RENEWING AMERICAN LEADERSHIP CORE DOCTRINE – Part 2 (of 6)
II. The Remarkable Legacy The Founding Fathers Constructed From Antiquity, Christianity, And The English Constitutional Experience
The Nearly Fatal Experiments With Socialism At Jamestown And Plymouth.
The ideas that would later be labeled “capitalism” and “socialism” have been feuding in America since its inception. The results of those early contests were decisive and fateful. Both the English colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth began as experiments in communal living. They both were nearly destroyed by that policy. But when the colonists were forced by necessity to turn to private property and individual initiative, they ignited an economic and cultural boom that has continued to this day.
Jamestown
The royal charter for the first continuous English settlement on the new continent was granted to a group called The Virginia Company, which founded Jamestown in 1607. As historian Paul Johnson recounts in his History of the American People, the crown had nothing to do with financing England’s first colonies. Investors risked their own money in return for grants of land.i But with no knowledge of the land awaiting them, the first settlers the investors sent over were more “gentlemen-adventurers.” than farmers. Most were hoping to find gold or other quick riches as the Spanish had in South America.
The men were divided into threes—a third to start the farm, a third to build the fort, and a third to head off into the woods to look for gold. Naturally, everybody slipped away to hunt for gold, and neglected the fort and farm.ii Even though the territory was particularly fertile, with a coastline and abundant game, the first settlers weren’t at all interested in farming because they weren’t farmers. And even if they had been, everything they produced went into the communal company store, from which everybody received the same rations, without regard for how much they had contributed.iii
The results were disastrous. In the first six months, 66 of the initial 104 settlers died of starvation and disease. After a second group of 500 settlers arrived in 1609, 440 died within the first six months.iv Finally in 1611 “High Marshall” Sir Thomas Dale arrived and immediately diagnosed the problem. It was obvious to him that the men were lazy because they had no investment in the land—they had no private property. So without asking permission from the colony’s shareholders in England, Dale gave three acres of land to the earlier settlers and something less to the later arrivals. They would be able to enjoy all the profits from their land without contributing to the communal store, except for a lump sum annual tax of 2.5 barrels of corn.v
The colonists were thrilled. They immediately began clearing their land, plowing their ground, planting, dunging, and watering—whatever they could to have their own food for the winter. By fall, the storehouse was full, thanks to the two-barrel tax, and the people were alive.vi They soon learned how to cultivate tobacco and were exporting it by 1616.vii
In 1619, the Virginia Company granted the Jamestown colonists “the rights of Englishmen,” and on July 30, 1619, the first General Assembly of Virginia met for a week at Jamestown Church.viii
Self-Government and Communism in Plymouth Plantation
The second English colony was led by group of Puritan Nonconformists who were fleeing the “Romish” teachings and governance of the Church of England. The Virginia Company granted them an 80,000 acre grant of land and authority to erect a system of self-government with wide powers.ix
Before they landed in 1620, the 41 families aboard the Mayflower drew up a remarkable social compact based upon the original Biblical covenant between God and the Israelites. It also reflected early 17th century social-contract theory, which was later to receive notable expression in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1655) and John Locke’s Treatise of Civil Government (1690). x What was significant about this particular contract was that it was not between a servant and a master, or a people and a king, but among a group of like-minded individuals, with God as a witness and symbolic co-signatory.xi One of their leaders, William Bradford, later wrote a
history, Of Plymouth Plantation, in which he first referred to them as “Pilgrims.”xii
Unfortunately, the Virginia Company in London had not yet learned the lessons of their Jamestown venture. They continued to require the Pilgrims, as a condition of their transport, to organize and share communally for the first seven years of their habitation. They were all expected to work the fields together, and food was to be divided from the common pool by family.xiii
Consequently, a famine hit the colony for two years. People ate rats, horses, dogs and cats.xiv Governor Bradford recounted the scene in his autobiography:
For this community [common ownership]…was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense… And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it…And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object, this is men’s corruption … God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.xv After another unfruitful harvest in 1623, Governor Bradford consulted with the community, and found an approach that would be more successful. He describes this change in his History of Plymouth Plantation: So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other thing to go on in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end …xvi
This had very good success for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise could have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of manyxvii
The lesson was clear: If the amount of thought and labor a person invests in his work has no effect on the return he earns, most people will contribute little or nothing, and the community will be the poorer for imposing such a system. On the other hand, when private property is secure and people are free to work for themselves, prosperity follows.
The abject failures of the initial socialist experiments in both Jamestown and Plymouth, combined with the spectacular success the very same people achieved when they were allowed to work for the betterment of their own families became the “American system” that was to change the world for the better.
Transplanted Visions and Dreams
The European Impetus
The thirteen colonies that formed the United States in 1789 had developed separately over a 182year period, each with its own distinct history and people, drawn from a wide variety of European immigrant groups. As Europe’s nation-states had emerged and sorted themselves out in various wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, they had attempted to build cohesive societies among their subjects. Solidarity with the monarch was expected. Mystical theories of birthright, based on “blood and soil,” were propounded to try to unify diverse ethnic and religious factions into unified, and cohesive states. The European monarchs of the early modern period controlled the state churches in their realms through their power to appoint bishops and other offices. There was no separation of church and state. European rulers also insisted on dominating the economies of their kingdoms through a system of royal privileges, grants and monopolies they gave to their relatives and allies called mercantilism. (Without its royal trappings, mercantilism continues to suck the life out of national economies around the world to this day.)
The Diverse Origins of America’s Colonists
On the European continent, the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 and formalized the longstanding policy that the monarch was empowered to impose the Catholic or Protestant religion of his choice on all his subjects. He had freedom of faith, they didn’t. Religious uniformity was the rule, not toleration. People who held faiths different from the king were given the choice of converting or leaving. Many fled to America. In England, the religious and political upheavals of the Civil War of 1641-51, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, displaced a large number of Protestant Puritans and royalist Roman Catholics, who migrated to America. As American historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1891: Louis XIV devastates the Palatinate, and soon hundreds of its inhabitants are hewing down the forests of Pennsylvania. The Bishop of Salzburg persecutes his Protestant subjects, and the woods of Georgia sound to the crack of Teutonic rifles. Presbyterians are oppressed in Ireland, and soon in Tennessee and Kentucky the fires of pioneers gleam. These were but advance guards of the mighty army that has poured into our midst ever since. Every economic change, every political change, every military conscription, every socialistic agitation in Europe, has sent us groups of colonists…xviii
So the English colonies in America were comprised of a kaleidoscope of people and factions with very diverse and firmly- held beliefs. Historians of the period estimate that forty percent of the North American population in 1750 was non-English.xix English Puritans and Baptists had formed New England. New York inherited a landed class of wealthy Protestant Dutch patroons, and had attracted merchants, tradesmen, and industrial workers, including a strong cohort of Sephardic Jews. English Quakers, German Lutherans, and Anabaptists, and a flood of Scots Irish settled the middle colonies. Maryland had become a haven to Roman Catholics. Virginia attracted and developed a class of wealthy planters, who brought over indentured servants and slaves. It also attracted a flood of Scots Irish to Appalachia. South Carolina was founded by wealthy aristocrats from Barbados in the Caribbean, along with Protestant Huguenots from France. It was the only original colony with a slave majority.
Finding or inventing a single form of government that could tie together such a polyglot population, and allow them to prosper in harmony and freedom, was an incredible challenge.
The Great Awakening Forges America’s Character and Begins the American Revolution
When the Declaration of Independence holds it “self-evident” that “all men are created equal,” we seldom stop to realize what a radical idea this is. In the 18th Century, outside of America, hardly anyone believed all people are equal. Large parts of the world dispute that idea to this day. Yet in America there was such a powerful consensus on human equality that the colonies adopted the Declaration, and then ratified a revolutionary new Constitution founded on the idea that “We the people” are not only equal, but entitled to govern ourselves. What made America so exceptional?
Human equality is a Christian idea.
In parables like the Sheep and the Goats,xx or the rich man and Lazarus,xxi Jesus taught that a day of judgment is coming when every individual will be judged by the same standard, according to his or her actions in this life. With his “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s,”xxii Jesus also taught that faith and government are two separate spheres. Yet the distinction between church and state had been contested in the West since the 4th century, with the state nearly always prevailing. Statecontrolled churches spoke with the combined authority of God and King. They taught that God has divided society into static “natural orders” comprised of the monarch, the aristocracy, the Church, and the people, with the members of each social class owing due deference to their “betters.” Yet by the time of the Revolutionary War, Americans had rejected those ideas completely. How did that happen? Looking back years later, John Adams wrote “What do we mean by the American Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution: it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people…a change in their religious sentiments.”xxiii
The turning point had occurred in the 1730s and 40s when a firestorm of Christian revival, later called The First Great Awakening, swept through the American colonies. The Great Awakening was a historically verifiable outpouring of the Holy Spirit that forged a new soul and character for the American people. It was the true beginning of the American Revolution.
The Great Awakening decisively ended the dominance of the established churches in colonial America. In the northern and middle colonies it largely erased the social stratification that had been imported from Europe. It was a powerful, shared experience that united thirteen very different colonies into a single nation. It also ignited America’s distinctive enthusiasm for mass education as the key to prosperity and social advancement. And finally, the new spirit of equality fostered by the Great Awakening led the founding fathers to divide America’s new government by function into executive, legislative and judicial branches, rather than basing it on a British style balance of powers between the “natural orders” of king, elite and commoners.
Jonathan Edwards
The first public evidence that something extraordinary was occurring was recorded in the ministry of Jonathan Edwards, the Yale-educated Congregational minister who was president of Princeton University. Edwards demonstrated that the Bible teaches that all men are created equal and the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior and not his class.xxiv Drawing on Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus in the third chapter of John’s Gospel, he stressed that all men can be saved, but everyone must make a profession of their personal belief in God, and be “born again.” Good works alone couldn’t secure salvation. Complete repentance and reliance on God’s grace was the only way.
As historian Paul Johnson writes, in his books, Edwards “developed an entirely new gloss on the harsh old Calvinist doctrine of Redemption by stressing that God did not just choose some, and not others, but, as it were, radiated his own goodness and beauty into the souls of men and women so that they became part of him.”xxv The core of his message is that love is the essence of the religious experience.xxvi “Through this doctrine of love, Edwards proceeds to liberate the human will…insisting that human beings are free because they act according to their perception and conviction of their own good.”xxvii Johnson writes, “Here was indeed a frontier religion, for persons of all creeds and backgrounds and ethnic origins, native-born Americans and the new arrivals from Europe, united by the desire to do good, lead useful and godly lives, and help others to do the same in the new and splendid country divine providence had given them.”xxviii
Jonathan Edwards may have been a brilliant polymath, but his preaching was anything but exciting. He read his sermons in a relentless monotone, with his eyes firmly planted on the back of the church.xxix So it wasn’t his delivery that caused the lightening to strike in 1734, when the Spirit suddenly fell on a congregation Edwards was preaching to in Northampton, Massachusetts. No one was more astonished than the preacher himself.xxx As he reported in a 1737 treatise, Narrative of Surprising Conversions, “And then it was, in the latter part of December, that the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to…work among us. There were very suddenly, one after another, five or six persons who were, to all appearance, savingly converted, and in some of them wrought upon in a very remarkable manner…God made it, I suppose, the greatest occasion of awakening to others of anything that ever came to pass in the town…The news of it seemed to be almost like a flash of lightning upon the hearts of young people all over the town, and upon many others.”xxxi This was followed by similar dramatic conversions in Edwards’ own parish. Then the “New Light” began to fall in South Hadley, in Suffield, Sunderland, Deerfield, Hatfield, West Springfield, Long Meadow, Enfield, Westfield, and Northfield—all of which Edwards recorded and published. xxxii
George Whitefield
Edward’s sermons and books were avidly read in evangelical circles in both America and England. News of the outpouring in Massachusetts reached particularly attentive ears in Georgia, where two young Anglican ministers from England, John Wesley and George Whitefield, were helping General James Oglethorpe evangelize the colonists and Indians in the years 1735-8. Wesley, who had a particular heart for the poor, was to return to England, where he had his famous experience of the assurance of his salvation on Alders gate Street, London, and became one of the greatest preachers of the 18th Century.xxxiii
Whitefield, on the other hand, was a rhetorical and histrionic star of spectacular gifts, who felt called to preach in America.xxxiv His preaching had already ignited miraculous revivals in England. “Before long, it seemed that all Georgia was vibrating to the deep, resonant, farcarrying tones of the remarkable ‘boy preacher,’ who had the ability to capture the hearts as well as the minds of his listeners.”xxxv
Paul Johnson writes that Whitefield “simply carried a torch and used it to set alight multitudes…In 1740 he made the first continental tour of the colonies, from Savannah in Georgia to Boston in the north, igniting violent sheets of religious flame everywhere. It was Whitefield, the Grand Itinerant, as he was known, who caused the Great Awakening to take off…He seems to have appealed equally to conventional Anglicans, fierce Calvinists, German pietists, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, even a few Catholics. A German woman who heard him said she had never been so edified in her life, though she spoke not a word of English.”xxxvi Whitefield had an unusually deep and loud voice, which was crucial to his ability to reach large crowds outdoors, where he often preached. He attracted audiences of between two and twenty thousand wherever he went.
When Whitefield moved on, as he always did, other ministers followed through on his meetings and continued to minister to the newly converted. Not surprisingly, the established churches did not all embrace this “New Light,” especially when it questioned the authority of ministers who had not undergone a personal conversion experience. But other ministers who went to Whitefield’s meetings heard God himself in what he said, and no less than twenty ministers in Boston openly acknowledged George Whitefield as the instrument of their conversion.xxxvii
Again and again Whitefield returned to the attack. He made seven tours, in every colony, from one end of the continent to the other between 1740 and his death in 1770. Everywhere he went, revival accompanied him. And those who had been bearing the Light before he arrived, unanimously welcomed him as an answer to prayer.xxxviii Finally, he arrived in Boston in August, 1770, five months after British troops had fired on a mob of civilians. With his health broken, Whitefield still spoke to some of the largest crowds of his career. He died at dawn, a month later, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the day after his final sermon—which had lasted nearly two hours.
Altogether George Whitefield had preached eighteen thousand sermons between 1736 and 1770.xxxix The movement he led literally forged the American character and began the American Revolution.
Three legacies of the first Great Awakening are worth summarizing briefly.
Americans Move Decisively from Established Churches to Independent Sects
In ancient Rome, showing reverence to the established national gods was considered essential to social cohesion. A key part of the job of Roman Emperor was to serve as the Pontifix Maximus, the chief priest of the national cult. Roman citizens were expected to burn incense, and make sacrifices and oblations to the gods and deified emperors as an essential mark of patriotism because there was no other universal unifying principle to hold that society together. Observance of the outward ceremony was much more important than the inward belief of the citizen. In the Roman Empire, Christians were persecuted as “atheists” because they firmly believed there was only one God, and therefore they refused to honor the traditional gods and deified emperors. When the Roman Emperor Constantine ended the persecution of Christians and legalized Christianity in 313 AD, he considered it natural to play the role of Pontifix Maximus in the new religion that he believed had made him emperor. Even before he was baptized, Constantine made himself the head of the Church. He showered the Church with subsidies and buildings. He began appointing bishops and calling Church Councils that he then presided over. Over time millions of Romans became “Christians” because it was the new patriotic thing to do, rather than through a change of heart.
Thus began the tragic history of the established Churches of Europe, ”headed” by their kings. Since the 4th century, confusion has reined in Europe over what should be rendered to Caesar and what to God. The Great Awakening clarified those issues for Americans, and made them into a new and separate people.
Before the Revolution tax-supported churches were established in most North American colonies on the European model.xl The Church of England was established in southern and some middle colonies, while the Congregational Church was established in New England. Even after the Constitution was ratified, seven of the new states retained tax-supported churches.xli
Established churches intermixed the roles of church and state. They were important social and political tools for the government. Church offices were highly prized government patronage jobs. The people viewed their membership in the tax-supported church as something they were born into as subjects of the king or citizens of New England. Attendance was as much a patriotic gesture as an expression of personal belief. The Church of England presented the policies of the king as the will of God. Conflating the policy of the monarch with the will of God left little room for individual discretion. The king’s loyal subjects were expected to follow both the theological and political guidance of this central social institution. But in America this theory broke down. In the middle colonies there were too few clergy to serve the growing population. And those they had tended to be trained in England, out of touch with their people, and not sufficiently emotional for their taste.xlii
The Great Awakening’s “New Light” of Bible study, personal salvation, personal piety and social equality caused thousands of established church members to leave the churches of their birth and join the Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Moravians, and dozens of other new sects that were emerging. While Americans today think nothing of changing churches or denominations, it’s easy to overlook the fact that that in the 18th century, leaving the Church of England was an explicit act of spiritual and social rebellion against the king and his Church. While they were still political “subjects” of the king, the Americans who left the churches they were born into had taken personal responsibility for their spiritual lives. Once they had made that decision, it would be only a small step to take control of their political destinies as well.
Awakening the Sense of Being “American”
Before the Great Awakening, each North American colony had been a little self-contained world of its own, with its outward links running chiefly to London. As Paul Johnson writes, “The Great Awakening altered this separateness. It taught different colonies, tidewaters and piedmonts, coast and up-country, to grasp and appreciate what they had in common, which was a very great deal.”xliii
George Whitefield’s “New Light” preaching tours were the first intercolonial events that generated exciting news in every colony that was of intense interest in the others. The “media entrepreneur” who first recognized and exploited this opportunity was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, then in his thirties, became a lifelong friend and supporter of Whitefield. He didn’t subscribe to Whitefield’s theology, but he admired Whitefield for exhorting people to worship God through good works. Franklin printed Whitefield’s sermons on the front page of his Gazette, devoting 45 issues to Whitefield’s sermons and journals. Fully half of Franklin’s publications in 1739-1741 were of Whitefield.xliv This helped promote the evangelical movement in America, and helped Franklin become independently wealthy. He eventually was able to sell his newspaper to an investor and lived comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of his long and enormously productive life.
The Launch of America’s Distinctive Faith in Mass Education
One of the key pillars of American exceptionalism to this day is our society’s strong belief in mass education and literacy as essential foundations for social advancement and national prosperity. This is another key American trait that can be traced directly to the theology of the Great Awakening and the competition between the various new Christian sects that grew out of it. The “New Lights” taught that salvation did not result from birth, but by making a personal commitment of faith in God. Since every believer had to work out his or her own salvation, that meant that at a minimum, seekers had to be able to read the Bible for themselves. So after the Great Awakening, providing basic literacy to all citizens became a high priority in America. This commitment to mass education is exemplified by the crucial Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was enacted by Congress as the Constitutional Convention was in progress, and in coordination with it. In that statute, the First Congress clearly expressed their recognition of the essential interrelationship between education and religion in American life: Article 3: Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of education shall forever be encouraged.xlv
Once basic literacy was secured in America, the demand naturally grew for higher education to equip qualified teachers and ministers to help believers to grow into Christian maturity. And since the new American sects that had emerged couldn’t train such people in England, they each had to establish their own colleges. Here was another distinctive American solution. As historian Daniel Boorstin points out, while the established Church of England was able to prevent dissenting academies from granting degrees in that country,
In America the school of every sect arrogated the dignity of an ancient European university. By the time of the Revolution nearly every major Christian sect had an institution of its own: New-Side Presbyterians founded Princeton; revivalist Baptists founded Brown; Dutch Reformed revivalist founded Rutgers; a Congregational minister transformed an Indian missionary school into Dartmouth; and Anglicans and Presbyterians worked together in the founding of King’s College (later Columbia) and the College of Philadelphia (later the university of Pennsylvania)…
Between 1746 and 1769, twice as many colleges were founded in the colonies as in the previous hundred years; between 1769 and 1789 twice as many again as in the preceding twenty years. And so it went. The movement gathered momentum, and seems hardly yet to have stopped.xlvi
And then market-driven reality stepped in to provide still another distinctive trait of American exceptionalism. The need to attract tuition-paying students for all these new sectarian institutions prevented them from discriminating against students from other sects. Daniel Boorstin writes, No American college during the colonial period imposed a religious test on its entering students. Thus, a nonsectarianism, which was not the product of an abstract theory of toleration, became an ideal of American higher education…The proliferation of sects and the growth of religious enthusiasm in 18th Century America had produced an unpredicted and unplanned (often undesired) religious tolerance. Where every sect lacked power to coerce, they all wisely “chose” to persuade.xlvii
Thanks to the Great Awakening nearly all Americans accepted that all men are created equal. The circumstances of a person’s birth neither automatically conferred nor prevented their advancement in life. The question naturally followed, ‘How can I get ahead?’ The characteristic American answer has always been: education, pluck, and hard work.
i Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, Harper Collins, NY, 1997, pg 24
ii W. Cleon Skousen, The Five Thousand Year Leap, American Documents Publishing, Franklin, TN 2009, Forward by Glenn Beck, pg 2
iii Bruce, Phillip. Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, page 212 (Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0844610917/lewrockwell/)
iv Warren Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689.) (Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0807812374/lewrockwell/)
v Bethell, Tom. The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages) (Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312223374/lewrockwell/)
vi Skousen, pg 3
vii Johnson, pg 26
viii Johnson, pg 27
ix Johnson, pg 29
x Johnson, ibid
xi Johnson, pg 30
xii Johnson, ibid
xiii “Even the Pilgrims Couldn’t Make it Work”, The Powell Center for Economic Literacy, July 6, 2006. http://www.powellcenter.org/uploads/PilgrimsU.pdf
xiv John Stossel, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, RealClearPolitics.com, November 21, 2007. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/the_tragedy_of_the_commons.html xv(http://www.powellcenter.org/uploads/fall02/pdf/middleh1.pdf) (Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation) xvi(http://www.powellcenter.org/uploads/fall02/pdf/middleh1.pdf) (Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, pages 120-121)
xvii (John Stossel, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, RealClearPolitics.com, November 21, 2007. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/the_tragedy_of_the_commons.html)
xviii Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and other essays, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994, pg 27
xix Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California, Origins and Ideologies of the American Revolution, Part One, The Teaching Company, 2006
xx Matthew 25: 31-46
xxi Luke 16:19-31
xxii Matthew 22:21
xxiii John Adams, letter to Hezekiah Niles, 1818, Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 1992) pg 1; cited by Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, DC, 2007, pg 72
xxiv Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1992, pg 303
xxv Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, HarperCollins, New York, 1997, pg 111
xxvi Johnson, pg 112
xxvii Ibid
xxviii Johnson, pg 112
xxix Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory, Fleming H. Revell, Grand Rapids, MI, 1977, pg 241
xxx Marshall and Manuel, pg 241
xxxi ibid, pg 242
xxxii ibid, pg 243
xxxiii Johnson, pg 113
xxxiv ibid
xxxv Marshall and Manuel, pg 244
xxxvi Johnson, pg 113
xxxvii Marshall and Manuel, pg 249
xxxviii ibid, pg 247
xxxix ibid, pgs 252, 253
xl Kelly Olds, Privatizing the Church, Disestablishment in Connecticut and Massachusetts, Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago, April, 1994, pg 277
xli W. Cleon Skousen, The Five Thousand Year Leap, American Documents Publishing, Franklin, TN 2009, pg 67
xlii Professor Darren Staloff, City College of New York, The History of the United States, Part II, The Teaching Company. 1998, Lecture 14
xliii Johnson, pg 116
xliv Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin, An American Life. Simon & Schuster 2003, p.110, 112,113
xlv Skousen, pg 59
xlvi Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans, The Colonial Experience; Vintage Books, New York, 1958, pg 179
xlvii Boorstin, pg 180
