of memory lasted from 249-256: J.P. Mullins, Father of Liberty Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2017), 92: Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 380. 12 CHAPTER II

The Bishops’ Wars: The Origins of the First Bishop Controversy of the 1760s (1760-1763)

“And being possessed of the precious jewel of religious liberty, a jewel of inestimable worth, let us prize it highly, and esteem it too dear to be parted with on any terms; lest we be again entangled with that yoke of bondage [The and High Commission] which our fathers could not, would not, and God grant we may never submit to bear.” ~ (1760)23

In August 1765, just two years after the threat from Catholic France was quelled, previously jubilant Bostonians erupted in violence. In perhaps the most famous incident, colonists hung an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the stamp officer and Secretary of Massachusetts.

Carrying the effigy through the streets and decapitating it in front of the Oliver family home,

Bostonians burned it amongst acclamations of approval. The newly erected Stamp-Office, destroyed earlier that evening, provided timber to fuel the flames that consumed the effigy. This mob also attacked Oliver’s home, tearing down gates and destroying his furniture.24 Violence such as this led Oliver to wisely resign his post as the stamp officer.25 That evening in August marked a transition in resistance to British authority, from verbal assault—to physical violence— and was the product of three years of skirmishes over perceived dangers to civil and religious liberties that began in a series of events known as the Bishop Controversy.

The First Bishop Controversy of the 1760s not only carried political implications, since bishops in England sat in the House of Lords in Parliament, but it also imbued political actions

23 Ezra Stiles, A discourse on the Christian union: the substance of which was delivered before the Reverend Convention of the Congregational Clergy in the Colony of Rhode-Island; assembled at Bristol April 23, 1760 (Boston, 1761), 96, Eighteenth Century Collections Online: The Star Chamber court was supported by the King’s prerogative, without juries for verdict or indictment. Charles I relied on it when he avoided calling Parliament for a decade, using it to enforce his Ship Money tax. The High Commission court was used for ecclesiastical matters to corporally punish Dissenters. 24 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 133. 25 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 19 August 1765, letter, MS. N-1419, Hollis Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts. 13 with religious meaning.26 It was perceived that the threat to British liberties posed by the Bishop

Controversy—and which later appeared to be confirmed by fiscal policy—that first opened up the constitutional debates of the American Revolutionary Era.27 While the First Bishop

Controversy of the 1760s was limited to the first half of that decade, the issues at stake in the

Bishop Controversy had been fiercely contested by several generations on both sides of the

Atlantic, beginning with the migration of non-Anglican colonists to New England in the early seventeenth century. Religious Dissenters’ fear of an American episcopate was firmly rooted in the memory of Anglican bishops and their relationship to Stuart tyranny, which both

Presbyterians and Congregationalists fought against in the seventeenth century. The Bishops’

Wars with Scotland (1639-40) began when Presbyterians rejected the liturgical and religious reforms of King Charles I and Archbishop that pressed for strict uniformity with the Church of England. The origin of the English Civil War (1642-51) had similar beginnings, sparked by a rejection of coercive religious uniformity—inside and outside the Church of

England—and arbitrary taxation without representation.28

While the Dissenters of the American Revolutionary Era were far removed from the events of the seventeenth-century such as the English Civil War (1642-51), the restoration of the monarchy (1660), and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89), some were old enough to recall

26 J.P. Mullins has described the Bishop Controversy prior to the Stamp Act as the First Bishop Controversy of the 1760s. Mullins, Father of Liberty, 124. 27 Bell argued that the Bishop Controversy tied bishops to taxes and led to an argument over parliament’s authority. Bell, War of Religion, xi, 80: Mullins argued that the First Bishop Controversy was political, opened up a constitutional debate, and separated Patriots and Loyalists, Mullins, Father of Liberty, 124, 145, 149: Caroline Robbins has asserted that the constant discussions of religious liberty kept the Whig tradition of toleration. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 9. 28 Jonathan Mayhew, A discourse concerning unlimited submission and non-resistance to the higher powers: with some reflections on the resistance made to King Charles I. and on the anniversary of his death (Boston, 1750), 23, Eighteenth Century Collections Online: Micaiah Towgood, An essay towards attaining a true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, and the causes of the civil war. Extracted from, and delivered in the very Words of some of the most authentic and celebrated Historians, viz. Clarendon, Whitelock, Burnet, Coke, Echard, Rapin, Tindal, Neal, &c (London, 1748), 42, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 14 firsthand accounts or experienced the as children. While the younger leaders could acquire historical memory, the older leaders were living testaments to that memory: battle-worn stalwarts loyal to their religious ideologies and unrelenting in their convictions. The Anglican leaders included Archbishop of Canterbury (b. 1693), the president of King’s College in

New York City, Samuel Johnson (b. 1696), the minister of King’s Chapel in Boston, Henry

Caner (b. 1700), and missionary to Cambridge, East Apthorp (b. 1733). The non-conformists in

Great Britain included British dissenting theologian and Presbyterian minister

(b. 1684), Presbyterian minister and historian Micaiah Towgood (b. 1700), dissenting minister and historian William Harris (b. 1720), and dissenting philanthropist Thomas Hollis Esq. (b.

1720). In America, the nonconformists included Congregationalist ministers of First Church in

Boston, (b. 1705), Noah Hobart (b. 1706), Andrew Eliot of New North Church in Boston (b. 1718), Jonathan Mayhew (b. 1720) of Old West Church in Boston, and Reverend

Ezra Stiles (b. 1727) of New Haven, . However, Charles Chauncy, Andrew Eliot, and Jonathan Mayhew all learned from Harvard’s Hollisian Professor of Divinity Edward

Wigglesworth (b. 1693), who wrote against episcopacy in 1724.29 Though none of these leaders lived during the seventeenth-century, they were all old enough to remember previous ecclesiastical attempts by the Anglican Church to overtake Congregational hegemony in New

England.

Anglicans attempted to send bishops under Queen Anne. In 1725, they appealed to be the established religion in New England, and in the 1740s they tried to send bishops again with the assistance of Thomas Secker, , a post primarily responsible for American

29 The Hollisian Chair was named after an earlier Hollis. Thomas Hollis was from a line of benefactors to that went back to the seventeenth century. Bond, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn, 4-5. 15 missions.30 After learned of Secker’s plan to send bishops he wrote to Secker criticizing him for his ignorance of American affairs.31 While Whitefield and Secker were far from amicable, even Secker’s friend Philip Yorke, the second Earl of Hardwicke, reminded him that the English in America left England to avoid bishops.32 In many ways the battle over a bishop was a battle for the hearts and minds of the British youth and for the religious future of an adolescent British Empire.33

Justifying their non-violent resistance on the same religious reason that led their ancestors to emigrate to New England—perceived corruptions and injustice in both church and state— colonials looked to their pantheon of seventeenth-century political and religious heroes for guidance. These two entities were so intertwined that modern minds should be cautious when separating a union that many early modern Europeans found sacred. The First Bishop

Controversy of the 1760s is critical for the ideological foundations of the American

Revolutionary Era because it caused influential religious and political leaders to increasingly view actions by the government as in league with the Church of England. Ironically, this was far from the truth. The only enemy more opposed to the designs of the Church of England than

Dissenters was Great Britain’s government, which fully understood what an American episcopate would do to colonial relations. However, after witnessing the spread of “enthusiasm” in the Great Awakening and reinvigorated by the controversial annexation of Catholic French

Canada Anglicans aggressively pursued a policy of uniformity. They simultaneously hoped to grow the “true religion” while stamping out perceived . In a climate where the state-

30 Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 21: Clark, Language of Liberty, 88. 31 Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, 224. 32 Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, 250. 33 Jeremy Gregory has noted that Anglican missionaries were targeting the “rising generation”. Gregory, “Refashioning Puritan New England,” 107. 16 supported church was aggressively pursuing power, even secular actions such as taxation appeared to dissenters throughout the empire as encroachments on religious and civil liberties.

Victory’s Terror: The Background of the Bishop Controversy

In 1764, Anglican clergyman George Whitefield famously wrote from Great Britain, warning New Hampshire’s ministers of a “plot” against American civil and religious liberties.34

However, Whitefield’s warning came four years after fears of Anglican aggression began to stir.

When Reverend Charles Chauncy helped Congregational minister Ezra Stiles publish A

Discourse on the Christian Union in 1760, Stiles perplexed Anglicans who were perceptive that victory in the Seven Years War could favor Anglicans in New England.35 In this publication,

Stiles called for a union among Dissenters—particularly Congregationalists—on fundamental doctrines concerning soteriology, eschatology, , , scripture, and ecclesiology.

Church government was a significant doctrinal battleground that appeared more than any other topic. Stiles cited the agreement in churches concerning voluntary Christian fellowship and communion amongst congregations, and presbyterian . All of these agreements were contrary to the doctrine of the Church of England, which Stiles pointedly criticized. He highlighted ecclesiological similarities between the Church of England and the

Catholic Church by showing that Anabaptists, , Congregationalists, Dutch Reformed,

Lutherans, and Presbyterians all followed presbyterian ordination.36 In other words, all these

34 Kidd, God of Liberty, 32: Carl Bridenbaugh, The Spirit of ‘76: The Growth of American Patriotism Before Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 118. 35 Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, 4: Bridenbaugh devotes an entire chapter to the publication of the Christian Union in chapter one. 36 Stiles, Christian Union, 35-36. 17 Protestant churches supported ordination by local elders or pastors, whereas the Church of

England and required a bishop’s ordination.37

Stiles also argued that the Church of England was different in how it dealt with liberty, and encouraged educating the youth. Stiles said,

In these disquisitions we initiate our posterity the rising generation, not with a view of interfering with any protestant , but upon the principles of conscience and self-defense…And even our episcopal brethren must confess that we treat them with much greater lenity, charity, and christian benevolence, than they treat our congregational brethren in England.38

Persecution by the Church of England is evident throughout Stiles’s pamphlet for both the past and present showing a continuous struggle with the established church at home. Hearkening back to the tyranny under Charles I and the Star Chamber, Stiles said,

And being possessed of the precious jewel of religious liberty, a jewel of inestimable worth, let us prize it highly, and esteem it too dear to be parted with on any terms; lest we be again entangled with that yoke of bondage which our fathers could not, would not, and God grant we may never submit to bear.39

According to Stiles, remembering the trials under Charles I and the great errand into America was something that the youth should never forget.40

To avoid the loss of liberty through ecclesiastical tyranny, Stiles suggested a principle that Reverend Jonathan Mayhew termed Obsta Principiis (resist the beginnings). Speaking of the threat of Congregational consociations, which could threaten individual congregational

37 Under the contention of whether ordination should be by a presbyter or bishop, was an even more contentious matter over whether the Greek words for presbyter and bishop were synonymous. Nonconformists believed the terms were synonymous. Jonathan Mayhew, A defence of the Observations on the charter and conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, against an anonymous pamphlet falsly intitled, A candid examination of Dr. Mayhew's Observations, &c. And also against the letter to a friend annexed thereto, said to contain a Short Vindication of said Society. By one of its Members. (London, 1764), 83, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 38 Stiles, Christian Union, 36. 39 Stiles, Christian Union, 96. 40 Stiles, Christian Union, 116. 18

autonomy, Stiles said, “the moment jurisdiction enters, like the creating Caesar perpetual

DICTATOR, the beginning of the absolute loss of liberty commences.* Let the consociations be advisory only to the churches, as the privy council to his majesty, the assembly of the states to the united provinces.” However, his footnote explained this principle further: “The procedure is gradual from artfully deforced surrenderies of power to abridgments first, and afterwards an intire abolition of liberty.”41 The symbiotic nature between politics and religion is essential to understanding the mentality of these eighteenth century Congregational divines. Stiles used political bodies to explain how the Congregational Church was supposed to function. This shows that not only could political actions be interpreted religiously as happened with the Bishop

Controversy, but that in the eighteenth century Anglo-American mind, religion and government had such a close relationship that it was customary to explain one by the other.

The Church of England’s clergy recognized the subtle rhetorical assault that Stiles’s pamphlet deployed. Three years after its publication, Anglicans were still infuriated by Stiles’s

Discourse on the Christian Union. Henry Caner, of King’s Chapel in Boston,

Massachusetts wrote to Thomas Secker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, proclaiming that Stiles’s sermon was intended to unite all sects against the Church of England. Caner explained that the only reason he could find for such actions was fear that at the end of the Seven Years War,

Britain would add new territories that would require controversial decisions on religious matters.42 This projected fear was in no way unfounded since Church of England clergy on both sides of the Atlantic anticipated that the end of the war would produce an advantageous outcome

41 Stiles, Christian Union, 89-90: A consociation is a body of individual churches who relinquish individual autonomy to the group. 42 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 7 January 1763, in Henry Caner, Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, SPG Missionary in Colonial Connecticut and Massachusetts until the Revolution: A Review of His Correspondence from 1728 through 1778, ed. Kenneth W. Cameron (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1972), 117. 19 for the Church of England. In 1760, Caner told Secker that military victory over France should revive the scheme for providing bishops in America.43 Caner had desired bishops for some time, in December 1760, he mentioned the need for a bishop to preside over issues of contention in the

Church of England and to assist in its development.44 A bishop in the colonies had been a goal of

Thomas Secker’s since the 1740s, but Secker knew the issue required discretion since an

American episcopate would have to survive the channels of imperial bureaucracy. After Secker received Reverend Samuel Johnson’s plan for reforming the colonies in 1760, which included a bishop both for ecclesiastical purposes and to support royal authority, Secker responded that prudence required delay. Like Secker, Johnson was another clergyman who had wanted an

American bishop since the 1740s, but in the early 1760s he was more than a missionary, he had the influential role of President of King’s College in New York City.45 Caner also shared

Johnson’s frustration in 1762 when Secker told him that he would have to remain patient.46

However, Stiles was not the only clergyman Caner complained about at the beginning of 1763.

He also detested Congregational ministers Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew.47

Charles Chauncy was an influential preacher in Boston and steadfast opponent to episcopacy, with strong ties to Harvard, where he received his Master’s in Theology in 1724. On

May 12, 1762, Chauncy delivered a sermon entitled The Validity of Presbyterian Ordination

Asserted and Maintained, at the annual Dudleian Lecture at Harvard College. Like Stiles,

Chauncy used political allusions to explain church doctrine. In reference to differences in ordination Chauncy said,

43 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 6 October 1760, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 112. 44 Henry Caner to Secretary, SPG, 8 December 1760, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, A.D. 1676-1785, ed. William Stevens Perry (Privately Printed, 1873), 459. 45 Mullins, Father of Liberty, 125-126. 46 Thomas Secker to Henry Caner, 6 October 1762, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 474-475. 47 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 7 January 1763, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 117. 20 the ordainers are nothing more than his [Christ] servants in instating the persons they ordain in the regular exercise of this authority. As in the case of the mayor of a city, the kings charter of incorporation grants the power; the burgesses and recorder only indigitate the proper recipient of it, and put him legally into the execution of his office.48

This further demonstrates the symbiotic nature of religion and state in eighteenth century perception. Since Christian doctrine taught that godly government was ordained by God, politics and religion were therefore enjoined in an inseparable union.49 This was particularly true of churches like the Church of England where bishops maintained authority in government.50

Referring to the primitive church at the beginning of Christianity, Chauncy referenced the same principle that Mayhew and Stiles projected—that corruptions came from small beginnings.

It was undoubtedly small at first. The bishop was no more than “primus inter pares,” the “head-presbyter,” the “praeses” of the consistory. And it was by gradual steps that he attained to that dignity and power with which he was afterwards vested.51

For Chauncy and his allies, the historical origin of this corruption in the Church of England took root when William Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 under King Charles I, despite warnings that he would create a division between the Church of England and other reformed churches he persisted in his preference for episcopacy.52

Chauncy not only showed the longevity of the Bishop Controversy itself by referencing the origins in the period leading to the English Civil War, but he also referenced a 1724 sermon

48 Charles Chauncy, The validity of Presbyterian ordination asserted and maintained. A discourse delivered at the anniversary Dudleian-lecture, at Harvard-College in Cambridge New-England, May 12. 1762. With an appendix, giving a brief historical account of the epistles ascribed to Ignatius and exhibiting some of the many reasons, why they ought not to be depended on as his uncorrupted works. By Charles Chauncy, D.D. one of the Pastors of the . (Boston, 1762), 10-11, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 49 Mayhew’s Unlimited Submission explains when it was right to resist something that God ordained. 50 Charles Chauncy, The Validity of Presbyterian Ordination, 47-48. 51 Charles Chauncy, The Validity of Presbyterian Ordination, 64. 52 Charles Chauncy, The Validity of Presbyterian Ordination, 84. 21 by Harvard’s Hollisian Divinity Professor Edward Wigglesworth.53 The elderly Wigglesworth was an living monument to the various attempts of Anglican hegemony and attempts to send a bishop. He experienced every attempt to send a bishop since the turn of the eighteenth century and wrote against it in 1724. As a professor he undoubtedly instilled a wariness of bishops in

Harvard’s students, some of whom included John and Samuel Adams, John Hancock, James Otis

Jr., James Bowdoin, Jonathan Mayhew, Charles Chauncy, and Andrew Eliot. Harvard produced many prominent politicians and lawyers in this period, but perhaps the most politically influential for the eighteenth century was Jonathan Mayhew.54

Civil Corruptions: The Writs of Assistance Trials and the Indian Affair

While Anglicans despised Charles Chauncy and Ezra Stiles, the most notorious New

England preacher from the perspective of the Church of England was Reverend Jonathan

Mayhew. Both Stiles and Chauncy were friends of Mayhew’s, as was English Dissenter Thomas

Hollis and the Bostonian lawyer James Otis Jr., who Mayhew had known since his days at

Harvard.55 Mayhew and Otis had emphasized the connections between religion and politics in an attempt to protect their precious liberties against perceived local injustices carried out by the new governor of Massachusetts Francis Bernard, in 1760-61. While the events of 1760-61 are significant at the local level, they served an even greater purpose within the context of the

Bishop Controversy.56

53 Charles Chauncy, The Validity of Presbyterian Ordination, 86-87. 54 Mullins, Father of Liberty, ix. 55 Harrison Gray to Thomas Hollis, 28 July 1766, Hollis Papers: J.P. Mullins, ““A Kind of War. Tho’ Hitherto an Un-Bloody One”: Jonathan Mayhew, Francis Bernard, and the Indian Affair,” Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 11 (2009): 38. 56 Peter Oliver correctly started his history of the American Rebellion with Massachusetts politics. Oliver, Origin and Progress, 27. 22 Following his appointment in 1760, Bernard pursued a campaign against smuggling through search warrants called writs of assistance, which had been authorized by parliament

1696 but never employed before 1760.57 Any contraband seized was split three ways between the governor, the customs officers, and the crown.58 Bernard was supported by high ranking officials, including Massachusetts Port of Boston Customs Official Charles Paxton, and

Provincial Secretary Andrew Oliver, and Lieutenant Governor and newly appointed Chief Justice

Thomas Hutchinson. The former Chief Justice, , was a longtime friend of the

Mayhew family, and he had confided his concerns to Otis about the questionable constitutionality of writs of assistance before he died. In December 1760, Otis convinced the

Massachusetts House of Representatives to permit provincial treasurer Harrison Gray to take

Paxton to court for misappropriation of funds. Two months later, representing sixty-four Boston merchants, four of whom were attendants of Mayhew’s church, Otis delivered a fiery speech against writs of assistance.59

Like Stiles and Chauncy who spoke against the loss of religious liberty by an episcopate and tyrannical government, Otis employed memories of abuse during the Stuart era to awaken colonial consciousness, calling attention to the severity of perceived corruption and tyranny. He juxtaposed King George III to Charles I and James II, exclaiming that, “the privileges of his people are dearer to him than the most valuable prerogatives of his crown; and as it is in opposition to a kind of power, the exercise of which, in former periods of English history, cost one King of England his head, and another his throne.”60 Otis was unsuccessful in the court, but

57 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 219: Writs of Assistance were search warrants issued by superior courts typically staffed by close allies of governors. 58 Mullins, “A Kind of War,” 30. 59 Mullins, “A Kind of War,” 32-33. 60 James Otis, “John Adam’s Reconstruction of Otis’s Speech in the Writs of Assistance Case” in The Collected Political Writings of James Otis, ed. Richard Samuelson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/collected-political-writings. 23 was successful in gaining the support of the people and instilling a fear of tyranny and political corruption. In December, 1761, Bernard sent Lord Barrington a proposal for a new establishment in America that would revoke the semi-republican Massachusetts charter and institute a royally appointed aristocracy to govern the province.61

While the contention over Writs of Assistance startled people in Massachusetts, Mayhew had a personal conflict with Governor Bernard over Bernard’s alleged acceptance of an illegal payment, from two Native American petitioners who he knew from his father’s mission on

Martha’s Vineyard. During this controversy in December 1761, Mayhew not only infuriated

Hutchinson and Oliver by ignoring the conventions of deference in trusting the testimony of

Native Americans over the governor, but he especially angered Bernard who was always afraid that people were not treating him with proper respect.62 While Boston’s auditor and deputy registrar of the Vice Admiralty, William Story, wagered ten guineas that Mayhew would retract his accusation, James Otis stood by Mayhew and assisted him with legal advice. Even though the actual issue was over integrity, Bernard’s threat to sue Mayhew for slander appeared to Mayhew as an attack on his freedom of speech, something that was at stake in the English Civil War.63 As historian J.P. Mullins has aptly argued, throughout the Indian Affair, Mayhew and Bernard both alluded to Royalists and Parliamentarians.64 After the writs of assistance cases in 1760-61 and the Indian Affair in December 1761, there was an evident solidarity among the opposition to

Bernard’s colonial regime in Massachusetts. It was apparent that James Otis and Jonathan

Mayhew were ideologically rooted in Real Whig principles, willing to oppose any advancements against liberty—no matter how small.

61 Mullins, “A Kind of War,” 33: Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 10. 62 Mullins, “A Kind of War,” 43, 48: Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 8. 63 Mullins, “A Kind of War,” 40. 64 Mullins, “A Kind of War,” 45. 24 The Congregational Missionary Society

While Real Whig Dissenters feared what the end of the Seven Years War might mean for religious establishment in New England, they endeavored to spread their ideals of Christianity amongst Native Americans. This was not merely a power grab; the Dissenters were sincerely apprehensive about Anglicans being more concerned with converting Protestants and neglecting the souls of American natives. This irritated Anglican hopes of overcoming other forms of

Protestantism and even more because it threatened to undermine their power over Native

American missions with their Society for Propagating the Gospel. Dissenting attempts at were not only met with imperial resistance, but an awakened effort to obtain a colonial episcopate which ignited dissenting memories of the Bishops’ Wars in the seventeenth century.

Fear of the encroachment of tyranny on New England’s cherished liberties spread in the new opposition party with Otis and Mayhew. It was in this context of heightened awareness of potential civil and ecclesiastical threats that in early 1762, Mayhew wrote to Thomas Hollis in

London,

We are apprehensive, Sir, that there is a scheme forming for sending a Bishop into these parts; and that our G[ove]rn[o]r, Mr. B[e]rn[a]rd, a true ch[u]r[c]h m[a]n, is deep in the plot. This gives us a good deal of uneasiness, as we think it will be of bad consequence: at the same time that we are much at a loss, how, or in what manner to make Opposition to it. If you should happen to hear it discoursed of, I believe I may assure you, that you could not do the body of the people in N. England a more essential service, or lay this under stronger obligations, than by using your influence, in such ways as may appear proper to you, to prevent this project’s taking effect. And I should be glad if you would take an opportunity to hint something as to this affair to Mr. Mauduit, and other leading Dissenters in England; who might be likely, as occasion offered, to appear in opposition to such a proposal.

25 Mayhew’s fears of Bernard’s involvement in obtaining an American bishop seemed to be confirmed by Bernard’s threats to Harvard. According to Mayhew, Bernard had unlawfully gone outside his jurisdiction when he granted a charter to a college within seventy or eighty miles of

Harvard.65 This was a particular danger since only Yale and Harvard were Congregationalist, but especially since out of the six American colleges at the time half were Anglican. No longer a bastion of Congregationalism, Yale had experienced multiple Anglican conversions in the 1720s that produced a group of professors dubbed the “Yale Apostates.” The Church of England was fully established in Old England, over half of British America, and had control over King’s

College in New York City with Samuel Johnson, one of the “Yale Apostates,” as president.

According to historian Jeremy Gregory, New England was even slowly becoming comfortable with Anglican culture; temporarily permitting theater, celebrating Christmas, and importing organs and organists for their Anglican churches. Although still claiming less than five percent of the region’s population, the Church of England was the fastest growing denomination in New

England between 1760-1774.66 Anglican advancement was a clear threat to the progeny of those who remembered their ancestors’ arduous journey into the wilderness, those who allegedly exchanged safety in this world for liberty to find the next. Both Catholics and the “half- reformed” Church of England had persecuted New England’s forefathers, and both of them did so through bishops. Curiously, while Dissenters feared an American episcopate and the Church of England’s missionary efforts, Anglicans in America and Great Britain feared that a united effort by non-conformists on both sides of the Atlantic would stymie Anglican advancement.67

65 Mayhew to Hollis, 6 April 1762, Hollis Papers. 66 Gregory, “Refashioning Puritan New England,” 88, 95, 97, 99: For more on establishment see Jeremy Gregory’s chapter in British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, “Establishment” and “Dissent” in British North America. 67 Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, 232: Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 9 August 1762, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 115. 26 During this time a group of Congregationalists sought to evangelize those they perceived to be neglected by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG)—Native Americans.68 In early 1762, Jonathan Mayhew along with Charles Chauncy, Andrew Eliot, Harrison Gray, James

Bowdoin, Harvard’s president , Andrew Oliver, and other prominent

Congregationalists organized a Congregational Missionary Society for evangelizing Native

Americans: the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge Among the Indians of North

America.69 This was an especially personal endeavor for Mayhew, whose father had experienced success among the tribe on Martha’s Vineyard, winning him the admiration of

Reverend and Samuel Sewall.70 Bowdoin was elected president of the missionary society and in a matter of days raised £2,000.71 This was an enormous amount since East

Apthorp the SPG missionary to Cambridge, Massachusetts made £125 in his first two years, and the salary for an assistant at Church in Boston was £60 per annum.72 However, the £2000 could not be used until the act of incorporation received assent from the Privy Council in

England.

68 This counters historian Andrew Porter’s argument that the SPG were more inclined than dissenting bodies to push their work beyond white communities. Porter, Religion versus empire?, 28. Under Cromwell dissenting funds were gathered for missions, but redirected after the Restoration, and John Eliot had 3,000 praying Indians by 1674. Though King Philip’s War decimated the missions, the last Indian pastor from his mission died in 1716. Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 33. By the mid-eighteenth century, dissenters were far more concerned with spreading the Gospel to Native Americans than Anglicans. Not only was there an attempt at a Congregational missionary society, but dissenters were giving funding to the SPG for the purpose of taking Christianity to the natives of America. Micaiah Towgood to Jonathan Mayhew, 24 March 1764, letter, #1612 Box 1 of 1, Mark and Llora Bortman and Foxcroft and Mayhew Family Papers, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. 69 Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution: 1759-1766, 67. 70 Mullins, Father of liberty, 21. 71 Akers. Called Unto Liberty, 175. 72 East Apthorp to Secretary, SPG, 12 February 1763: William Hooper to Thomas Secker, Date Unknown, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 491-492, 510-511. 27 Despite the society’s sincere effort to recruit Anglicans, only one joined.73 Dissenters were right to fear that Anglicans would oppose this new missionary society. While Mayhew confided his apprehensions in Hollis, Andrew Eliot requested assistance from English dissenting theologian (b. 1693). Eliot’s excitement was evident when he mentioned the

£2000 raised, with a continuing annual subscription of £200, and their three native translators from the Six Nations. However, like Mayhew he feared Anglican resistance, and though

Governor Bernard assented to the charter, Eliot was concerned about the governor’s power to grant charters. According to Eliot, if an unelected governor could grant charters, then he could favor private interests. And as governors were members of the Church of England this executive power was particularly perilous for Dissenters.74

Colonial Anglicans saw the new society as a direct attack against their own missionary society, the SPG, and feared that the new missionaries would target Anglican missions.75

Archbishop Thomas Secker warned Henry Caner that the SPG could not appear to oppose the new organization, and even acknowledged the group’s many competent dissenting ministers, specifically mentioning Mayhew. Secker’s fear of royal assent is evident, but Secker cunningly went about opposing the act from behind the scenes.76 Bishop of London , who sat on the board of trade and would review the Massachusetts act for incorporating the missionary society, reprimanded the American Anglican missionaries for failing to notify them

73 The true desire of the society seems to have sincerely been to include Anglicans. Henry Caner later complimented what became of the Congregationalist society for its catholic disposition for giving funds to support Cornelius Bennett. Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 16 August 1763. For Colonel Royall see Letter book Henry Caner, Henry Caner to Samuel Johnson, 23 December 1762, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 115-116. 74 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 6 April 1762, Hollis Papers: Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 75: Andrew Eliot to Samuel Chandler, Date Unknown, letter, Andrew Eliot letters, 1767-1776 and undated, MS Am 882.5, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Chandler was also a fellow student of Archbishop Thomas Secker, and was part of Hollis’s circle, though his age limited his activeness. 75 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 9 August 1762, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 115. 76 Thomas Secker to Henry Caner, 6 October 1762, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 474-476. 28 sooner, and informed Secker that he could not oppose it as Secker wished.77 However, Anglican clergyman William Smith had three objections that he believed would prevent the act’s passage.

The first dealt with establishment and argued that the society might encroach on Native

Americans that were outside of Massachusetts. Another objection raised the issue that the missionaries would not be under the control of a civil magistrate such as an Agent for Indian

Affairs, and could weaken the influence of the crown on the Native Americans as had in

1756. The final objection built on the last, criticizing Mayhew for rejecting the King’s supremacy in all British ecclesiastical affairs.78 These latter two points not only show how intertwined religion and politics were, but that Anglicans viewed dissenters as anti-royalist and potentially disloyal subjects.

This attempt to create a dissenting missionary society was particularly frustrating to

Anglicans because unlike Jonathan Mayhew’s father, , they had not witnessed significant success amongst Native Americans in fund raising or even in finding missionaries. Caner complained that the SPG mission at Stockbridge with the Mohawks had dwindled to nothing and blamed their lack of civilization. Caner even went on to mention

Experience Mayhew’s mission on Martha’s Vineyard and that support for it came from a society in Scotland and friends in England, whose goal was to defeat the Church of England’s establishment.79 As historian Robert Ingram has observed, the controversy over the New England missionary society was as much about bishops as it was about missionaries.80

77 Richard Osbaldeston to Thomas Secker, 11 October 1762, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 476-477. 78 William Smith to Thomas Secker, 22 November 1762, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 477-478. 79 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 23 December 1762, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 115-116: Cox alludes to the problems with the Church of England’s missionizing mentality. Since they approached proselytizing with a confessional point of view they believed that to receive Christianity people had to be settled, deferential, and have indigenous leaders sympathetic to Christianity. Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700, 34. 80 Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, 234. 29 Many of the missionaries that the Church of England had in the colonies were American, and to serve as a missionary they had to first travel to England for ordination by a bishop.

Samuel Johnson remarked that out of twenty-five Americans who had attempted the trip, five perished or were lost. His relentless pursuit of an American bishop became personal when his own son died while seeking ordination. Historian Peter Walker has argued that the death of missionaries while in transit for ordination created a martyrology that embodied the sufferings of the American Church and invested the bishop question with enormous emotional and spiritual significance.81 While Dissenters were adamantly opposed to a colonial bishop, Anglicans were just as mentally and emotionally invested in pursuing their goal—even to the point of death.

In the last letter from Caner to Secker before the Privy Council disallowed the dissenting mission society act in May 1763, Caner (with great frustration) quipped that the American

Anglicans would follow Secker’s orders to not appear in opposition. Not only would they not appear in opposition, they could not oppose because they needed a bishop, adding that “There is no Authority, no union among us; we cannot even summon a Convocation, for united Counsills, while the Dissenters have their Monthly, Quarterly & annual Associations.”82 Despite dissenting fears, Anglicans were continuously frustrated with their inability to practice their religion in the way they wished. These frustrations became more visible and incited more fear when a pamphlet war between Mayhew and a number of Anglicans started in 1763.

81 Walker, “The Bishop Controversy,” 316. 82 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 7 January 1763, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 117: Caner’s frustration also manifested itself in his letter to Samuel Johnson when he complained of Secker being so little of a politician. Henry Caner to Samuel Johnson, 23 December 1762, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 116. 30 The Commencement of the Pamphlet War

In the wake of Anglican opposition to the Congregational missionary organization,

Mayhew’s anxiety about an Anglican bishop in the colonies increased. In the winter of 1763, a pamphlet war commenced regarding SPG missions starting with the life of SPG missionary Dr.

Ebenezer Miller. Between the military victories of 1759-60 and the Stamp Act crisis in 1765-66, nothing aroused as much attention in New England as this religious controversy and nothing influenced this controversy as much as memory.83

East Apthorp, the SPG missionary in Cambridge, Massachusetts came to Miller’s defense against an anonymous writer believed to be Reverend Mayhew.84 There was good reason for

New England Dissenters to fear the actions of the Church of England. East Apthorp’s assignment as missionary to Cambridge was particularly threatening to Dissenters because it was the same town that housed the Congregationalist Harvard College, the oldest institutional bulwark against episcopacy. The SPG was even apprehensive that putting a missionary in Cambridge would provoke opposition, but it ultimately followed the advice of Caner and Samuel Johnson agreeing to place one there in 1759.85 By 1760, a church was under construction. A year later Apthorp’s mansion was complete, a structure Mayhew derided as the ‘prelates palace.’86 While the Church of England may have been growing in New England, the Cambridge congregation struggled to become financially independent, and was supported only by a few gentlemen. Apthorp even

83 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 194: Mullins observed that the Bishop Controversy flared brightest at this time. Mullins, Father of Liberty, 124. 84 Bell, War of Religion, 72: Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 3 June 1763, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 117. 85 Thomas Secker to Henry Caner, 19 July 1759, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 453. 86 East Apthorp to Secretary, SPG, 30 August 1760: William Gilchrist to Secretary, SPG, 27 July 1761, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 457, 466: Mullins, Father of Liberty, 131. 31 admitted that he was naively optimistic about proselytizing there in 1762.87 Though Apthorp’s intentions were unquestionably sincere in his devotion to missionizing, he was inexperienced with religious controversy.88 His sermon at the opening of his recently built church on the edge of Cambridge common, near Harvard College on October 15, 1761 was entitled The Constitution of a Christian Church. It was this sermon that inspired Chauncy to preach his Dudleian Lecture on presbyterian ordination in May 1762.89

A year later, Apthorp was on the defensive with his Considerations on the Institution and

Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1763), defending the

Anglican view of New England as a mission field, ‘othering’ New Englanders, and likening them to infidels. Apthorp undermined the Christianity of New Englanders when he said, “The means of public Religion are NO MEANS to him whose Conscience cannot use, or does not approve, them: no more than Popery or Mohamitanism afford the means of Religion to a good Protestant, who happens to reside in Popish or Mohametan countries.”90 While trying to show an increased need for tolerance, and thus a bishop, he only further demonstrated how different the Church of

England was from other Protestants. He even attacked the religion of Massachusetts.

Religion no longer wears among us that savage and gloomy appearance, with which Superstition had terribly arrayed her: its speculative doctrines are freed from those senseless horrors with which Fanaticism had perverted them: Hypocrisy has worn off, in proportion as men have seen the beauty of Holiness: and above all that exterminating monster Persecution, is itself exterminated both from the temper and practice of the age.91

87 East Apthorp to Secretary, SPG, 14 February 1761: East Apthorp to Secretary, SPG, 29 September 1762, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 463, 473-474. 88 Apthorp gave two years of his salary to the debts incurred from the construction of the church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since he was not properly functioning as a minister during that time. East Apthorp to Secretary, SPG, 12 February 1763, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 491-492. 89 Bell, War of Religion, 70. 90 East Apthorp, Considerations on the institution and conduct of the Society for the Propogation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. By East Apthorp, M.A. Missionary at Cambridge (Boston, 1763), 14, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 91 Apthorp, Considerations, 17. 32

According to Apthorp, the “beauty of Holiness,” a phrase coined by Archbishop Laud to refer to uniformity in ceremonious worship, was ameliorating intolerance. Apthorp repetitively emphasized the primary goal of the SPG as providing “the means of Public religion” to English settlers as opposed to the ‘heathen’ Native Americans or Africans. Like Caner, he cited the ill success of Anglicans in converting Native Americans because of their supposedly uncivilized nature and argued that “savage” conversion could only result from miracles that no longer manifested themselves as in the early church.92 He also concluded his pamphlet by glorifying the true religion of the Church of England.93 Apthorp said,

And how rapturous is the prospect of the true Patriot, who unites his views of Policy with those of Religion; to behold this extensive country, just won to the British empire, gradually acceding, among its numerous inhabitants, to the empire of JESUS CHRIST, and of consequence, flourishing in Arts, in Science, and in Liberty both civil and religious!94

This not only fused religion and politics but excluded dissenters from being “true Patriots” and from being the harbingers of the Empire of Christ. This exclusion was offensive for ‘othering’

Congregationalists as unchristian, but also because participation in the Empire of Christ was an aspiration of Congregationalists as well.95

92 Apthorp, Considerations, 15-16, 20. 93 Apthorp, Considerations, 14, 17. 94 Apthorp, Considerations, 24. 95 In 1758, at the beginning of the Seven Years War, the Nathaniel Ames almanac printed in Boston published an article with the title A Thought Upon the Past, Present, and Future State of America. The article speaks of the manifest destiny of progress from East to West with regards to literature, art, science, and religion. After speaking of a need for the colonies to unite, and the fertile country in the west, it said, “As the Celestial Light of the Gospel was directed here by the Finger of GOD, it will doubtless, finally drive long! long! Night of Heathenish Darkness from America.” Andrew Eliot Diaries, 1758, Ms. N-1164 Box 2, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts: Ezra Stiles also speculated at the exponential growth of the Congregationalist population which led him to conclude the need to ensure a proper education of liberty for the youth. Stiles, Discourse on Christian Union, 110, 115: Jonathan Mayhew and John Adams both saw transcontinental expansion as well, Mullins, Father of Liberty, 90. In the midst of the Sugar Act pamphlet debates in 1764, James Otis also called attention to the potential of an American empire. James Otis, A Vindication of the British Colonies Against the Aspersions of the Halifax Gentleman in His Letter to a Rhode-Island Friend (Boston, 1765), 15, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 33

Mayhew responded with his pamphlet, Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. In Observations, Mayhew attacked the SPG for abandoning its mission of evangelizing Native Americans and Africans, defending

Protestantism against Roman Catholicism, and misappropriating funds to convert fellow

Protestants. Mayhew further argued that in 1761, New England had thirty Anglican missionaries, the highest of any province. The province with the next highest number of missionaries was New

York, which only had sixteen. At the other extreme, the southern colonies had too few missionaries and appealed to the SPG for more.96 This was not an unsupported argument; by

1765 North Carolina had thirty-two Anglican parishes yet only five resident clergy, and in 1764

Governor Dobbs of North Carolina requested an Anglican missionary to deal with Presbyterians in Mecklenburg County.97 Due to missionary demographics, Mayhew noted that it appeared the

Church of England was on a crusade against other Protestants.98 This accusation was particularly loaded; by stopping Congregational efforts to evangelize, the Church of England appeared to be opposing other Protestant groups analogous to the Roman Catholic Church opposing infidels.

There had not been a strong resemblance of an English crusade against Protestants since the Stuart monarchs. Mayhew habitually juxtaposed the Stuart regimes to the liberty that the

Glorious Revolution created. Mayhew decried the persecution of Dissenters in England and reminded his audience that Anglicans or episcopalians despised King William III’s Act of

Toleration.99 Mayhew also drew on the historical memory of the Bishops’ Wars (1639-1640) that preceded the English Civil Wars (1642-1648).

96 Jonathan Mayhew, Observations On The Charter And Conduct For The Propogation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (Boston, 1763), 45, Internet Archive Harvard University. 97 Clark, Language of Liberty, 207, 265-266. 98 Mayhew, Observations, 48-49. 99 Mayhew, Observations, 80. 34 One of our Kings, it is well known, excited his Scotch subjects to take up arms against him, in a great measure, if not chiefly, by attempting to force the English liturgy upon them, at the instigation of the furious episcopal zealots of that day; by whom he was wheedled and duped to his Destruction. But GOD be praised, we have a KING, whom Heaven long preserve and prosper, too wise, just and good to be put upon any violent measures, to gratify men of such a depraved turn of mind.100

Mayhew was not only pointing to a memory of Anglican persecution, but also using it to remind the empire of the repercussions of religious persecution that led to the Bishops’ Wars. His reference to the king should not be seen merely as royal approval, but as a royal reminder.

Memory so infused the language of these eighteenth-century colonials that Mayhew was often called a supporter of Cromwell. In 1762, Massachusetts Governor Francis Bernard accused him of ‘Cromwellian tendencies’ over his actions with the Indian Affair.101 Accusations continued in 1763, when a newspaper accused him of attempting to set up an inquisition against the national religion like Cromwell, while the Anglican Reverend Arthur Browne compared him to an Oliverian writer.102 This memory of episcopal oppression was the bond of alliance, a mutual identity, that cemented dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic.

Following Mayhew’s publication of his Observations, dissenters on both sides of the

Atlantic offered felicitations and counsel. Contrary to recent scholarship, dissenters in Great

Britain did not sever ties with their American counterparts over the Bishop Controversy.103

Knowing that their numbers were dwindling from the schisms caused by the Great Awakening,

100 Mayhew, Observations, 130. 101 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 96: See also JP Mullins, “A Kind of War.” 102 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 185: Bell, A War of Religion, 76. 103 In an effort to revise the traditional narrative, Katherine Carté Engel argued that dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic split in the 1760s over the issue of an American episcopate. Though she is predominantly focused on the Bishop Controversy after the Stamp Act, she focuses on only a few dissenters, mainly Ezra Stiles. A broader approach shows that the reinvigorated Anglican aggression also resurrected dissenting resistance from a wide range of Dissenters across the Atlantic. Engel, “Revisiting the Bishop Controversy,” 135. 35

dissenters in the British Isles would instead seek to save their religious kin from their own fates.104

In the American colonies, Massachusetts provincial treasurer Harrison Gray commented that he had never known a performance of a controversial nature to meet with so general approbation and applause.105 Stiles accounted Anglican success to nepotism and complained that

Anglicans were trying to quiet dissenters. He also warned against America falling prey to cunning designs as the dissenting churches did in Old England under the Houses of Tudor and

Stuart. To avoid their fate, he advocated vigilance and spirited defense as in the first century of the .106 Noah Hobart, another New England Congregationalist preacher and graduate of Harvard, commended Mayhew. Like Harvard’s Divinity Professor, Edward Wigglesworth,

Hobart was a veteran of the Bishop Controversy, who wrote against episcopacy in 1748 in response to one of the “Yale Apostates.” He rejoiced that Observations had been published in

London, congratulated Mayhew on the response from the Anglicans, and hoped it would prevent the people from trusting the Anglicans with ‘the Distribution of their Charity.’107

While American support was valued, the attention of dissenters in Old England was far more important for obtaining political redress. These Dissenters experienced the state that

Anglicans sought in New England, and many had little hope for Old England. Watching their numbers dwindle they realized that the battle in Britain was virtually lost, all hope rested in

104 Nathaniel Lardner to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 July 1763, Mayhew Family Papers. 105 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 184. 106 Ezra Stiles to Jonathan Mayhew, 15 April 1763, Mayhew Family Papers: This allusion to the Reformation further qualifies Dr. Ingram’s assertion that eighteenth-century divines saw themselves as part of the Reformation not the Enlightenment. Robert Ingram, Reformation without end: Religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 10. 107 Bell, War of Religion, 58: Noah Hobart to Jonathan Mayhew, 17 April 1764, Mayhew Family Papers. 36

America, one of the reasons they strove to propagate their ideas through philanthropy.108

London-based Massachusetts agent, Israel Mauduit, accepted the conspiracy that Anglicans were scheming to deprive America of religious liberty. He further mentioned that Apthorp disclosed information that would unsettle his superiors.109 After reading Observations, Micaiah Towgood, a dissenting minister in England, remarked that he had long wished to see the SPG examined in a

“just light.” Towgood thought Mayhew made an impression on those in England and that SPG activity would decline in Massachusetts. He also disagreed with Apthorp that Indians had to be civilized before becoming Christian proselytes, and advocated the method the Jesuits used in

Paraguay.110 Dissenting English theologian Nathaniel Lardner, who was a child during the

Glorious Revolution (1688-1689), also commended Mayhew. Lardner tried to propagate

Mayhew’s ideas in Observations by sharing the tract with everyone he could. However, his wordy eight-page letter to Mayhew was not full of optimism. He warned Mayhew that the

Church of England was increasing its wealth (a clear step towards obtaining more American missionaries), while dissenters, other than the highly-orthodox Methodists, were in decline.

Lardner advised Mayhew to treat Anglicans with respect, but alerted him about the , who

told his congregation, without reserve, The business of that society was not so much to encrease the number of , by conversion of Indians, as to unite the subjects of Great Britain in one communion. I heard him myself, & that with great astonishment…However, I hope nothing will be done, nor any attempt made, to deprive you of your liberties.111

108 W.H. Bond, “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”: Thomas Hollis's Gifts to the Harvard College Library. Introduction by Allen Reddick. Preface by William P. Stoneman. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 19. 109 Israel Mauduit to Jonathan Mayhew, 5 July 1763, Mayhew Family Papers. 110 Micaiah Towgood to Jonathan Mayhew, 24 March 1764, Mayhew Family Papers. 111 Nathaniel Lardner to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 July 1763, Mayhew Family Papers. 37 Alarmed by Anglican advances, these English dissenters not only accepted the ideas that

Mayhew espoused, they tried to assist Mayhew in his cause with their counsel and connections.

Conclusion

The first three years of the 1760s ignited memory-based fears of religious tyranny. The

Bishop Controversy united Dissenters throughout the Atlantic in resistance to imperial religion and government. By the end of 1763, the situation for Dissenters was bleak. The British Empire acquired Catholic Canada with victory over the French in the Seven Years War, which both

Anglicans and dissenters nervously recognized would change the religious and political landscape.112 With local politicians in Boston and an Anglican crown appointee appearing corrupt, the Church of England’s aggression with missions in New England and with the opposition to dissenting interests, a conspiratorial mania among dissenters manifested on both sides of the Atlantic.113 These fears of an American episcopate were not new, but part of a phobia that had existed for more than a century and a half starting with Charles I and Archbishop

Laud in the 1630s.114 However, these fears reignited over Anglican aggression in a period of exponential imperial growth in America, with the potential of reducing the influence of New

England’s dissenting establishment in an already unequal balance of colonial ecclesiastical power. Across the Atlantic, these threats would awaken shared memories of tyranny, prompting a number of dissenters to attack the imperial government and strengthen colonists’ resolve by publishing English histories of the seventeenth-century.

112 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 7 January 1763, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 117. 113 This supports Bailyn’s thesis that there was a real fear of comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world, not simply America, and that corruption nourished the idea. America was seen as only the most immediate part of the empire threatened. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, xiii. 114 Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, 235. 38 CHAPTER III “Ship Money” and Memories of Tyranny: The Sugar Act and Peaceful Resistance (1763-1765)

“Are we not to prophesy the future by the experience of the past?” ~The Earl of Clarendon (John Adams) to William Pym (1766)115

After over a decade of perceived abuses: unlawful seizures, religious persecution, military impressment, the quartering of soldiers, making courts dependent on the crown, and losing the freedom of speech, patriots were victorious in displacing the tyrannical yoke of abject slavery. They had sacrificed countless lives in a bloody revolution and won their independence under a republican government. On January 30, 1649, Charles Stuart, the King of England was executed, but not before allegedly uttering his last word—“remember.”116 Throughout the eighteenth century British subjects took this command to heart, however, Dissenters and

Anglicans, nominal Whigs and Real Whigs, were polarized on what was worth remembering.117

As the controversy over the possible installation of an Anglican Bishop intensified in

New England, Parliament introduced the Sugar Act in 1764, increasing fears of tyranny stemming from similar memories of oppression and persecution during the illicit fundraising campaigns of Charles I. At the heart of the colonists’ objections was a tax called ‘Ship Money.’

This was a tax traditionally levied on coastal towns to produce ships in times of war, but Charles

I used it to raise money so that he could avoid requesting revenue from a Parliament he did not call for a decade. As colonists combatted the Sugar Act that they perceived as antithetic to their rights, they invoked the memory of Charles I’s Ship Money in an attempt to communicate their

115 John Adams, “The Earl of Clarendon to William Pym 13 January, 1766, No. I” in The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams ed. C. Bradley Thompson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 47: James Otis also adopted a seventeenth century pseudonym, John Hampden, a parliamentarian who challenged Charles I’s policies. McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 268. 116 David Hume, The , from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the revolution in 1688. In eight volumes. Volume 7. A new edition, with corrections, and some additions (London, 1767), 150, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 117 Dissenters included all Protestants who did not align with the Church of England, but the largest sects were the Quakers, Presbyterians, and the progeny of the —the Congregationalists. 39 concerns, both amongst themselves and with the British subjects on the other side of the Atlantic.

This memory-based idea of oppression resonated amongst Dissenters because they already felt their rights were being threatened by the possibility of the establishment of an Anglican bishop.

Memories of persecution had been passed down amongst Dissenters since the Glorious

Revolution to ensure that they would remain vigilant against an ever-looming threat. Dissenting clergymen kept these memories alive from the pulpit, and some even printed their own histories.

As historian Philip Hicks asserted, history was one of the great building blocks of the Anglo-

American mental universe and was paramount to the colonial psyche. After all, history was philosophy teaching by examples.118

The intricate relationship between politics and religion cannot be overemphasized. Some recent historians have marginalized the Bishop Controversy’s political significance and attempted to show that politics influenced religion—not the other way around. But as historian

Robert Ingram has shown, eighteenth-century divines often imagined themselves as being at war over religion. In the pursuit of truth, they still viewed themselves as part of the Reformation, not the Enlightenment.119 The Bishop Controversy in the 1760s functioned the same way, divines still saw themselves at war over religion, a war that included civil rights and fiscal policy.

Circumstances had changed since the Stuarts’ tyranny in the seventeenth-century, but liberty— specifically the liberty of conscience was no different in 1776 than in 1630.120 Real Whig

Dissenters in England who appeared to be losing this ‘war’ over religion, did not split over the

Bishop Controversy in the 1760s as some have recently argued.121 Real Whig Dissenters shared a

118 Philip Hicks, “Portia and Marcia: Female Political Identity and the Historical Imagination, 1770-1800,” The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, vol. 62, no. 2 (April 2005): 268-269. 119 Ingram, Reformation without end, 10. 120 Stout, New England Soul, 267. 121 Jeremy Gregory challenged the unpopularity of the Church of England in New England and does not see the animosity between the Church of England and American Dissenters as a trigger for the American Revolution and directly challenges historians Carl Bridenbaugh, JCD Clark, and James Bell. Gregory, “Refashioning Puritan New 40 common identity founded on memories of religious and civil persecution on both sides of the

Atlantic and attempted to help each other by spreading their memories and ideology.

Although British citizens across the Atlantic optimistically hoped for a new world with a vast empire of liberty and Protestant Christianity, it was this shared memory of oppression in the seventeenth century that kept many in the dissenting circles grounded to a pessimistic conservativism with regard to their rights.122 In this context of heightened sensitivity to their rights, New England colonists ardently opposed both the Sugar Act and a colonial Bishop, viewing both as individually having civil and religious implications.123 While Dissenters appeared to some as paranoid, the British government continually confirmed their fears through actions that seemed to mirror Stuart oppression.

Memories of Resistance

While France challenged Great Britain’s hegemony in America and continuously moved the scales in the international balance of power, internal matters consumed the British elite. The identity and ideology of the British Empire was of paramount concern because within the first sixty years of the eighteenth century there were at least seven revolts or fears of rebellion to

England,” 91-92: Gregory, ““Establishment” and “Dissent” in British North America,” 165-166, 168: Walker also challenged the importance of the Bishop Controversy by arguing that the controversy was quickly eclipsed by growing protests over Parliamentary taxation. Walker, “The Bishop Controversy,” 308: Engel also asserted this point and added that the Bishop Controversy destroyed transatlantic dissenting networks because British Dissenters disagreed with their American brethren. Engel, “Revisiting the Bishop Controversy,” 134-135. 122 In 1758, at the beginning of the Seven Years War, the Nathaniel Ames almanac printed in Boston published an article with the title A Thought Upon the Past, Present, and Future State of America which optimistically looked to a grand Protestant American future. Eliot Diaries, 1758: Ezra Stiles also speculated at the exponential growth of the Congregationalist population which led him to conclude the need to ensure a proper education of liberty for the youth. Stiles, Christian union, 110, 115: Jonathan Mayhew and John Adams both imagined American expansion, Mullins, Father of Liberty, 90. In the midst of the Sugar Act pamphlet debates in 1765, James Otis also called attention to the potential of an American empire. Otis, A vindication of the British colonies, 15. 123 Bailyn argued that by 1765 colonists in New England saw the Bishop Controversy and Stamp Act as part of the same plan. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 97: Bell, A War of Religion, xi: Bridenbaugh, The Spirit of ’76, 119: Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, 253. 41 support the return of the Stuart challenger for the throne. It had not yet been two decades since the last blood was shed in an internal uprising. Loyalty and obedience were chief concerns for the regime whose authority was more a result of religion than bloodline, since it came to power by deposing the son of King Charles I.

Many Dissenters and Anglicans held different memories of Charles I and his sons,

Charles II and James II. Most Anglicans justified the overthrow of King James II—thus legitimizing the Georgian line—while simultaneously rejecting the execution of Charles I. Many

Dissenters however, justified both overthrows based on a right of resistance to tyranny. The philosophical origins of the two camps dates back to the seventeenth century, as Anglicans favored the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes while Dissenters preferred John Locke.

These ideological camps manifested themselves in the histories of the English Civil War, many of which were written within a decade or two of the 1760s. These new histories not only refreshed minds and related seventeenth century history to contemporary concerns, but provided a medium for Real Whigs to peacefully oppose challenges to their ideology.124 In this context, history was being written by the losers in Great Britain with an aim to prevent their American counterparts from suffering the same fate.

The Dissenting community was a vigilant vocal minority. Dissenters were exceedingly active in trying to spread their ideas and influence politics, and they strategically utilized memory to inform public opinion.125 Unlike Anglican missionaries in the colonies, American

124 Both David Hume and Micaiah Towgood mention the contemporary value of studying history in their histories of England. These histories must be viewed with the understanding that these historians had agendas for the contemporary public opinion. Hume, The history of England, 157: Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, v-vi. 125 Kathleen Wilson noted that one of the ideological strategies of the extra-parliamentary Wilkite campaigns in the 1760s was the revival of the historical experience and political language of the seventeenth century. John Seed, Dissenting Histories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 112: Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 17. 42 Dissenters did not have to request literature to sustain their religious campaigns because

Dissenters in Great Britain frequently donated or recommended influential publications.126

Nathaniel Lardner, a leading English Dissenter, suggested that Mayhew read his own work, as well as other histories and theological works.127 In a battle for the minds of the American youth,

William Harris sent Mayhew and Harvard copies of his histories, specifically hoping that the histories might influence the youth and help Mayhew in his campaigns against the Anglican

Church.128 American minister Noah Hobart rejoiced to see the London copy of Mayhew’s

Observations, which Thomas Hollis had bookseller Andrew Millar publish.129

While many Dissenters worked to spread their ideals, Thomas Hollis was the most important benefactor of Real Whig and Dissenting ideology. Inspired by seventeenth-century

‘commonwealthman’ John Milton, Hollis sought to influence politics “by deeds of peace.”130

Hollis constantly defied ambitions within the empire and liberally supplied books to various colleges and universities throughout Europe and America. He was even blamed by

Tories for helping incite the American Revolution with his “democratical” works.131 After the

Harvard library burned down in 1764 and lost at least 5,000 volumes, Hollis assisted Harvard by replenishing hundreds of books in less than a decade.132 In total it is estimated that Hollis spent

126 Dr. Ebenezer Miller to Secretary, SPG, 13 April 1761: East Apthorp to Secretary, SPG, 29 September 1762: Edward Bass to Secretary, SPG, 25 March 1763: Edward Bass to Secretary, SPG, 29 September 1763: Apthorp even requested books for Harvard, undoubtedly with an eye toward influencing their students in favorable ways toward the Church of England, East Apthorp to Secretary, SPG, 12 March 1764: Joshua Wingate Weeks to Secretary, SPG, 21 June 1765, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 465-466, 473-474, 494, 505, 512, 517-518. 127 Nathaniel Lardner to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 July 1763, Mayhew Family Papers. 128 William Harris to Jonathan Mayhew, 2 July 1765, Mayhew Family Papers. 129 Noah Hobart to Jonathan Mayhew, 24 May 1764, Mayhew Family Papers: Thomas Hollis Diary 15 September 1763, W.H. Bond Papers. 130 “By deeds of peace,” is a quote from Milton’s Paradise Regained. There was no seventeenth-century mind that Hollis sought to emulate as much as that of John Milton. Bond, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn, 33. 131 John S. Tanner and Justin Collings, “How Adams and Jefferson Read Milton and Milton Read Them.” Milton Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3, (2006): 208. 132 Bond, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn, 53: In North America, Hollis also donated books to the College of New Jersey (Princeton), Yale, King’s College (Columbia), College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), in 43 £1,400 on 5,000 books sent to Harvard alone between 1755-1770.133 Hollis’s books were strategically selected to influence both the curriculum at Harvard and the public who used the library.134 He preoccupied himself with keeping politically contentious publications in print: books that propagated liberty, Real Whig ideology, and the memory of the seventeenth century, many of which were originally authored in the seventeenth century.135 These books would have fallen into the hands of people like John Hancock, James Otis Jr., Jonathan Mayhew, and John

Adams, who even attended Harvard on a Hollis scholarship.136 Hollis became so popular among the Adams family that in 1790 John Adams’s grandson was named Thomas Hollis Smith, and in the 1780s John considered naming various parts of his farm Hollis-Meade, Hollis-hill, and

Hollis-brook, just as Hollis had named one of his fields after John.137 However, his political influence on the colonies was not limited to books; he also served an important function as the center of a dissenting network, often forwarding information and connecting people of similar ideology throughout Europe and America.

The transatlantic flow of ideas was multifaceted and egalitarian, including women as well as men. Dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic maintained a familial relationship based on their soteriological beliefs and tried to help each other in their defense of liberty and the British constitution.138 Americans also sent their literature abroad: Massachusetts’s London agent Israel

Europe he also frequently sent books to the Zentralbibliotheks in Bern and Zurich, Switzerland, Christ College, Cambridge, England and Dr. Williams’s Library the famous Dissenter’s library in England. Allen Reddick, introduction to “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”, 3. 133 Eyres, “The Invisible Pantheon,” 107. 134 Reddick, “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”, 5: The British troops recognized the significance of books to the American Revolution and destroyed the library at Princeton which also experienced Hollis’s philanthropy. Eyres, “Thomas Hollis,” 8. 135 Reddick, “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”, 18. 136 Reddick, “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”, 14. 137 Tanner and Collings, “How Adams and Jefferson Read Milton and Milton Read Them,” 210: Eyres, “The Invisible Pantheon,” 107-108. 138 Part of Christian doctrine was the belief in the family of God, upon conversion one became a child of God and thus brothers or sisters with other Christians. As long as Dissenters shared religious beliefs their unity would remain resolute. William Allen of Philadelphia prayed that God would preserve Mayhew in his search after truth and that 44 Mauduit, Reverend Richard Baron, Reverend Nathaniel Lardner, Thomas Hollis, Reverend

William Harris, and Reverend Micaiah Towgood, all received copies of Mayhew’s Observations, in which he attacked the Anglican Society for Propagating the Gospel. In Observations, Mayhew also referenced the seventeenth century Bishops’ Wars, issuing a warning reminder to his audience of what happened when Charles I encouraged religious uniformity and excited his

Scottish subjects to rebel.139 Many of the leading Dissenters in Great Britain also attempted to help Mayhew by contributing their thoughts and advice.140 Two of these Dissenters, Harris and

Towgood, were both clergymen and historians. Though she was not a member of the clergy, there is likely no historian as influential on Real Whigs than the first British female historian—

Catharine Macaulay—who published her eight volume History of England during the pivotal years of the American Revolution from 1763 to 1783.141 While she did not maintain a correspondence with Mayhew like the others, her work did influence him. Mayhew’s wife,

Elizabeth, even said, “I could wish there were more like worthies among our sex.”142 In the early

Mayhew would deliver the True Doctrines of Christianity. William Allen to Jonathan Mayhew, 12 March 1761, Mayhew Family Papers: Israel Mauduit, Massachusetts’s London agent, prayed that God would bless Mayhew’s labors and wished their brothers would support the design to promote the redeemer’s kingdom amongst the Indians. Israel Mauduit to Jonathan Mayhew, 8 April 1763, Mayhew Family Papers: Micaiah Towgood English Dissenter and historian called Mayhew brother and said Mayhew was fighting under the banners of the King of Righteousness and Truth. Micaiah Towgood to Jonathan Mayhew, 24 March 1764, Mayhew Family Papers. Christian familiarity amongst Dissenters starkly contrasts Professor Engel’s argument that the Bishop Controversy separated Dissenters on each side of the Atlantic. Engel, “Revisiting the Bishop Controversy,” 135. 139 Thomas Hollis Diary, 8 Nov 1763, W.H. Bond Papers. 140 Israel Mauduit to Jonathan Mayhew, 5 July 1763, Micaiah Towgood to Jonathan Mayhew, 24 March 1764, Nathaniel Lardner to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 July 1763, Mayhew Family Papers. 141 Macaulay not only proposed reforms in her histories that the later adopted, such as: eliminating standing armies, rotation of office, extension of the franchise, and religious liberty, but she also kept correspondence with John Adams, and visited George Washington at his home. Philip Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain,” Journal of British Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (Apr., 2002): 175-176: Hicks has called Macaulay the most celebrated female patriot and noted how her histories provided a conduit to the seventeenth-century, but her influence over American sympathizers and American revolutionaries raises her influence far above Hume, Harris, or Towgood. In addition to corresponding with Adams, she also wrote to Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, the latter chose to emulate her in 1775 and write a history of the American Republic. Hicks, “Portia and Marcia,” 276, 287: Bernard Bailyn also credited Macaulay with intellectual significance. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 41. 142 Elizabeth was not alone to recognize Macaulay’s ability, Jonathan Mayhew and Hollis both commented on their esteem for her histories. Thomas Hollis to Catharine Macaulay, 15 January 1765, letter, MS Eng 1191.2, Thomas 45 1760s she was highly regarded by Hollis’s circle of Real Whigs, and became increasingly popular in the Northern colonies in the second half of the 1760s and early 1770s.143 These historians not only shared a common memory and political ideology, but published and propagated this memory in an active attempt to withstand a perceived backslide into tyranny.

In 1748, just three years after a Jacobite rebellion where supporters of the Stuart line captured Edinburgh and invaded England, Micaiah Towgood published An Essay Towards

Attaining a True Idea of the Character and Reign of K. Charles the First, and the Causes of the

English Civil War. Towgood’s work is an important example of Real Whig ideology in eighteenth-century historiography prior to the imperial crisis of the 1760s. It not only offers a

Whig interpretation of history, but it also demonstrates a continuity of Real Whig ideology that persisted into the 1760s. In the wake of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, when many throughout the

British Empire performed acts of loyalty to show their obedience to the crown, Towgood boldly advocated a ‘right of resistance’ to the monarch.144 This right of resistance was founded on John

Locke’s arguments in his Second Treatise on Government (1689), where he argued that government could be dissolved. If the government betrayed the trust of the people, then they

Hollis correspondence with Catherine Macaulay, 1763-1769, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 8 August 1765: Elizabeth Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 10 March 1770, Hollis Papers: Contrary to what Katherine Carté Engel has asserted, that there was a shift in the 1770s when radicals like Macaulay and Joseph Price entered the Bishop Controversy, radicals were involved in the Bishop Controversy from the beginning of the 1760s. Engel, “Revisiting the Bishop Controversy,” 147. 143 In England she was tied to John Wilkes who was friends with her brother John Sawbridge member of Parliament. However, her circle also included Theophilus Lindsey, Richard Baron, , , and Thomas Hollis. David Hume referred to her political salon as the Sanhedrin at Mrs. Macaulay’s. Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War,” 175. While Hume was referenced in the 1767 Boston almanac, a print of Macaulay, and her histories were included in the 1772 almanac after Jonathan Dickinson. Eliot Diaries, 1772. 144 Following the rebellion of 1745 people throughout the British Empire showed obedience, colonial governors calling on subjects to express loyalty through days of prayer, fasting, and humiliation. Chris Beneke, “The Critical Turn: Jonathan Mayhew, the British Empire, and the Idea of Resistance in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Boston,” Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 10, (2008): 28: These actions of devotion included the Anglican celebration to commemorate the martyrdom of Charles I. S.J. Connolly, “The Church of Ireland and the Royal Martyr: Regicide and Revolution in Anglican Political Thought c. 1660-c. 1745,” in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 54, no 3, (July, 2003): 497. 46 could lawfully resist.145 Pertinent to British subjects in the 1760s, he argued that because people entered society for the preservation of property, if the legislative invaded property, they betrayed their trust. Locke said,

whenever the legislators endeavors to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence.146

The concept of the right of resistance is critical to understanding how religious subjects could reject and attack something perceived as sacred.147

Just as colonists in the 1760s feared an Anglican bishop would lead to religious tyranny and contribute to civil tyranny, in 1748 Towgood argued that the first stage of tyranny in seventeenth century England was coercive religious uniformity. According to Towgood, the

Anglican clergy was rewarded for preaching unlimited submission to the crown, and they used the authority of God to promote the schemes of the court.148 Towgood and other clergy knew that people would submit to the authority of God, and if the clergy preached submission to the king, then the right of resistance was endangered. As a preacher, Towgood asserted that the Civil War was not a rebellion and defended the right of people to resist despotic government. He said that,

there was no Choice left, but for the Nation to sit still, and to have the Chain of Despotick Government riveted upon its Neck; or else, to take Arms, and stand up in Defence of its Constitution, its Liberties and Rights. To the glorious STAND, which was then made, we owe it, under GOD, that our Freedom is preserved: and

145 Hollis mentioned in the preface of this edition that he would not have written against Sir Robert Filmer, who advocated divine right, but some of his contemporaries were sympathetic to Filmer’s principles. When John Locke originally published this work it was in response to Filmer. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, 1764), EC75.H7267.Zz764ℓ Lobby IV.2.2, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, preface: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, 1764), 391, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 146 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 392. 147 In Christian doctrine government is a sacred entity ordained by God. Towgood argued that the freedom and rights of parliament were sacred and that the throne should ever be sacred, Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 36, 93: Hume pointed out that a sacred regard to princes was salutary, Hume, The history of England, 156: Mayhew’s Unlimited Submission explained when it was right to resist something that God ordained. 148 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 21-22. 47 that we are not now a Nation of abject and helpless Slaves; groaning under the Yoke of arbitrary Rule. That Subjects greatly oppressed have a Right to take Arms and to stand upon their Defence, King Charles himself before all the World expressly avowed.149

For Towgood, seventeenth century patriots were lawfully enabled to resist Charles I and maintained that framing the Civil War as a rebellion would undo the legitimacy of the current monarchy because the Glorious Revolution functioned on similar principles.150

In the late 1750s, David Hume published his volumes of The History of England that covered the English Civil War and the Interregnum, his Tory interpretation candidly attacked

Real Whig ideology. His history directly conflicted with Towgood’s arguments. He contended that concealing the doctrine of resistance from the public was praiseworthy and asserted

Hobbesian ideals of government, which expressed that the government was instituted to restrain the people. Those Hobbesian ideals were in sharp contrast with the Lockean view that people chose to create government as an expedient. Hume even went so far as to say, “Nor is there any danger, that mankind, by this prudent reserve [concealing the doctrine of resistance], should universally degenerate into a state of abject servitude.”151 This completely contradicted

Mayhew’s Obsta Principiis (resist the beginnings) and the right of resistance to tyranny found in

Towgood.

Another advocate of the right of resistance, William Harris published An Historical and

Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell in 1762. He was heavily influenced by

Towgood’s True Idea of the Character and Reign of K. Charles the First, but was not applauded for his biography of Cromwell because he stepped over the conventional bounds of the Whig

149 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 129-130 150 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 132 151 Hume, The history of England, 155. 48 political argument by openly supporting Cromwell.152 Harris also carried out a campaign against the histories of Lord Clarendon and David Hume. He continuously attacked them for being impartial. While Harris’s goal of confronting Hume’s recent history of England was evident, he was so concerned with impartiality that his pages only have one or two lines of text, with almost whole pages of footnotes, which sometimes included entire letters. He contested Hume on the issue of Cromwell’s character, and defended the Barebones Parliament, but disagreed with

Cromwell’s tyrannical abuses after he became Lord Protector.153 While Harris’s history was not widely applauded, it was influential.

Harris’s history of Cromwell is among only thirty-two books that remain of John Adams’ library, books that Adams chose to keep for his family instead of donating to the public.

However, Adams’ copy was not intended for him, but for a man he greatly admired—Jonathan

Mayhew.154 When John Adams listed seven men who sparked the “awakening and a revival of

American principles” of the early 1760s, Mayhew was among them. Adams listened to him preach, and made Mayhew’s 1750 sermon on resistance his ‘political catechism.’155 Thomas

Hollis sent Adams’ copy to Mayhew shortly after its publication. Though Hollis did not write it, he made substantial contributions to Harris’s biography of Cromwell. Hollis not only helped

Harris gather the primary sources he needed, but also arranged for publication with Andrew

Millar, annotated copies, and distributed them to various places and people, including Mayhew

152 Seed, Dissenting Histories, 109, 114. 153 William Harris, An Historical and Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the , Scotland and Ireland. After the Manner of Mr. Bayle. Drawn from Original Writers and State Papers. To which is added, An Appendix of Original Papers, Now first published. (London, 1762), 26, 337, 347, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 154 William Harris, An Historical and Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. After the Manner of Mr. Bayle. Drawn from Original Writers and State Papers. To which is added, An Appendix of Original Papers, Now first published. (London, 1762), Adams National Historical Park, Quincy, Massachusetts, title page. 155 Mullins, Father of Liberty, 3, 44, 180. 49 and future Prime Minister William Pitt.156 Though Whigs in general did not like the biography, because it was more spirited than Harris’s history of Charles I, Real Whigs like Thomas Hollis and Jonathan Mayhew admired the text and tried to propagate its ideas.157

The right of resistance was the key issue in Mayhew’s Unlimited Submission (1750); it was from this sermon that John Adams and first encountered Real Whig principles, and it was this sermon that Adams continued to circulate as late as 1818.158 Mayhew preached from Romans 13:1-8 to show that the Apostle Paul did not intend for the Romans to be universally obedient to government.159 Following Locke’s political philosophy, Mayhew argued that obedience was contingent on government seeking the welfare of the people. If the government failed its purpose then people could resist, Mayhew said, “It was upon this principle, that king Charles I, was beheaded before his own banqueting house. It was upon this principle, that king James II. was made to fly that country which he aim’d at enslaving.”160 These issues of conscience led Mayhew to state that,

If it be our duty, for example, to obey our king, merely for this reason, that he rules for the public welfare, (which is the only argument the apostle makes use of) it follows, by a parity of reason, that when he turns tyrant, and makes his subjects his prey to devour and to destroy, instead of his charge to defend and cherish, we are bound to throw off our allegiance to him, and to resist.161

It was on the topic of resistance, specifically the regicide, that Mayhew freely expressed Real

Whig principles farther than either Towgood or Harris. Both Towgood and Harris gently shifted the blame for the regicide to King Charles I since he could not be trusted, and argued that the

156 Thomas Hollis Diary, 16 June, 15, 25 July, 4, 5, 27, 30 October, 29 December 1759; 11, 15 July, 11 September 1760; 8 January, 27 September 1761, W.H. Bond Papers. 157 Thomas Hollis Diary, 2 July 1761, W.H. Bond Papers. 158 Mullins, Father of Liberty, 3, 63-65. 159 Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 16. 160 Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 13. 161 Mayhew is particularly focusing on Romans 13:4 in the quotation: Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 29-30. 50 execution should be understood as a matter of self-preservation for the Parliamentarians.162 But while Towgood mentioned that the regicide was by an illegal court and should be condemned and Harris did not give a personal opinion, Mayhew not only pointed out when it was right to resist, but radically showed that there was a religious obligation to do so.163

The right of resistance was not only a political concept, but a Christian doctrine that

Dissenters believed was inherent to Protestantism and the liberty of conscience. Towgood,

Harris, Macaulay, and Mayhew all argued that one of the greatest infractions that Charles I committed was authorizing sports on the Lord’s Day (a sinful violation for Reformed

Protestants) and persecuting ministers for refusing to publicly read Charles’s license.164 In fact one of Mayhew’s favorite idioms Obsta Principiis (resist the origin) was itself a theological term used for resisting false doctrine, which was applied to the political climate of the 1760s.165 In

162 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 141: Harris, the Life of Oliver Cromwell, 202. 163 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 156: For more on Unlimited Submission see Beneke, “The Critical Turn.” 164 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 105-106: Harris, the Life of Oliver Cromwell, 13: Macaulay added that this action was so averse to the prevailing opinions of the age that it occasioned a greater murmuring than almost any other illicit exertion of power which had happened in this reign. Macaulay, The History of England, 149: Mayhew, unlimited submission, 42: Clark, Language of Liberty, 274-275. 165 The term principiis obsta was used to justify the last execution for blasphemy in Great Britain in 1697, which was itself a period where covenant-minded Presbyterians reverted to the ideology they espoused during the English Civil War era. Michael Graham, The Blasphemies Of Thomas Aikenhead Boundaries Of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 100, 116-117. New England Pastors Charles Chauncy, Jonathan Mayhew, and Ezra Stiles all employed the concept, though not always the term obsta principiis, during the Bishop Controversy when combatting the spiritual corruptions of the Church of England. As these clergymen employed it theologically, Stephen Hopkins, Mayhew, and James Otis deployed the concept to combat the Sugar and Stamp Acts. Charles Chauncy, The validity of Presbyterian ordination asserted and maintained, 64: Stiles, Christian Union, 89-90: Jonathan Mayhew, Remarks on an Anonymous Tract, Entitled An Answer to Dr. Mayhew’s Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Being a Second Defence of the said Observations (Boston, 1764), 62, Eighteenth Century Collections Online: Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of the Colonies Examined (Providence, 1765), In The American Revolution Writings from the Pamphlet Debate I: 1764-1772, ed. Gordon Wood (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2015), 136: James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764), In The American Revolution Writings from the Pamphlet Debate I: 1764-1772, ed. Gordon Wood (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2015), 94: Jonathan Mayhew, The Snare Broken (Boston, 1766), 34, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 51 Harris’s history of Cromwell, he argued that the doctrine of resistance was particularly familiar to Protestants, an issue Hollis thought important enough to underline for Mayhew.

One strong presumption, however, in favour of protestantism is, its being the constant object of the hatred of those kings and who delight to trample under foot, the liberties of mankind, and render all subject to their own wicked wills. A doctrine of liberty can ill be digested by men sensible of designs subversive of it. Hence have arisen the persecutions of protestants, and in this light have they, I think, generally been viewed. Almost every where, when in power, have the ruling ecclesiastics stirred up princes, to crush and extirpate a race of men who constantly oppose themselves to their designs.166

For these Real Whigs, resistance was a religious right to avoid spiritual corruptions and tyrannical government. As eighteenth-century clergy often did, Mayhew intermingled religion and politics to explain that divine right and the doctrine of unlimited submission were as absurd as transubstantiation.167 According to these historians there was a bargain struck between the scepter and surplice for enslaving the bodies and souls of men.168 But enslavement did not come solely from religion; Charles I also exploited legislation in a corrupt manner that no one remembered favorably.

“Ship Money”

Having distinguished himself by advocating the revocation of Rhode Island’s charter,

Martin Howard Jr. became an enemy of Real Whigs in Rhode Island as well as James Otis of

Boston.169 In 1765, Howard continued to agitate Real Whigs by writing against the ideas of Otis

166 Harris, the Life of Oliver Cromwell, Adams National Historical Park, 405: Hollis underlined this text before sending it to Mayhew. 167 Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 35: Transubstantiation was the doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper, a doctrine of Roman Catholicism. This argument was also used by Anglican William Stoughton in 1709. Connolly, “The Church of Ireland and the Royal Martyr,” 493. 168 While all the historians noted a link between church and state which led to tyranny, Mayhew employed the term “scepter and surplice.” Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 52. 169 Martin Howard Jr. and Dr. Thomas Moffatt both advocated for Rhode Island’s Charter to be revoked in hopes of it becoming a royal colony. In opposition the Newport Mercury carried a copy of the commission which Charles I 52 and Rhode Island Governor Stephen Hopkins, who both opposed the Sugar Act. In his pamphlet, he ridiculed the idea of American representation in parliament, and Hopkins’ and Otis’ view of natural rights. Yet his most significant criticism was of how the colonial opposition deployed seventeenth-century memory.170 Though the Sugar Act of 1764 lowered the tax on molasses from six pence to three pence, colonists feared a backslide into tyranny and called upon the memory of Charles I’s Ship Money in an attempt to obtain redress.

Charles I not only seized property and imprisoned merchants against the will of parliament, which closely resembled the writs of assistance issued in Massachusetts in the 1760s, but he also taxed England under the auspice of Ship Money.171 Ship Money had traditionally been levied on coastal towns to produce ships in times of war, but Charles I used it during peace to raise money so that he could avoid requesting revenue from Parliament, which he did not call for over a decade. Towgood said that Ship Money raised the greatest clamor of all the fundraising schemes of Charles I.172 Harris addressed Ship Money immediately after a section on

Charles I’s spiritual tyranny. He explained that

Charles I. and his ministers were bent on introducing uniformity in religion, and despotism in the state…After Hampden’s stand in the great case of ship-money, and the infamous determination of the much greater part of the bench, all was profound silence; a dead calm succeeded; every one look’d about him for a place of refuge and retreat from the iron hand of power.173

had issued to Archbishop Laud and others in 1634, with power to revoke all colonial charters. Though Otis lived in Boston, he was connected to Rhode Island through his cousin Major Jonathan Otis of Newport, who like himself, became a Son of Liberty. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 49-50, 53. 170 Martin Howard Jr., A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, to His Friend in Rhode Island, Containing Remarks upon a Pamphlet, Entitled, The Rights of the Colonies Examined (Newport, 1765), In The American Revolution Writings from the Pamphlet Debate I: 1764-1772, ed. Gordon Wood (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2015), 147, 153, 154. 171 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 28. 172 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 30. 173 Harris, the Life of Oliver Cromwell, 50-52. 53 This not only shows the terror that resulted from Ship Money, but its relationship to spiritual tyranny. However, unlike the other historians, Macaulay was finishing her history that covered

Ship Money the year the Sugar Act was enacted. She asserted the illegality of Ship Money by showing how an expedient means of raising money for immediate defense was abused for years, and extended from coastal counties as was originally intended, to inland counties as well.174

Giving colonists precedent to follow, she showed the historical means of recourse for arbitrary taxation, going after the magistrates and other officers who levied the tax.175 Highlighting the actions of a female, Macaulay emphasized the importance of judge Crook’s wife, who convinced her husband to maintain his conscience and side with John Hampden in his case against Ship

Money.176 Macaulay even showed the contemporary utility of this history:

Subjects ought to be very careful how they give way to bad precedents: the most noxious privileges of princes are often established on no better foundation. Charles and his minister Wentworth looked on this contribution, though a voluntary one, as the King’s right.177

Macaulay was not simply recounting events of the past; she was encouraging Real Whigs to resist encroachments on their rights. Like all the Real Whig historians, Macaulay’s friend,

English Reverend Richard Baron noted in 1763 that civil and religious oppression rose and fell together.178 Dissenters who continuously reiterated the lessons of the English Civil War and

174 Macaulay, The History of England, 201. 175 Macaulay, The History of England, 207. 176 Macaulay, The History of England, 226: This particular point was highly influential on Americans in the 1770s, Mercy Otis Warren told Abigail Adams that they should use Lady Crook as a model. Hicks, “Portia and Marcia,” 279-280: Hicks argues that Macaulay overemphasized Lady Crook’s significance, but she served as one of the few female patriots. Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War,” 188-189. 177 Macaulay, The History of England, 174. 178 Seed, Dissenting Histories, 118-119. 54 watched for threats to tyranny believed that the Bishop Controversy and the Sugar Act were inextricably linked, just as seventeenth century religious uniformity was tied to Ship Money.179

As he was in the cases of the writs of assistance and perceived corruptions of local government in Boston, James Otis Jr. was also an outspoken critic of the Sugar Act of 1764. Otis led the charge against the Sugar Act closely trailed by John and Samuel Adams, Josiah Quincy, and John Hancock.180 Following Lockean political theory, Otis argued that government received its power from the people and its purpose was the good of the whole.181 According to Otis,

America deserved to be represented in Parliament because the colonies were so large and distant,

Parliament could not understand the good of the whole for the American colonies.182 Otis referenced Locke’s On the Dissolution of Government to show the power of the right of resistance within the British constitution. He explained that after James II was deposed, representatives created the compact, but if the people did not like the proceedings, it was in their power to control them, as it would be if the supreme legislative or executive powers ever again attempted to enslave them.183 This comment on enslavement shows a common fear among Real

Whigs, a fear grounded on threats to their right to property. Towgood said, “THE power of

Raising Money is justly counted the grand Bulwark of the People’s Liberties; for the Moment this is seised by the King, and yielded by the People, He becomes absolute, they Vassals and

Slaves.”184 The fear that British subjects could easily slip into slavery was an idea that Hume and

179 Bell argued that the Bishop Controversy tied bishops to taxes and led to an argument over parliament’s authority, Bell, War of Religion, xi, 80: Mullins argued that the First Bishop Controversy was political, opened up a constitutional debate, and separated Patriots and Loyalists, Mullins, Father of Liberty, 124, 145, 149. 180 Stout, New England Soul, 269. 181 Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 55. 182 Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 76-77. 183 Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 56. 184 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 21. 55 other nominal Whigs found absurd and fanatical even as Real Whigs opposed minor infractions.185

Property rights were critical for self-preservation. Towgood and Harris both justified the regicide of Charles I on the grounds of self-preservation, and Otis echoed Locke that self- preservation was the purpose of government.

For all power given, with trust for the attaining an end, being limited by that end, whenever that end is manifestly neglected, or opposed, the trust must necessarily be forfeited, and the power devolve into the hands of those who gave it, who may place it anew where they shall think best, for their safety and security...whenever any one shall go about to bring them into a slavish condition, they will always have a right to preserve what they have not a power to part with; and to rid themselves of those who invade this fundamental, sacred and unalterable law of self preservation, for which they entered into society.186

For Otis, parliament could not function properly because it could not know the ‘good of the whole’ for America without their representation, giving the American colonies justification for resistance.187

Within the resistance theory was the fear of a systematic erosion of rights and the need for Mayhew’s Obsta Principiis. Otis remarked, “If a shilling in the pound may be taken from me against my will, why may not twenty shillings; and if so, why not liberty or my life?”188 Hopkins concurred stating that, “if the people in America, are to be taxed by the representatives of the people in Britain, their malady is an increasing , that must always grow greater by time.”189

Hopkins’s comment shows that while colonists were genuinely afraid of tyranny in the 1760s,

185 Hume, The history of England, 155: Howard, Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, 158. 186 Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 63-64: Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 141: Harris, the Life of Oliver Cromwell, 202. 187 Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 80. 188 Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 94. 189 Hopkins, The Rights of the Colonies Examined, 136. 56 they were also concerned with its growth over time.190 The whole point of resisting the beginnings of tyranny was that liberty was rarely taken at once; liberty was lost through small advances.191 However, Howard, like Hume, doubted this conservative skepticism and did not believe harm could be done as long as the crown filled the admiralty department with an upright judge.192

Colonials resisted, trying to exert their political influence by writing pamphlets in an attempt to inform Parliament of their discontent. Those pamphlets were intended as reminders of the abuses committed before the English Civil War—specifically Ship Money. Otis asserted that no unlawful taxation had occurred since the Glorious Revolution and showed how common

English Civil War memory was, even for the less educated, when he said “King Charles I. his ship-money every one has heard of.”193 Hopkins opened his pamphlet with a poetic quote about

John Hampden, a member of parliament who refused to pay Ship Money, and was one of the five members who Charles I illegally tried to arrest, which ignited the war. The poem read

Mid the low murmurs of submissive fear And mingled rage, my Hambden rais’d his voice, And to the laws appeal’d;194

Opening with this quote incited memories of Ship Money from those who read it, including

Howard who criticized Hopkins for adopting this poem. Seeing no similarity between 1641 and

1764, Howard thought the poem was irrelevant to the Sugar Act. Howard also used it to deride

190 Macaulay complimented Sir Edward Coke who compiled , for not only caring for his age, but for future generations. Macaulay, The History of England, 204-205. 191 Ezra Stiles makes this clear with Christian liberty by stating, “The procedure is gradual from artfully deforced surrenderies of power to abridgments first, and afterwards an intire abolition of liberty.” Ezra Stiles, discourse on Christian union, 89-90: Mayhew said liberties are not taken all at once. Mayhew, Second Defence, 62. 192 Howard, Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, 158. 193 After explaining different forms of government Otis included this footnote, “For the sake of the unlettered reader it is noted that monarchy means the power of one great man, aristocracy and oligarchy that of a few, and democracy that of all men.” Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 54. Ship Money. Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 99. 194 Hopkins, Rights of the Colonies Examined, 125. 57 Hopkins on the point that those who could not vote in England did not “murmur with submissive fear, and mingled rage.”195 This shows a sharp divide between the memory of the English Civil

War and its contemporary applications to the imperial state.

These pamphlets on the Sugar Act, like those on the Bishop Controversy, were not created to merely air local grievances, they carried imperial political capital and had the power to influence parliament, especially when reprinted in London. Howard feared the potential of these pamphlets. He ridiculed Hopkins for believing that his pamphlet could convince parliament to give up its right to tax the colonies, and feared that it would “excite the jealousy of the parliament” and that parliament would look at the colonies with an evil-eye.196 Howard was correct, while William Allen was in London he informed Mayhew that Otis’s pamphlet had angered members of Parliament, and that it was too late to argue the right of taxation. However, he still helped other colonial agents like oppose the act in London.197 While there were mixed feelings on Otis’s Rights Asserted among the opposition, Thomas Hollis approved and after reading Otis’ polemic, he decided to anonymously begin sending Otis books.

His only qualm was that he wished Otis addressed the ‘episcopizing scheme,’ referring to the

Bishop Controversy.198 Though Otis did not address the Bishop Controversy directly he did mention some of the same issues Mayhew addressed in 1764. Otis said,

If it [religion] differs, and the colonies are obliged to use the religion of the metropolis on her embracing paganism, so must the colonies. Since the revolution, all Dissenters, both at home and abroad, papists only excepted, have enjoyed a free and generous toleration. Would The gentleman deprive all Protestant Dissenters of this invaluable blessing?...The dreary prospect of

195 Howard, Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, 147, 153. 196 Howard, Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, 156. 197 William Allen to Jonathan Mayhew, 15 October 1764, Mayhew Family Papers. 198 Hollis said that ‘a friend’ liked The Rights of the British colonies asserted and proved, but it seems clear that Hollis is referring to himself in the same way that Lardner told Mayhew to read his publication on the Logos of John 1 when he said that the tract was anonymous but he had been told that it was approved by Mayhew’s honorable correspondent there. Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, March 4, 1765, Hollis Papers: Nathaniel Lardner to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 July 1763, Mayhew Family Papers. 58 confinement to the use of the laws and religion of a region 3000 miles beyond sea, in framing which laws, and in forming the modes of which religion, they shall have no voice nor suffrage; nor shall they have any preferment in church or state, tho’ they shall be taxed without their consent, to the support of both.199

Otis was not only addressing a threat to American religious freedom, but showing that there was a constitutional threat and that taxes could progressively lead to a tax for the establishment of the

Church of England.

The Bishop Controversy Rages

The fears of an American bishopric only magnified with reports of a new threat to liberty—Catholicism was spreading in England. This was a major issue for Dissenters because this also occurred during Charles I’s reign. Dissenters often regarded tyranny and Catholicism as inextricably linked.200 Towgood devoted an entire chapter to this matter in his history of the

English Civil War. He asserted that under Charles I the Church of England preached Roman doctrine, popish officials were appointed in that church, Catholics were in high office, were relaxed, and Catholicism was tolerated in Ireland.201 Macaulay attributed the errors of

Charles I to his French Catholic wife, that she convinced him to be like the French using the clergy for firm supports of the crown.202 These dissenting historians who were in correspondence with Hollis, Mayhew, and others in the colonies, found common cause with them and tried to help them defend against an American Anglican Bishop—especially when the Church of

England appeared to be recoiling at reformation. It was during 1763 and 1764, as historian J.P.

199 Otis, A vindication of the British colonies, 23-24. 200 Due to Charles I’s Catholic sympathies the freedom of the press was restrained. Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 72: Otis thought that the Sugar Act and mention of a Stamp Act were more like Rome and the inquisition than the common law of Great Britain. Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 68- 69. Otis also linked Catholicism and absolute monarchy. Otis, A vindication of the British colonies, 11. 201 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 63, 66-68. 202 Macaulay, The History of England, 212. 59 Mullins has argued, that the Bishop Controversy flared brightest in the public press before reigniting in the late 1760s. Although it is easy to dismiss the first Bishop controversy of the early-1760s as an interdenominational squabble, Jonathan Mayhew and the American and British

Episcopalians who answered him viewed it primarily in political terms.203

In 1764, Mayhew learned that people in England were converting to ‘popery’, that a handsome popish chapel was built by the Neapolitan diplomat, that a chapel was also rebuilt by the Sardinian minister as, “one of the handsomest places of worship in town,” and that a was boasting of converting 1,500.204 Though this was likely an inflated number and Catholicism was not making great strides throughout the nation, its numbers were increasing, particularly in

London around the chapels established by foreign diplomats.205 Catholic growth in the capital and Anglican aggression amplified fears in 1764. Hollis thought the Archbishop of Canterbury

Thomas Secker had sent a spy to Massachusetts, possibly Reverend East Apthorp who wrote against Mayhew’s Observations (1763) and who had moved into a lavish mansion in Cambridge in 1761.

Mayhew responded to Anglican ministers Apthorp, Arthur Browne, Caner, and Johnson in 1764 with A Defence of the Observations…, and A Second Defence of the said

Observations...206 In those tracts, Mayhew conveyed the deterioration of Protestantism in

England where the Anglican Church and episcopacy were established by referencing the intelligence Hollis sent.207 Mayhew explained that the true concern for the SPG should not be in

203 Mullins, Father of Liberty, 124. 204 Hollis to Mayhew, 6 December 1763, 10 October 1764, Hollis Papers. 205 Eamon Duffy has maintained that the beauty and music of the Embassy chapels attracted Protestants. There was even a thriving public Catholic milieu surrounding the Sardinian Chapel. Duffy also showed that the chapel at Isleworth, not far from London, grew from 100 to 150 between 1747 and 1755. The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 shows how securely ensconced Catholics were in the public. Eamon Duffy, Challoner and his church: a Catholic bishop in Georgian England (London: Darnton Press, 1981), 7, 8, 14, 21. 206 Hollis to Mayhew, 28 August 1764, Hollis Papers: Mullins, Father of Liberty, 135. 207 Mayhew, Second Defence, 71-72. 60 the colonies where Roman Catholics had not been since the and , but in England where they were spreading.208 Mayhew once again appealed to British memory by explaining that before the Glorious Revolution, bishops “were in every scheme promoting tyranny and bondage.”209 However, the most powerful thing Mayhew did in this pamphlet was speculate about future offenses—including the foreboding Stamp Act. Mayhew said,

Nay, if bishops were speedily to be sent to America, it seems not wholly improbable, from what we hear of the unusual tenor of some late parliamentary acts and bills, for raising money on the poor colonies without their consent, that provision might be made for the support of these bishops, if not of all the church clergy also, in the same way.210

Mayhew feared that the Anglican Church would use civil powers to achieve its goals of uniformity, and left his readers with an important piece of advice: Obsta principiis

(withstand/oppose beginnings), because liberties are not taken all at once.211

Both A Defence and A Second Defence were received throughout dissenting networks and carried political capital in the metropole. Micaiah Towgood, William Harris, and Noah Hobart read them with satisfaction and thanked Mayhew for taking up the ‘Cause.’ Hobart, who wrote against an American episcopate in 1748, said that he thought Mayhew had a chance of “finishing this Controversy,” but he also thought Mayhew was more liberal than he needed to be in his concessions with his Second Defence. However, Hobart understood the difference it would make if it were printed in London.212 Hollis had Millar reprint the Second Defence in London while

Parliament was in session to ensure members of Parliament would see it, and even bought

208 Mayhew, Second Defence, 35: Though Maryland was founded as a Catholic haven, by the mid-eighteenth- century it was firmly Protestant. There was even a scare of Catholicism and Stuart loyalty after two men supposedly toasted the Stuart Pretender in 1754. McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 112-113. 209 Mayhew, Second Defence, 12-13. 210 Mayhew, Second Defence, 67. 211 Mayhew, Second Defence, 62. 212 Noah Hobart to Jonathan Mayhew 23 December 1763, 24 May 1764, 17 September 1764, Micaiah Towgood to Jonathan Mayhew, 24 March 1764, William Harris to Jonathan Mayhew, 7 September 1764, Micaiah Towgood to Jonathan Mayhew, 6 April 1766, Mayhew Family Papers. 61 eighteen New England copies to prevent having two editions in circulation.213 Hollis also sent the pamphlet to thirty-one different locations including Radcliffe and Bodleian Libraries at

Oxford, Christ College Cambridge, the University of Dublin, as well as other educational institutions, and Dissenters.214 Presbyterian chief justice of Pennsylvania, William Allen, who went to London to resist the Sugar Act, not only contributed to fears of an American episcopate, but explained the purpose of one being sent. He said,

The Archbishop of Canterbury, and many of the Society are fond of transporting it into the Colonys. But, from what I could observe, the Bishops, nor their office have not many friends among the Nobility, and gentry: if ever they are sent among us it will be with Political views to make us more tame, and submissive to the yoke intended to be laid on us. I am sorry to say it, there is, at present, an evil eye over America, and that odious Stamp-Act is intended for a precedent for much greater impositions. The power of our own Legislatures is to be annihilated; for if the Parliament lay internal taxes on us, they are in a great measure rendered useless.215

Clergymen were not alone in fearing a colonial episcopate, even public officials in the colonies were terrified of an American bishop. Many dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic saw

American bishops as not merely religious, but as political actors meant to impose imperial objectives—after all, they were already more than religious in England.

While key Dissenters feared what 1765 would mean for liberty in the colonies, Anglicans were optimistic. Some Anglican missionaries reported amicable temperaments amongst

Dissenters in their communities, but those closest to the Bishop Controversy were frustrated.216

Missionary William McGilchrist said Mayhew’s Defence did not merit a response, but he was

213 Thomas Hollis Diary 28 August 1764, 24 October 1764, W.H. Bond Papers: Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 10 October 1764, Hollis Papers. 214 In addition to sending Mayhew’s defenses, Hollis also circulated Archbishop Secker’s attack against Mayhew to Catharine Macaulay, Richard Baron, Samuel Chandler, as well as college libraries in Great Britain. Thomas Hollis Diary, 11, 24 October, 7 November, 1764, W.H. Bond Papers. 215 William Allen to Jonathan Mayhew, 15 October 1764, Mayhew Family Papers. 216 Joshua Wingate Weeks to Secretary 13 August 1764, 21 June 1765, to Secretary 1 January 1765, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 515-517. 62 optimistic about the religious climate in Massachusetts. He explained that people in his area were learning the difference between ‘Episcopacy and Popery’ which used to be seen as synonymous.217 Henry Caner, who was heavily invested in trying to obtain a colonial episcopate, said that Mayhew’s Second Defence said nothing new, but that Mayhew was determined to have the last word. For Caner, dissent was problematic because it loosened the bonds of English identity and imperial loyalty.218 In an American milieu of geographic expansion, Anglicans sought strict uniformity so that they could ensure their hegemony over bodies and souls, but they struggled to understand how people who proclaimed religious liberty could refuse colonial bishops for Anglican subjects.219

The controversy over a colonial episcopate was an issue of memory and essential liberties. Dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic feared that a bishop would be sent to the colonies and Dissenting Americans would be coerced to conform as Britons were in the seventeenth-century.220 Even though some like Hume and Howard scoffed at this idea, and some

Anglicans made assurances that American bishops would not be as powerful as their counterparts in Great Britain, but Anglican clergy were not averse to using the government to achieve religious goals. In 1751, American Anglican Samuel Johnson requested a bishop with full power as in England.221 Twelve years later, in 1763, the Archbishop of Canterbury still

217 William McGilchrist to Secretary, SPG, 17 July 1764, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 514-515. 218 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 1 September 1764, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 119-120. 219 William McGilchrist to Secretary, SPG, 31 July 1765, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 519. 220 William Allen to Jonathan Mayhew, 15 October 1764, Nathaniel Lardner to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 July 1763, Mayhew Family Papers. 221 Mullins, Father of Liberty, 125. 63 hoped that the civil power would assist the Anglican Church in America.222 For both sides the tenuous future of an American episcopate was contingent on shades of the past.

Conclusion

It was the religious skirmishes between the Church of England and other Protestants that first incited fear amongst the Dissenters in the metropole and periphery, that caused increased sensitivity to protecting liberties. Adams confirmed the significance of this event in retrospect in

1815, through a letter to Jedidiah Morse at a time when the religious climate had dramatically changed.

Where is the man to be found, at this day, when we see Methodistical Bishops, Bishops of the Church of England, & Bishops, Archbishops, & Jesuits of the Church of Rome, with indifference; who will beleive, that the apprehension of Episcopacy, contributed 50 years ago, as much as any other cause, to arouse the attention, not only of the enquiring mind but of the common people? And urge them to close thinking on the Constitutional Authority of Parliament over the Colonies? This nevertheless, was a fact, as certain as any in the history of North America.223

Seventeenth century nightmares of Anglican hegemony reverberated in the 1760s and influenced the way contemporary colonists perceived their reality. However, this was an early example of ideological resistance, and resistance through debate and discourse. After all, if Obsta Principiis was followed, tyranny could be prevented without bloodshed.

Due to the Bishop Controversy, the Sugar Act, and the impending Stamp Act, which was not yet imposed in early 1765, tensions and fears had risen on both sides of the Atlantic. It appeared to many Real Whigs that the church and state were nefariously supporting each other’s

222 Thomas Secker to Henry Caner, 30 March 1763, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 494-496. 223 John Adams to Jedidiah Morse, 2 December 1815, letter, Founders Online, National Archives, accessed 1 January 2016. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6548: Steven Green, Inventing a Christian America, 108: Kidd, God of Liberty, 59. 64 efforts.224 In the first half of the 1760s memories of seventeenth century oppression were implemented for peaceful resistance, but as long as American colonists framed their dispute in the same ideological terms as the English Civil War, it could hardly remain bloodless.225

224 Mayhew’s term for the coalition between the Church of England and British government in the eighteenth century. Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 52. 225 Mullins made this argument with regard to an Indian Controversy between Mayhew and Massachusetts Governor Bernard in 1761-1762. Mullins, “A Kind of War,” 52. 65 CHAPTER IV

“No King but King Jesus”: The Stamp Act and Violent Resistance (1765-1766)

“America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted. Three million of people so dead to all feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.”

~William Pitt, British House of Commons (1766)226

Tensions between the empire and her American colonies were at a breaking point. Then

in March, 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which was to take effect November 1 of that year. However, Bostonian fears of fiscal tyranny were not confirmed until May when news of the act’s passage arrived from London. News of the Stamp Act reached Boston at a terrible time: not only was the local imperial government using writs of assistance for the search and seizure of ships, and the Sugar Act being strictly enforced by the vice admiralty court; but there were other problems that arose in 1763 and 1764. Boston’s economy was adversely affected by a postwar depression, a drought in 1763, and a smallpox outbreak in 1764 that undermined trade with merchants who were unwilling to risk contracting the virus. In addition to all these economic factors, religious controversy had been fueling dissension between imperial and local interests for three years.227

With the Stamp Act, the price of almanacs doubled. Almanacs themselves even warned

that the fee for possessing an unstamped almanac was forty shillings, when in 1765, a dozen almanacs could be acquired for just over three shillings.228 Some of the Stamp Act taxes included a two pound tax on documents relating to donations and diplomas for universities, ten pounds for a license to practice law, six pounds for a grant of franchise, three to four pounds for taxes

226 William Pitt, Speech against the Stamp Act (1766). Colonial Williamsburg, accessed 3 June 2018. http://www.history.org/almanack/life/politics/pitt.cfm: Peter Oliver despised Pitt for saying this and supporting American resistance to the Stamp Act. Oliver, Origin and Progress, 55. 227 Eliot Diaries, 1763, 1765: John Reynolds to Jonathan Mayhew, 13 April 1764, Mayhew Family Papers: Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 12, 31. 228 Eliot Diaries, 1765, 1766. 66 pertaining to liquor documents. But what likely bothered many Real Whig Dissenters the most was one of the cheapest taxes—a one shilling tax on documents for ecclesiastical courts that did not exist in America.229 Just as the Real Whig contention over the Sugar Act had little to do with the tax amount, the worst part of the Stamp Act pertained to principle not purse.

The only way to properly understand the colonial response to the Stamp Act of 1765 is to include an interpretation of it through the same memory-based-religious lens that many colonials used. The London government saw the stamp tax as mild by English standards, and assumed that the unrest must have had some other origins.230 To colonists and specifically those in the northern colonies, the Stamp Act was not viewed as a means of assuaging a war debt of £137 million when the normal operating budget was £8 million.231 The Stamp Act appeared to be, as

Mayhew warned, a tax to drive the colonists into religious submission to the tyranny of the

Church of England. And as the Bishop Controversy raged on, Real Whig colonists—already fearing the erosion of their liberties—were unwilling to shoulder the Stamp Act’s relatively light burden.232 During the Stamp Act both Dissenting and Anglican leaders, despite internal contentions, decided to avoid the topic in order to prevent adding to tensions over the Stamp Act that appeared to be the early stages of a civil war. Archbishop Secker repealed his aggressive policies to obtain a bishop, and Mayhew was unwilling to fan the flames of civil unrest.

However, the religious and political fears already present from the Bishop Controversy and

Sugar Act, which boiled over in the Stamp Act, began to deteriorate trust in both the Parliament and the king.

229 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 73: The Stamp Act 1765, accessed 3 June 2018. https://archive.org/stream/stampact176500grea#page/2/mode/2up. 230 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 105. 231 For war debt see James Byrd, Sacred Scripture Sacred War The and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 27. 232 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 197. 67 The Stamp Act & The Bishop Controversy

After reading Jonathan Mayhew’s Second Defence in 1766, dissenting historian and clergyman Micaiah Towgood asked Mayhew to send him a copy of his sermon preached at

Harvard’s Dudleian Lecture, Popish Idolatry, which Mayhew had already sent to fellow Real

Whig Dissenters Thomas Hollis, Nathaniel Lardner, Benjamin Franklin, and William Harris.233

In winter 1764, Hollis learned that Mayhew was selected to give the Dudleian Lecture in 1765.

The lecture was named after Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Dudley in 1750, and it cycled through one of four topics each year: natural religion, revealed religion, the Roman

Catholic Church, and Presbyterian or Congregational ordination. This was the same lecture at which Charles Chauncy preached The Validity of Presbyterian Ordination in 1762. However, after mentioning how alarming the spread of ‘popery’ was in London, and that he was selected for the Dudleian Lecture, Mayhew informed Hollis of the bitter news that the Hollisian Divinity

Professor Edward Wigglesworth had died. Wigglesworth was one of the oldest veterans of the

Bishop Controversies and had written against an American Bishop as early as 1724. The loss of such a “worthy man” struck at the Dissenter “Cause,” and Mayhew was uncertain they would find someone worthy to replace him.234 After suffering this loss, Mayhew entered the Harvard pulpit on May 8, 1765, stepping into a time-honored tradition of Dissenters at Harvard College and attacked the Roman Catholic Church—just as Wigglesworth had eight years earlier.235 While

Anglican missionaries were trying to show differences between Episcopacy and ‘Popery,’ and dispel fears, Mayhew preached on their similarities. He was not only convinced of Anglican

233 Micaiah Towgood to Jonathan Mayhew, 6 April 1766, Mayhew Family Papers: Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 13 May 1765, Hollis Papers. 234 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 18 December 1764, Hollis Papers. 235 As Harry Stout showed, occasional sermons were often less spiritual and more political. They were not the spiritual sermons that were traditionally preached on Sunday mornings, but in New England were often preached on Wednesdays, Thursdays, or special occasions such as the Dudleian Lecture. Stout, New England Soul, 3, 27-31. 68 attempts at colonial hegemony, but he also feared that British toleration of Catholicism was a sign that the Church of England was in the process of becoming Catholic and that the imperial government would assist the Anglican encroachment through taxation.236

In this sermon Mayhew attacked the Roman Catholic Church for being idolatrous. He also compared the Church at Rome to Babylon and explained how both persecuted God’s people.237 As Dissenters had previously done, Mayhew recalled fears of religious tyranny by calling on the memory of the English Civil War and the Restoration under Catholic-influenced monarchs, Charles I and James II.238

At least, if we are ever to be so unhappy as to lose our liberty, God grant the loss may not be aggravated, by having it taken from us either by lordly, tyrannical priests, or by those of the laity, from whom we have the best reason to expect the defence and security of it. Popery is now making great strides in England; as great, perhaps, as it did in the reign either of Charles [the first] or James the second: I pray God, things may not at length be brought to as bad a pass!239

Not only was there cause to despise Catholic tyranny, according to Mayhew, there was also reason to fear its encroachment on London and the Church of England. Mayhew later remarked that he “could scarce refrain from some strictures on another church, so zealously propagated among us.”240 At the same sermon where John Adams first made Mayhew’s acquaintance,

Mayhew was expounding the close relationship of and Catholicism based on memories of the seventeenth century tyranny. This was the same argument that Mayhew made in

Unlimited Submission which Adams made his ‘political catechism.’241

236 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 17 May 1765, Hollis Papers. 237 Jonathan Mayhew, Popish Idolatry (Boston, 1765), 6, 46, Internet Archive Harvard University. 238 Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 23, 41-42: Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 63, 66-68. 239 Mayhew, Popish Idolatry, 50. 240 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 17 May 1765, Hollis Papers. 241 Mullins, Father of Liberty, 3, 180. 69 The fear of Roman Catholic-based religious tyranny was not isolated to a minority in

Boston or London. Throughout the British Empire, but especially in the colonies, people feared

Roman Catholicism due to its perceived relationship with tyranny. Catholic-motivated slave rebellion conspiracies were discovered and prevented in Virginia (1687 and 1709), South

Carolina (1720), New Jersey (1734), Maryland (in the late 1730s), and South Carolina in (1740).

Violent rebellions occurred or were allegedly thwarted in New York City in 1712 and 1741, and in South Carolina (the Stono rebellion) in 1739.242 The 1741 New York fire that was attributed to

Catholic slaves captured from Spanish ships in the Caribbean also led Governor George Clark to keep a closer watch on strangers.243 Virginia's Governor Robert Dinwiddie warned Robert

Hunter Morris in 1755 of the dangerous situation they were in with German Catholics living on the Pennsylvania frontier.244 In addition to Catholic slave conspiracies and a fear of strangers, there was the ever-present worry that the Catholic Stuart line would return to power. Those challengers for the throne led multiple attempts throughout the early eighteenth century to retake the throne, including those in 1708, 1715, 1719, 1721, 1743-44, 1745, and a scare in 1759.245

Maryland also experienced a scare after two men toasted the ‘Stuart Pretender’ in 1754.246 These fears of religious and civil tyranny were not part of a forgotten distant past, but were fresh in the minds of British subjects, particularly those in the American colonies who were old enough to remember. Those religious fears incited terror throughout the American colonies just as the

Stamp Act did in the summer of 1765.

242 Clark, Language of Liberty, 251. 243 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 117. 244 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 115. 245 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 262. 246 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 112. 70 While Mayhew and others feared a nefarious plot, other Real Whig Dissenters were less alarmed, but nevertheless defended religious and civil liberty. On May 29, just three weeks after

Mayhew preached Popish Idolatry, Andrew Eliot, a friend of both Mayhew and Hollis, went before the Massachusetts Governor, his council, and the House of Representatives and preached his election sermon.247 In his sermon, Eliot expounded on the value of representation and suffrage, explaining the obligations of rulers and subjects.

For rulers, Eliot started with a republican interpretation of the Old Testament showing that Saul and David were anointed by a special commission of God, but that they had not claimed authority from this anointing until they were elected by the people of Israel.248 He also heavily referenced John Locke’s argument that government arises from the disadvantages in the imperfect state of human nature, and that its purpose is to restrict unlimited freedom.249 Like other Real Whigs he also warned against a progressive loss of liberty by arguing that once change started being implemented in a constitution no one can discern where it will end.250 In reference to the current religious tension with the Anglican Church, Eliot called for Christian rulers to promote a freedom of conscience, virtue, and have a degree of disinterestedness. He also alluded to shared Christian familiarity when he suggested that a Christian ruler would always look out for the common good because his subjects were his brethren.251 This would have

247 Though it was not nearly as widely read throughout the British Empire, it found favor with Hollis. Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 November 1765, Hollis Papers. 248 Andrew Eliot, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard, Esq; Governor The Honorable His Majesty’s Council, And The Honorable House Of Representatives, Of The Province Of The Massachusetts-Bay in New England, May 29th 1765 (Boston, 1765), 6, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 249 Eliot, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard, 8. 250 Eliot, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard, 22. 251 Eliot, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard, 23, 25, 29. 71 seemed to be a subtle admonishment for Anglicans, since Dissenters of various denominations often saw each other as brethren while Anglicans treated Dissenters as religious ‘others.’252

As for subjects of the crown, Eliot explained the duties of obedience and the lawful ability to resist. He said that the Apostle Paul plainly taught that as soon as the government ceased to be an instrument for the good of the people, it could be lawfully resisted, and anyone who supported it would betray their country. While arguing that power lies in the people, he also reminded the people that rulers are capable of error and that resistance should only result from many abuses. In other words liberty should not be exploited to advocate rebellion.253

Furthermore, Eliot gave both the people and the government a similar piece of advice: remember. He reminded the Massachusetts government of the importance of memory when he said:

He cannot but be sensible how much the present times are affected by the transactions that are past, and the precedents that have been established…He [who] consults the good of distant generations, leaves as little as possible for them to correct, and as far as human wisdom can, lays his plans, not meerly to keep things quiet while he is on the stage, but that the happiness of his country may be of long duration, may be perpetual.254

Eliot was encouraging the government of Massachusetts to be cognizant of the power of memory because it was causing discord. He also exhorted the people to remember the struggles New

England had faced in the past.255 Although Eliot did not list specific historical instances, in a similar sermon by Ezra Stiles in 1764, Stiles mentioned Archbishop Laud’s attempt to recall

252 Wlliam Allen, a Presbyterian, prayed Jonathan Mayhew, a Congregationalist, would deliver the True Doctrines of Christianity. William Allen to Jonathan Mayhew, 12 March 1761, Mayhew Family Papers: Ezra Stiles showed how nearly all Protestants practice presbyterian ordination except the Church of England. Stiles, Christian Union, 35-36: East Apthorp compared the religious state of New England with that of Islam or Catholicism. Apthorp, Considerations, 14, 17: Mayhew said it appeared as if the Church of England was on a crusade. Mayhew, Observations, 48-49. 253 Eliot, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard, 42-43. 254 Eliot, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard, 16. 255 Eliot, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard, 54. 72 colonial charters in 1635, and the Stuart consolidation of New England in 1685.256 In both 1635 and 1685, the church and state of England were aggressively attempting conformity which mirrored the tyranny found in Catholic nations.

At the beginning of August, 1765, two months after Hollis informed him that he heard

Catholics were permitted to help govern Canada and three months after Mayhew preached

Popish Idolatry, Mayhew expressed his fears of the religious and political climate.257

Immediately before addressing the Stamp Act, Mayhew commended Catharine Macaulay’s second volume of her History of England that Hollis had sent. This specific volume covered resistance to Charles I and Archbishop Laud on bishops and ship money during the English Civil

War. Mayhew thought it was “written with a Spirit of Liberty, which might shame many great

Men (so called) in these days of degeneracy, and ty-r-nny, and oppression.” Concerning the

Stamp Act Mayhew then said,

These Measures appear to me extremely hard and injurious. If long persisted in, they will at best greatly cramp, and retard the population of, the Colonies, to the very essential detriment of the Mother country. And what may, in time, be the consequence of raising a general and great disaffection in the people of this large Continent, no one can certainly foresee. But you and I, Sir, are at least clear in this point, that no people are under a religious obligation to be slaves, if they are able to set themselves at liberty.258

Encouraged by a shared memory, Mayhew expected British leaders to see their errors the same way Real Whigs understood them. He pointed to a right of resistance, echoing the ideas of his sermon Unlimited Submission.

Though it was not directly referenced, the turmoil that inspired Mayhew to preach

Unlimited Submission (1750) was likely recalled by many Real Whig Dissenters in Boston in

256 Bell, War of Religion, 78. 257 Hollis to Mayhew, 24 June 1765, Hollis Papers. 258 Mayhew to Hollis, 8 August 1765, Hollis Papers. 73 1765. At twenty years prior, the Knowles Riot was the most recent incident in Boston that led to mass civil disobedience.259 In 1748, food prices were rising, there was economic stagnation, and imperial relations were strained when the formerly French possession of Louisbourg, which colonials sacrificed to obtain, was returned to the French. In an anonymous election pamphlet,

Quincius Cincinnatus cautioned that colonial rights were in danger, and that a loss of liberty was likely to occur under encroachments made under the “Colour of Prerogative.”260 As historian

Chris Beneke has aptly asserted, the anti-impressment riots in Boston in 1741, 1745, and 1747, the last known as the Knowles Riot, were the first acts of crowd violence directed at the imperial government since the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689). Thomas Hutchinson reported that thousands of people held Commodore Knowles’s sailors captive until he returned impressed sailors, but not before he threatened to bombard Boston.261 As a result Samuel Adams, Jonathan

Mayhew’s fellow Harvard graduate, wrote against the misuse of power before the press was silenced.262 Beneke also argued that had there only been civil disturbances between colonial loyalty and imperial protection this might have passed silently, but the Anglican Church was also advocating an American bishop. This religious disturbance incited a pamphlet war which

Mayhew entered with Unlimited Submission on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, viewed as a martyrdom by Anglicans.263 The turmoil in the 1760s was not new, it was another chapter in a saga of imperial jockeying of power that had also occurred in 1732 when the Massachusetts

259 Carl Bridenbaugh showed various problems in the mid-eighteenth century that occurred prior to 1760. There were various threats by the Crown, Parliament, and the Church of England to establish the Anglican Church in the Northern Colonies. Of the 3,500 American provincial troops that helped the British capture Cartagena in 1741 only ten percent returned, causing colonials to question British military abilities. New England troops rejoiced when they took Louisbourg in 1745, but giving it back to the French and Commodore Knowles’s impressment of sailors and threat to bombard Boston sullied colonial attitudes toward the British. Bridenbaugh, The Spirit of ’76, 92-96. 260 Beneke, “The Critical Turn,” 30. 261 Beneke, “The Critical Turn,” 32. 262 Beneke, “The Critical Turn,” 33-34. 263 Beneke, “The Critical Turn,” 35-36. 74 colonists prevailed against the king concerning a standing salary for their crown appointed governor.264

In a Lockeian argument for the power of the people, Mayhew complimented Parliament for resisting Charles I in Unlimited Submission. He said, “And who so proper to make this resistance as the lords and commons;—the whole representative body of the people;—guardians of the public welfare.”265 By 1765, Parliament presided over fiscal policy, but neither Mayhew, nor Hollis, nor the Real Whigs they were associated with saw Parliament as the true problem behind the Stamp Act. Parliament was undoubtedly corrupt, but according to Real Whigs the true threats were the young king and/or his advisors, particularly John Stuart, third Earl of Bute.

Through patronage the king still retained a large share of power in the 1760s.266 Mayhew said that “the whole British empire is in very deplorable Circumstances, and in imminent danger of coming into much worse, under the hands of such Operators, and a pensioned, bribed H[ouse] of

C[ommo]ns and H[ouse] of L[ords].”267 In response to Secker, Mayhew also said that the old cry

“no Bishop no King” had been in mighty efficacy in times past.268 Hollis himself turned down a seat in Parliament on multiple occasions to avoid bribery.269 Macaulay argued that a publicly funded debt and a professional army were the means by which crown patronage corrupted public life. Unlike the women of the next century, she never advocated for female suffrage or representation because she saw members of Parliament as puppets of successive ministries who could be bought with titles and honorifics.270 Mayhew, Hollis, and others in the British Empire

264 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 3. 265 Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 45. 266 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 272. 267 Mayhew to Hollis, 7 January 1766, Hollis Papers. 268 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 192: “no Bishop no King” was a phrase that James I said to deride Dissenters. 269 Bond, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn, 9; Thomas Hollis Diary, 25 December 1760, 17 January 1761, W.H. Bond Papers. 270 Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War,” 171, 189-190, 197. 75 were disturbed when the hero of the Seven Years War, William Pitt the Elder, accepted a pension from the King and then resigned, but not nearly as much as when he accepted the Earldom of

Chatham in 1766.271 Macaulay had such little faith in Pitt that she juxtaposed him and his wife to the heroes of the Ship Money case judge Crook and his wife, who instead of accepting a peerage and a ribbon, resolutely stood in resistance to King Charles I.272 James Wilson who worked under John Dickinson in Philadelphia thought that the crown was extending its prerogative over the rights of the people and those who received pensions or offices from the crown would concur with its wishes.273 Benjamin Franklin, also an acquaintance of Hollis and correspondent of

Mayhew, believed that the reason the royal negative (the king’s power to veto) had not been used in a century was because the king had no need to wield it.274 John Adams also had doubts that surpassed Parliament and questioned whether the tyranny associated with and feudal law was supported by George III’s ministry.275 These fears were not ungrounded since King George

III both supported the extension of the Anglican Church and the Stamp Act, though not as part of the same scheme.276 George III also imprisoned John Wilkes, a member of Hollis’s circle, for writing against him in the North Briton No. 45. With an uncharacteristically aggressive monarch determined to govern through loyal ministries and punish dissidents, it should not seem extraordinary that no one would directly attack the king regardless of their sentiments.277

271 Hollis noted that people in London were ignorant of Pitt’s motives. Thomas Hollis Diary, 10 October 1761, W.H. Bond Papers: Hollis told Mayhew that he wished he had not accepted the pension, especially at that time, and that the pension should not be considered a reward, but a as benevolence. Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 27 October 1761: Mayhew mentioned that the colonies were also saddened to learn of Pitt’s resignation. Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 6 April 1763, Hollis Papers: 272 In 1761, Pitt accepted a pension for himself and a peerage for his wife. Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War,” 189: Macaulay, The History of England, 226-227. 273 Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 103. 274 Nelson, Royalist Revolution, 199. 275 Adams, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, 34. 276 Lowe, “Archbishop Secker, the Bench of Bishops, and the Repeal of The Stamp Act,” 437: In a letter dated 1 August 1766, Thomas Secker told Henry Caner that King George III viewed Anglicans as his best loyal subjects. Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 20 October 1766, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 129-130. 277 Eyres, “The Invisible Pantheon,” 47-48. 76 However, it was because of seventeenth-century memory and the events leading to the Stamp

Act in the eighteenth-century, that caused Real Whig Dissenters to be sensitive to their liberties.

These Real Whig Dissenters were republicans after the seventeenth-century principles founded by the establishment of King William III, based on the constitution after the Glorious

Revolution, but they were also inspired by the republican experiment under Cromwell. Real

Whigs reconciled their principles with circumstance. Despite their calls for reform, they knew that their political situation was preferable to other nations in Europe and that their current government maintained republican characteristics that previous generations had sought. Though they sympathized with seventeenth century republicanism, Mayhew, Hollis, and others in their cohort still respected royal authority. While being a ‘commonwealthman’ who admired republicans such as Cromwell, John Milton, Algernon Sidney, and James Harrington, Hollis still prayed for the king.278 A respect for authority should not, however, be mistaken for ‘semi- deification’ of the king or neoabsolutism, as historian Brendan McConville has suggested, nor historian Eric Nelson’s “Patriot Royalism.”279 These Real Whigs were republicans who respected

278 Hollis Diary 9 November 1761, 6 February 1762, 12 August 1762, 4 June 1764, 4 June 1766, W.H. Bond Papers: Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 3. 279 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 218. In 2011, a debate occurred between historians Eric Nelson and Gordon Wood over American revolutionary ideology. Nelson argued that there was a rupture in ideology, that in the 1760s many Americans began as orthodox Whigs, but that during the 1770s they defended Stuart royalism before returning to Whig ideology in 1776. He said that in 1776 the patriots became disciples of James Harrington, John Milton, and Algernon Sidney, but not before taking instruction from James I and Charles I. Eric Nelson, “Patriot Royalism,” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 4 (October 2011): 537: Wood challenged this by arguing that colonists concluded in 1774 that there had to be a final authority and that parliament had no authority, they were connected to the empire solely through the king. According to Wood, most scholars disagree with Nelson’s argument that Americans argued for the dominion theory “by mounting an affirmative defense of the Stuarts against parliament.” Gordon Wood, “The Problem of Sovereignty,” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 4 (October 2011): 574-576: With patriots’ deep rooted ideology, it seems unlikely that after being raised in and defending it, that they would turn their back on it simply to turn about again: Nelson also overestimates Hume’s influence on America when he claims that Hume’s history was not “reviled and neglected in colonial America because it was understood to be tory.” Nelson, “Patriot Royalism,” 545: Mayhew, Otis, and Adams who are representative of the leading revolutionary ideology in New England favored Dissenters like Towgood, Harris, and Macaulay who all challenged Hume. Especially after the Stamp Act, Macaulay found favor in New England and continued to publish histories throughout the entire American Revolution clear up to American victory in the war. Hume, however, had published his last in 1761, two years before Macaulay published her first. 77 the republican establishment that resulted from the Glorious Revolution and were prepared to protect infringements to that constitution. To color respect for monarchy as royalism is to create an inaccurate portrayal of these historic figures. Painting revolutionary leaders such as John

Adams in a royalist tincture is an inaccurate portrayal of the republican men and women, like

Mayhew, Hollis, and Catharine Macaulay, who influenced their deep rooted ideologies. Adams was not only a republican, he was a republican influenced by seventeenth-century intellectuals like John Milton.280 The royalist portrayal considerably overlooks the transatlantic religious link that promoted republicanism. Patriots such as both John Hancock, Samuel Adams, James Otis,

Andrew Eliot, Jonathan Mayhew, and Charles Chauncy were baptized into Whig literature, regularly absorbed it from the pulpit, and were confirmed in their devotion by their transatlantic brethren.281 Like their ancestors, they continued to defend the memory of fallen heroes who stood resolute in their defense of liberty. Even in an era of revolutions, historic continuity was as important as radical change.

One of those baptized in the Real Whig philosophy that Mayhew encouraged in

Unlimited Submission was John Adams. Adams also resisted the perceived religious offensive established by the Stamp Act. The Bishop Controversy and the Stamp Act prompted him to publish articles in August, September, and October 1765, which Hollis then republished in

England under the title Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, had William Pitt read a week after he spoke against the Stamp Act in Parliament, and even requested an advertisement for it be inserted in the Boston Gazette.282 Hollis effectually disseminated seeds of liberty to America,

280 Tanner and Collings, “How Adams and Jefferson Read Milton and Milton Read Them,” 209, 213. 281 Stout also mentions that ministers read John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and James Harrington. Stout, New England Soul, 268: Bailyn alluded to Mayhew saying that he was indoctrinated in civil liberty by Algernon Sidney, John Milton, John Locke, and Benjamin Hoadly. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 45. 282 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 209: Thomas Hollis Diary, 21 November 1765, W.H. Bond Papers. 78 from which sprang Adams’s Dissertation, which he then spread throughout the British

Empire.283 The ideas in the Dissertation were so common in the colonies that Adams later remarked to Catharine Macaulay that he did not give them a title or a signature because they received little notice in Boston.284

In his diary Adams recorded that the Stamp Act was, “for battering down all the Rights and Liberties of America.”285 It must be remembered that for the exception of the Interregnum, when a republican government existed under Oliver Cromwell, freedom of speech in seventeenth century England was heavily restricted. This was an issue that Micaiah Towgood addressed in A

True Idea of the character and Reign of K. Charles the First, something Mayhew defended in his

“Indian Affair,” and something Adams and colonials feared.286 The Stamp Act was taxing the freedom of speech through newspapers, almanacs, and colleges; things that Adams saw as the defense against despotism both civil and ecclesiastic which were synonymous to the terms canon and feudal. The attack on colleges and education was not only an infraction that was relevant to

Harvard College and the Bishop Controversy, but something Macaulay saw as a foundation of tyranny. Adams also argued that education was a crucial defense against tyranny, something

New Englanders established when they founded Harvard College after migrating from the despotism of Charles I.287 The argument that the Stamp Act was an attack on free speech was not an unsupported polemic—in addition to the Wilkes case, instead of restricting the opposition in

283 Tanner and Collings, “How Adams and Jefferson Read Milton and Milton Read Them,” 210. 284 Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, 238. 285 Adams, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, 20: Green, Inventing a Christian America, 108. 286 Towgood, true idea of the character and reign of K. Charles the first, 72. 287 Macaulay attacked miseducation for tyranny and blamed contemporary political corruption on the public schools, universities, and the grand tour. Hicks, “Catherine Macaulay’s Civil War,” 183-184: After John Adams mentioned the development of New England colleges he even gave credit to for establishing his lecture right after he had listened to Mayhew in May, 1765. Adams, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, 26-28: Clark, Language of Liberty, 168. 79 1712 by issuing a new licensing act, the British government limited newspaper circulation through a stamp act.288

Like Mayhew, Adams formed his argument in his Dissertation based upon a memory of religious resistance that went back to the English Civil War.

The people grew more and more sensible of the wrong that was done them by these systems [canon and feudal law], more and more impatient under it, and determined at all hazards to rid themselves of it; till at last, under the execrable race of the Stuarts, the struggle between the people and the confederacy aforesaid of temporal and spiritual tyranny, became formidable, violent, and bloody.289

According to Adams, as seventeenth-century grew in understanding their rights, they resisted tyranny leading to civil war. Adams proposed that the Stamp Act was the first step toward enslavement. He argued that the act was stripping Americans of their knowledge by taxing items necessary for learning. Mayhew’s influence on Adams is evident at the conclusion of his pamphlet, where Adams stated, “The designs and labors of a certain society, to introduce the former of them [canon law] into America, have been well exposed to the public by a writer of great abilities.”290 That Adam’s solution followed the resistance rhetoric of Mayhew is paramount for understanding the Stamp Act as a religious threat. He called for two courses of action, “Let the colleges join their harmony in the same delightful concert [proclaiming liberty as a right]” and “Let the pulpit resound with the doctrines and sentiments of religious liberty.”291

Many prominent New England preachers followed Adams’ instructions and formed the first line of defense against perceived religious and civil tyranny. Men such as Connecticut’s

Stephen Johnson and Ezra Stiles, and prominent Bostonians including Mayhew, Andrew Eliot,

288 Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 247: Eyres, “The Invisible Pantheon,” 47-48. 289 Adams, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, 23. 290 Adams, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, 34. 291 Adams, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, 33 & 34. 80 Samuel Cooper, and Charles Chauncy were all active in and out of their pulpits. In an effort to keep the youth engaged in the defense of liberty Mayhew offered money to start a fund at

Harvard to reward a student from each class for exemplary performance in various subjects, the senior award was for the best speech on civil liberty.292 In 1765, Chauncy began promoting protests and encouraged action against the Stamp Act.293 Chauncy had an important role in creating the Sons of Liberty, which as historian Harry Stout pointed out, encouraged controlled active disobedience, not anarchy.294 Historian Brendan McConville agreed that well into the imperial crisis, the victims of violence were limited to those deeply involved in affronts to

British liberty.295 Other preachers also took part, such as Boston’s Samuel Cooper and

Connecticut’s Stephen Johnson.296 On December 18, 1765, Johnson preached on similarities between the colonists and Israel against the new Egyptian bondage of Britain, with Prime

Minister George Grenville as Pharaoh.297 The term the “Sons of Liberty” was not, however, just an American creation; the term was also employed in Great Britain. Dissenting minister and historian William Harris used it in a religious context in his 1762 biography of Cromwell. After discussing the benefit of abolishing bishops during the interregnum, and how Calvinists and

Lutherans could unite if ecclesiastical honors and preferments were abolished, Harris said,

“These were the sentiments of some of the sons of liberty in the age of which I am now speaking.”298 The term was also used in a 1766 London print celebrating the repeal of the Stamp

Act where some Anglican clergy were lambasted.299 Preachers utilizing the term “Sons of

292 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hubbard, 6 June 1765, Mayhew Family Papers. 293 Stout, New England Soul, 275, 271. 294 Stout, New England Soul, 271. 295 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 288. 296 Stout, New England Soul, 272: Byrd, Sacred Scripture, 30. 297 Byrd, Sacred Scripture, 30, 31. 298 Harris, The Life of Oliver Cromwell, 311. 299 Prime Minister, Lord Rockingham also commissioned a print that portrayed the ‘true SONS of LIBERTY’ as those parliamentarians who supported repeal of the Stamp Act. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale 81 Liberty” for those who opposed religious tyranny, and ministers leading such political organizations not only demonstrates how civil and religious tyranny were inextricably intertwined, but how the Sons of Liberty were ideologically linked across the Atlantic.

Violent Resistance

While May was an eventful month for declarations of colonial rights and ideological resistance, the colonies erupted in violent protest in the summer of 1765. This was not only fortuitous because this precedent would be followed throughout the 1760s and 1770s, but because French spies were present to witness the deterioration of imperial relations.300 Boston experienced the most violent resistance in August, but instead of Anglicans and Massachusets government officials blaming the worst acts of resistance on the Sons of Liberty, one man received the bulk of the blame—Jonathan Mayhew.

On August 27, 1765, Rhode Island protestors gathered in solidarity against apologists for the Stamp Act, Dr. Thomas Moffatt, Martin Howard Jr., and Rhode Island Stamp distributor

Augustus Johnson. These men hung in effigy, Moffatt’s effigy accused him of being a Jacobite and friend of John Stuart Earl of Bute. Howard’s caricature charged him with ambition and stated that his memory would be cursed by future generations. In addition, Rhode Island protestors made a song to go along with the protest, a song that ignited memories of sacrifice in the name of liberty.

He who for a post, or base sordid pelf his country betrays; makes a rope for himself, Of this an Example before you we bring. In these infamous rogues, who in Effigy swing

University. Benjamin Wilson, “The Repeal or the Funeral Procession of Miss Americ-Stamp,” print, (London, 1766) Catalogue of prints and drawings in the British Museum. Division I, political and personal satires / Frederick George Stephens, vol. 4, no. 4140. 300 Larrie D Ferreiro, Brothers at Arms. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 17. 82 Huzza my brave Boys! every man stand his ground. with Liberty’s praise, let the Welkin301 resound Eternal disgrace on those miscreants fall Who thro’ pride or for wealth would ruin us all.

Let us make wise resolves & to them stand strong your puffs & your vapors will never last long To maintain our just right every measure persue To our KING we’ll be loyal, to ourselves we’ll be true

Those blessings our Fathers obtained by their blood we are justly obliged to our own sons to make good All Internal Tax’s—let us then nobly spurn these effigies first—the next the stamp papers burn

Chorus Sing Tantarra302 Burn all Burn all—Sing Tantarra burn all.

New England was unwilling to relinquish hard fought freedoms without a war. There was also a warning that hung with the effigies that warned against taking them down before evening.

Religion was not absent in this display of protest, over Moffatt’s effigy hung a book with the

Devil hanging out of it. A note also hung in public which mirrored Andrew Eliot’s 1765 election sermon.

But he that suffers his rights and privileges to be taken from him by an Invader without resistance, is a Coward and a poltroon & deserves slavery without hope[.] He that’s born a true Briton is jealous of his liberty & takes noble & jealous alarms, when danger threatens the loss of it. He that is of a bad disposition hurts himself the most, but he that is a smiling Villain endangers a whole Society[.] He that prostitutes his liberty knows not the worth of it, but he who prostitutes that of the publick ought to be dealt with as an highwayman.303

According to Real Whig ideology true Britons would not passively become slaves they would resist, and in 1765 that meant targeting officials that would support the Stamp Act. The effigies were burnt that evening and the mob dispersed, but Rhode Island’s protests were not finished.

301 Sky or Heavens. 302 Tantara is short for the Latin taratantara a word that in ancient times evoked the sound of a war- trumpet. 303 Copy of a letter from Newport, 29 August 1765, Mayhew Family Papers. 83 On August 28, the mob mustered again attacking the homes of Moffatt, Howard, and Johnson, breaking windows, pictures, and furniture. This riot was not unique, it was influenced by similar events in Boston that occurred days earlier.304

On August 14, 1765, the first acts of physical resistance against the Stamp Act transpired in Boston. Andrew Oliver, the Stamp Officer was the first to experience backlash. Just as

Macaulay had represented the resistance to Ship Money, people spoke against, and even tried to intimidate the officers responsible for administering the tax.305 The Sons of Liberty hung

Oliver’s effigy (on what later became the Liberty Tree), and the sheriff acting on Hutchinson’s orders unsuccessfully tried to take it down. The crowd later decapitated it in front of Oliver’s home, and symbolically burned it on wood from the ruins of the stamp office.306 However, his effigy did not hang alone.307 Beside the effigy hung a boot, an attack on John Stuart third Earl of

Bute, and emerging from the boot was the Devil with his fork. The sole of the old boot was green, a pun on Green-Vile in reference to Prime Minister George Grenville. The next night, people approached Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion to question him about whether he approved of the Stamp Act, since many believed he did, but he fled and his house was unmolested.308 The correlation between the Stamp Act, the Earl of Bute, and the Devil are critical to conceptualizing the relationship between the Bishop Controversy and the Stamp Act.

Some referred to Grenville’s tax as the mark of the beast from the Book of .309 The tax was perceived by many Dissenters as a step towards religious persecution by causing turmoil in a

304 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 152. 305 Macaulay, The History of England, 207. 306 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 129, 138. 307 Stout, New England Soul, 270. 308 Mayhew to Hollis, 19 August 1765, Hollis Papers. Andrew Oliver was married to Mary Sanford, Thomas Hutchinson’s sister-in-law. Oliver, Origin and Progress, x-xi. 309 Clark, Language of Liberty, 261. 84 fairly tranquil empire, and undermining property rights, an integral part of British Protestantism and Whig philosophy.310

After the riot of August 14, Massachusetts Governor Bernard dashed off a letter to his superiors claiming that Mayhew supported the unrest, and just as Governor Shirley did in 1747,

Bernard fled to Castle William escaping the outbursts of August 26.311 Bostonian preacher

Andrew Eliot, a friend of both Mayhew and Hollis, explained that the people of Boston were careful to distinguish between the actions of August 14 and 26. In regards to the twenty-sixth

Eliot said that, “It was a scene of riot drunkenness profaneness and robbery.”312 That evening a mob attacked the homes of William Story, Deputy Register of the Vice-Admiralty Court, and

Ben Hallowell, Comptroller of Customs. The mob then turned on Deputy Governor Thomas

Hutchinson’s mansion where they destroyed windows, doors, furniture, wainscoting, paintings, and stole £900 in cash as well as clothing and silverware.313 Peter Oliver, Andrew Oliver’s brother, blamed Mayhew’s sermon of August 25 for the violence.

Few historians have given Mayhew’s sermon an adequate analysis. The two historians who have given it the fairest examination, Charles Akers and J.P. Mullins, have both neglected to examine fully the historiographical significance of the sermon’s inaccurate portrayal. The majority of historians have accepted the testimony of Thomas Hutchinson that he included in his

History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, or Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the

American Rebellion, both of which were politically opposed to Mayhew, Otis, and the Adams’ political thought.314 By selectively choosing only to mention part of the sermon’s scripture

310 Stanwood has maintained that the Protestant imperial vision depended on the defense of property rights. Stanwood, The Empire Reformed, 122. 311 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 205: Stout, New England Soul, 270: Beneke, “The Critical Turn,” 32. 312 Andrew Eliot to Hollis, 27 August 1767, Hollis Papers. 313 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 133. 314 All of Galatians 5:13 is omitted from the following texts. Frank Dean Gifford, “The Influence Of The Clergy on American Politics from 1763 to 1776.” Historical Magazine Of the Protestant Episcopal Church. vol. 10, no. 2 85 (Galatians 5:12-13), these writers framed Mayhew’s balanced sermon as an inflammatory vindication for the Stamp Act riots. While Hutchinson and Oliver are incorrect in their accounts, they show what moderate Whigs and Tories chose to believe or wanted to believe of a Real

Whig Dissenter who had been defending liberty and resisting a bishop for over a decade.

Except for Hutchinson, the opposition were exceedingly unfair in their assessments, sometimes entirely omitting the scripture for the sermon and basing everything on hearsay.

Looking back to 1765 in 1780, Peter Oliver said that Mayhew preached, “so seditious a Sermon, that some of his Auditors, who were of the Mob, declared, whilst the Doctor was delivering it they could scarce contain themselves from going out of the Assembly & beginning their

Work.”315 After mentioning how Dissenters preferred republican government, Henry Caner informed the Archbishop of Canterbury that Mayhew had distinguished himself in the pulpit by

“advising people to stand up for their rights to the last drop of their Blood.”316 The irony of the opposition is that the person who was least critical of Mayhew was Hutchinson. Though he was disturbed by the proceedings of August 26, he at least inserted a footnote mentioning most of the passage that Mayhew preached from, and noted that Mayhew apologized and claimed innocence.

Thomas Hutchinson said, “The verse which follows, ‘For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty only; use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh,’ if properly enforced, would have been

(June, 1941): 108: Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1974), 38: In addition to omitting verse thirteen, Stout and Byrd were unaware that the sermon still exists. For some reason Stout also referenced the wrong scripture, Galatians 1:7-9 instead of Galatians 5:12-13, which none of the other historians mentioned. Stout, New England Soul, 270-271: Byrd, Sacred Scripture, 29. Part of Galatians 5:13 is mentioned by Jonathan Clark. Clark only mentioned “for, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty.” Clark, Language of Liberty, 367: The only references to the sermon that mention the complete passage were J.P. Mullins and Charles Akers. Akers gave the entirety of both verses, but reminded the reader that it would have been more important about how it was said than what was said. Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 202: While Mullins did not delve into this matter specifically, he provided an exemplary argument about why this sermon should not be held responsible for the riot. J.P. Mullins, “The Sermon That Didn’t Start The Revolution: Jonathan Mayhew’s Role in the Boston Stamp Act Riots,” in Community Without Consent New Perspectives on the Stamp Act edited by Zachary Mcleod Hutchins (New Hamprshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2016), 13. 315 Peter Oliver, Origin and Progress, 44. 316 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 5 September 1765, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 123-124. 86 sufficient to have kept the people within bounds.” However, allegedly one of the rioters who was imprisoned said that Mayhew’s sermon excited him, and that he thought it was God’s work.317

On August 25, Mayhew preached on Galatians 5:12-13, against dangers posed to New

England’s liberties.

12 I would they were even cut off which trouble you. 13 For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.318

Though what we know of Mayhew’s sermon comes from him after he was accused of inciting the riot, and must be examined with a degree of skepticism, it is nevertheless a sermon in

Mayhew’s , and it should be accepted as the closest source to the truth. Mayhew historically acted based on his conscience and likely acted no differently in this instance.319

While this was a political sermon preached when political tempers were inflamed,

Mayhew was likely balanced in his approach to resistance and obedience, neither inciting riots, nor advocating Anglican passivity. Mayhew reminded his affluent congregation of Real Whig principles arguing that men entered civil society for the common good and mutual security, and as such gave up some of their natural liberties. He also asserted that regardless of the number of rulers, civil liberty rested in representation. With reference to the Sugar and Stamp Acts,

Mayhew alluded to colonial slavery saying, “For if they are to profess, no property, nor to enjoy the spirits of their own labor, but by mere precarious pleasure of the mother, or of a distant legislature in which they neither are, nor can be represented; this is really slavery, not civil liberty.” In reference to all those who contested the arbitrary rules of Charles I and James II,

317 Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (London, 1828), 123, accessed on 17 May 2018. https://books.google.com/books?id=E5lbswEACAAJ&q=Mayhew#v=snippet&q=Mayhew&f=false. 318 Gal 5:12-13 (King James Version) 319 Going against one’s conscience, which was a , was not only addressed in the chapter proceeding the Apostle Paul’s address for obeying government in Romans 13, but Mayhew argued in this sermon that in addition to avoiding the wrath of the government, conscience was a reason to be obedient. Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hutchinson, 25 August 1765, Mayhew Family Papers. 87 Mayhew bracketed material to argue that his argument was agreeable to the “most approved

English writers on liberty before as well as since the [Glorious] Revolution.” At the conclusion of his sermon he even reminded his auditors that the doctrine of resistance was not prohibited by using liberty as an “occasion for the flesh.” According to Mayhew, it was always just to resist continual injustice and tyranny, but he also countered resistance with responsibility.

Mayhew also warned against using liberty “for an occasion to the flesh.” Mayhew warned his congregants that it was not their role to recompense those who persecute God’s people, that fell under God’s purview. He also used Romans 13:2 to argue that disobeying lawful government could lead to damnation.320 Just as he had done in Unlimited Submission (1750), in this sermon he also maintained that liberty should not be used as a means for licentiousness.321

By referencing the period in Israel’s history when it was continually plagued with internal strife,

Mayhew told his congregation that people cannot enjoy civil liberty if each of them did what was right in their own eyes.322 He also cautioned against licentiousness by ignoring the law of God, which was a particular issue in Massachusetts during the Antinomian Controversy in the seventeenth century with , a distant relative of Thomas Hutchinson.

Despite supporting resistance to arbitrary government, Andrew Eliot denied Mayhew’s involvement and Mayhew not only gave a public letter of apology, but also preached the following Sunday against the riot of August 26, ostracizing himself from some “friends of liberty.”323 As Mullins, has recently argued, there is little reason to suspect that Mayhew actually intended the events of August 26, or that his congregation had much of a role at all. It would not

320 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hutchinson, 25 August 1765, Mayhew Family Papers. 321 In 1750, Mayhew said “Let us prize our freedom; but not use our liberty for a cloke of maliciousness.” Mayhew, Unlimited Submission, 55: Not using liberty as a means of licentiousness was also prevalent amongst Presbyterian congregations in New York City and Philadelphia. Clark, Language of Liberty, 357. 322 Mayhew is referencing the period covered in the Book of Judges before Israel had a strong central government. 323 Andrew Eliot to Hollis, 27 Aug 1767, Hollis Papers: Stout, New England Soul, 271: Mullins, “Jonathan Mayhew’s Role in the Boston Stamp Act Riots,” 13. 88 be unlikely that the purpose of destroying the mansion of Thomas Hutchinson was for the Stamp

Papers because colonists in both Rhode Island and South Carolina also seized and destroyed their papers.324 However, the claim of Mayhew’s responsibility not only shows his prominence and the heightened sensitivity of religious rights as a result of the Bishop Controversy, but that the

Stamp Act was interpreted through a religious lens and was as Adams said, amongst “not only of the enquiring mind but of the common people.”325

Unlike Real Whig Dissenters who advocated rights at a time of heightened sensitivity to tyranny, Anglicans encouraged strict obedience to government. Just as the Dissenters lost one of their leaders Professor Edward Wigglesworth (b. 1693) in late 1764, in the summer of 1765 the

American Anglicans suffered the loss of Doctor Timothy Cutler (b. 1684), rector of Christ

Church in Boston. Cutler was Wigglesworth’s antithesis not only because of his age and living memory, but because he was one of the “Yale Apostates” and former president or rector of Yale

College before his conversion to the Church of England. On August 20, 1765, Henry Caner took the funeral as an opportunity to advocate what the Anglican missionaries preached during the

Stamp Act—passive obedience.326 In The firm Belief of a future Reward a powerful Motive to

Obedience and a good life, Caner challenged the Dissenter’s Real Whig principles of Mayhew’s

Unlimited Submission. He asserted that in Hebrews 11 the author encouraged Christians under

324 Bridenbaugh, The Spirit of ’76, 126-127: Copy of a letter from Newport, 29 August 1765, Mayhew Family Papers. 325 John Adams to Jedidiah Morse, 2 Dec 1815, letter, Founders Online: Green, Inventing a Christian America, 108: Kidd, God of Liberty, 59. 326 Anglican missionaries informed the secretary of the SPG that they were keeping their congregants from the civil disorders that accompanied the Stamp Act. Henry Caner informed Archbishop Secker that those in the Church of England detested the violent proceedings in Boston. Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 5 September 1765, in Letter- book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 123-124: Ebenezer Thompson reported that he had spread the doctrines of the Church of England and prevented his flock from the recent disorders. Ebenezer Thompson to Secretary, SPG, 25 March 1766: Joshua Weeks commented on the violence that permeated all around Marblehead, Massachusetts, but that it was moderate and gave testimony against the tumultuous climate. Joshua Wingate Weeks to Secretary, SPG, 20 June 1766: Edward Winslow lamented the discord the Stamp Act caused and encouraged loyalty. Edward Winslow to Secretary, SPG, 8 January 1766, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 521-522. 89 afflictions and showed examples of people undergoing persecution for their faith who joyfully laid down their lives in the expectation of a glorious reward from God.327 Despite personally disliking the Stamp Act, Caner supported obedience.328 Caner even went so far as to share this sermon with Mayhew after conceding that the Bishop Controversy had been protracted for too long.329

Caner was not the only one who thought that the Bishop Controversy should not be prolonged; both Mayhew and Hollis thought its prosecution should be eased. Right before the

August riots in Boston, Mayhew told Hollis that his friends had advised him not to answer

Apthorp because it was a poor performance, to which Hollis agreed.330 While Mayhew had hinted at letting the Bishop Controversy burn out, after the riots Mayhew was fully confident that he was obligated to stop. Mayhew told Hollis that he did not want to contribute to the Bishop

Controversy while the colonies were violently inflamed towards Parliament, which disappointed

Dissenters in Great Britain.331

Shortly after expressing his decision to avoid writing on the Bishop Controversy,

Mayhew confided his fears and anxieties in Hollis. He said,

You can hardly conceive how the minds of the people in the colonies are inflamed by the late Parliamentary regulations, particularly the Stamp-Act. The violent Measures which have been taken already in most of them, to make the Stamp- Officers resign their posts, and many other things, confirm me in the opinion which I intimated to you in the last, That this Act will never be carried into execution, without the effusion of much blood: For it is the general voice of the

327 Henry Caner, The firm Belief of a future Reward a powerful Motive to Obedience and a good life A Sermon Preached at Christ Church in Boston August 20, 1765. At the Funeral of the Rev. Timothy Cutler, D.D. Late Rector of Said Church. (Boston, 1765), 5, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 328 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 5 September 1765, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 123-124. 329 Henry Caner to Jonathan Mayhew, Date Unknown, Mayhew Family Papers: This letter appears to have been sent in August or September of 1765 because Caner informed Samuel Johnson that they were exchanging friendly letters. Henry Caner to Samuel Johnson, 6 September 1765. 330 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 8 August 1765, Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 19 September 1765, Hollis Papers. 331 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 26 September 1765: Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 November 1765, Hollis Papers. 90 people, that they had rather die by the sword, than submit to such slavery as they conceive they shall be under, by submitting to such a kind of taxation.332

Mayhew thought he could no longer contribute to the Bishop Controversy, because by doing so he might fan the flame of civil war.333 This not only shows that Mayhew understood the Stamp

Act to be partially religious, but that the Bishop Controversy could incite further violent outbreaks. Mayhew was not alone in his fears of violent unrest. Hollis was also fearful for the state of the empire. He noted a Dutch medal that pictured two vases floating and the inscription which read “Frangimur si collidimur” (If we clash, we break) the idea being that the vases would sink to their ruin.334 Hollis also inserted this reference to the Dutch medal into the London

Chronicle during Parliament’s debates on the Stamp Act, from the later part of 1765 through the beginning of 1766.335 As Hollis told Mayhew, all his “little Energies” were being exerted to fix the relationship between Britannia and her colonies.336 Joseph Warren, brother-in-law of James

Otis and friend of John Hancock and John and Samuel Adams, feared that the Stamp Act was intended to force the Americans into rebellion so that military force could reduce them to servitude.337 Connecticut divine Ezra Stiles worried that the Stamp Act would turn the American colonies into another exploited territory like Bengal.338

Tensions heightened in October of 1765 over the illegal Stamp Act Congress where nine colonies met to jointly express their grievances with a letter to the imperial government.339

332 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 26 September 1765, Hollis Papers. 333 Morgan has shown how the Sons of Liberty established intercolonial connections for mutual defense. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 209-211. 334 Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 November 1765, Hollis Papers. 335 Morgan, The Stamp Act, 281: Hollis included this excerpt in his letter to Mayhew. Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 November 1765, Hollis Papers: Thomas Hollis Diary, 18 November 1765, W.H. Bond Papers. 336 Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 November 1765, Hollis Papers. 337 Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 101. 338 Jane Merritt, The Trouble With Tea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 62. 339 Kidd, God of Liberty, 15: Stout, New England Soul, 272. 91 Rumors circulated in Boston that British General Gage had seized the firearms in New York

City, and occupied the castle with three months’ provisions. The nefarious attack on English rights to self-defense was a right James Otis advocated as part of the absolute liberties of

Englishmen.340 Despite this simply being a rumor, it intimated that there was going to be armed conflict, that New York would be forcefully occupied and coerced into obedience. Mayhew explained he was privately and publicly explaining the danger that followed forcible, riotous, and illegal proceedings, because the colonies could not contend with Great Britain at that point.

However, he explained that the greater part of the people were willing to run the hazards.341 The only comfort that Hollis could offer Mayhew was the prospect of William Pitt the Elder returning to government.342

After six months, Mayhew continued to report rising apprehension in January 1766, and stated that “I am daily more and more confirmed in my opinion, that the said [Stamp] act will never be received without much blood-shed.”343 It is likely that part of what he was referencing was the increased passions that raged during the annual Pope’s Day celebrations in Boston on

November 5, 1765, only four days after the Stamp Act went into effect, an untimely error.344

This was one of the first three imperial holidays, and the only one not pertaining directly to the monarch.345 Typically, Pope’s Day was in memory of Protestantism’s triumph over the Guy

Fawkes Plot to detonate explosives under James I and Parliament, and the triumph of William III over James II. Pope’s Day in Boston usually witnessed a battle between two factions with stones

340 Otis, A Vindication of the British Colonies, 8. 341 Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 1 October 1765, Hollis Papers. 342 Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 18 November 1765, Hollis Papers. 343 Mayhew to Hollis, 7 January 1766, Hollis Papers. 344 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 137. 345 The other two holidays were the monarch’s birthday and coronation day. McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 64. 92 and barrel staves.346 In 1765, the normal ceremony was supplanted by the North and South End confraternities joining forces to protest the Stamp Act. Even as far south as Savannah, Georgia, a mock stamp collector was paraded through the streets with a rope around his neck.347 Pope’s Day created a ceremony in which enquiring minds and the common people could express their pride of Protestantism and disgust of popery and tyranny in unity. Pope’s Day in 1765 highlights the religious interpretation of the Stamp Act because the stamp collector effigies were placed on the same cart as the Pope and Stuart Pretender.

Repeal

It was an imperial effort to obtain the Stamp Act’s repeal; people on both sides of the

Atlantic voiced their frustrations. Since the colonial issue with the Stamp Act was ideologically based on internal instead of external taxes, Benjamin Franklin met with Charles Watson-

Wentworth, second Marquess of Rockingham in December, 1765, and suggested that paper currency be taxed as a means of raising revenue instead of the Stamp Act.348 However, Hollis had already privately met with him on October 23, 1765, to enlighten him of colonial discontent.

Hollis shared a letter from Mayhew that no longer exists, but likely included news of the actions of August, which would have recently arrived. Though Hollis noted the great civility with which

Rockingham received him, Rockingham did not seem to take seriously the threat of losing the

Northern Colonies. Hollis instead took solace in the power and influence of his friend William

Pitt. His comfort was not misguided. On February 11, 1766, he received intelligence from John

346 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 127. 347 McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 301-302. 348 On Benjamin Franklin meeting with Rockingham. McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 240. 93 James Perceval, third Earl of Egmont, that the Stamp Act would be repealed and Pitt appointed

Secretary of State.349

On January 14, 1766, William Pitt the Elder gave his speech against the Stamp Act to the

House of Commons. In it, he mirrored the Real Whig principles that Otis advocated, defended the colonies, and called for an immediate repeal of the Stamp Act because it was based on erroneous principles. Unlike colonials separated by the Atlantic Ocean, Pitt explained that virtual representation was viable in Great Britain because people in non-represented districts still had the ability to influence those who had suffrage. Pitt also asserted that the British Empire’s health was contingent on America, and said, “America, if she fell, would fall like a strong man. She would embrace the pillars of the state, and pull down the constitution along with her.” Like Otis, he also maintained the difference between internal and external taxes, and advocated that

Parliament, “bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power whatsoever - except that of taking money out of their pockets without their consent.”350 Pitt was not alone to advocate repeal; contrary to colonial fears, the colonies had an unlikely ally in their fight for repeal—Archbishop Thomas Secker.

In the House of Lords, Secker and Rockingham both moved in opposition to the Stamp

Act. While Rockingham opposed the Stamp Act for principles akin to Pitt, Secker opposed for other reasons. During the Bishop Controversy from 1762-1765, Secker remained silent in

Parliament.351 He was inconspicuously waiting for an opportune time to attempt what all of his successors failed to do—obtain a colonial episcopate.352 Even before Caner pled that it would be

349 Thomas Hollis Diary, 11 February 1766, W.H. Bond Papers. 350 Pitt, Speech against the Stamp Act (1766). 351 Lowe, “Archbishop Secker,” 432. 352 Thomas Secker explained that the time was not right in 1762. Thomas Secker to Henry Caner, 6 October 1762, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 474-476: Caner agreed to Secker’s demands to avoid overt opposition to the Dissenters in America. Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 7 January 1763, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 117: Secker expressed his apprehension that the civil government would assist in obtaining a 94 a mistake to send a bishop with colonial tempers raging, Secker decided to placate colonial relations before renewing his plans for a prelate.353 In March, 1766, Secker and Rockingham succeeded in obtaining a favorable proxy vote of 105-71 in the House of Lords with, and 250-

122 in the House of Commons.354

This momentous occasion brought about a popular political print by Benjamin Wilson,

“The Repeal or the Funeral Procession, of Miss Americ-Stamp,” on the day of the repeal March

18, 1766.355 Though originally printed in London, this image favored a Real Whig Dissenter interpretation of the Stamp Act similar to that which Pitt presented to Parliament two months prior. First, the Whigs are well represented with the three ships representing Henry Seymour

Conway, Lord Rockingham, and Augustus Henry Fitzroy, the Duke of Grafton, as well as a tribute to Pitt. Behind the bishops there is a statue of Pitt being loaded on the boat for America that has the number of those who voted for repeal in the House of Commons.

Most of the ideological value of this print is based on memories of Stuart tyranny. On the left is the family vault of English tyranny, abuses that “Lie Interred, it is hoped never to rise again.” Of these various abuses of power are the Star Chamber Court and Ship Money of Charles

I. Though it was not passed under the Stuarts, King Henry IV’s Act de Haeretico Comburendo, which punished heretics (in other words, Dissenters) was pertinent to contemporary religious fears. The vault is shadowed by two skulls with the dates of two Jacobite rebellions 1715 and

1745. This adds to the interpretation that was prevalent in the Stamp Act Riots and Pope’s Day,

colonial bishop. Thomas Secker to Henry Caner, 30 March 1763, Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 494-496. 353 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 23 December 1765, Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 125: Caner was not the only one to advocate holding off on pushing for a colonial bishop. SPG missionary Charles Martin of South Carolina warned the Bishop of London in October 1765 that presenting a bishop is as dangerous as presenting a distributor of stamps, that most colonists were independent in matters of religion, and Republican in matters of government. Bridenbaugh, Spirit of ’76, 119. 354 Lowe, “Archbishop Secker,” 440. 355 Benjamin Wilson, “The Repeal or the Funeral Procession, of Miss Americ-Stamp.” 95 that the Stamp Act supported tyranny akin to the Stuart or even further that the Stamp

Act was another plot by Catholic Jacobite sympathizers to undermine the Protestant Hanoverian line.

Pictured from left to right: Anglican Clergyman James Scott, Alexander Wedderburn, Fletcher Norton, George Grenville, Prime Minister (1763-1765), John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, Prime Minister (1760-1763), John Russell, fourth Duke of Bedford, Richard Grenville, second Earl Temple, George Montagu-Dunk, second Earl of Halifax, John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, , , and William Warburton, .

The image also exhibited the presence of colonial fears. The numbers on the two boats loading goods to be shipped to America are juxtaposed to the numbers on the flags carried by the statesmen in the funeral procession, both the houses’ votes for and against repeal. Under the print it says that the numbers 250 and 105 “will ever be held in esteem by the SONS of LIBERTY.”

The image did not condemn the violence that occurred throughout the colonies, it justified it just

96 as Pitt did, on the basis that the Stamp Act was unjust and tyrannical. Just as the image communicated, in his speech on repeal Pitt went as far as to say, “America is almost in open rebellion. I rejoice that America has resisted.”356 The funeral procession which started with

Anglican clergyman James Scott followed by stately men such as the previous Prime Minister

George Grenville and Lord Bute, ended with Dr. William Warburton Bishop of Gloucester and

Dr. Thomas Newton Bishop of Bristol, both of whom resisted repeal. Close behind the bishops, is a box labeled “Black Cloth return’d from America,” a jibe at the cassocks that bishops wore in reference to the Bishop Controversy.357 Despite Secker’s assistance in repeal, Real Whig colonists, especially the undereducated, would have viewed the Rockingham Administration as sympathetic to all their grievances. This was intended since the print was commissioned by

Rockingham himself, showing that the leader of Parliament fully recognized the memory-based religious significance of the Stamp Act. Not only did it appear that the ministry in London was sympathetic, but once again the colonists had succeeded in defeating their opponents in the empire.

Though Archbishop Secker emerged out of parliamentary seclusion to advocate repeal,

Anglicans were not universally content with Parliament’s proceedings. The Bishops Warburton and Newton were not alone in resisting repeal, American Anglicans needed civil power to help them obtain a bishop in the colonies. If Real Whig Dissenters could acquire a political victory with the Stamp Act, then the Anglicans had little hope that Parliament would grant a Bishop.

356 Pitt, Speech against the Stamp Act: This particular statement enraged colonials like Peter Oliver who viewed the Rockingham Whigs as condoning the violence and rioting. Oliver, Origin and Progress, 55. 357 The Bishop Controversy would have also resonated with Warburton’s presence since colonial Dissenter and Bishop Controversy veteran Noah Hobart thought Warburton was writing against Mayhew. Noah Hobart to Jonathan Mayhew, 17 April 1764, Mayhew Family Papers. 97 After learning of repeal, Henry Caner feared the repeal would not be met with gratitude and that popular leaders maintained a riotous disposition amongst the people.358 Edward Winslow said,

It is, Sir, from strong inclinations as well as a sense of incumbent Duty, that I shall endeavor, at this juncture, to remind the people of my Charge of those obligations we in these Colonies are under, suitably to acknowledge & gratefully to resent the Grace and lenity of His Majesty and the parliament, in the Repeal of the Stamp Act, notwithstanding so much unbecoming behavior on our parts.359

American Anglicans who lived among and challenged the hegemony of Dissenters in

Massachusetts were frustrated that the King and Parliament would condescend to the level of colonials and capitulate to their demands.

Upon learning of repeal, Dissenters in Great Britain gave Mayhew political capital and congratulated him and America on the obstinate spirit that led to repeal. Micaiah Towgood congratulated Mayhew and their fellow Britons in America on their resistance and tied it to the

Bishop Controversy. He suggested that their resistance to a colonial bishop may have hastened the tax, and that if that “Order of Men” were established in the colonies Mayhew would have found, not only the saddle fixed, but riders mounted. Towgood was alluding to the stress

Dissenters were under in Great Britain and rejoicing that those in America had escaped it. He went on to suggest that America would become a great empire where civil and religious liberty would be enjoyed more fully than anywhere on that side of the Atlantic. However, he also called for the colonies to help with paying British debt.360 William Harris also gave political capital to

Mayhew and the Americans. After presenting more books for Harvard, William Harris said, “I sincerely congratulate you on the Repeal of your Stamp Act,” and said the repeal brought

358 Henry Caner to Thomas Secker, 15 May 1766, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 126-127. 359 Edward Winslow to Secretary, SPG, 1 July 1766, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 525. 360 Micaiah Towgood to Jonathan Mayhew, 6 April 1766, Mayhew Family Papers. 98 satisfaction in Britain.361 Hollis also wrote to Mayhew telling him to rejoice in the repeal; that he had done his part, but that the man who was truly responsible was William Pitt.362

By the time Hollis’s letter reached Boston, Mayhew had already paid tribute to William

Pitt. On May 23, 1766, Mayhew preached and later published his occasional sermon The Snare

Broken, which showed the religious significance of the Stamp Act. This sermon opens with

Psalms 124:7-8,

7 Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. 8 Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.363

Like others, Mayhew viewed the Stamp Act as a way of weakening not only God’s chosen

Covenant People (American Colonies), but Britain, which had fought off the enemy of

Protestants, the Roman Catholic Church.364 The fowlers were the Houses of Bourbon (France) and the Pretender (Stuart challenger for the throne) who tried to cause “an open rupture between

Great Britain and her colonies!”365 Mayhew explained that the Stamp Act incited multiple fears, but that among them was the financial support for an army of Anglican bishops. He said,

And so some suspected, that this money was partly intended to maintain a standing army of bishops, and other ecclesiastics, to propagate the importance of certain rites and ceremonies, to which they had an aversion; the divine right of diocesan episcopacy and tythes, with many et caetara's of the like sacred and interesting importance.366

At the end of his sermon, Mayhew encouraged his congregation to forgive and return to life as it was before the Stamp Act. However, he also encouraged them to be wakeful in their defense of liberty and left them with one important reminder: Obsta Principiis.367 This maxim returned to

361 William Harris to Jonathan Mayhew, 15 May 1766, Mayhew Family Papers. 362 Thomas Hollis to Jonathan Mayhew, 8 May 1766, Hollis Papers. 363 Psalms 124:7-8 (King James Version): Mayhew, Snare Broken, 1. 364 Mayhew, Snare Broken, 1-2. 365 Mayhew, Snare Broken, 9. 366 Mayhew, Snare Broken, 19 367 Mayhew, Snare Broken, 34, 41. 99 the idea that Mayhew had encouraged in his Second Defence—stay vigilant and resist progressive advances against civil and religious liberty, because that was how tyranny grew during the seventeenth century.

That this sermon went through multiple editions in three months and was read throughout the Empire from Boston to Virginia and in the Mother Country highlights the popularity of its sentiments with Real Whigs throughout the empire.368 Like Hollis, Mayhew saw the Stamp Act as another Pretender Plot to return the Stuart line to the throne, put forward under the influence of John Stuart the Earl of Bute. This was the same kind of conspiratorial ideology that historian

Bernard Bailyn argued was not merely rhetorical, but sincere. The Cromwellian spirit that

Mayhew allegedly had was shared by Presbyterians in Pennsylvania led by Chief Justice William

Allen. New Jersey Governor William Franklin reported that Pennsylvania Presbyterians insinuated that he was giving people doses of “Poppies and Laudanum,” a reference to popery and Archbishop Laud.369 Presbyterians in Philadelphia also allegedly cried out “No King but

King Jesus.”370 This same phrase was used by against Charles I in the English

Civil War. Whether Presbyterians actually shouted that phrase or not, English Civil War rhetoric was being invoked on both sides to understand the situation.

As the general colonial climate settled after the repeal of the Stamp Act, both Anglicans and Dissenters anticipated future threats. In June, 1766, Anglicans held a convention and

Congregationalists came together for an ecclesiastical council. Fourteen of the American

Anglican clergy met in Boston on the King’s birthday, June 4, 1766, which they celebrated with public service. Shortly after the August riots, the idea for this convention originated at Timothy

368 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 212. 369 Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 197-198. 370 Clark, Language of Liberty, 261: Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 265-266: Kidd, God of Liberty, 33. 100 Cutler’s funeral, but required Richard Terrick the Bishop of London’s approbation, which Caner received in February, 1766. Though this convention was of recent design, Caner proposed this idea as a tertiary option in 1760, if a bishop was unobtainable. Caner said it was necessary to hold an annual convention to support each other “till such time as Bishops may be appointed for

America.” Anglican missionary William McGilchrist informed the Secretary that they “made something of an appearance for this Country, when we walked together in our Gowns and

Cassocks,” and that the Governor joined them for dinner.371 In an atmosphere of heightened sensitivity to rights and a terror of church and state collusion, a group of priestly clergy, and especially a group of clergy accompanied by the Governor would have caused “something of an appearance.”

Anglican clergy were not alone in their apprehensions of the future, even after jubilees of the Stamp Act’s repeal, Real Whig Dissenters remained vigilant in their defense of liberty. Two weeks after the Anglican convention, the Congregationalists held an ecclesiastical council to admonish one of their pastors for abusing his power. On June 8, 1766, the morning before

Mayhew left to attend the church meeting, he sent a letter to James Otis suggesting an idea that he wanted Otis to put before the lower House of Massachusetts before it dissolved. Realizing that the colonies needed to keep each other informed, as Mayhew prepared to depart for this church council he suggested there be a ‘Communion of Colonies’ like the communion of churches, what later became committees of correspondence. The first conceptualization of the committees of correspondence that Otis later suggested, had its origins in church practice. Not only did the

371 Henry Caner to Richard Terrick, 10 September 1765, 3 February 1766, 30 June 1766, in Letter-book of the Rev. Henry Caner, 124-125, 127: Henry Caner to Secretary, SPG, 8 December 1760, William McGilchrist to Secretary, SPG, 27 June 1766, in Papers Relating to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 462-463, 524. 101 Stamp Act cause fears about religious tyranny, but civil tyranny was fought based on religious practices.372

When Mayhew suggested this he had a new reason to fear: only a few days earlier,

Governor Bernard suggested that the provincial council be stocked with crown appointees instead of elected by the colonial house of representatives. While it is unclear what specifically sparked this revelation, the advisory council convicted Reverend Thomas Frink of arbitrarily abusing his pastoral power, and even preventing members of his congregation from voting.373

Mayhew warned Otis that,

It is not safe for the colonies to sleep since they will probably always have some wakeful enemies in Britain; & if they should be such children as to do so, I hope there are at least some persons too much of men, & friends to them, to rock the cradle, or sing lullabie to them.374

Even when tensions were lessening, these Real Whig Dissenters reminded each other to stay vigilant—because liberties would not be taken all at once, but chipped away progressively.

372 Mullins, Father of Liberty, 174-176. 373 Mayhew, Proceedings “An Ecclesiastical Council Consisting of Five Churches,” 18 June 1766, Mayhew Family Papers. 374 Jonathan Mayhew to James Otis, 8 June 1766: The issue of colonies sleeping while being robbed of their liberties also appeared in a letter to Mayhew from William Allen concerning the West India Islands who did nothing about Parliament’s measures. He informed Mayhew, “I was answered by a considerable one among them, that they durst not stir, for Mr. Greenvile had promised them nothing should be done against the Southern Colony but they should be incouraged by the intended act, if they would not oppose his measures.” William Allen to Jonathan Mayhew, 15 October 1764, Mayhew Family Papers: Mayhew’s suggestion to Otis has been noted by Gifford, Akers, Clark, and Mullins, but none have speculated at why Mayhew was inspired by the ecclesiastical council to suggest committees of correspondence. Gifford only briefly mentioned Mayhew’s letter to Otis. Gifford, “The Influence Of The Clergy on American Politics,” 111: Bridenbaugh argued that this communication device had been perfected overtime and invented by the nonconforming clergy. When the colonial opposition, which included many Dissenting ministers, organized it did not indulge in a miraculous improvisation, but the tried-and-proved ecclesiastical organization. Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, 203-204: Akers did not look at Committees of Correspondence, but at the significance of Mayhew’s vigilance to stay alert to future threats. Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 219: Clark mentioned it only in passing and without detail. Clark, Language of Liberty, 368: Though he did not go far enough, JP Mullins does adequately assert that Mayhew was always vigilant to promote Obsta Principiis as a means to avoid mob violence and armed resistance. Mullins, Father of Liberty, 176. 102 Conclusion

In Boston, the 1767 almanac (printed in 1766), conferred the thoughts of Real Whigs like

John Adams, Macaulay, and Mayhew on the public. By calling for an improvement in the arts and sciences, it referenced the ignorance that results from tyranny and oppression. It encouraged those in Massachusetts to strengthen their defense against tyranny, arguing that the Pope used to be tyrant of Europe, he made Britons pray in Latin, and prevented them from reading the Bible.

The almanac went on to say,

Let us then, my countrymen, study not only religion but politicks and the nature of civil government; become politicians every one of us; take upon us to examine everything, and think for ourselves; striving to prevent the execution of that detestable maxim of European policy amongst us, viz That the common people, who are three quarters of the world must be kept in ignorance, that they may be slaves to the other quarter who live in magnificence.375

Even those who had no connection to Mayhew or others were culturally encouraged to maintain a defense of their liberties down to the very least. This sensitivity to civil and religious liberty set the stage for the next round of Parliamentary taxes and the reinvigoration of the Bishop

Controversy by the Anglicans in America.376

During the Stamp Act, the American colonies experienced a wave of violence unprecedented since the Knowles Riot (1747). This violence was understood and encouraged as the latest in a saga of resistance against religious tyranny, which had occurred at minor levels since the Glorious Revolution (1688-89), but not on this magnitude since the seventeenth century. Consequently, the fears of a returning Stuart and various plots to overturn the toleration of William III created nightmares of Anglican hegemony that gave new birth to the republicans of the English Civil War while demonizing imperial centralization. Colonials interpreted their

375 Eliot Diaries, 1767. 376 Peter Walker showed that the Anglican clergy in the northern colonies went rogue, abandoning their reliance on their ecclesiastical superiors to pursue a bishop. Walker, “The Bishop Controversy,” 336. 103 present through a past of persecution, and like their predecessors, resisted perceived spiritual corruptions and thus temporal and eternal punishments. Each subsequent action by imperial authorities had the potential to be viewed as an action of retribution or an attempt to force the colonies into submission.

104 CHAPTER V

Conclusion: “It is not safe for the colonies to sleep.”

“To a good man all time is holy enough, and none too holy, to do good, or to think upon it.” ~Jonathan Mayhew to James Otis (8 June 1766)377 The funeral procession of Miss Americ-Stamp was not the only funeral procession of

1766, in July of that year Dissenters in the empire lamented the unbearable loss of one of their own. To return to the earth from which it came, this body was interred not in a family crypt, but in an unmarked grave. Leading the funeral procession were not a handful of politicians, but 114 gentlemen of his congregation, followed by the largest funeral procession Boston had ever experienced; fifty-seven carriages, and sixteen coaches and chariots. Carrying his casket were six leading New England clergyman: Nathaniel Appleton, Ebenezer Gay, Charles Chauncy, Andrew

Eliot, Ebenezer Pemberton, and Samuel Cooper.378 Three of these clergy would be distinguished by Peter Oliver’s pen in 1780 when he wrote Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion;

Charles Chauncy, Samuel Cooper, and the man they were carrying—Jonathan Mayhew.379

Dissenters and Real Whigs throughout the British Empire mourned the loss of their leader and friend. None of Mayhew’s congregants mourned his loss as much as Massachusetts treasurer Harrison Gray. Though he eventually turned Tory and evacuated Boston with the

British troops in 1776, he clung to a portrait of his deceased pastor and later told Mayhew’s daughter nothing could convince him to part with it.380 The Sunday following Mayhew’s death,

Chauncy manned his friend’s pulpit and delivered a funeral sermon honoring his brother in

377 Jonathan Mayhew to James Otis, 8 June 1766, Mayhew Family Papers. 378 Mayhew was likely buried in the cemetery nearest his church, if so he would be later accompanied by many of his friends: James Otis, , Edmund Quincy, Josiah Quincy, and Robert Treat Paine. Mullins, Father of Liberty, 178-179. 379 Oliver, Origin and Progress, 43. 380 Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 223-224. 105 Christ. He reminded the congregation of their beloved pastor’s devotion to the cause of Christ, that despite his ability and education, Mayhew always returned to “What saith the Scripture?”381

One of Mayhew’s best qualities, according to Chauncy, was his devotion to liberty. Not only did

Mayhew hate all human establishments in religion, especially the establishment of ceremonial rites as necessary to Christian communion, Mayhew honorably resisted the spread of episcopacy into America.382 Despite the loss of such a great man, it was his cause that Chauncy returned to, saying that God can raise up others to replace him and that Mayhew was still present in his writings.383 The man was dead, but his spirit—his cause—lived on.

Following Mayhew’s death Andrew Eliot became Boston’s principle contact for English

Dissenters as well as Anglican Archdeacon Francis Blackburne, but he was not alone.384 Despite the separation from a “faithful and kind” husband, Elizabeth Mayhew was fully devoted to the dissenting cause offering to help Hollis defend liberty however she could, starting by burning

Hollis’s correspondence to her husband.385 Hollis told Elizabeth that the greatest consolation he received was her willingness to serve the cause. Having read Chauncy’s sermon, he also informed her that the only excellent representation of her late husband was done by

Blackburne.386 Unlike other Anglicans, Blackburne considered Mayhew a member of God’s

381 Charles Chauncy, A discourse occasioned by the death of the Reverned Jonathan Mayhew, D.D. late pastor of the West-Church in Boston: who departed this life on Wednesday morning, July 9. 1766, aetatis 46. Delivered the Lord's-Day after his decease (Boston, 1766), 27-28, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 382 Chauncy, A discourse occasioned by the death of the Reverned Jonathan Mayhew, 29-30. 383 Chauncy even gave exalting Mayhew too much as a possible reason God saw fit to remove him from the world. Chauncy, A discourse occasioned by the death of the Reverned Jonathan Mayhew, 21, 37, 39-40. 384 Thomas Hollis to Andrew Eliot, 6 September 1766, Hollis Papers. 385 Quotation is from Chauncy’s sermon, but Mayhew’s love and devotion to his wife are evident in undated letters to her mentioning how he and the children miss her, and offering to comfort her by his presence when Boston was in tumult. Harrison Gray said that “there never was a more happy Match upon Earth. Their obliging behavior to each Other in Life did Honour to the Marriage State.” Chauncy, A discourse occasioned by the death of the Reverned Jonathan Mayhew, 30: Jonathan Mayhew to Elizabeth Mayhew, Mayhew Family Papers: Elizabeth Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, 27 July 1766: Harrison Gray to Thomas Hollis, 28 July 1766, Hollis Papers. 386 Thomas Hollis to Elizabeth Mayhew, 4 October 1766, Hollis Papers. 106 family and offered Elizabeth his condolences.387 Upon Mayhew’s death England’s Micaiah

Towgood wrote to Chauncy encouraging a reverence for the providence of God, though he acknowledged he was one of the thousands who lamented Mayhew’s death.388 But despite condolences and memories being shared across the Atlantic, there was no time for complacency—Mayhew’s last words to Otis clearly resonated—“It is not safe for the colonies to sleep.” There was no reprieve for the dissenting cause of liberty, shortly after Mayhew’s death

Boston’s Edmund Quincy Jr. informed Hollis that,

We have great reason daily to expect two Regiments in This Town only, the Church [of England] too already begins to exult upon our misfortunes, but we doubt not he who is able of Stones to raise up defenders of our Rights Civil and Sacred, will send us other Mayhews as we need them.389

While mourning the loss of their friend, the defender of liberty and what many Dissenters perceived to be the “true primitive Apostolic Doctrines of Christianity,” they recognized they could not rest, they had to think upon the cause before them.390

Shortly after Mayhew’s Snare Broken reached William Pitt, he accepted the earldom of Chatham from the king, and shortly became Prime Minister. Being bought by the crown was a sign of corruption that many Real Whig Dissenters could not tolerate.

Macaulay had referenced the practice in her History of England, as being one of the problems of the current age.391 Pitt and Mayhew became binaries for Real Whig interests.

Hollis told Elizabeth that Mayhew’s Snare Broken was delivered, but he had never received any acknowledgement from Pitt. Hollis said,

387 Francis Blackburne to Elizabeth Mayhew, 23 January 1767, Mayhew Family Papers. 388 Extract of a letter Micaiah Towgood to Charles Chauncy, 27 March 1767, Mayhew Family Papers. 389 Edmund Quincy Jr. to Thomas Hollis, 25 July 1766, Hollis Papers: The stones reference is to Luke 3:8, King James Version. 390 Quote is from Harrison Gray. Harrison Gray to Thomas Hollis, 28 July 1766, Hollis Papers. 391 Hicks, “Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War,” 189: Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line vol. II (London, 1765), 226-227, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 107 May the Medals of the lost W-P be now flattened like his Virtues! But a few prints from You, Madam, of IONATHAN MAYHEW D-D an unswerving, magnanimous Assertor of Truth and Liberty, even unto the Death, would be truely acceptable to me, and one or two Friends.392

For Hollis a live Pitt was no match for a dead Mayhew. Hollis said the same to Andrew

Eliot, “How glorious the death of Dr. Mayhew to the now life of that Man! that fallen, meanest Man!”393 Pitt did not just fall from grace with Hollis, Eliot told Hollis that though Boston was still attached to Pitt as a commoner, talk of a statue had been dropped.394 Even in places like Charleston and New York, Pitt was remembered for being a paragon of liberty by advocating for the repeal of the Stamp Act, not for his actions afterwards.395 Neither champion of civil and religious liberty could help the empire after

1766; one defender of rights had died—the other was immortalized, not by a statue, but by the spirit of liberty.

By moving the origin of the traditional American Revolutionary Era back to 1762, the original cause behind the revolution deepens from a surface of material concerns and power structures to the cause beneath them—a confessional controversy, which resurrected memories of conflicts over religious and civil liberty. Every conflict included problems of maintaining spiritual integrity and a freedom of conscience. Starting with the missionary conflict between the

Congregationalists and the Anglicans, opposition was a spiritually based ordeal over hegemony.

The Bishop Controversy and Stamp Act intensified fears of Anglican control and strengthened

392 Thomas Hollis to Elizabeth Mayhew, 4 October 1766, Hollis Papers. 393 Thomas Hollis to Andrew Eliot, 11 May 1767, Hollis Papers. 394 Andrew Eliot to Thomas Hollis, 7 January 1767, Hollis Papers. 395 The pedestal of the Pitt statue in New York even read that his statue was erected, “AS A PUBLIC TESTIMONY OF THE GRATEFUL SENSE THE COLONY OF NEW-YORK RETAINS OF THE MANY EMINENT SERVICES HE RENDERED AMERICA PARTICULARLY IN PROMOTING THE REPEAL OF THE STAMP ACT.” Webster, The Nation’s First Monument, 68: Smith, “Wilton’s Statue Of Pitt,” 26. 108 opposition. Without recalling the memory of the English Civil War it is easy to discount the civil significance of the Bishop Controversy and the religious value of the Sugar and Stamp Acts.

Just as British subjects clung to their constitutional rights and remembered a century of fighting for freedom, Americans should be careful with their own memory. Forgetting or misremembering the causes of the American Revolution not only distorts the history of Real

Whig Dissenters, but it undermines the rights and liberties that the United States was founded upon, thereby distorting the principles of the Constitution. The liberty that the British patriots and subsequent generations of Americans sacrificed for can easily be repealed if Americans start imbibing innovations into American jurisprudence by attacking America’s founding principles.

Despite recent attempts to undermine religious liberty, religion still maintains political capital for influencing change.396 It is evident from the recent Biblical controversy between former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Jeff Sessions over immigration, that religion and politics have not been divorced in American government.397 Religious liberty should not disappear, it is fundamental to the freedom of conscience and thought. If religion is extracted from the Constitution, what right will be repealed next? Religion was an instrumental catalyst for igniting the American Revolution and like seventeenth-century political philosophy, it should not

396 In 2011, Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman argued that religion did not deserve specialized protection. The Obama administration argued that religious organizations should be treated as clubs. Steven Smith, The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 139-140: Michael Gerson, “A case study in the proper role of Christians in politics,” Washington Post, 21 June 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/a-case-study-in-the-proper-role-of-christians-in- politics/2018/06/21/39acd0bc-7578-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?noredirect=on. 397 Jane C. Timm and Alex Seitz-Wald, “All four living former first ladies condemn Trump border policy,” NBC News, 18 June 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna884136: Nicole Darah, “Hillary Clinton cites another Bible quote to fight Trump on immigration,” FOX News, 18 June 2018, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/18/hillary-clinton-cites-another-bible-quote-to-fight-trump-on- immigration.amp.html: E.J. Dionne Jr., “Humanity won this time. But there’s a hard road ahead,” Washington Post, 20 June 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/humanity-won-this-time-but-theres-a-hard-road- ahead/2018/06/20/1bf55c74-74c9-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html. 109 be forgotten. After all, the patriots of the American Revolution were not inventing—they were remembering.

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