Timothy Roberts - American Exceptionalism Vol 2

During the 125 years following the American Revolution and establishment of the US Constitution, writers on themes of American exceptionalism tended to see the Revolution as an event marking an epoch in human history. As the texts in this volume show, however, opinion differed over when the Revolution ended, and whether succeeding generations of Americans were to fulfil its purposes by protecting its legacy or institutions from outsiders, or by extending its liberal ideology across time and space.

Perhaps surprisingly, the first writers on the Revolution emphasized not its lack of precedent but its continuity with the Protestant Reformation, initiated with Martin Luthers protest against corrupt practices of the Church. The Reformation came west when the Puritans crossed the Atlantic. Prototypes for many American revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century, some twenty thousand Puritans in the 1630s resolved to abandon England and to establish a new community in the wilderness. Initially the Puritans hoped to point Europe towards religious reform, and New England intellectuals had correspondents across the Old World. However, within a generation Massachusetts became a permanent colony for radical critics of the Church of England, for whom the colony functioned not only as an asylum but as a marker for the arrival of a thousand-year period of Christs reign on earth. Whereas other colonists in New France, New Spain and New Amsterdam more often understood themselves to be emissaries of European empire, the New England Puritans centred their enterprise on the meaning of the New World as the new promised land.

Covenant theology, derived from biblical accounts of Gods compacts of mutual promise and obligation with the Jewish patriarchs Noah, Abraham and Moses, was central to the organization of New England society, as it was in similar communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among Swiss, English, Scottish, Dutch, German and French Protestants. As ancient Jewish people attempted to build holy commonwealths through their covenant with God and with one another, these groups used the concept of the covenant to envision a new society based on the idea of a Christian commonwealth, established for the happiness of members of the community, subject to divine and not man-made law, and dependent on the guarantee of a revealed God who rewards and punishes. A dramatic expression of covenant theologys justification of resistance to authority occurred in the English Civil War, culminating in the execution of Charles I.

In America, covenant theology manifested not in regicide but first in assertions of local moral sovereignty. Congregationalism asserted local church authority. In an even more radical step, Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts for insisting on separation of religious and political authority, established Providence Plantation as a place welcoming other dissenters. Puritan authorities deemed Williams an anarchist. His example suggests the tension in American revolutionary consciousness, a legacy of covenant theology, between freedom-seeking under the rule of law as texts across this volume tended to emphasize and individuals right to freedom of conscience.

Eventually American revolutionaries including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would assert Calvins doctrine of resistance to civil as well as religious tyranny, expressed in the epitaph of the judge of the trial of King Charles, John Bradshaw, bridging the sacred and the secular realms, that rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Thus the American upheaval of British rule had dual emphases one an overthrow of established political authority, and another an assertion of a provision of radical Protestant Christianity as a basis of the national culture at its origin. While officially secular, the American republic was also assumed to be Christian in character, to the point of possibly being the location of Gods new kingdom on earth. The motto of the Great Seal of the United States of 1782 reflected this duality. The Seal declared 1776 as the beginning of the New Order of the Ages. However, Americans of the day would have recognized that the original interpretation of the phrase Novus ordo seclorum, derived from lines 58 of the poet Virgils Eclogue, was a prophecy of the second coming of Christ. During the centennial of the Revolution the poet James Russell Lowell wrote of British regulars that they died / To keep the Past upon its Throne, but of American farmers, Twas for the future that they fought. Behind Lowells poetry lay the assumption of nineteenth-century Americans that their patriot forefathers had embraced Martin Luthers foundation of new institutions in Western Christianity; their modern revolution brought these institutions to bear in the emerging world of modern state-building.

Beliefs about the Revolutions embrace of both secular and religious virtues were perhaps exceeded by emphasis on, if not obsession with, the Revolutions achievement of both liberty and order, reflecting how the Revolution was both radical and conservative. This perhaps ephemeral, certainly unusual, equipoise also underlay the principles and institutions of American government and society. The popular historian George Bancroft, for example, wrote that the Revolution was the most radical in its character, yet achieved with such benign tranquility that even conservatism hesitated to censure.