Covenantal Democracy in America: Two Radicalisms.

Copyright 2006 Graham Maddox and Tod Moore

 

Abstract  [see conference abstract]

It has long been accepted that Calvinism made a contribution to the radical features of American democracy, and the radical implications of the covenant theology give rise to two claims in the literature: first, that covenant theology produces activist, reformist, and democratic ideas; second, that in New England, it led to the first modern, secular, practical democracies. As well as these two claims, other effects of Calvinism in America could include its indirect influence on the drafting of the 1787 Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Owing to the ambiguity of Calvinism, however, some confusion is evidenced by the demonstrable inability of commentators to make convincing connections between the early experiments in democracy in New England, and the anti-democratic republicanism of the Constitution and of the literature of the Revolutionary era.

To address the problem, we propose a distinction between two types of Calvinism, both of which have profoundly affected the American political landscape in different ways. First, we posit "I-type" Calvinism, which was the prevailing type in early New England, and which includes the idea of radical democracy. The other form of Calvinist political ideology we propose is "P-type", in which democracy is opposed in favour of republican ideals. The statements of propagandists for the two sides of seventeenth century Calvinism, the Independents and the Presbyterians, can be used to illustrate the differences between I-type and P-type Calvinist politics, as well as their underlying similarities. Perhaps the most engaging matter to arise is the way that initially similar belief systems can subsequently diverge so much on political questions.

Both types of Calvinism were present in the United States before 1775, in populations concentrated in different Colonies, and sometimes even in the same Colonies. For example, the Ulster migrations of the 1720s and 1730s brought large numbers of P-type Calvinists to the Middle Colonies, but also many who went to the older I-type Colony of Massachusetts. The result of migrations was the emergence of two distinct Calvinist political sub-cultures. New England Congregationalism and Plymouth Separatism gave rise to a democratic ethos. On the other hand, Presbyterians and their secular counterpart, the Commonwealth-men, helped to generate the republican ethos -- much less congenial to democracy -- which came to dominate politics in the Revolutionary era, and beyond.

 

Covenantal Democracy in America: Two Radicalisms.

 

A recent biography of Alexander Hamilton  (Chernow 2004 34) notes with interest that at the age of seventeen the future statesman and co-author of the Federalist Papers came under the spell of one Hugh Knox, an Irish Presbyterian minister who had been educated at the College of New Jersey and preached in Delaware before moving to the Caribbean town of St. Croix. Hamilton's subsequent connections to the influential Presbyterian William Livingston and his family (p. 43), hints at a Calvinist background to the political thought of the American Revolution. The suggestion is strengthened by Ralph Ketcham's biography of James Madison (1990 48), where he points to the possible influence on him of his Presbyterian tutors, Donald Robertson, Thomas Martin, and especially John Witherspoon. The case for a significant or even preponderant role being assigned to Reformed religion in the Founding is advanced by the observation of historians such as Clark (1994 362) and Sandoz (1990 125) that the struggle of the patriot side for independence was seen by some contemporaries as "nothing more nor less than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion." Yet Bernard Bailyn's account of the origins of the political ideas of the Revolutionary Era (1967 32) allows for only one Calvinist strand among the six which he identifies, and this is limited to the atypical covenanting Calvinism of the New England population of congregationalists, without reference to mainline Calvinists in the other colonies. Why does a leading account of the ideas of the Revolution (May 1976  46) pass over what is arguably its dominant religious component? We shall endeavour to provide an answer to this question by distinguishing between the type of Calvinism in New England, and the type found elsewhere, particularly among the colonial Presbyterians and their allies, and searching for corresponding ideas in patriot ideology. We ask why New England, with its precocious development of local democracy, is a less likely candidate for the role of spiritual home of the Founding than the strongholds of orthodox Calvinism in the middle colonies and piedmont Virginia.

 

Religion and Revolution in America

Here we begin by noting that there has long been a tendency to overlook or even reject the possible influences of Calvinist religion on the ideologies of the Revolution, and we then seek to demonstrate that those scholars who take religion seriously have left us a legacy of confusion, partly owing to a misplaced emphasis on New England, and partly to an inadequate appreciation of the typologies of Calvinist political ideology. The assumption that the old puritan colonies of New England would naturally be the principal source of religious contributions to the radical political ideas of the Revolutionary Era, both unduly privileges congregationalist views of politics, and draws attention away from other possible sources of ideas, specifically the Reformed protestant elites of the middle colonies and Virginia.

 

This argument arises from consideration of the helplessness of those trying to explain a link between puritan New England and the Founding, which enshrines highly disciplined national government within a very low estimate of human nature, and a disdain for the political capacity of the ordinary person. The difficulty encountered in making a convincing comparison between the participatory, voluntarist, and anti-elitist traditions of congregationalist thinking and practice, and the elitist Whig ideology of the Founding, makes it all too easy to see the Founding in entirely secularist terms. This tendency to ignore or reject religion as a factor in the ideological mixture in the revolutionary era is most evident among scholars who explain the Revolution, and subsequent Constitution and Bill of Rights, in terms of civic humanism or Real Whig ideology, to the exclusion or minimization of other ingredients (Robbins, 1959; Bailyn, 1967; Wood, 1969; Pocock, 1975; Rahe, 1992). These are careful historians of political thought, but like the key intellectuals of the Founding itself they take "the Protestant character of the country so much for granted that they [are] inclined to mistake it for religious neutrality," to quote J. R. Pole's essay "Enlightenment and the politics of American nature" (Porter, 1981 211).

 

But here we are concerned with those writers who have sought religious foundations for the Revolution and Founding, but have searched almost exclusively in New England. At about the same time that Perry Miller (1962, 1967) was revising early New England history, Richard Niebuhr published an important paper on the role of "covenant" in American democracy (Niebuhr, 1954). In it he relied exclusively on the New England experience and theology to illustrate the affective significance of Calvinist concepts. We shall return to the affective role of Calvinism at the conclusion of this paper, but here we note that Niebuhr's preoccupation with New England is typical. Following Miller, writers such as Alan Heimert (1966) and Sacvan Bercovitch (1975) have accepted the centrality of New England congregationalism to American identity, but within the context of a "declension," with a corresponding Jeremiad, which quarantines many of its radically democratic tendencies. This historical reasoning does not tell us what it was about their political thinking which made it problematic, from the point of view of the generation of the Revolution and Founding.

 

The Types of Calvinist political ideology

We propose the subdivision of Calvinist political theory according to a simple bipolar model derived by analysing the broad political philosophies espoused in over sixty separate works published by the two groups involved in the pamphlet wars on church government which took place in Britain and New England roughly from 1641 to 1645, specifically the groups which were known to each other and to subsequent history as the Independents and the Presbyterians. We therefore name our two variants of Calvinist political thought "I-type" and "P-type," with the former representing the ideas typically associated with Independents, and the latter the ideas typically found in Presbyterian writings clustering around the "Grand Debate" of the Westminster divines, 1643-45 (Paul, 1985). It is important to stress that these are typologies, that is, abstractions of the principal features of the ideas of the two groups participating in this discourse. They do not necessarily apply perfectly to the political thought of every Independent and Presbyterian writer, and some Independents will exhibit P-type tendencies, just as some Presbyterians are sure to exhibit I-type tendencies.

 

The most distinctive differences between the two types are in their approaches to the idea of democracy, and in their theological basis within the broad Reformed tradition traced from Luther and the first generation of Reformers, through Calvin the synthesizer, to the later Reformed writers like Theodore Beza, Gisbert Voetius, Franciscus Gomarus, William Perkins, and William Ames. Independents emphasised the New Testament itself within this tradition, and also placed greater stress on Ames and Perkins, whereas the Presbyterians, while still focused on the Bible (especially the Old Testament), were usually much more erudite, and placed particular stress on the later Genevan theologians and other representatives of "High" Calvinism. Combined with this theological divergence we find in their writings a divergence of the terms of trust in politics, which leads the Independents to a far more positive view of democracy and lay participation than the more elitist and sin-obsessed Presbyterian propagandists. This divergence has its roots in Calvin himself. He recommended no form of polity, arguing that the model ought to vary according to the circumstances. Yet he did base all political considerations on the reality of original sin. The human propensity to take advantage of power in order to dominate others makes all power relations inherently corruptible. "The fall from kingdom to tyranny is easy; but it is not much more difficult to fall from the rule of the best men to the faction of a few; yet it is easiest of all to fall from popular rule to sedition," (Calvin 1960, 1493; Hancock 1989 69). This in turn creates a tension in Calvin between following the injunction in Romans 13, to obey the powers that be, and the fear of sin taking hold and perverting those same powers to the point where they lose this protection -- that is, they cease to be godly in any sense at all, and obedience no longer applies, especially in any case where this would "lead us away from obedience to [God]" (p. 1520). We see this view of sin in his statement that "however excellent anyone has been, his own ambition always pushes him on � a blemish with which all virtues are so sullied that before God they lose all favour" (p. 294). Calvin himself did not attempt to resolve this dilemma, but he did endorse the view that it is "safer and more bearable for a number to exercise government," demonstrating a philosophical preference for aristocratic forms of government, or mixed forms, in the same passage from the Institutes. "For if the three forms of government which the philosophers discuss be considered in themselves, I will not deny that aristocracy, or a system compounded of aristocracy and democracy, far excels all others," in the absence of complications arising from sin (p. 1493).

When the puritan revolution in Britain in the early 1640s gave British Calvinists the opportunity of remaking the realm and the church in conformity with Reformed beliefs, the mainline Calvinists split into two factions, the Independents and the Presbyterians, which Woodhouse (1938 4) ascribes to the Centre and Right of the revolution's ideological spectrum respectively, with the Left of that spectrum reserved for the ultra-radical sectaries who later evolved into Quakers and Baptists. The wranglings of Independents and Presbyterians over government in church and state spawned a huge literature of pamphlets and books, and it is this body of writings which enables us to construct typologies which profile their contrasting political ideologies. These variant ideologies took shape within a broad Calvinism which gave them much common ground, for instance the belief in the right and duty to resist tyranny, which Calvin neither supported nor condemned, but which became one of the distinguishing features of later Calvinism (McNeill 1949; Coffey 1997 177). Another important area of common ground was the characteristic protestant idea, deriving ultimately from Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, that the individual conscience is supreme, and that there is the spark of divinity in every person which only God can restrain, and which enjoins a regard for all people as being born free and equal in terms of their "light" or innate capacity for conversion � a democratic notion (Maddox 1996 149, 262 n.40; Perry 1964 107). Independents and Presbyterians alike subscribed to such core protestant ideas, and the typologies we propose are not intended to cut across this basic unity.

 

I-type Calvinism

We begin with the Independents, and here the first thing to notice is that they placed great emphasis on the ideas and practices of the exiles who sailed to Massachusetts Bay in the early 1630s, the puritan pioneers of New England. Independents favoured a literal approach to Scripture combined with respect for the use of covenants voluntarily to establish individual parish churches, and this in turn led each congregation to conduct its affairs along democratic lines. The testimony of the New England churches, established as autonomous congregations, became a very important element in the debate, even though the delegates invited from there were unable to attend the deliberations of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (Paul, 1985 125). This positive attitude toward democracy, which according to Russel L. Hanson (Ball, 1989 68) is nearly unique for writers in the early modern period, is construed by Thomas Goodwin (1641, 4-5) as a preference for the poor, so that "when Christ came at first, the poore receive the Gospell; not many Wise, not many Noble, not many Rich, but the Poore: so in the Reformation of Religion, after Antichrist began to be discovered, it was the common People that first came to look after Christ." In keeping with this view of the laity, the Massachusetts minister Richard Mather, and other (unnamed) ministers (1643, 53-57), argued that in New England "Church government is in part Democraticall or popular", and in part aristocratic, and that it is "in respect of the people a Democratie." The leading Bay theologian, John Cotton, was initially content to emphasize the mixed nature of congregational government (1645, 100), but later (1648, 97) he declared that as far as the primitive Christian church of the New Testament was concerned, "their Form of Government was like well-nigh, or almost to a Democracy" because "they did no act of Church-Government without concourse and censure of the Bretheren." The democratic tendency of the Independents existed within the ideal mixed form of aristocracy plus democracy, familiar from Calvin (above), and endorsed by Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye in their Preface to John Cotton's THE KEYES Of the Kingdom of HEAVEN, AND Power thereof (1644, A4 recto-A4 verso).

 

While both Presbyterians and Independents placed great stress on the Bible and on Calvin as sources of political ideas, the Independents tended to emphasize Scripture. This can be seen, for example, in John Cotton's 1643 pamphlet, The Doctrine Of The Church To Which Are Committed The Keys Of The Kingdome Of Heaven, where he defines "covenant" (p.1.). Other examples of the Scriptural emphasis of Independent works are Cotton's 1644 text, THE KEYES Of the Kingdom of HEAVEN, and Thomas Goodwin's 1641 pamphlet A GLIMPSE OF SIONS GLORY. Some Independent writings rely solely on Scripture, such as the anonymously published 1641 booklet A discovery OF NEW LIGHT OR Ancient truthes revived. They not only believed in the priority of the New Testament text, but also felt that they had had the benefit of insights or "new light" which post-dated Calvin, the Genevan Consistory, and the presbyteries which were modelled on the Consistory (Goodwin, 1643 4,  23). Their careful reading of key passages in the Gospels, Acts and the Pauline Epistles, suggested a congregation which was more autonomous than those following a strict Genevan model, with an unquestioned right to vote to expel minister and member alike. An example is in Cotton's THE KEYES Of the Kingdom of HEAVEN (1644, 12-16), where we see him using readings of Acts 15, Acts 14 and Galatians 5 to support congregational autonomy, in the sense of "the votes of the people [being] needfull in all admissions and excommunications" (Goodwin, 1644, 8).

 

Their congregational model gave the Independents a strongly local bias, enshrined in the town meeting, and evincing a suspicion of overarching institutions which would have the capacity to thwart the will of the congregation. This is not to say that there were no higher structures at all, and Cotton (1644 15-16, 28-29) allows as Scripturally warranted the holding of periodic synods for the discussion of urgent matters, with the proviso that these synods make recommendations back to the congregations for action. This is as far as Independents are generally prepared to go, and they condemn the permanent institution of powerful presbyteries and synods as in the Scottish Presbyterian model, and the classis as found in the Dutch Reformed model (Bradshaw, [1605]1641 7; Anon, 1641 1; Woodward, 1644 13; Holmes, 1644 13; Anon., 1644a 45; Goodwin, 1644 9; Goodwin, 1645 7). The congregational model not only emphasizes the role of the laity, but also has a problematic relationship with worldly rulers, especially monarchs, and in history this can be seen in the republican Cromwellian administration which followed after the execution of Charles I. As we have seen, Calvin himself was anti-monarchical (McNeill, 1949), and this mistrust of rulers is also evident in a late work of John Cotton (1656 72):

 

A Prince himselfe cannot tell where hee will confine himselfe, nor can the people tell: But if he have liberty to speak great things, then he will make and unmake, say and unsay, and undertake such things as are neither for his owne honour, nor for the safety of the State. It is therefore fit for every man to be studious of the bounds which the Lord hath set: and for the People, in whom fundamentally all power lyes, to give as much power as God in his word gives to men �

 

Not all Independents were republican, as we can see from the remark made by the early Independent William Bradshaw in 1605 (1641 6) that it is "the Monarchicall State, which they acknowledge to be the best kinde of Civill Government for this Kingdome [i.e. England]."

 

P-type Calvinism

Presbyterianism was the preferred form of Calvinism among British puritan elites in the era that Coffey (1997) terms the British Revolutions, and when the Westminster Assembly met in 1643 it was a foregone conclusion that the English and Scottish divines (ministers) meeting there would endorse a Presbyterian system. In the pamphlet war, the Presbyterians frequently take their Independent opponents to task for giving power to the laity, and for making pro-democratic statements. As early as 1641 George Gillespie, in AN ASSERTION OF The Government of the Church of SCOTLAND, defended the Scottish kirk against the Independent alternative, because "the exercise of Ecclesiasticall power and jurisdiction in a particular Congregation, ought not to bee committed to the whole collective body thereof" or else "the Government of the Church must needs be popular" (p. 109), and this meant exposing the godly to "the rudenesse of the vulgar sort" (p. 114). Samuel Rutherford (1642 16) stated bluntly that "[t]hat which maketh the government of Gods house Democraticall and popular is not to bee taught," and Adam Steuart, another Scot, can be found (1644 43-45) arguing against autonomous congregations, as being places which "excitate the ignorant people" and give power to the untrustworthy "ordinary Mechanick". The frequency of statements similar to these can leave us in no doubt about either the Presbyterian position on democracy, or their sincerity in maintaining such a position (Edwards, 1641 16; Steuart, 1644 46; Rathband, 1644 26; Gillespie, 1644 1; Forbes, 1644 39; Edwards, 1644 92; Rutherford, 1644 480; Baillie, 1645 125). In keeping with the tenets of strict or �High' Calvinism, they expected all ministers to be educated as well as to be called, and the basis of ministerial education was fluency in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and the ability to interpret any passage from Scripture (Anon., 1644 2); their erudition bred a haughty contempt for the  "illiterate" (Edwards, 1644 79; Rathband, 1644 23). Like the Independents, they preferred a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, but unlike them, the Presbyterians leaned toward the aristocratic side.

 

Against the autonomy of congregations, the Presbyterians insisted on the need for permanent representative institutions (Herle, 1643 11) based on the ministers and elders of a locality, region, and ultimately the nation itself, to decide all controversies of religion and to present potential ministers to individual congregations lacking a minister (Anon., 1644b). This system, which had been established in Scotland by John Knox and Andrew Melville as a national equivalent of the localized Genevan Consistory, was subsequently defended from attempts to replace it by bishops, by means of the national Covenant, a perpetual oath of support given before God in imitation of Old Testament Israel (Vallance, 2001; Coffey, 1997). Presbyterians were at pains to point out the need to be able and ready to resist the secular powers, accusing the Independents of tying their own hands in this respect by failing to establish a strong overarching institutional framework above their congregations (Gillespie, 1641 A4 recto; Steuart, 1644 10; Prynne, 1644a 9). One consequence of the system of synods and presbyteries was the intolerant attitude which the Presbyterians displayed toward any whom they regarded as heretical, for failing to conform to Calvinist theology as they defined it (Gillespie, 1644 31), and William Prynne (1644b 12) includes the Independents in this category. It should be noted here that the New England churches were a great deal less tolerant than the Independents in England were, as we can see from treatment of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.

 

The last and most difficult theme of the Presbyterian literature from the Grand Debate which we examine is their development of a republican political theory. In part this emerged from the theory of resistance, so that Rutherford (1644 A4 recto) is able to declare that: "we say, Presbyteries professe that Kings are under the coactive power of Christs keys of discipline, and that Prophets and Pastors, as Ambassadors of Christ, have the keyes of the kingdom of God, to open and let in beleeving Princes, and also to shut them out, if they rebel against Christ; the law of Christ excepteth none �" If this were the full extent of their republicanism, then they would differ little on that score from the Independents. But their republicanism was also developed from ideas of natural law and civic humanism, although even here there was a Calvinist twist, as it was the spark of divinity which gave the people an irresistible prior right to determine and to unmake the constitution (cf. Mclaren 2006 32). Popular sovereignty is affirmed by Rutherford (1644 66), who asserts (p.391) that "there is an absolute Majesty in the people" which underpins any particular form of government, and he relies in part on a natural law argument, for example in his idea (p.413) that "power of Government, by the light of nature must be radically and originally, in a Communitie". Government exists for the sake of public order (p.57) and particular regimes need only be supported as long as they maintain good laws for the defense of life and religion (p.106), and this state of affairs proceeds from an initial contract to establish society (p.4), and then a second contract to establish the regime (p.399). The Presbyterian writers show a clear preference for limited monarchy, other things being equal (Herle, 1643 7; Rutherford, 1644 8, 17, 387), and so it is not possible to say that they were republicans in the sense of opposing all forms of monarchy, even though their republicanism is more classical than a purely Biblical approach would allow.

 

One of the most noticeable aspects of the Presbyterian writings is their use of a wide array of sources from the civic humanist tradition, including Aristotle (Steuart, 1644 16; Rutherford, 1644 65), and Tacitus (Cheynell, 1643 A4 recto; Gillespie, 1644 3, 38; Rutherford, 1644 A4 verso), but rarely Cicero, and also their use of important Huguenot works with republican themes such as Francois Hotman's Francogallia and the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (Rutherford, 1644 156, 178, 349). Generally speaking the Presbyterians combine Scripture, including the Old Testament, with secular citations, whereas the Independents infrequently use secular sources and prefer New Testament Scripture. The Presbyterian conception of natural law is Calvinist, in that for them natural reason has been clouded because of the fall (Calvin 1960 368) and is therefore not to be relied upon in the same sense as Scripture. Yet they do endorse a form of natural law argument, as we see from Edwards (1641 13), who rejects Independency because "the God of Nature and Reason hath not left in his Word a government against the light of Nature and right reason", and they are more likely to use natural law arguments than Independents, although pure reason remains suspect due to sin, and confirmatory empirical evidence is therefore necessary, a point developed in detail by the English Presbyterian Robert Greville (1641).

 

The following table summarizes the main features of the two types of political Calvinism:

 

	I-type	P-type
Theology: Ideal State: Ethos: Style: Emphasis: Scope: Attitude: Action: Culture: Obligation:	Bible Calvinism (Republic?) Democratic Direct Laity Local focus Participation Self-exile Toleration Personal Covenant	High Calvinism Limited Monarchy Anti-democratic Representative Elite National Covenant Discipline Armed resistance Non-toleration Contractual-Covenant

 

Calvinism in Colonial America

We have already noted the role of New England protestant clergy, particularly John Cotton, in the Grand Debate on the side of the Independents. The ongoing dominant presence of congregationalism in New England (Gaustad, 1976) strongly suggests that we should expect to find I-type political thinking there in the period leading up to the Revolution. This supposition of continuity with the ideas of the early New England theologians, such as Cotton, is, however, challenged by the emergence of rationalistic writers less closely aligned with Bible Calvinism, including Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew (Gura 1988 439). By the 1730s several developments, including the rise of rationalist philosophy among intellectual elites, a "declension" from the settler experience, especially the lack of persecution or threatened persecution, and the promise of a more worldly pioneering lifestyle, had begun to erode the old I-type political culture. I-type covenant themes in Congregationalist preaching at the time of the Revolution now coexisted with Whig views or, as Harry Stout puts it (1986 292), the "secular ideology of republicanism". When the concept of covenant was also projected to cover America as a whole (p. 296), as an elect nation in the Old Testament sense, it mirrored the P-type model of the National Covenant familiar from Scottish history (Anon., 1676). Sections of the laity in New England were early and enthusiastic participants in the conflict with the British (some well known examples being the non-importation agreements, the burning of the Gaspee, the Boston Tea Party, and the raid on Rivington's press), and were also moved to rise in arms against the confederacy at the time of Daniel Shays's rebellion (Gross, 1993). In the middle colonies, patriots were inclined to see their New England counterparts as radicals and "fanatics," and according to May (1976 94) this made the [I-type] New Englanders "deeply unpopular" among their [P-type] allies.

 

In the middle colonies the religious history is one of diversity, at least on the surface, with a variety of protestant denominations forming their own separate congregations. Calvinism remains the dominant theological bedrock for most of these congregations, however, and this is particularly true of the Presbyterians, German and Dutch Reformed, and many Baptist communities -- even some Episcopalians embraced Calvinist theology. The available statistics for the colonies as a whole (Greene, 1991 69) show that, after allowing for the New England Congregationalists, the Presbyterians are the next most numerous, followed by the Baptists, then the Episcopalians, German and Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, and Quakers. Throughout the colonies, but especially in the middle colonies, the number of Reformed congregations (Presbyterian, Baptist, and German Reformed) was increasing exponentially during the middle part of the eighteenth century; the Baptists expansion was accompanied by a rising tide of Calvinist theology (Gaustad, 1976 11-12, 21, 28). Congregationalist numbers in New England rose in similar fashion (p.15). Even though the scene was marked by an apparent great denominational diversity, Mark A. Noll (1993) confirms that Calvinism was preponderant in the middle colonies. [i] This is important for present purposes since it raises the question whether this central Calvinism evidenced one or other of the proposed typologies.

 

Notwithstanding their support for the Hanoverian succession, the Presbyterians were ideologically predisposed to commit to the patriot cause. Many of the Covenanters who between 1660 and 1690 had migrated from Scotland to Ulster in order to maintain their Solemn League and Covenant, then migrated to the American colonies, principally New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and piedmont Virginia. According to Westerkamp (1988 137), this movement of radical Presbyterians from Ireland "began slowly in the eighteenth century, becoming a continuous flow by the 1720s," and although many of the early Ulster Presbyterian migrants went first to New England, many of them flowed into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the other middle colonies, as well as Virginia and the Carolinas. These Irish Calvinist immigrants, described by May (1976 52) as "Scotch-Irish newcomers" in the 1740s, attained dominance in the Presbyterian Church in the colonies, with Northern Ireland supplying the majority of ministers (Clark, 1994 354). Adherence of Presbyterianism to strict or "High" Calvinism embodied in the Westminster Confession was now ensured. This support for what Griffin (1994 30) terms "classic Reformed statements of faith" encourages the theory that the colonial Presbyterian clergy and laity had a broadly P-type ideology.

 

 

The debate over Alan Heimert's thesis on the Great Awakening has led many historians to discount the series of religious revivals as a possible source of patriotic radicalism, (Heimert, 1966; Goff, 1998; Lambert, 1999), but they did unquestionably reinvigorate the pre-existing Calvinism (both types) in both New England and the middle colonies. In the middle colonies, these revivals had precedents in the mass conversions, field conventicles and communion feasts which periodically swept Ulster and the western parts of Scotland from 1625 onward, and which were marked by their embrace of  radical Calvinist theology, especially after 1688 (Westerkamp, 1988 59). Calvinism was further strengthened by the "Bishop's War," which revolved around the challenge of prelacy, against which Calvinists (both types) had had long standing objections; in the case of the Irish Covenanters these objections were especially fierce. Presbyterians of the middle colonies who were prominent in the campaign against bishops in 1768 included William Livingston, Francis Alison and sometime Quaker John Dickinson (Greene, 1991 18). By 1769 the anti-bishop feelings aroused at Princeton were indicative of growing hostility to the British among the middle colony "intelligentsia" (Clark, 1994 357). The French and Indian War was another factor uniting Calvinists, raising as it did the spectre of Catholicism on the frontier of the middle colonies, blocking their westward expansion (Noll, 1993 629).

 

From such historical evidence we are proposing is that it is at least possible that P-type Calvinist political ideology was already embedded in the political culture of the middle colonies before the Revolution. The typology is suggested by their Ulster connections and the revival of Calvinism generally owing to the factors given above, but of course it is possible that an I-type predisposition was introduced from New England as well. During the 1760s New England Congregationalists and middle colony Presbyterians met several times to co-ordinate their struggle against bishops (von Rohr, 1992 198), and later, in 1801, a section of Presbyterians formed a Plan of Union between the two denominations (Balmer, 1993 47). There was not much of the hostility which had existed between the two types in the puritan revolution in Britain the previous century, and in an Irish Presbyterian pamphlet of 1765 by Charles Lucas the pioneers of New England are cited as an outstanding example of "wise and free" people fleeing oppression and "slavery" (Morley, 2002 54). Nonetheless, the existence of dominating Calvinism in the crucial middle colonies on the eve of the Revolution is one kind of evidence for a Calvinist element in the Revolution and Founding, and a second is the striking similarity of the republican political ideas of radical P-type Calvinists of the seventeenth century like Algernon Sidney and Samuel Rutherford, and the republicanism of the patriots and the Founders.

Civic virtue, Calvinism, and the Federalist Papers

One way of looking for influence is to seek direct links between the clergy, especially the Presbyterian clergy (the Black Regiment), and the Revolution itself. A particular concern here is to distinguish between the responses of New England Congregationalists and middle colony Presbyterians, without overlooking the pervasive radical influence of Calvinism generally. The evidence provided by sermons supports the case for a P-type ideology among most sections of the middle colony Reformed clergy (Griffin, 1994), although space limits the scope for discussion to one or two indicative examples. The anonymous 1783 sermon, published as Defensive Arms Vindicated and the Lawfulness of the American War Made Manifest (reprinted in Sandoz 1991 711-70), deals mainly with resistance theory. The author relies on the Presbyterian tradition, citing Rutherford (pp. 720, 755), Buchanan (p. 724), and other sources including the 1667 text Naphtali (pp. 720, 731), to buttress his claim that the people have a private duty to resist tyrants even when the inferior magistrates are unavailable to play a leadership role. His main argument is from popular sovereignty � when the people "determined their form of government" in the first instance, "they did not give away their birth right of self defence and power of resistance," which remains in the people as "their own power in the fountain" (p. 736), and he relates this to a particular idea of the social contract which voids the king's power and authority "in case of failing in the main and principle thing covenanted" (pp. 736-37). Abraham Keteltas, a sometime Presbyterian minister who also preached to Dutch and French Reformed congregations in Massachusetts, published the sermon God Arising and Pleading his People's Cause in 1777 (Sandoz, 1991 580-604). In it he alludes to tyranny and lists the crimes of the British Parliament and British troops, but is mainly concerned to link the American patriot struggle to the wider struggle of international Calvinist protestantism (pp.599-600). He specifically regards America as an elect nation, constantly referring to God's "people" and "his elect," and maintaining that "the cause of this American continent � is the cause of God" (p. 595). Ahab is the exemplary tyrant, and release from tyranny is linked to the concept of "Liberty," although Keteltas acknowledges a positive, secular dimension of liberty which echoes the Whig ideology � it "is the grand foundation, under God, of every temporal blessing, and what is infinitely more important, it is favourable to the propagation of unadulterated Christianity" (p. 597). He also stresses the need to follow patriot leaders "who have by their writings and public speeches" advanced the "cause" (p. 591), especially ministers (p. 600), a case he supports by quoting a verse on liberty by Addison (p. 598). The P-type ideas of the Presbyterian ministers would undoubtedly have influenced the patriot cause within the ranks of the army, owing to the large presence there of the Presbyterian laity. John Shy (1976 166) describes them as "poor Irishmen" who, in the eyes of many British, had been manipulated by colonial elites "to do most of the dirty business of actual fighting." Their preponderant numbers in the Continental Army can be explained, according to Shy (p. 178), by the fact that of the three patriot strongholds during the Revolution, two, the Pennsylvania hinterland and the Virginia piedmont, were thickly populated with Presbyterians. It can as easily be argued, however, that these were patriot strongholds precisely because they were the core P-type areas, and since the third stronghold was the back country of New England, a broader Calvinist connection is plausible.

 

The way in which some P-type themes were deployed in political discourse a little earlier in the revolutionary era, can be seen by examining John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer (1768). Dickinson, a Quaker with English legal training and strongly influenced by Presbyterianism (Flower 1983), regards the colonial cause against unfair taxation as both constitutionally valid and godly. Much of what is written in the Letters fits well enough into the secular Whig framework. The overall emphasis is constitutionalist and most of the arguments are legal, stressing the notions of liberty, property, and virtue, with Dickinson citing Cato's Letters, Montesquieu, Machiavelli's Discourses, and David Hume (1768 27, 39, 40, 43, 46, 65, 66, 68, 75). Yet this is not a secularist text. The author not only sees the colonists as part of a trans-Atlantic protestant community (p.18), but also as particularly favoured by God (p.72), and even as an elect nation (p.15). When discussing the vices of the British administrators, he argues that they are ruled by "power" and "desires" to the extent that their reason fails them (p.48), a case strikingly similar to the Calvinist argument that temptation clouds natural reason. Dickinson's view of radical political action is in line with the P-type position, as he favours a disciplined approach, resolute yet orderly (p.78), and when discussing the British revolutions of the preceding century (p.65) he turns his back on the more radical puritans for encouraging an "excess on the part of the people." He quotes Scripture several times to good effect (pp.15, 19, 34, 74) and invokes God to advance the patriot cause (pp.16-17, 19), especially in his final Letter (pp.72, 74, 78). In his blending of Whig and Calvinist ideas there is no sign that he found the two inconsistent in any way.

 

This raises the question of the relationship of Whiggery and Calvinism: a second test for Calvinist influence is to take the widely acknowledged Real Whig sources of patriot ideology, such as Cato's Letters of Trenchard and Gordon, and see whether these writings could have a partly Calvinist basis. It is accepted that in 1688 the Whig ranks were filled with Calvinist dissenters who had been forced into exile, and the Calvinism of William himself is beyond dispute (Claydon, 1996 150-51). To maintain the existence of a reasonably close connection between Calvinism and Whig ideas would be to assert that the standard interpreters of the Founding, Robbins, Bailyn, Wood, Pocock, and Rahe, have presented only half the story, and that the Whig writers were not secular authors but were in fact deeply committed to protestant religion and especially its Calvinistic varieties, notwithstanding peculiarities such as their Deism. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to elaborate upon such an argument, we do note that Steven Dworetz (1994 100) has pointed to the existence in the work Trenchard and Gordon of a substratum of Calvinistic belief in the political reality of original sin, which has also been observed by Isaac Kramnick (1968 250), but which is at odds with the interpretations of Pocock et al. On the other hand, McBride (1997 81) claims that the doctrine of resistance found in Rutherford was "deeply offensive" to Whigs because it contained a stipulation that the lesser magistrates must be approved Calvinists, although we have been unable to verify this in the seventeenth century sources, and McBride relies on a history published in 1893. Whig and Calvinist alike would have expected a person in authority to be sympathetic to the Gospel, and to make decisions based on the public good, although it is conceded that P-type Calvinists (and some I-types) did engage in heresy hunting from time to time. According to Sher (1985 191) the "new Whiggism" was less secular than either "country" ideology or the "civic" ideology of the earlier eighteenth century, and was "more closely tied to radical Presbyterianism."

 

A third way to test the proposition that Calvinism played a role in the Revolution and Founding is to see whether either of the typologies outlined above is broadly in conformity with the key theoretical text of the Founding � the Federalist Papers. It is to this that we shall devote the concluding part of the paper, but before we begin, a few words on the possible influence of John Witherspoon are apposite. Madison and many others of his generation felt the attraction of Witherspoon's variety of Calvinism as students at Princeton in the period leading up to the outbreak of hostilities, and this Calvinism was spelled out in the celebrated sermon of May 1776, "The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men". Unlike the �moderate' Presbyterians such as Francis Hutcheson, who watered down the P-type ideology with rationalistic elements, Ned C. Landsman (Sher, 1990 30) characterises Witherspoon as a "firmly orthodox" Presbyterian. Richard B. Sher confirms this orthodoxy, based on the Westminster Confession and the "Scottish and Scots-Irish" Covenanting tradition (Sher, 1990 52), which Sher describes elsewhere as the tradition of "old-school Calvinists" (Sher, 1985 45; May, 1976 19). It is indicative of his P-type tendencies that Witherspoon did not favour democracy as such but was an elitist, regarding the citizenry as "mobs," "the multitude" and "the assembly of the vulgar" (Scott, 1997 59, 69).  His worries concerning the "Passions of Men" are clearly consonant with Madison's Federalist, although this is not to say that Witherspoon was the sole inspiration of Madison's political thought.

 

According to the Federalist human nature is flawed, easily corrupted, and subject to the passions which make any popular form of government inherently unstable and prone to degenerate into some sort of tyranny.  This is maintained by both Madison in Federalist 10 (Hamilton, 1992 41) and Hamilton in Federalist 1 (p. 3). In Federalist 15, Hamilton (p. 72) bases this on a standard argument familiar from Calvin when he poses the question "Why has government been constituted at all?" and answers "Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice," linking the concept of passions in the Federalist to the idea of sin in Calvinism, particularly of the P-type. A similar argument is used by Madison in Federalist 20, and the "cure" which Madison proposes in Federalist 10, to the disease of the tyranny of the majority, is political representation (p. 45), which he describes in Federalist 14  (p. 63) as the "great principle" of the republican plan of the Constitution. The concept of the tyranny of the majority is clearly foreshadowed by P-type writer Alexander Forbes (1644 48), and as we have seen, the representative idea of collective decision making is also cherished by the P-type Calvinists as the basis of institutions such as the synod, the classis, and the presbytery.

 

Popular sovereignty provides the basis of politics and government here just as it does for the P-type Calvinists such as Rutherford and the author(s) of Naphtali, and in Federalist 51 (p. 265) Madison affirms that "the people" are the "fountain of authority" for the new Constitution. Although the will of the people establishes the institutional framework of the polity in terms of the form of government, this does not necessarily imply that the regime will be a pure democracy. Indeed we argue that the Federalist is broadly anti-democratic in that it regards the people as untrustworthy, and rejects the idea of giving the people direct access to the undiluted power of the state (cf. Wolin 1989 93). [ii] Madison pushes this point in Federalist 14 (p. 62) where he distinguishes between republics and democracies, giving as examples of the latter the city states of ancient Greece and early modern Italy, although he could as easily have included the I-type experiments of colonial New England. The "representative republic" described by Madison in Federalist 48 (p. 254) as comprising a limited and disciplined "executive magistracy," controlled by a national "assembly" representing the passion-ridden "multitude" presents another threat from the direction of democracy. Unlike the national presbytery of the P-type Calvinists, this representative body lacks the discipline of an agreed theological foundation and of the cautious and prudent ministers and elders of the congregations, making it necessary for Madison to find an alternative means of keeping democratic forces at bay in the new legislature. Madison's solution, spelled out in Federalist 51, of using ambition itself "to counteract ambition" (p. 266), is not a Calvinist notion, in the sense that no Calvinist would believe that any positive benefit could flow from sin. This core idea of Madison's political thought can be regarded as a break with any P-type Calvinism which we might wish to impute to the Founding, and a reminder that however much we may wish to reduce it to a single model, the Founding draws on many sources, and also strikes out in new directions previously unknown to political thought.

 

The rights of the individual citizen, which are frequently mentioned in the Federalist, and which find constitutionally concrete expression in the first ten Amendments, can be related to one of the cardinal tenets of Calvinism. Freedom of conscience, that part of the psyche which is closest to God, is asserted in much Calvinist political writing including I-type sources (Goodwin, 1643; Cotton, 1643; Cotton, 1647) as well as P-type sources (Gillespie, 1644; Rutherford, 1644). In the anonymous 1667 P-type resistance tract Naphtali, tyranny is defined (p. 45) as "a Lordly Dominion over Consciences and violent Persecution of mens persons", and the fear is expressed (p. 41) that it "may terrify men out of all Conscience" and thus "extinguish all Light" and hence all hope of salvation. Some of the most celebrated rights which are contained in the Bill of Rights are readily viewed as extensions of this freedom of conscience. In particular, the freedoms of speech and religion have greater meaning if they are viewed as protection of the inner freedom to believe and to find salvation at the personal level, rather than as instruments assisting the pursuit of economic individualism or for preventing civil unrest. On the other hand, the freedom of speech and of religion which P-type Calvinists would be likely to accept might be limited in individual cases by their opposition to what they regarded as heresy.

 

Conclusion

We argue that although the ethos of New England democracy is not evident in the Founding, the likelihood of Calvinist influence in the ideological mix of the Revolution and Founding is not ruled out. The existence of two distinct types of political Calvinism, most strikingly evident in the literature of the British Revolutions of the 1640s, provides us with a framework for addressing this question. We note that both I-type New Englanders and P-type Calvinists from the middle colonies and Virginia, were at the forefront of the struggle for American independence. Within this experience, the importance of the immigration of Covenanters from Ireland to the middle colonies and piedmont Virginia in the middle of the eighteenth century is stressed. American Calvinism was further enhanced by the Great Awakening, by the "Bishops War," and possibly by the French and Indian War. Not only was there a large influx of Presbyterians, but there was also a high level of support by P-type Calvinists for the patriot cause, and high P-type membership of the Continental Army. Whig ideology is important, but we find an unforced co-existence of Whig and P-type ideas in writers such as Dickinson, along with Calvinist undercurrents in Whig ideology itself. While the Federalist adopts the theory of popular sovereignty, which is common to both types of Calvinism discussed here, other aspects of the political theory of the Federalist correspond to the P-type. These include the origin of government in sin, a fear of the tyranny of the majority, emphasis on strong and disciplined government, and a representative as opposed to participatory idea of democracy. The concept of using ambition to counteract ambition is not a Calvinist idea, however, and this alone would undermine any use of Calvinism as a single-factor explanation for the Founding. The Bill of Rights is broadly consistent with the freedom of conscience found in both types of Calvinist political ideology. The evidence that Calvinism, in the period 1765-1775, played a significant role in the formation of patriot ideology and, by extension, in the birth of the American state, is sufficient to warrant further investigation. More research is needed to seek to understand the democratic implications of the "spark" of conscience in Calvinism, and to chart the development of natural law ideas by P-types and their relationship with rising rationalist philosophy, and with Deism. On the Founding, we need a re-appraisal of the biographies of the Founders based on their religious affiliations and associations, and also an examination of the theological bases for the democratic ideas of the anti-federalists.

 

It is not our aim to question the work of other researchers who have done so much to uncover the secular themes of the Founding. Our understanding of the Founding has been advanced by excellent studies by Robbins, Bailyn, Wood, Pocock, Rahe, elucidating the role of civic humanism, classical republicanism, and Enlightenment proto-liberalism. Accounts such as these which focus on secular Whig ideology, however, risk retrojection, in that they encourage us to believe the period in question to have been one somewhat like our own, where religion has become less central to the life of the community. By emphasizing the equally significant contribution of theology to patriot ideology in the age of the Founding, we hope to rekindle interest in the role of Calvinist political thinking, of both types. The Calvinist idea of covenant, expressed in the covenant of the congregation in New England and in the Presbyterian National Covenant concept, is a powerful affective factor in the makeup of American political culture, giving it a participatory aspect which is beyond the reach of narrow political theory (Niebuhr, 1954 132). To conclude with the same author (p. 133):

 

Covenant was the binding together in one body politic of persons who assumed through unlimited promise responsibility to and for each other and for the common laws, under God. It was government of the people, for the people and by the people but always under God, and it was not natural birth into natural society that made one a complete member of the people, but always the moral act of taking upon oneself, through promise, the responsibilities of a citizenship that bound itself in the very act of exercising its freedom.  

 

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